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Our Blogs Open Sauce OLPC: one bad idea per child
Our Blogs Open Sauce OLPC: one bad idea per child | OLPC: one bad idea per child |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 22 February 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 When well-known open source advocate Bruce Perens raised questions about Microsoft's involvement, he found a receptive audience. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The laptop itself is attractive to a child. I got my 12-year-old son to play with it for a while; he liked it but then any nerdy kid growing up in a Western country and having tech toys aplenty at his disposal would. I don't know about the robustness - when I asked whether my son could drop the laptop from a height of five feet (it is supposed to be able to withstand such a shock), the man who had the laptop on display said "no" very fast. The cost of the XO has gone up to $US187 and now we have the prophet behind the idea, Nicholas Negroponte, proclaiming that by 2011, this figure will be down to $US50. Peru, Uruguay and Nigeria will see the first big rollouts in coming months, according to this modern-day Moses; there has been speculation that there are moves afoot to turn competitors like Asus (the eeePC) into allies so that more XOs will be supplied faster. The OLPC appears to be on the defensive when approached by the media. I asked Jim Gettys, the vice-president of software, whether he was willing to spend some time talking about it recently while he was in Melbourne. His answer was "maybe." I gave him a time and place but though he showed up, he told me that he had to speak to a number of other people first. I waited for what I considered a reasonable amount of time and then went about my own business. His attitude was easy to understand after I had a look at the OLPC wiki ; while responding to a critical piece in the Economist, this line, towards the end, said it all: "I won't deny that we are arrogant and self-righteous." It's not clear who wrote this response but whoever it was does speak for the project. |
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