One NNTP-Server Per Child

the olpc project was launched
with bluesky promises of
price/performance breakthrus
for the generator
the wireless
and the screen

promises that were inevitably
quietly downsized
until now they appear to have
production models
but still no public stats at all
on price/performance

and hints that the wireless
and the generator
only work with an expensive
infrastructure assist

which we should have expected all along
because price/performance in the cellphone industry
with its billion dollar r&d
is nowhere close to nNeg's magic beans

but there's a much more modest
downsized model that ought to be do-able
using the pre-www
netnews paradigm

village servers with satellite internet
and stationary-bike battery chargers

children (and adults) with $5 pdas
with alphanumeric keyboards
with one- or two-line displays
and flash memory modules
that can easily hold a weeksworth download
of text-only reading
browsable at leisure on the pda
where offline followups
public and private
can be composed

along with a list of promising
blog-links to be downloaded next time

 
 
 
 
 
  
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Hoaxtop update

you should know
that negroponte is peddling snakeoil
because we've heard comparable promises
a million times before

of products coming real soon now
that will set the world on fire

and when they arrive
a day late and a dollar short
they always disappoint
(especially if they come out of academia)

poorly engineered
awkward interfaces

not at all like it looked
in the glossy magazines

you simply don't engineer
good products this way

starting with hype about low cost
and super features

there are hundreds of comparable
hardware platforms
in the $500 range
and none of them shows any promise
of setting anything on fire

if the $500 model isn't fun
the $100-$200 model won't be, either




i love the dream
of a cheap device that kids love
where they can learn to hack

and it will happen someday

but it will start
from one of those $500 models
like the nokia 770
that hits a sweet spot for hackers
and over a period of a few years
evolves, via the programmers' 'bazaar'
a useful and fun software feature set
that can be ported
to incrementally cheaper platforms
inevitably eventually hitting the $100 mark

but not this way




PS:
how can they skip the phase
where they put 100 working prototypes
in the hands of their target audience
and painstakingly gather feedback
thru multiple cycles of finetuning???

Idiots Alert: $100 laptop

Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab
has been touting a $100 laptop all year
and everybody seems to lap it up
probably because he's from MIT

but MIT's Media Lab is a joke
whose outstanding talent is hype
and whose greatest success is Lego Mindstorms

and the product he's describing
will cost $500 minimum with today's technology

so his $100 boast is whitehot air
a pricepoint chosen not because it was realistic
but because it's barely imaginable

and the fantasy that such a price breakthru
could arrive first via the Media Lab
and be distributed first to the needy

is as believable as UFOs arriving any day now
to take us home to the mothership