October 9th, 2007

OLPC is the PC you can't ever criticize

Posted by George Ou @ 2:42 am

Categories: Hardware, Intel, Linux, Microsoft, Mobile/Wireless

Tags: PC, One Laptop Per Child Project, George Ou

As Nicholas Negroponte said a year and a half ago in a presentation on the OLPC: “people really don’t want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually”.  When I dared question the need for OLPC mesh networking (criticism on client-side mesh topology and not fixed wireless mesh or wired mesh) since it is a solution to a problem that can be solved a lot cheaper and better though other means, I got flooded with harsh words and intimidation.  I’ve had people accuse me of being a first world rich snob even though I was actually born in the third world and went to a mud-made school with holes for windows and doors.  I even had one person in the past get so personal in a forum that he accused me of hating children, including my own.

When the Indian minister of education Sudeep Banerjee did when he said that the OLPC was “pedagogically suspect” last year, he was quickly dismissed.  Now we have New York Times pundit David Pogue has accused the education minister of fearing a change in the status quo and losing his job though he didn’t have the courage to call him out by name but it’s fairly clear what he meant.  Now I’m not going to sit here and say you can’t criticize the India minister of education, but it’s pretty silly when you consider how well India educates its children when PC penetration in that country is a mere 5%.  Pogue also went on to say that the obstacle to the XO’s (that’s the name of the green OLPC machine) isn’t technology but “big name computer makers” fearing the loss of a two-billion-person market.  I guess Pogue was afraid to call out Microsoft and Intel by name since those are the usual scapegoats for the conspiracy to kill the OLPC.  Never mind the fact that Microsoft has been working with OLPC project and Intel is actually on the board of the OLPC project, we can’t ever blame the OLPC or the project for being too expensive and not delivering on promised features.  It’s always someone else’s fault that foreign governments are only happy to sign on for the OLPC so long as someone else signs the check.

Pogue raved about the “famed $100 laptop” (what’s +$100 among friends) in a video embedded in the same article on page one quoting the battery specs and the mesh feature though I have yet to see an objective analysis of the actual battery life and I have yet to see a successful implementation of client-side mesh topology.  But when it came to actual criticism such as the boot times and application load times, Pogue thought that was just fine since “it isn’t for snarky bloggers it’s for poor kids in other countries”.  But that kind of self-righteous arrogance made me very uncomfortable and what is it about poor kids in other countries that makes it ok for them to have long boot times (2 minutes when I tried it last spring) and application load times (20 seconds when I tried it last spring)?

Maybe if it wasn’t possible to build a responsive $200 laptop, then the OLPC XO’s sluggishness might be an excusable shortcoming but the $230 (basic model with Wi-Fi) Asus Eee has already shown 15 second Linux boot times and Intel Classmate works just fine too.  Instant boot was actually one of Negroponte’s key selling points in the same presentation he gave where he said you couldn’t criticize the OLPC.  Negroponte criticized modern bloated PCs (only if you have too much Crapware which can be removed) and promised that the OLPC will make computing wonderful again with instant boot.  Yet the reality is that OLPC turned out way more sluggish.  But since no one is allowed to criticize the OLPC, I guess everyone is overlooking that minor detail.  The OLPC is the one PC you can’t ever criticize or give an honest assessment of because you’ll be bashed like there’s no tomorrow.