OLPC: One Laptop per Child

Dragontamer

I heard of the project a long time ago, I think when they asked the Wikipedia community to help... but whenver it was that was a few years ago... I never imagined them to get this far however (then again, I never did any research to see who was behind this...)

They have gone a little overboard on the price... their aim was a $100 laptop, and they now deliver a ~$200 laptop... although the price will probably drop with mass production. Currently, they are on a "Give one, get one" basis right now for $400. $200 of that is counted as a tax deductable donation, and you get to keep one laptop. (9 days left... I might want to get one if I had more money on me...)

But seriously folks, this is a cool laptop. The friggen laptop has Wi-Fi, extremely long battery life, can be recharged by crank (for the countries who don't have a power-grid yet), and the user can program little things in Python, and even a simple sound synthesis program.

The dream: one laptop per child... costs are slightly overrun... but maybe that dream might just come true. Discuss?
 
I can't help thinking that, while the people doing this are acting with the best of intentions, surely people living in parts of Africa devastated by war, AIDS and drought need food, clothes and medicines more than they need computers. £100 (which equals $200) buys food and clothes for an orphan for a year whereas $400 buys one laptop for you and one for them.

I know which I'd spend my money on...
 
0.0 I`m looking for a laptop too, might aswell bet this, also I can use the internet and shoddy battle on this right?
 
Well actually they could get a vast amount of information that is currently unheard of in developing countries like Africa. And with the laptop maybe they could order some damn condoms online and stop spreading AIDS.
 
Did some research, and I found out: its batery last six hours, can tranform into a gameboy and e reader. Can charge by crank, solar power, or cord. It has no hard drive and dvd/cd thingie.
I might buy it if I can play sb on it. Can I play shoddy battle on it?
 
4gb ssd drive is the biggest limitation. runs cs:s and everything, though. kinda neat.

i'd get one if i wanted to do something good for like. people.
 
The purpose of the laptop is education. You look at the software on the laptop, word processor and so forth. Education IMO is the biggest concern. You need to teach people how to help themselves, as opposed to just getting them food for a year.

IMO, they should hand out these laptops to children in the USA >_> Our education system is lacking, lol. But seriously, the primary purpose of this laptop is to help education, teach sciences and whatnot to developing countries.
 
Wow, this made my day/morning/whatever.

The add for this page is the One Laptop per Child add. That makes up for all the horrible ones normal shown.
 
OLPC used to resemble a pipe dream, now I think it's one of the best education initiatives/plans currently in existance.

Kids straight-up _learn_ when you give them machines like so.
 
I kinda agree with what timw said, because you can teach those kids a lot, but if they all die because they have nothing to eat, this is just a plain waist of money.

On the other hand, maybe we'll get some more african people here at smogon...
 
I saw a commercial about this they kept saying give a laptop get one back wtf ? and the laptoops looked pretty cheezy... like toy labtops with lime green transparent cheap plastic so i would rather spend the 400$ on food but seeing im only 15 i cant.


http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=6y3rgvo&s=1



lol I didnt see this until after i posted but its funny please click the link
 
What is wrong about the give 1 get 1? I've tracked this project for a bit of time now (not often, but I did track it :-p), and initially they were going to sell them to the government directly for $100 each. They couldn't make them cheaper than $200, so the governments refused.

Now they're forced to ask for donations if they wish to continue the project, and the more they have to make the cheaper they're going to get per unit (mass production). So it seems like give 1 get 1 is a good idea to me.

Finally, the amount of technology that they crammed into the thing is absolutly oustanding. I imagine that it is one of the most advanced laptops of our generation, optimized solely on price and educational value. Cramming Wi-Fi, Python IDEs, audio analysers, and so forth into a laptop for only $200, along with all the latest education software avaliable from the HCI department from MIT... the laptop is pretty nice.

In addition, the laptop was shock and environmentally tested for durability. There is no hard drive or any moving parts on the laptop at all. The entire laptop is purely solid state with the exception of the monitor and 2 cables.
 
Yeah, its kinda amazing actually. When did you first hear about it Surgo?
Click to expand...
Two or three years ago when I was investigating REUs for the first time, I stumbled across Google's summer of code; OLPC was an available project at the time.
 
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