PlexNex

Today's Lesson: Do Not F**k with the Negroponte Brothers

In light of the bush-league behavior of Intel in undercutting OLPC's education project with the meritless "Classmate PC", I read this morning with schadenfreude that the New York State attorney general is going after Intel ...

"Cuomo Subpoenas Intel Over Antitrust Accusations"  | Nicholas Confessore | The New York Times | 11 Jan 2008

While the inquiry does not overtly pertain to the recent behavior of Intel toward OLPC and the article does not mention OLPC at all, and while AMD has been pursuing lawsuits against Intel for anti-competitive practices in other locales for several years now, the chance seems remote to me that this new heat on the gorilla chip-maker is not directly connected to Intel's bullying of John Negroponte's little brother, Nicholas.

Nicholas Negroponte, OLPC's chief, has (despite being the one being assaulted) sounded like a whiny schoolgirl throughout a series of petulant, uncoordinated and apparently improvised complaints against Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini.

"A Little Laptop with Big Ambitions" | Stecklow & Bandler | The Wall Street Journal | 24 Nov 2007

"Negroponte on Intel's $100 laptop pullout" | interview with David Kirkpatrick | Fortune | 4 Jan 2008

Otellini, for his part, comes out looking only a few degrees worse, like a hapless corporate chieftain caught in the crossfire of the throwing tantrums of his own Board of Directors and also Bill Gates -- the real and undisputed czar of Intel -- both of whom are undoubtedly breaking Otellini's balls to win back the OLPC chip business from AMD (with, ironically, only disastrous implications for Intel's already weakening profit margins).

Clearly what has taken place is that Gates and Intel have together determined that OLPC -- which could eventually embed GNU/Linux in a global ecosystem of a billion or two billion computers for young people -- must not fly and must be halted at all costs. This is why Intel's salesforce is out in the field cajoling, threatening any OLPC-buying national education departments not to purchase OLPC. What is so surprising is that they have apparently been successful, even though Intel's alternative, the "Classmate," offers not comparable technology and no comparable value.

OLPC's President, Walter Bender, sets the mood straight today with a brief letter to The Wall Street Journal, telling of Intel's anti-competitive behavior:

"Intel is on the Outside of One Laptop Project" ...

"... OLPC even went so far as to help Intel improve its competitive offering by incorporating the unique features of our XO laptop. However, Intel didn't meet our cost, power or environmental specifications. In contrast, we have a very fruitful collaboration with AMD."

OLPC's ex key-"man", Mary Lou Jepsen, also clarifies in an interview with Groklaw's Sean Daly how piss-poor is the Intel Classmate's design ...

Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not only is the XO cheaper than the Classmate, the XO requires less infrastructre expenditure for electricity and for internet access. In Peru we can run off of solar during the day and handcrank at night for an additional $25 or so per student – this is one-time expense – the solar panel and the crank will last 10 or perhaps 20 years. Just try running electricity cables up and down the Peruvian Andes for that cost while making sure it's environmentally clean energy. The Classmate isn't as durable as the XO, and its screen is about 30% smaller, the batteries are the type that can explode and only last 1-2 years and can't be removed by the user and harm the environment. The batteries are expensive to replace: $30-40 per replacement. The XO batteries last for 5 years and cost less than $10 to replace. Finally, the XO is the greenest laptop ever made, the Classmate isn't – this matters a great deal when one proposes to put millions of them in the developing world.

My own speculation: with his brother in a high position, Nicholas Negroponte is not in the mood to lie down to Intel's (Microsoft's) co-manipulations here at the low end of the important education laptop segment. Not calling in a favor from the Empire State, or from Andrew Cuomo personally, may be too hard to resist, but it is the Negroponte's responsibility to apply pressure on the ugly establishment in whatever ways they are able. (I have no information that John Negroponte has involved himself in this matter. That conclusion is purely speculation on my part.)

Intel's cash costs and opportunity costs (in terms of further management distractions) are going up just through the New York State lawsuit, alone. That will proceed whatever the outcome, whether Intel joins OLPC and plays fair (which it may have to do to achieve the best outcome for itself).

It's about time we got into the "Chin-Music"! And it's good news for Free Software fans. This year, 2008, looks to be the year GNU/Linux players start to play hardball. We seem to be absorbing the necessary methods: some of the pitches need to be up & in if the other pitches, low and on the outside corner, are to be at all effective.

Fair is, apparently, fair in markets -- as in love & war.

WSJ's Harsh Toke on OLPC

To:     [email protected], [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date:  November 24, 2007

Steve & James --

Your piece on OLPC certainly covers all the bases.

But it reads like a hatchet-job against Negroponte -- like you have something personally agianst his pluck, or against not-for-profits. Undeserved in my view, given how much real new technology was created in the project which would not otherwise exist (networking hardware, dual-mode screen, low power-consumption throughout, user-interface design, more).

Your conclusion that OLPC will survive a long time contradicts your lead "...gets stomped"

A truer lead: "Big Chip Muscles its Way Back In"

Clearly Nicholas Negroponte has given Intel what it wanted: the road to serving the world's next billion machines. Please cover that for us.

-Sam

OLPC: Give One, Get One

For five more days you can purchase a Little Green Laptop. Wired Store is participating; or go directly to the OLPC project.

If units are delivered before Christmas (unknown), this will make a great present for any age.

OLPC + Windows

Negroponte redefines "open" in his statement justifying the inclusion of an opening for Windows on the OLPC.

"It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open," Negroponte said.

Jo Best | ZDNet Australia

Open means visible code. Not welcoming of having your head stoved in.

This twisting of language, good sense and repudiation of declared objectives must be an expedient to get Bill Gates & Warren Buffett to stop standing on his bunyons.

Negroponte needed to get the anti-OLPC-league off his back to close some big deals. But he just gave up one of the strongest educational principles supporting the project: that kids can open up the software and learn from playing with the source. This will probably never be possible with a Windows version of OLPC (-- and if Microsoft releases its source it will stop these kids from ever contributing to Free Software because they will have seen the Microsoft code and become a patent violation risk).

In addition, OLPC Windows runs afoul of the principles of Free Software and common sense in an education project by distributing a hornet's nest of proprietary dependencies into fast-growing markets.

In fighting for oxygen in the real world of influence, OLPC just stopped being important. Another big win for the Gorilla.

The Gray Lady is All Over Linux

You'll notice that massive failures like Microsoft's ISO and EU debacles in September have cascading effects on editors and send shudders through the belief-system supporting monopoly dominance in technology.

Not only did my editor at FT come in with a late request to cover the Linux migrations in Europe, but it must be LinuxWeek at The New York Times, where we got nice graphics above the fold of Circuits yesterday and where the immortal D. Pogue (his name means "kiss" in Gaelic -- as in "Pogue mahone!") covered OLPC today -- "Laptop With a Mission Widens its Audience".

And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. “Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop,” they say.

Clearly, the XO’s mission has sailed over these people’s heads like a 747.

The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.

There’s real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the computer itself. Many nations in XO’s market have few natural resources, and the global need for information workers grows with every passing day.

(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte’s, response: “Nobody I know would say, ‘By the way, let’s hold off on education.’ Education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.”)

It's about time that the first project to bring Linux to a billion people [my prediction] gets sensible & objective coverage.

Starting November 12th, go to www.xogiving.org for the $400 give-one get-one plan.

Go to The New York Times story through the link above for David's very inviting video explanation of why the OLPC XO is so great.

Get a Two-fer at OLPC

Steve Lohr writes in today's New York Times about One Laptop Per Child's ("OLPC") disappointing sell-through.

Consequently, the project is offering a 2-for-1, sorry, 1-for-2 deal for $399 in affluent circles. Buy one for yourself and have one delivered gratis to Botswana or Namibia or Zaire, or The Bronx...

I'm a buyer in whatever quantity they permit.

OLPC & Intel Join Up

David Berlind covers the new alignment between the One Laptop Per Child EDUCATION project and the big chip-maker.

What interests me about this new development, which represents a smoothing of earlier ruffled feathers, is how much the nonsensical anti-OLPC rhetoric will now diminish. The answer is MUCH, if most of it had been originating from Intel; not much, if it has been originating from the Other Gorilla.

PODCAST: OLPC on NPR

Chris Leyden's NPR show, Radio Open Source,  put on a segment (MP3) about OLPC last night (Wed., Feb 21, 2007).

I still can't fathom why people can't get the brilliance of this. However, the discussion & certain of the sincere criticism is healthy and does in fact point up areas of the project that can be strengthened while also pointing up areas where Negroponte | Bender | Papert are way ahead of just about everybody's concept of the usefulness of a device for learning by doing.

Walter Bender (OLPC, MIT Media Lab) mentioned the device's Linux OS, its Sugar UI, its open hardware and strippability...

The transparency and the access that open source gives you, we think is really important to learning. We want the children to be able to reach inside the machine we want their teachers to be able to reach inside the machine; and touch it, and transform it, and explore it as deeply they want to. And a closed system doesn’t allow that.

Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center for Internet and Society)

...once you actually think about putting this device in the hands of every student, you have real questions about what the classroom is going to look like. This device has some really interesting pedagogical theory built into it.

People who have this device get to participate in that global conversation. I think what's really important is to realize that this isn't just an electric book reader, this isn't just a classroom tool; this is a content production tool. We are seeing just the tip of the iceberg right now over on the Global Voices Project, and we're seeing how different our picture of a country can be when we're actually hearing from someone over in Saudi Arabia [Leyden interrupts: "That's why we love it, Ethan!"] telling us about Saudi society. What happens with this is we now have the potential for maybe a million Libyan school kids to tell us what it's like to be in Libya, a country that we don't know very much about in this country and we tend to have a great deal of suspicion about. So that's revolutionary. Even more revolutionary than that, we tend in America to think of ourselves as idea-producers and content-producers. If we think about sort of the underpinnings of the American economy right now, they're really cultural production, they're our ability to make and share ideas whether they're entrepreneurial ideas or artistic and then selling that to a global audience. In the long run, putting that ability into the hands of children around the world changes everything.

Wayan Vota (OLPC News)

It is clock-stopping hot technology.

A Merry Christmas!

It is a merry Christmas, this, the year that OLPC got rolling. I think this is the most significant effort in the history of our industry, when ingenuity turns from pleasing the requirements of the affluent 15% (or whatever percent) to reaching out to every soul by making difficult choices and asking the difficult questions.

I have been amazed by the resistance to OLPC. Even if you expect a lot of trash talk from Bill Gates, Intel and the entrenched interests in the PC field who are threatened by a well-designed $100 machine, the fancy & false logic from all sectors has been a surprise. There are sites -- more than one -- gloating on every piece of negative news, as well as fudging numbers in every possible way to put the project in a gloomy light.

One post coming on OLPC News this week from a source closer to the project really contrasted nicely with this river of weak arm-chair punditry.

"A Holiday Wish: One Laptop Per Nepali Child"
by Shankar Pokharel
President, One Laptop Per Child Nepal

M. Pokharel makes a useful argument using the criticisms of OLPC's detractors to make his simple case. Countries need to provide their people basic education -- which includes basic literacy. They do not provide effective education today and in some cases more than half of some national populations remain untouched by the educational system. Nepal, for one, misses 20% of its people in remote areas.

Many do not recognize that a connected laptop is a replacement for text-books, which are expensive, hard to ship, and become rapidly obsolete. Moreover, a text-book based curriculum is limited by comparison to learning activities driven by the vast content possibilities of the Web.

Critics often transfer their own circumstances to the environment being discussed. They have no feeling for the challenges of education in poor and remote places and seem not particularly curious. That's why it is impossible for some people to look past the difficulties to see the brilliance behind simply placing this device ubiquitously.

It would be enough to have no curriculum concepts or plans. It would be enough to have not thought about the design of the interface. It would be enough to let locals figure out how the networking is going to work itself out. But OLPC addresses all of these and in addition has enough respect for children and local teachers to trust them to be brilliant -- as people tend to be.

M. Pokharel says it clearly:

Some people argue that it is arrogant for the OLPC organization to assume that poor kids want laptops. I think it is arrogant to assume that we don't want them and that we can't figure them out. Those kids are poor, but they're not dumb. They will figure out how to use the laptops and support them, even if their parents and teachers are dumbfounded by them.

It boggles my mind that some people would deny this. The status quo is, indeed, a powerful intoxicant.

And there is a habit of number-crunching -- in defiance of useful context -- that argues why these countries cannot afford OLPC.

We might as well give up on this whole laptop thing and revert to our current strategy which is succeeding fabulously at not educating our people. Hey, 45% literacy doesn't look too bad after all! We can always send our literate citizens to earn hard currency in the Persian Gulf as security guards and maids!

The poverty card is a fascist argument to keep the poor out of the way.

I think OLPC is the best economic development program since clean water. And we'd do well to trust sources close to the project for clean information. 

OLPC: Distractions from Intention

The OLPC -- the Little Green Laptop, the device itself -- is so interesting that it is distracting worldwide attention from the more important aspects of the project.

Someone affiliated with the MIT Media Lab -- it's not clear who -- has started an interesting blog: "Froth" (under the DoubleSoyLatte URL). They are saying some useful things...

The staggering scale and size of the numbers associated with one laptop per child (o-l-p-c) has distracted from its objective. The Laptop is dangerously close to overshadowing all that motivated its development. The initiative requires more attention than the tool.

What caught my attention at Nicholas Negroponte's keynote address at LinuxWorld Boston last February is that OLPC is an education project (rather than a computer project). I immediately registered that this is going to be the basis of misunderstanding while, at the same time, noted that this will be one of OLPC's keys to success.

A basic study of sustainable development will reveal that in order for this to be achievable on a truly global scale in an economically meaningful and environmentally strategic way, the emerging populations will need to technologically leapfrog the rest of the world. The most penetrating and instantaneous way to make this happen is by deploying to the youngest segments of the population.

Some of the objections to the project have been about the difficulty of distributing, managing, maintaining & preserving these devices in-country on such massive scale. Other objections focus on the design of the device itself: that it is too small; something is wrong with the User-Interface; the mesh network will never work in central Kenya, etc. There is also criticism about a lack of curriculum, but generally fewer people have focused on the educational side.

Criticism is normal and important for any serious project and certainly for a project with such ambition and one which brings audacity & talent to solving real & fundamental problems on a global scale.

It's my wish that the criticism would improve in quality. I think it would if people would focus more on OLPC's fundamental goals and not so exclusively on the laptop.

For innocent bystanders, it is also going to be useful to put on your bullshit detectors, to be able to tell the sincere criticism from the purely defeatist criticism sponsored by lazy-blogging, jealousy and industrial gamesmanship.