Waiting for the 100$ laptop

70s-80s overlander

Hey, let's try some optimism. I still encourage folks to take a look at the Peruvian teachers' comments for which I gave the url above. Just now I found this note on the **NEW** OLPCNews forum about the forum itself:
http://www.olpcnews.com/

classroom reports: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?board=27.0

repair advice etc: http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?board=45.0
[apparently the earlier the model the harder the repair, with improvements being made with each generation; clearly OLPC is hoping the 81,000+ geeks who just purchased a laptop for their own private use to assist with some brainstorming on these repair issues, the designing of compatible peripherals, etc, etc]

I am having problems figuring out whether Reliance Communications is still working with OLPC-India or not.

Nick-H

One Toilet Per Family would do more for the world.

Over-rated things, computers....

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Aishah

Totally agree - properly maintained and cleaned public toilets would be wonderful! With hygienic sewage disposal in sealed pipes to an outside city limits sewerage plant etc. The public toilets here are disgraceful - and right against the Fort wall, not far from the entrance men are openly peeing all the time so the stench is dreadful. The built 'toilets' are nothing more than stone hidey places with urine dripping out onto the ground and these are opposite the fruit barrows, beside the vegetable market. Appalling.

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capt_mahajan

different men, I hope

Aishah

LOL, Captain! Multitudes of different men!

Nick-H

OK, so any philanthropy is better than none, and it has been mentioned elsewhere that Mr Gates has put, and is willing to put a heap more, into the prevention of malaria. He probably supports a heap of other stuff that is not high-tech or IT-related too.

But I suspect that many of today's wealthy philanthropists have grown up in, and made their money from, IT-related industry --- and probably think that computers really are essential to life.

Of course, they're pretty useful; I'd be the last to deny that!

ALERT!

So far as computers for the masses in India is concerned, it might be helpful if these people also lobbied the government to correct that the situation that India's broadband is slow, limited, and the fifth-most-expensive (per byte of bandwidth) in the world!

brownboy66

byte of bit?

Nick-H

I should have said bit, of course, as that is how bandwidth is sold.

Hey! I'm out of practice with this stuff !

brownboy66

I thought maybe the Indian govt or someone had a different way of measuring bandwidth in India!

Nick-H

the TRAI (?) has just issued a discussion paper about what the definition of 'broadband' should be.

At least they're prepared to think and talk about it.

One day. Maybe ...

70s-80s overlander

Nick-H -- obviously I agree. See my entry #22 above on this thread -- the entry titled, "$100 laptops versus $35 toilets". I'm optimistic enough to hope that some kid surfing the net will figure out how to bring toilets to his community. You know I've been looking forward to a generation of side-walk computer-repair shops staffed by 10-year-olds working after school. I guess India could use a generation of side-walk toilet-repair shops similarly staffed. Clearly, the whole idea is to open up a generation of poor kids' minds to a huge world of knowledge available via the internet. Perhaps mastering a $100 laptop will lead a kid to discovering more powerful sources of information and knowledge.

In the Peruvian experiment noted above, the teachers observed that school attendance went up and the kids showed up at school better dressed -- so one has to wonder if there were not some self-esteem issues that got addressed without anyone directly focusing on these.

There are a couple of optimistic Indians who are going around building toilets in communities [and there's that guy who built the New Delhi subway despite all the nay-sayers], but it sure looks like several generations of Indians have felt overwhelmed [and pessimistic] about the enormity of the toilet task. I'm betting on one of these $100-laptop-kids making a breakthrough on the Indian toilet problem.

navinkurian2002

Frankly toilets are more difficult to set up then computers in schools. Why? land mafia, land laws , other legal hassels on setting up an addition structure.

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Nick-H

Woops... I had a feeling I was repeating a point someone had already made.

Sorry about that

Can't argue with the rest of your post: interesting points.

They'll never get that access to the world of information out there if they can't afford the internet connection, though .

70s-80s overlander

Nick-H, the "affording the internet connection" problem gets back to my note #91 above:
Apparently Reliance promised last year to provide this -- but I can not find any recent confirmation.

In the short- and long-run, one of the best things that could come out of this is that OLPC ends up with a fair number of serious competitors -- preferably Indian competitors -- making inexpensive computers that can survive in the midst of monsoons, dust, heat, poverty -- bad toilets -- etc, etc -- and that can be repaired by a 10-year-old kid. The OLPC has no moving parts and is "water resistant"/"dust resistant".

And what exactly is this entity called OLPC-India? It seems to keep a rather low profile.

Diana

True, but my understanding was that one of the primary used of the OLPC jobbies was to allow access to text - be a portable pile of books if you will - in places where it's difficult to tote or keep paper-based books. I know I shipped 3 big boxes of kids books to the center in Kerala (before I knew better last year) and all arrived in tatters, boxes soaking we, books destroyed,...

I was able to dry and salvage a few but even so, I noted that during parts of the year Kerala is so humid that you can practically drink the air! Usually I do not blow-dry my hair as I wear it straight and it drys quickly...everywhere but Kerala. One day I went to give a workshop w/o blow drying my hair, thinking it would be dry by the time I set up but,...it never dried all day long!

I spent an entire day with sopping wet hair, standing in front of a typically polite group of Kerala teachers who never made a single comment. Bless their reserved little hearts.

(Though I'm glad I couldn't understand what they were giggling about in Malayalam at lunchtime. ) But I digress. Humidity = Bad on Books.

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