It needs a real keyboard.

“That is: how do we pay for it? Turns out that is not hard, because
the total cost of ownership, including buying the laptop, maintaining
it and connecting it, is $1 per week, per child. While that is high
for the poorest nations, it is not outrageous. The issue is how to
front the money.”

A (1): through professor muhammad yunus’ “social business” model (read
“Creating A World Without Poverty”). to see ways in which that
operates successfully on an international scale, see e.g.
http://kivo.org. adaptation of kivo to fund children’s education on a
long-term scale instead of / as well as funding businesses: that could
be very interesting.

A (2): as the http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com project shows (see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4365350.stm) you
actually only need to drop _one_ computer into an entire _village_,
and the kids will work it out and educate themselves. you will have
heard of the hole-in-the-wall project: it’s the project that inspired
“slumdog millionaire”. you _have_ to listen to the interview, it is
heart-rending inspiring stuff, and also very very funny at how badly
we quotes adults quotes underestimate quotes ignorant quotes children.

A (3): i don’t see cafod and oxfam saying things like “pay $1 a week
and get a child a laptop so he can get educated” i see “pay us $1 a
week and get a child some fresh water” hmmm…

insight 2

whilst negroponte brings to us the importance of educating children,
why is it in all the discussions is there no mention of providing
facilities for the _adults_ in these same countries?

as the ndiyo.org project’s fultoa and attridgeville 2006 deployments
showed (funded through microloans from professor yunus’s grameen bank,
in the bangladesh case), there _is_ a way to make use of low-cost
technology to bring internet communications to the third world and the
emerging markets: it’s just that there appears to be nobody really
“marketing” such technology in order to get it out to people! given
that i am aware that the price of technology has dropped by almost 50%
since the 2006 ndiyo.org deployments, i find this to be personally
quite frustrating.

http://ndiyo.org/news/fultoa
http://ndiyo.org/news/attridgeville

http://plugable.com/products/ud-160-a/ and products like this are now
beginning to be integrated into the _monitors_. with smartphones
coming out with large amounts of RAM and faster ARM CPUs, it’s
perfectly possible to connect two monitors… to a smartphone! and
have them run as an Internet Browser, VoIP phone calls (through
speakers or a headset connected to each monitor). the smartphone _is_
the PC, eliminating the cost of the PC entirely.

insight 3

if 600,000 copies of electronic books can fit onto an OLPC, and if
http://wikireader.org can fit 3 million wikipedia pages onto a
handheld viewer, why isn’t access to these resources more widely
distributed?

insight 4

if these 3rd generation OLPC books are so fantastic and cheap, why the
hell aren’t they also being made available for adults, as well?

why aren’t they being provided in china, india etc. for them to run
educational training videos (“learn how to maintain and service a
motor scooter in 12 weekly night classes”) that are downloaded over
the period of one week, over slower low-cost networks? one training
video per week won’t be disrupted if it takes 4 days to download the
video, will it?

and the same OLPC system can be used by the kids during the day, too.

insight 5: technical misrepresentation

ahhh… although the SUGAR software would _like_ you to believe that
it can run on Windows PCs, it actually can’t. not fully-functionally,
that is. the process of compiling the software to run on Windows is
an absolute bitch: a key strategic component is tied too closely to
the Firefox Browser engine (xulrunner). the last time someone
(novell) successfully compiled that component was nearly 18 months ago
(xulrunner 1.8 for win32) and that is _far_ too out-of-date.

despite this, there _are_ a large number of components that will still
operate “independently” of the firefox browser engine, but it’s going
to be a slow process of getting programmer mindshare and redesigning
from the ground up to accommodate alternative operating systems. if
they wanted SUGAR to run on windows, they should have started with
that in mind in the first place.

ideally, SUGAR-on-a-stick should (if it isn’t already) just be a Linux
“Live Boot”, taking over the hardware without touching the hard drive.
i haven’t checked that this is the case, though.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry

now i have: it’s a “live boot” USB memory stick, which “takes over” your computer without touching it. it is NOT actually install Sugar as a “windows application”. that goal has a long LONG way to go, to be achieved.

Insight 6

What happens when all these OLPC users grow up? Has anyone thought ahead, to provide these countries with the technology that these newly-inspired creative minds will need?

anyone that needs reminding of the potential nasty consequences and the responsibilities and duties associated with NOT abandoning a foreign country that you’re helping achieve a particular goal, watch the very last five minutes of “Charlie’s War”.