[geeks] $100 One Laptop Per Child - grist for the mill

[John Francini]

OK, I'll bite.

Two things make this article nothing more than a polemic:

a) The author: John C. Dvorak.  This is the moron who wrote some time 
ago that he KNEW that Apple was going to ditch Mac OS X for Windows.

He is a BS shoveler of the first degree.

b) Its appearance in a Microsoft publication.  OF COURSE they don't 
want a $100 laptop to succeed.  A $100 laptop precludes having 
Windows on it.  This means it will some sort of FOSS operating 
system.  That has to be resisted with all their might.  And if they 
have to spread FUD to do so, all the better.

----------------------

All the above being said, there are some potentially good points in 
the article. The villagers' basic needs, such as food, clothing, 
shelter, electricity, etc. need to be taken care of.  Anecdotally, 
using a laptop screen as a source of light for a hut is kinda sad, on 
the face of it.  But they're probably using it because they don't 
have any other source of cheap-to-use lighting.

But they can be taken care of in addition to the educational needs of 
the kids.  Dvorak's missing the point here: these laptops can store 
on them the books and study materials of an entire primary and 
secondary school education on them without breaking a sweat. This is 
probably a far less expensive way of getting large amounts of 
educational materials into these kids' hands than distributing the 
equivalent pile of books would be.


The article comes across as if it were written with the viewpoint of 
"Don't bother educating these kids until they're all perfectly fed, 
clothed, and sheltered.

Sigh.

John Francini
-- 
John Francini, francini at mac.com

"The journey is more important than the destination-that's part of 
life. If you only live for getting to the end, you're almost always 
disappointed."     -Donald Knuth