![]() ![]() unfortunately I’m personally spoiled so my perspective is certainly skewed, but I’m going to try. I decided to take them up on this so I could see it for myself and do a review that looked at it from the perspective Negroponte had envisioned, not the spoiled developed world perspective. You’ve heard of deals where you can buy one get one free? this is the opposite, it’s buy two get one! The idea is you pay for two machines and one gets sent to a child in a third world company (and you get the tax deduction) and the other one is delivered to you. In November, the One Laptop Per Child program (or OLPC) opened up to the public to purchase one of these so called XO laptops. People want these for THEIR children, completely missing the point of what this laptop is all about, the problem it’s trying to solve. Everywhere I turn I read people saying “well, it hasn’t got a hard drive” or “the screen is too small” or “it’s only got 256MB of RAM” or “it’s only a 433Mhz processor”. Over the last couple of years Negroponte has followed his dream to create a $100 laptop (when it gets to high volume) and I’ve been frustrated by all the people who are whining about what this laptop is NOT. Remember last week when I described the article from the Wall Street Journal about the kid in Africa who read about windmills in a used text book – imagine if he’d had the internet to read? ![]() I think that a multi-prong approach is a good idea – food, water, medicine, and technology in the hopes of allowing them to learn from the vast knowledge available on the internet. ![]() I don’t disagree that they need these things, and there are people trying to fix those problems directly. I’ve gotten into debates with people about whether he’s way off base, because these people need food, water and medicine first. This really set the understanding of how these people are living. ![]() the most compelling description he gave was when he explained that the children would bring laptops home so they could be used as a light source. He described how he and his team traveled to many countries and studied how they used laptops they were given. In 2005 I had the great pleasure of hearing Nicholas Negroponte from MIT speak at the All Things Digital conference about his dream of providing computers to the third world children in hopes of helping them pull up out of poverty. I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me during this year. I’m sure I’ve forgotten to name some friends of the show here, but there are so many people who send me great ideas, prop me up by saying nice things about the show and writing nice reviews, I now have friends all over the world. Without this show, I never would have gotten to know Bart and Leo and Ben and Susan and Victor and Tim and Len and Robert and Martin and Connor and Donald and even crazy James. I’m really feeling grateful at this time of year for all the good friends I’ve made through the podcast. Today is Sunday, December 16th, 2007 and this is show #127. Macintosh, XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child, OLPC, iPhone, iPod Touch Listen to the Podcast Once (44 min 28 sec) We also talk about how we both improved our blogs to be iPhone and iPod Touch friendly with the theme and plugin for WordPress from. In Chit Chat Across the Pond with Bart Busschots of bartbusschots.ie we talk about Anxiety App from, and ImageWell from. Garageband lets you create custom ringtones for free, Google maps improved, MacTracker for the iPhone and iPod Touch at. Review of the XO Laptop, otherwise known as the OLPC from One Laptop Per Child at. ![]()
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