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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 + 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.

OLPC: All Icing & No Cake?

John Markoff's story in The New York Times offers a nice & timely update of the One Laptop Per Child project, which recently took down its first 1,000 prototype machines from manufacturer, Quanta Computer, in Taiwan.

"For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate"

Walter Bender & Nicholas Negroponte sample the frosting.

There are a lot of detractors to this project. They raise some interesting questions and, because Microsoft & Intel object to the idea and understandably feel threatened by a serious education-based project for a low-cost and durable wireless information device for children (the operating system is Linux-based and the processor is a power-efficient AMD model), there is a fair amount of dissent that very likely has financial backing.

My favorite spot for anti-OLPC propaganda is OLPC News, where the principals frame themselves as intensely sincere and yet offer an editorial balance that would make FoxNews shudder.

Among the problems detractors identify are the project's...

- high cost to national education departments
- bad User Interface design
- lack of a plan for hardware maintenance
- lack of a curriculum model 

When you understand, however, the project's educational goals, many of the poorly supported objections reveal their fragile underpinnings.

Nicholas Negroponte is the project's leader...

“You have to remember that what this is about is education.”

Mary Lou Jepson, an ex-Intel microchip designer, invented the OLPC's innovative backlit display which functions in two modes -- black & white (to be visible in bright direct sunlight) and also color -- at very low power consumption (80 percent off our wasteful standard)...

“We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.”

Seymour Papert is a project advisor...

...if young people are given computers and allowed to explore, they will “learn how to learn.” That, Mr. Papert argues, is a more valuable skill than traditional teaching strategies that focus on memorization and testing.

A close look at the technical and political challenges that the project has taken on head-first offers an indication of its seriousness of intent and its likelihood of success.

Cost

The World Bank is providing loans to countries to fund the purchase of the OLPC in quantities no less than a million. Project detractors worry that amounts are too large relative to some national budgets and could place countries further into debt where debt is already a problem.

It is an interesting issue to watch closely. The point taken to extremes indicates a poor general faith in sovereign governments to manage their national budgets effectively themselves (there are plenty of examples supporting the notion). But the doubters also appear to overlook the critical benefits OLPC will surely offer to economic growth in countries when the kids mature and form technology or other businesses and can use e-mail, blogs, wikis, the Web and other emerging tools on equal footing with a Fortune 500 corporation.

OLPC obliterates the digital divide at a reasonable cost.

Internet Access to Remote Areas

A laptop is only a typwriter or gaming device without Internet connectivity; with it, the device is a full-blown communicating & learning device. The Ad Hoc or "mesh" networking principal is a creative solution to another difficult challenge facing computing in potentially remote locations. The project relies upon the national and local infrastructure to provide downlink bandwidth to a local tower, in some cases via satellite and in others via high powered WiFi protocols, but the mesh net will distribute bandwidth evenly through a physical community where each device uses its most proximate neighboring laptop as its access point.

We'll see if this presents a problem in many areas; undoubtedly there will be kinks to be ironed out (just as I struggle periodically with my Linksys WiFi router in our Manhattan townhouse).

Lack of Electricity

Introducing a learning device into remote townships or favellas which lack electricity is a non-starter.

So, OLPC's two most difficult design challenges were in creating a device that breaks known technological barriers in energy consumption while creating manual battery charging devices that are efficient, easy to carry and use while offering exceptional durability. We'll see how these efforts work once they get into kids hands.

Lack of Support & Maintenance Facilities

This would be a controversial area principally for people who believe kids in the "Third World" are stupid, uncivilized & barbaric.

OLPC project properly expects the children to be autodidacts (which children are), to support themselves, help eachother with hardware and software problems and in open source fashion teach themselves how to remove bad screens, dead batteries & hard-drives (flash memory is used so HD failures will be much lower than with our typical HD assemblies consisting of many moving & fragile parts).

It is my opinion this is one of the signal strengths of the project: to trust kids. 

User-Interface Design for Many Cultures & Languages

UI design is always tricky and it is even more challenging when you have a user base that speaks many different languages and will percieve UI symbols potentially in many different ways. OLPC's "Sugar" UI will undergo much testing and iteration with a very large population of children and adults providing feedback. If the project is successful, Sugar will be the single most widely used computer UI on Earth. That's why it threatens people.

Again, this is one of the main strengths of the project: using inclusive open source iterative design methodologies which brings many eyeballs and many opinions to the solution of problems and optimization of systems.

OLPC: First-World Transference

"...audiences of all kinds most applaud what they like best."

- J.K. Galbraith

It's become quite popular to bash The Little Green Laptop: members of The Affluent Society tend to project their own circumstances onto others -- upon the less-fortunate, the less-civilized and even the the unspeakably barbaric. But where there's transference, I smell the fetid, cynical messaging of moneyed interests being repeated by the unthinking & complacent rabble.

A $100 laptop is threatening to the hardware and software regime, so it's no surprise that Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Bill Gates and even Scott McNealy have been trash-talking the machine, while offering little factual support for their received wisdom. But that's the obvious dissent that should be expected of interested parties if not of narcissistic hypocrits.

I find uncanny -- and surprising -- the amount of unimaginative and blindered thinking in blog comments and in the YouTube comment section, reflecting how reluctant or incapable affluent people are of placing themselves in the rural African, Asian, South American or even the impoverished urban US environments. There's so little consideration for the social and technical mountains the OLPC project has taken upon itself to scale. People seem to have trouble imagining what it's like to live in a favella, without power and where you might have to walk 100 yards or more to get water, or how difficult it might be to get bandwidth to grass huts in remote townships. Thoughtless quibbles about interface design of OLPC, in light of its thoughtful holistic product design, reveal a great deal about where we are at.

Brad Linder's post on the Download Squad blog about OLPC falls leaden onto the propaganda pile. The title is aimed to discredit OLPC through negative framing: "Will the OLPC interface ruin computing for millions of kids?", while the story itself is rather more balanced. Shame on Brad for his backwards headlining. A better question is 'Will the OLPC interface show what's wrong with the ones we already use?'

It's important to note that the interfaces to which we are accustomed in the First World -- Windows, GNOME & KDE -- and with the notable exception of OS X (which is perfect in every way) are probably the flawed ones, and the "Sugar" interface of the OLPC is likely to be proven the more natural, the more correct, the more universally relevant and the more popular interface within a few short years. It is certainly the most energy-efficient. Sugar will outnumber other interfaces by several multiples, once OLPC gets its wings; and Sugar will be defining the UI across language and cultural barriers for several generations.

Here's a demo of the Sugar UI on YouTube (from 90percentofeverything). Have a look for yourself... [Double-click the video image to run it full size.]

olpc: 1st Working Prototype

The first working prototype of the MIT $100 laptop from olpc was unveiled at the Seven Countries Task Force meeting this week.

Photo-set from Peter Barr-Watson on Flickr. Fedora looks to be running nicely in some of the shots.

I've held one of these non-working prototypes and the screen is not as small as you might imagine. Very robust little creature.

Bill Gates Criticises OLPC

Bill Gates' crude swipe at the MIT Media Lab's "OLPC" -- what I call The Little Green Laptop -- demonstrates how out of it the Chairman of Microsoft is. Between flights to Davos and Bridge rounds with his buddy, The Sage of Omaha, he's not reading the news or paying attention to developments in his field.

The comments are bush-league, uncouth, unobjective and reflect poorly on someone positioning himself as a global philanthropic authority.

Said Gates,

"...geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type."

Microsoft's mee-too effort is six times the cost of the OLPC, and Gates' comment also that the OLPC is for "shared use" is incorrect and an underhanded deprecation of the obvious goals of the Media Lab's project, a project called "One Laptop Per Child."

Moreover, Gates noted cynically that hardware is only a small part of the total cost of a PC...as if that justifies the higher cost of Microsoft's product. The OLPC will run Linux, which is largely self-supported in the local communities, and the network connectivity costs will be transparent since the OLPC will run in ad hoc mode -- the machines will use internal wifi cards to connect to each other in a chain to the inexpensive local government-funded access points. Gates' "high additional costs" that are supposed to take the pressure off Microsoft's high costs are illusory in the present, the relevant, context -- as usual. Gates should save these knowing irrelevancies -- misdirections -- for his paid henchmen like Jack Abramoff or Alan Yates in the trenches.

Gates would like to be the authority on Third-World computing, but his comments highlight only his mental isolation, his ignorance of global economic fundamentals, his immodest self-regard, his modest thought and his low opinion of the demands of serving information, computing services & educational infrastructure in developing nations. Bill Gates' derision of the OLPC should tell you everything you need to know about the sincerity of his own efforts in either computing or philanthropy to help people in poor and under-developed areas.

The only PR strategy for Gates is magnanimous praise for the OLPC and congratulations for Nick Negroponte and for Kofi Annan, its creator & its evangelist. Then walk away.

Bill Gates cannot be an effective or believable philanthropist or government advisor without still more finishing school...or handlers who are more wide-awake.

Financial Times: On Mark Shuttleworth

Ben King does a thorough treatment on Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical & Ubuntu in the Financial Times (print edition) today, truncated on the Web.

The only news to Linux-watchers will be the globetrotting pace Mark has set for himself to sign up accounts for the Ubuntu desktop. His message is modest: bluster is absent and he only emphasizes that the Canonical/Ubuntu project is characterized by high risk. There's no telling, he says, if Ubuntu will be a marginal 2-percenter or a mother-of-all-desktops 50-percenter.

Getting Ubuntu across The Chasm is the trick. But I will tell you that no Linux effort matches Canonical/Ubuntu in its common sense approach to The Chasm, husbanding resources and focusing energy on emerging locales like South- and West-African townships where poverty and fragmented langauge cultures have been impenetrable for the expensive, mainstream desktop.

It remains to be seen if a form of Ubuntu is the targeted system for the Little Green Laptop. This would make sense given The Shuttleworth Foundation's commitments to So. Africa tribal language localization, and also because our trusted acquaintance, Canonical's Mako Hill, is a member of the MIT Media Lab. 

The reason the Little Green Laptop is one of the most interesting stories through the rest of this decade is that Negroponte's project could single-handedly double the global installed base of Internet-connected PC devices within a few short years. Given the fact that Linux will run on that little hand-cranked system, Microsoft's share of installed systems goes down to 50% in a sharp-ish manner. What's more, the Little Green Laptop, if OpenOffice is the suite of choice, will make OpenDocument the 50% global file format. Add to this scenario the number of state or regional govenments following in the footsteps of The Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Peter Quinn and we can begin to visualize a better world for ICT systems and the flow of information.

Isn't it a little over-priced?

As if to prove that technology is really a social phenomenon, the Little Green Laptop project's founder says the work is a matter of education rather than technology, per se.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab Professor, Nicholas Negroponte, says this about his Hundred-Dollar laptop that's being targeted for emerging societies,

"Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education … so it is an education project, not a laptop project."

Pedants, pundits & Philistines will complain that the Little Green Laptop and Internet access will provide a corrupting influence for children as well as their elders in developing areas, exposing them to Western culture's advertising, pornography, flashing colored banners, and tempting consumer items they can ill afford.

Fuck that!

Phoney guilt is easy on the back if, on the other hand, the Internet also brings these kids literature, language, writing practise, small-business capabilities, community, mythology, history, tastefully colored banners as well as identity, confidence & hope.

A Billion Little Laptops

Warren Shiau in the The Globe and Mail (Toronto) covers the Little Green Laptop story with deserving urgency and a bit of analysis.

In a turn of brilliance, the program requires national governments to purchase these things -- with flash memory instead of a hard drive (for durability) and wind-up crank for power -- in quantities of 1,000,000 units. This creates instant ubiquity to prevent the poor kids or elders from selling them on for the cash.

Nick Negroponte, who runs the $100 Laptop program from MIT's Media Lab, has the UN General Secretary, Kofi Annan, on board. (If the UN General Secretary can't make time for the Little Green Laptop, then he needs a lobotomy.)

Says Annan, "We urge leaders and stakeholders … to do their utmost in ensuring that the initiative is fully incorporated into their efforts to build an inclusive information society."

Asks Shiau, 'Does "inclusive" mean exclusive of Microsoft?'

If Microsoft is feeling excluded from these kinds of open standards initiatives, it is of Microsoft's own volition. That company should really open up because it's taking itself out of all the fun.

The Little Green Laptop is an OpenDocument fait accompli. What's your best guess? Do we break 1 Billion of these by 2008, 2010 or 2012?

The next Andy Grove might come from Rwanda...or The Bronx or London or Queensland or Nairobi or...