Kids Review the OLPC 193
A. N. Onymous sends us to OLPCNews for an account of kids' reactions to the OLPC XO, and comments: "My first impression is, it's just like when you give a kid a box of Lego." The video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister replacing a mobo is pretty cool.
Is this real world testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, no! (Score:1, Insightful)
Here comes the job market competition!
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse...
Re:Amazing concept (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Amazing concept (Score:4, Insightful)
"guided" disassembly (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Junk (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, though, I like OLPC. While I'm not sure it will benefit poor African children much more than giving laptops to middle-schoolers in Seattle, it will still provide some benefits to its target demographic.
Better still, for me, it's inspired tech companies to design similar devices for rich countries, meaning I might have a competent, cheap mobile platform in my future.
Re:Neato! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there any truly common sizes for low-denomination coins around the world?
Mal-2
Re:missing the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Kids being able to put the thing back together again in a working state shows that thought has been given to the design to make it kid-proof (or at least kid-resistant.)
Re:Is this real world testing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Worst music ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Soft jazz: neither soft nor jazz.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course we all know it'll probably be mostly used for pr0n, but that's just a good hook to get kids online and techno-literate. And it's not like you coculdn't say the same thing about us when we were kids....
d
Re:Amazing concept (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't do this, can you?
Information Age (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is this real world testing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Once the OLPC is distributed, there will be a growing population of kids who have "used computers before".
And I don't think the plan is to limit the maintenance teams to 8 and 10 year old kids. Even if your assumption is correct, and unprivileged kids in poor countries can't fix things as well as these Canadian kids can, do you think that maybe unprivileged 14 and 16 year olds might be able to do what these Canadian 8 and 10 year olds managed to do?
It would be much more telling to see tests with kids in poorer nations for whom OLPC is their first PC.
Those tests will come, in time. Meanwhile this was simply a fun test that someone did just because they could.
What I find telling is that the manual dexterity of a 10 year old is adequate to the task of disassembling the OLPC, pulling the motherboard, then putting it all back together again.
steveha
Re:Amazing concept (Score:2, Insightful)
Not all poor people are dumb farmers that live in mud huts located in the middle of no where.
Bangkok has many poor people and they have power and food but no education. Even in the country side people don't live in mud huts with no electricity. Only first world morons like yourself think and talk about this crap with no idea what they're blabbering on about. KEEP THE POOR, POOR. Well, sorry asshole I beg to differ.
I have personally donated money numerous time to the local temple to provide books for the schools but it is not as good as providing a means for kids to learn a skill that would give them a better job then just farming.
Books and stationary become out of date and need to be replaced. These laptops could be passed down to students for decades if only just so the students could read books on them it would be worth it because printing books and shipping them around the country is expensive.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
From another angle, when the kids saw me replacing motherboards, several of them were fascinated. One of the older kids learned how to do it just because he wanted to, and helped us out for several weeks. Now, I'll admit that it is seems a useless skill, but that's only if you consider learning and enjoyment for its own sake to be useless. No, he won't likely be able to monetize the skill, but honestly he'll be lucky if he can monetize anything. So why not enjoy life in the meantime? And any brain exercise is good for these kids, as it sharpens the mind. There are geeks over there too -- they just don't have access to the stuff we do.
Cheers.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:1, Insightful)
By the way, if you expect these laptops to stay in the hands of the Thai children to whom they're given, you don't understand much about Thai societal corruption. Wat di.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:2, Insightful)
Also the old governments actions don't reflect the actions of the new government. Even under the old government the laptops would have reached the children. It would have just cost them twice as much for the project for no actual reason.
It is also off topic. Sure that might happen but saying, "meh we should teach them how to farm better because these poor people are too dumb to learn computers" is such and ignorant first world point of view.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amazing concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Technically true, but developping a love for computers will help them in other ways.
I mean, by old skills with ZX-81 BASIC or (one year later) converting assembly to hex by hand because you couldn't fit even an assembler in 1K RAM, are technically worthless today too. Noone would pay you to convert to hex by hand, unless it's as a drunken dare. But the fact that I grew up thinking algorithmically and liking it, is roughly why I'm a well paid consultant today. And knowing roughly what happens under the hood, as in, exactly what does the CPU do, sure helps write better code than the monkeys who think that efficiency is measured in lines of code.
You mean the skill that's even more useless in the real world, unless you're a wrench monkey at the local mechanic shop? How's that more useful? Chances are he'd make less money with that than even with the most basic computer skills.
Oh, you mean how it's more macho to take your own engine apart? It never ceases to amaze me how many think their penis size is measured in how often they take their engine apart. Don't you have anything better to do with your time than pretend you're an unskilled low-wage manual labourer? I don't know about you, but my time is more valuable than that.
Now you've really lost me? Agriculture? You mean the thing that, since the Great Depression, is so worthless that it survives only by government subsidies? And where you need a damn big farm to even be able to afford the equipment, even with government subsidies?
Newsflash: nowadays everyone can produce entirely too much food, so, as is the case when supply vastly outstrips demand, prices are all the way down in the cellar. The world nowadays is split into countries which subsidize their agriculture, and countries where their farmers went bankrupt and just import the food.
So your idea of a useful profession to teach someone is... an unskilled manual labour job, which mostly lives off government subsidy, for as long as that subsidy continues? Why not just teach him to be a bum and get unemployment benefits then? It will be only mildly more humiliating, but it's less work, the result is the same, and it will cost us all less money in taxes, so I figure it's a win-win.
And generally, what's with your list containing only low-pay low-skill manual-labour examples? God knows that even if you don't understand computers, there are other better paid jobs than farmer or wrench monkey. Want to guide your kid on a non-hardware path? How about management, marketting, non-computer engineering branches (biotech still does decently well, for example), etc?
Think Back.. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I hadn't had occasion to do things like this as a child, my mechanical and computer aptitude would probably be nothing like what it is now. I commend these folks for what they are doing. The fact that there is an adult in the video "helping" doesn't mean anything to me, as I can see the value in this that goes beyond our "television reality challenges" expectations when we read something about a challenge with kids.
The real challenge is that they got two kids to sit still in one place long enough to even take instructions like this and still manage to accomplish the task.
On another note, I'm tempted to buy one of these things for myself, looks like a great platform for DamnSmallLinux.
Re:Is this real world testing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Amazing concept (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the older kids learned how to do it just because he wanted to.... Now, I'll admit that it is seems a useless skill....
In the long run, possibly about as useless as writing a 386 kernel just for the fun of it.
Nope, nothing good ever came of doing tech for the sake of loving tech.
Mod parent up,
pww
Re:Amazing concept (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Because at the moment my mother will not use a computer, because almost every other action you do you will get a pop-up, asking you to decide on a technical question, with lots of choices. If you are not computer literate, this is a HUGE barrier to start. And what's up with the clicking. Sometimes you right-click, sometimes you left-click, sometimes you have to double click, sometimes you have to hold the button pressed. My mother asked me when you have to double-click and when not. Say, in the start menu, one click will be enough to start an application. But on the desktop, you'll have to double-click.
I hope the OPLC will be a bit like that, removing the non-obvious computer behavior that has settled itself into almost every desktop GUI around. As for your example about the kid, he was doing something technical, working with foreigners, getting used to the kind of work that is done with computers. Those skills start you up and get you somewhere. As a 16 year old I brought the newspaper around, how is that for a useless skill? But you learn how to deal with angry costumers, get responsibility (early starts!), and lots of things you add to your the luggage that make you who you are.
Re:Amazing concept (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to have an inaccurate idea (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Money. In the modern world, everything costs money, including getting water for irrigation, spare parts for those tractors, etc. And this is the root of all the evil that follows in this list.
2. An industry to support that agriculture. Just knowing how an internal combustion engine works, doesn't mean that you can just get a hammer and an anvil and make a tractor in a village smithy. Until this problem is solved, their agriculture is a case of either (A) inefficiently doing it by hand, or (B) importing expensive foreign tractors and spare parts, and see #1: that's money they just don't have.
3. A market where they can get that much needed money for their produce. And not just "market" as in selling it in the next city, but some kind of _export_ market, because you can't import much without exporting the equivalent. If you want to import something that costs US Dollars or Euro, you have to first sell something for US Dollars or Euro. Or you can take a loan, but then you're soon back to square one: you have to export something for US Dollars or Euro to pay it back.
But there they compete with the _massively_ subsidized EU and USA agricultural exports. And they lose.
It's as simple as that: if you and I make the same product, but the government subsidizes more than half the price of mine, you _will_ lose. That is their problem.
4. Some source of credit without all sorts of strings attached. A lot of "foreign aid" or "loans" actually come with strings attached, like "you must use that money to buy grain from the USA" or "you must use that money to buy trucks from Germany." (But when they break down, heh, you better have your own money to buy spare parts with.) Unfortunately while that may relieve a famine in the short run, in the long run it also just does even more to bankrupt the local farms and industry respectively.
5. An infrastructure. You can't have a modern agriculture without water pumps for irrigation, roads, silos, fuel pumps for the trucks and tractors, electricity, etc. And that's just infrastructure they don't have. In some cases they don't even have clean water for drinking, much less water for irrigation. And don't have the money to build an infrastructure.
6. In some cases, they don't have competent or honest politicians either. A lot of economies are run into the ground not because they don't know what an engine is, but because they're run by an incompetent, corrupt, kleptocratic clique.
Basically their main problem is that they're too poor, not that some white man has to come and teach them basic agriculture.
It's damn near impossible to start from zero and industrialize by your own efforts any more. It's a vicious circle: as long as you don't have high-tech stuff to export for the big bucks, you can't buy the machine tools and know-how to get even your basic industry started. Raw material and agricultural products are so damn cheap that you simply can't export enough of them to get some serious industrialization going.
Stalin did industrialize the USSR in the 30's... by starving a few million peasants (a lot of them Ukrainians) to death. Literally to death. That was the only way to export enough grain to be able to buy all the machine tools and blueprints he needed to start a serious industry.
Not only that kind of a solution isn't practicable in most countries, the problem just got much worse in the meantime too.
So, anyway, ironically giving them some computer skills may actually do them a hell of a lot more good than trying to teach them basic agriculture (which they already know.) If they can at least work offshore tech support, or assemble computers in a sweatshop, they and their country might even get _some_ dollars out of that. And, who knows, maybe get at least started on building the industry and infrastructure. The agriculture will follow.
Point number six should actually be #1 (Score:3, Insightful)
The economic friction caused by having to bribe the city police, the port inspector, and the cargo handlers can make small-scale export unprofitable. Or, if you look at the example of Zimbabwe, government price controls can make it unprofitable to sell basic necessities on the "legal" market. If 20% of your profits are eaten by baksheesh, that's a big problem. Most of those problems were avoided by the U.S. during our transition to an industrial-based economy because of the traditions and culture fostered by the founders.
As an aside, I think that's one of the reasons the U.S. is now having difficulty. The increasing corruption (by both parties and all sides) in government, and the apparent abandonment of the rule of law in favor of celebrity justice and the quid-pro-quo is going to become an increasing drag.
Back on topic, I agree that most folks in non-industrial countries don't need the sort of help that's often implied by slashdotters. One reason that's expected though is that the U.S. media routinely protrays other (non-Euopean) countries as desolate wildrenesses populated by teeming millions living in mud-hit squallor. Considering the many, many Americans whose entire knowledge of the "outside" world comes from National Geographic and appeals for aid to impoverished nations, it's not surprising to see this point of view.