Re: [MLUG] Anyone planning on getting a OLPC laptop?

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 11/12/07, Mark Rages <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> There are a lot of cool ideas in the OLPC laptop:
>
> http://bc.tech.coop/blog/071112.html
>
> Anyone on the list planning to get one?  If my daughter was a little
> older I would get one for her.  Or if I needed a little Linux computer
> for something, but I've got too many as it is.

It is a really interesting idea, and I'm glad to see they are actually
going to get to try the concept out. Many of the innovations here are
things that I believe we will see in much more widespread use pretty
soon, notably the lack of hard and optical drives and the use of flash
only for storage. That said, this system really wants to have a lot
more flash to do the kinds of things most of us would be doing. It has
an SD slot, but it's not clear to me that you can use it without
having something stick out of the machine. The cool thing about this
is that if the design concept is right, we should see faster and
better versions of this coming out over the next couple of years.

Also, having seen a bit more how computers are actually used in US
schools compared to how they could be used, I am a bit surprised that
there is no move on to make these available to kids in this country.
There are schools, jurisdictions, and even whole states that have
decided to go the laptop route, and these are less than half of the
cost of what most of those people are using. Within a couple of years,
we could probably also have a decent set of electronic texts cobbled
together, and the whole cost structure of teaching could change
everywhere. My concern with OLTP in other countries remains that I am
just not sure how many of these will really end up staying with kids
as opposed to being appropriated by adults. It's also not clear to me
that the adults would not find them at least as useful, so maybe
that's not a bad thing. The whole plan is extremely idealistic and
somewhat doctrinaire, and that also worries me a bit.

But the unit itself is extremely interesting.

jking

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