[dundee] OLPC Videos...niiiiiiiiiice!

[Gary Short]

-------- Original Message --------
> From: "Tim Spencer" <samurai.mit at gmail.com>
> Sent: 22 January 2008 05:31
> To: "Tayside Linux User Group" <dundee at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [dundee] OLPC Videos...niiiiiiiiiice!
> 
> 1. Rural areas are the more affected areas, who through the problem of being
> rural have less attractability/reachability for teachers and, especially in
> poor countries, are normally the more poverty stricken areas and hence force
> have shit loads of kinds (families have kids as their old age pension
> skeem)  Now if u combine schools with no money u don't get a lot out of
> that. I mean we are talking about the lucky few who can go to school because
> their parents can afford school fees. although the western world sends a lot
> of aid they normally do this in form of supplements like food and book n
> stuff. they don't like paying people.plus u have the major problem of native
> educated people preferring to opt out to higher pay out-of-the land jobs.

If the OLPC is designed to help those in especially rural areas, with little or no contact with more populated areas, how does OLPC software get from the hard drives of those in the more populated areas to the hard drives of the people you speak of? I know the OLPC has peer to peer network capabilities, but the software on the hard drives of your peers is always going to be a (very) small subset of the total software available. What do you do if you want a title that your reachable peers don't have?

> 2. on the one hand we can be harsh and criticise the bad points of the OLPC
> project but the only reason intel and all the other majors are developing
> comparative products is because the project has shown that selling pc's too
> poor countries is a feasible business model. now if u look at intel they are
> like ms out to make money where as the OLPC just really wants to get even
> big +.

I don't think anyone on this list was criticising the OLPC project per se, I certainly wasn't. I don't think its a bad idea, just not the best use of the money.

> 4. if the laptops weren't open source that would be a minus, why?. well Ms
> has never really been a major advertiser on free software for its platform

Though that is changing. There are free (Express) development environments for the main .Net languages plus a number of .Net open source projects on the go and don't forget Mono for Linux.

> the real solution would be to pump money into local businesses to produce
> shit so that parents have more money which the ultimately spend partly on
> their children and so one would not only boost educational standards but
> also the state of the country turning it from a needer possibly into a
> giver.

That's a neat idea but, unfortunatly, things are a little more complicated than that. Take Zimbabwe for example, it used to be the bread basket of Africa and a relatively prosperous country, and yet the current government there has totally wrecked the country's economy. So we can see from this example that pumping money into a country is not necessarily a good idea, you must ensure that political backing and stability are also in place. I'm not sure aid agencies have the cabability to do that and the current situation with Zimbabwe has shown that, often, other governments are slow to pressurise inginious governments to get to a place where the type of aid that you speak of above could be given.

> but would we have really bought options for local businesses because lets
> face it we are geeks and like the tecky stuff, so u get a sweet mobile
> laptop and u even help the developing world

True, but raising money for teachers must be easier than raising money for laptops. How do I know? Well, take any subset of the population and its got to be much easier to explain to them how teachers will help improve education than it is to explain how laptops will improve education - intuition is on your side with that arguement. Having said that, we have an OLPC scheme, we dont' have a teachers sans frontiers scheme so its right that people support it.

-- 
Cheers,
Gary
http://www.garyshort.org