Frankly, I have a few misgivings about the OLPC. One of them is the price -- US$100 is for a minimum quantity of 1 million. One of the participants in another mailing list thus called it -- facetiously of course -- the $100 million laptop. If you're looking for a $100 computer, look at http://www.ewayco.com/, which has $100, quantity one, computers. OK, maybe that's just the system box, but add a few thousand pesos for a monitor and keyboard and mouse, and you're looking at maybe $175? BTW, those prices will go down with quantity. Also, they may be more suitable as thin clients, so you'll have to account for the price of a server.
I do have to acknowledge that Negroponte got two important points right. First, the Sugar interface. I've been thinking for some time about the desktop metaphor first propounded by Xerox PARC, then Apple and Microsoft, and now *nix. Hmm, if my real desktop is cluttered, why replicate that on a PC? Shouldn't a PC *fix* that clutter? All it does is make it faster to clutter things up :) Sugar recognizes that today's computer is more of a communication device, and presents the computer as such, by announcing people with other nearby Sugar devices. I have reason to believe that GUIs in the near future will build on that concept. Corollary to this, Negroponte considers teaching office productivity tools to schoolchildren a criminal offense. The second of Negroponte's points is that "it's not a laptop project, it's an education project." (I don't think that point is in the quoted news article, it's one from another story.) It's an education project that happens to use laptops. Too many PCs-for-schools projects forget this. -- Daniel O. Escasa independent IT consultant and writer contributor, Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com) personal blog at http://descasa.i.ph _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
