Dvorak Slams OLPC As 'Naive Fiasco'

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak has a unique take on the cute One Laptop per Child XO-1, deeming the OLPC project a naive fiasco waiting to unfold that sends an insulting 'let them eat cake' message to the world's poor. When it comes down to a choice of providing African kids living in absolute poverty with access to Slashdot or a $200 truckload of rice, Dvorak votes for the latter. Buy ten OLPCs if it assuages your guilt, says Dvorak, but 'I'll donate my money to hunger relief.'"

That's not unique.

[mabinogi]

That's not a unique take, that's the same old tired objections that we've been hearing since the project started.
The XO is not intended to go to children who can't afford food. How dense can some people be?

Oh wait - it's Dvorak, silly question.

I think he's missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like Dvorak--as many others--are totally missing the point of the OLPC program. It's not for places where people are starving to death. It's for places where kids are able to go to school and get some education. The OLPC program is designed to get kids in developing countries access to technology where they otherwise wouldn't have it.

Not all third-world countries are starving to death. Quite a number have the basic needs covered, but they need effective education, and the OLPC program aims to supplement that education.

Re:Who is Dvorak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is Dvorak? The only Dvorak I know is a crippled keyboard.

Dvorak is a troll. All he does is write articles that get people upset and bring in ad revenue. He needs to be ignored.

Why does someone pay this guy?

[sayfawa]

I've heard some dumb shit from this guy before but this breaks the mold. That rant wasn't even worthy of one of the AC trolls around here.

How many times has it been said over and over and over again: the OLPC is not for the starving countries with the distended bellies and flies in the eyes. They are for countries that have generally good health and food but just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students. It would have taken about one freaking minute for him to find that out. Instead he lets us know (again) what an ass he is.

Give them weapons?

[Quila]

A lot of the hunger is because those in power are purposefully starving them, for example if they're part of the tribe not in power and are considered to be a threat to the local dictator. You can send tons of food, and it'll get confiscated to feed his supporters and resold for cash, keeping the dictator in power and maintaining the hunger.

Or in the case of Zimbabwe, you just have a president who instituted various socialist programs and turned what was once the breadbasket of Africa into a nation of starving poor. Getting rid of Mugabe would go more towards solving the hunger problem there than a million tons of grain.

Re:Hmmm. Let see

[Anonymous Coward]

He also thought mice would never take off.

Quote:

"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things."

The press overlooks the purpose of the machine

[Eric Smith]

The point isn't that the world's poor need computers or that they need to be on the internet. The point is that they need better education. Currently a major cost of education is textbooks. The OLPC is intended, in combination with suitable content, to replace printed textbooks. The cost of an OLPC, even at US$188, is less than the cost of printed textbooks a child needs for five years of school. By providing the children with OLPCs, it should be possible to give them a better education while saving money.

Re:Who is Dvorak?

[mollymoo]

John C Dvorak is a notorious professional troll. His MO is to post something which is carefully designed so it will be interpreted as highly inflammatory (like this story), but he's always careful to give himself a plausible "out" by never being absolute or explicit, so he can later claim he was misinterpreted. If you read this article, you'll see all the hallmarks - he never actually says that computers for the third world are a bad idea, or that education isn't better than food relief. He just wants people to think that's what he's saying because it's controversial and gets the hits.

Re:I think he's missing the point

[Matt Perry]

Looks like Dvorak--as many others--are totally missing the point of the OLPC program.

Dvorak isn't missing the point. He's trolling for ad dollars. He admits as much. [youtube.com] Don't click on the link and feed the troll. Nothing to see here, just move along.

Re:he's got a point.

[Gossi]

I've got a question. Does everybody on Slashdot believe that all of Africa is starving babies with flies covering their mouths? That's a serious question, by the way. Because whilst there are certainly places where that is still happening and it's terrible, there's a fuck of a lot of places where it isn't like that.

Re:he's got a point.

[Zibblsnrt]

It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.

I seem to have missed this memo; I wasn't aware that the OLPC project was aiming its materials at the type of children who appeared in 1980s benefit concert videos, or that the population of the developed world was nothing but an utter monolith of absolute poverty.

Then again, this is Slashdot, which is utterly incapable of discussing the developing world as anything other than a straw man parody of itself...

Re:New section

[Hockney Twang]

I have a solution. If you use the Greasemonkey Firefox extension or Opera userscripts, load up this little guy: http://parksideninjas.com/greasemonkey/antidvorakscript.user.js [parksideninjas.com]

Will remove any story with a summary containing the word "Dvorak".

Re:he's got a point.

[StormReaver]

No, he doesn't have a point. Dvorak is, always has been, and apparently always will be a bloody, flaming idiot.

Not all 3rd world countries are dying of starvation. These computers are not aimed at 3rd world populations that wonder if they are going to survive through the week. There are 3rd world countries with relatively stable food and water, but which lack the education to participate in a computerized world. That is the target market for these introductory computers.

Dvorak has contributed absolutely nothing positive to the computing world. I wish PC Magazine would just shut him the hell up until he achieves at least a double-digit IQ.

The Western way

[markov_chain]

1. Teach a man how to fish
2. Lend him a crapload of money under the condition that he buys the fishing boat, fishing equipment and fuel from you
3. Wait until man can't pay off the debt due to disastrous interest rates, and invoke the default clauses such as taking ownership of his business, and diverting the fish to a Western market
4. Profit!

Re:Luxuries Versus Necessities

[enjahova]

If you are a citizen of an impoverished nation, focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets.

How, pray tell do you expect a citizen of an impoverished nation to be reading your English post on an internet forum without a computer and access to the internet? How would they do it if they didn't "focus on the basics" of reading and writing? Where are they supposed to learn about free markets and agriculture?

Wouldn't it be amazing if there was a machine that could give them access to all of this information, as well as the ability to communicate with people from all over the world using the internet? Wouldn't it be awesome if kids could learn the basics from one little machine by teaching themselves, rather than depending on their loving despots?

This isn't a laptop project, its an education project. It isn't a luxury, its a pen, paper, textbook, word processor, paint brush, camera, instrument, and mesh network all rolled into one educational tool.

Re:Luxuries Versus Necessities

[burnin1965]

look at a highly successful people who transformed themselves from a 3rd-world nation into a 1st-world economic superpower. Consider the case of Japan.

While Japan had some serious rebuilding to do they were far from a 3rd world nation. Although significant infrastructure was destroyed and the country was in disarray they still had many people who were educated and learned in the ways of industrialization.

Tokyo invested almost no money in military forces, space adventures, etc. By 1980, Japan became a 1st-world nation -- and the #2 economic superpower.

Sorry, but that is a false dichotomy. The lack of investment in military development or space science is not the reason japan became a 1st world nation or an economic superpower. If somehow these investments would bankrupt a nation then the U.S. would have been bankrupted long ago and Japan would be #1.

While I'm no expert on post World War II history I'm pretty sure that 1) Japan did not invest in military development or space science because they were expressly forbidden by the Potsdam Declaration and terms of surrender [wikipedia.org];
(I've highlighted what I believe were real contributing factors to their recovery)

* Militarism in Japan must end.
* Japan would be occupied until the basic objectives set out in this proclamation were met.
* The terms of the Cairo Declaration would be carried out and Japanese sovereignty would be limited to the islands of Honsh, Hokkaid, Kysh, Shikoku, and such minor islands as the Allies determined.
* The Japanese army would be completely disarmed and allowed to return home.
* Those who had led Japan to war must be permanently and finally discredited, and abandoned.
* War criminals would be punished including those who had "visited cruelties upon our prisoners".
* Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.
* Japan should be permitted to maintain a viable industrial economy but not industries which would enable her to re-arm for war.
* The treaty was not intended to enslave the Japanese as a race or as a nation.
* Allied forces would be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished

And 2) the post war Japanese economic recovery [wikipedia.org] is well studied and massive investments before and during the Korean war played a significant role in their recovery, not lack of spending on military and space development.

Forget laptops. Forget space ships. Above all, forget nuclear weapons. If you are a citizen of an impoverished nation, focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets. If you can succeed at the basics (and everyone can succeed at the basics), then your nation will naturally prosper.

Party correct, except the laptop in OLPC is merely a tool for "focus on the basics: reading, writing, mathematics, science (includng agriculture), and free markets". I'd suggest that Dvorak and everyone else who keeps pointing out that laptops are not needed should do some prior research into the history of OLPC [emory.edu] and perhaps then they would understand its not about laptops, its about education and learning, its about contructive learning [wikipedia.org], and its not a bunch of pretentious westerners dumping laptops in 3rd world countries, th

Re:New section

[Breakfast Pants]

Here [youtube.com]'s how Dvorak works.

Re:Why does someone pay this guy?

[chris_sawtell]

More to the point: Why did the parent poster get a five when (s)he misses the main point by a million miles?

It's not "... just aren't rich enough to provide computers for their students". It is "...just aren't rich enough to provide books for their students".

Let me add to the chorus: It's an education project, not a computer project. The little green computers are just terminals to enable the kids to turn the information presented thereon into knowledge in their brains.

If J. Dvorak had the wit to be able to do so, he would have at least experimented with the software by downloading an emulator from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads/ [virtualbox.org] and the OLPC software from http://dev.laptop.org/pub/virtualbox/ [laptop.org]. The build OLPC-625.zip [laptop.org] works for me. If J. Dvorak had actually installed it, he would have discovered that the said little green box is the work of a team of top level geniuses, instead he just confirms the fact that he is just an ignorant shill squeaking mindlessly for that (in)famous Harvard dropout [microsoft.com].

Had he spent just a couple of hours doing that he would have discovered that Nicholas Negroponte [wikipedia.org] et all really do deserve a Nobel Prize [wikipedia.org].

Re:On having been to Africa

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

A computer won't help kids. A computer only helps administrators, and typists.

Go actually read about the OLPC or try the demo VM. It isn't a regular computer, it is computer designed from the ground up for educating children and letting them learn together. If this project was dropping Windows PCs with Office, I'd agree it is foolish. That is NOT what is happening.

Paper and pens were far far more useful than computers.

The OLPC is like an infinite supply of paper and pen, and a complete set of encyclopedias, a communications system that auto-discovers and promotes group communications, and a music studio, as well as a general purpose computer and video game system.

Educations works.

And yet educational programs that use technology don't?

...just don't get a piece of technology for a child who can't charge it.

Ignorance is bliss? It connects to solar panels and ships with a hand crank to charge it in regions where those are needed.

The whole point of real efforts to solve the problems is creating a sustainable way for people to get out of poverty. Agriculture is not going to work, unless we invest huge amounts of capital and I don't se it happening. The OLPC bootstraps them to sustainable content creation and info technology. These kids can probably make more money solving captchas than they could farming crops. Then they can buy their own food.

Transcript

[Nazlfrag]

INTERVIEWER: Tell us how it works John

DVORAK: This is the formula for pissing off Macintosh users, for getting a lot of links or attention, and this has been deconstructed but never accurate, let me give you the deconstruction.

First I'd write something that would be semi-innocuous with just enough insulting stuff to get a lot of attention from the Macintosh community. So then they would write in, and by the way it would always be done in such a way that I would have outs, in other words I would write in kind of a weasel way. I would then, then I'd get one column with a lot of numbers.

Then I'd get a lot of hate mail and all kinds of Macintosh reaction and then I would react to it as though I was flabbergasted, that everybody misinterpreted me and they hated it and I don't get it and what was wrong with these people, which would piss them off even more. So I'd get huge hits, after that..

INTERVIEWER: What was the point of all this?

DVORAK: Now wait a minute, for the numbers..

INTERVIEWER: Which numbers exactly? What numbers are you looking for?

DVORAK: And, believe me, lots of numbers. Now then I let it simmer down for a while and when whatever position I had taken originally I would change the position exactly the opposite, and tell the Macintosh people I was completely wrong and they were right all along and the numbers would go through the ceiling! (laughter)