Colombia Signs Up For OLPC Laptops With Windows 154
Reader Cowards Anonymous writes with this excerpt from Good Gear Guide: "Colombia will become the second country to use the One Laptop Per Child Project's (OLPC) XO laptops running Microsoft Windows XP in schools after signing an agreement for pilot programs in two towns. Schools in the towns of Quetame and Chia will be outfitted with the small green XO laptops developed by the OLPC. The pilot programs are expected to expand over time."
Pet Project (Score:1, Informative)
The ones going to Quetame will be standard OLPC laptops, the other town will get the Greener Green(tm) version with foliage.
Even in Colombia, Microsoft is trying to catch up (Score:5, Informative)
The groups did not say how many laptops would be handed out as part of the trial nor when it would start.
So it's an unspecified number of laptops at an unspecified point in the future. In the mean time, the linux version of the OLPC is a step or two ahead, and will be deploying 110,000 laptops running sugar:
Last month, OLPC announced that several towns in Colombia were in the process of buying or deploying its XO laptops, most of which use a Red Hat Fedora Linux OS core customized by OLPC and a graphical user interface aimed at kids called Sugar.
An initial 20,000 laptops will be handed out at schools in the capital, Bogota, thanks to several Colombian foundations and private donors. Another 90,000 laptops will be deployed in Cartagena.
Why will this pilot use windows laptops? easy, because Microsoft is paying for a big chunk of it:
Microsoft and OLPC will donate the XO laptops
This is quite interesting, after Bill Gates said the OLPC project was the wrong thing to spend charity money on, which should be spent on more fundamental things like food and healthcare. Clearly, this is not charity, it is fighting for the marketshare of the future.
The official excuse:
The decision to put Windows on the laptops came about because officials in some countries feared a non-Windows laptop would ill prepare students for the real world, in which Microsoft software dominates.
..is totally retarded. Anyone who has had a decent education can learn to use basic office programs in a day if needed. And anyhow, by the time these kids will enter the workforce, windows will be on version 15 (we're talking primary school kids!) and anything specific they learn about the system would be totally useless.
Re:Tragedy (Score:3, Informative)
Kinda odd considering that King Crimson have always been an under-the radar cult band and using their sounds on Linux would be a more fitting match. Microsoft should have instead had Fall Out Boy or Puff Daddy record the sounds, those'd be much more appropriate to Vista
Columbia did NOT choose Win-OLPC (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting that it is a right-wing nation like Columbia that chooses to get it's OLPC laptops with Windows installed.
Colombia (not Columbia) made no such choice. This is a future pilot program of unspecified size that microsoft is at least partially paying for. In the meantime, 110000 sugar-base OLPCs are already scheduled for deployment in Colombia (according to TFA). Summary is totally misleading.
This is a blip. (Score:4, Informative)
A.) This is TWO TOWNS. I'm finding all the teeth gnashing here a bit sad. The real deployments are already underway and most are using Linux.
If you RTFA you'll find that: .several towns in Colombia were in the process of buying or deploying its XO laptops, most of which use a Red Hat Fedora Linux OS... An initial 20,000 laptops will be handed out . . . in . . . Bogota. Another 90,000 laptops will be deployed in Cartagena.
. .
Around 1,000 XO laptops have been earmarked for schools in regions where the Revolutionary Army of Colombia rebel group remains active. The XO is already used in Marina Orth, former home to drug lord Pablo Escobar.
B.) And what makes you so sure that in a few years they won't eventually switch the OS on the M$ boxes when the press and suits go away? Quite a few Latin American countries are framing the switch to Linux as a nationalistic thing, as a chance to use Spanish-language optimized versions from Mexico instead of the Norteamericano corporate beast.
In short, dudes, relax.
Re:Too bad it's WIndows (Score:1, Informative)
You're going to learn something about computers by using them, even if all you learn is "click the blue E to get on the interwebs." This is self-evident and should not need to be explained to you, although recognizing this fact might interfere with the mocking tone of your post so I see why you cannot allow that. No matter how non-technical a user might be, they are going to have some kind of experience with the machines they use; the only relevant question is what sort of experience will that be? It is on this that I commented. The purpose behind their use of a computer is irrelevant to anything I said and I suspect that you know it. Thus, pointing out that computers are tools and that the intricacies of the tools might not be the object of interest is a pathetic attempt at a straw man.
Completely irrelevant when the machine is shipped from the vendor with all the needed drivers. Just like any computer with pre-installed Linux that you would get from any vendor who provides them (either you comment on something you know nothing about or this is more rhetoric -- I am inclined to believe the latter). The question about which OS the OLPC ships with concerns either A) Pre-installed Windows or B) Pre-installed Linux. You are pretending that the question is about C) Pre-installed Windows or D) User-installed Linux. Another straw man tactic? So soon after the last one? Try comparing like to like and you'll get more meaningful results. Another obvious thing that you probably already knew, and also another thing that makes your comment noise instead of signal.
I know it might surprise you since 12+ years of rote memorization and vying for the approval of teachers and professors who tell you what you need to learn and how you will learn it does tend to kill any sort of natural "how does that work?" curiosity by the time someone comes out of our modern school system, but children often do want to take a thing apart and see what makes it tick. They might even handle concepts that you would consider too advanced for them (in your great wisdom, I am sure) in order to do so. A completely open-source system, OS and apps, means no barriers to any students who want to do this. That is all I was saying. Pointing out absurdities, like the fact that Windows does not deliberately delete individual open-source applications, does nothing to address my point. Again.
All software has bugs. Some of those bugs cause crashes. WIth Windows, there is typically nothing at all I can do to mitigate said bugs. With Linux there is something I can do. It is not strange in the slightest for patches to be available within hours of bringing a problem to a developer, even if you yourself are not a programmer. Furthermore, when something fails for reasons other than a bug (like a configuration issue, or maybe I screwed up the permissions), I get a meaningful error message that usually tells me exactly where the problem is and what I need