Does anybody here have contact with Muhammad Yunus? I sent the author of this piece a note about Sugar for Caixa Mágica.
http://www.advogato.org/article/986.html Venezuela orders 1 million Intel Classmate PCs Many people in Free Software may lament the fact that Venezuela is ordering Classmates not OLPCs. The simple fact is that Negroponte has lost the plot. Confidence, Software and means of Communication is far more important than a lovely piece of hardware. I used to think that it was really bad that Intel is behind the Classmate PC. I held the view that they were a big corporate bully, knocking down the OLPC effort with biased newsreports that weren't vetted or researched properly, even by the BBC. Then I learned that the CEO of Intel had met with Professor Mohammad Yunus, and instantly my view on the matter changed. utterly. If Professor Yunus can inspire Intel to do the same thing that Danone did, I am 100% behind Intel. It's also worth mentioning that I'm 100% behind the SUGAR software, as well, and anything else like it. What's fantastic about Intel is that they can help fill one important piece of the puzzle, and people - governments - believe and trust them to be able to deliver. With guidance from Professor Yunus, Intel will not be performing a "profix maximisation" exercise on the buyers of the Classmate PCs. This is borne out by the evidence you can see before you: Intel is selling the design of the Classmate PCs to Portugal (for Venezuela to buy 1 million of them, whilst the Portugese government takes a further 500,000). When the OLPC first came out, and governments announced they were buying orders in the millions, those orders were stalled when they realised that they had no training, and that this "support" issue was simply... non-existent. Of course, the fact that it's often the children who teach the teachers how to use the machines was entirely overlooked - but it's that confidence that needs to be inspired... The other thing that's great about the Classmate PCs is that the machines can have WIMAX in them. Not the restricted version of WIMAX that's choked off by U.S. companies, so that it only talks to base-stations; the proper version of WIMAX that performs collaborative networking. Medium-rance Collaborative networking is vital in areas with little to no communications infrastructure, as that wonderful article on an OLPC deployment in a remote village described. The children use it to talk to each other, outside of school hours. However, WIFI is restricted in range - even in areas where there is relatively little metal to get in the way; WIMAX has a range measured in kilometres, opening up the possibility to cover an entire town with only a few machines. -- Don't panic.--HHGTTG, Douglas Adams fivethirtyeight.com, 3bluedudes.com Obama still moving ahead in EC! http://www.obamapedia.org/ Join us! http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai For the children _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
