The OLPC nightmare
The Economist (my favorite rag) has a scorching review of the OLPC XO that unfortunately is 100% right in all of its criticisms. I feel terrible for all of the people that I helped convince to pitch $400 down the drain on this thing; it is slow, buggy, and almost entirely unusable by people with advanced degrees, never mind small children. That said, I don't feel nearly as bad for all of the 1st world kids who've had their Christmases ruined by this plastic paperweight as I do about the kids in the third world whose governments are going to be bamboozled into buying XOs.
I remember having written about the OLPC before so I went back into the archives to see my very first post which was on Negroponte's announcement of the project at the 2005 D Conference. Apparently I was bamboozled as well and should have stuck with my first instinct.
The OLPC's software is just horrendous. The Etoys environment which I was so excited for is too cramped, too slow, and not at all simplified from Squeak Smalltalk. The browser is almost unusable, and the music application has such incredible latency between doing anything and hearing sound that you're more capable of controlling the noise the machine makes by waving your cellphone in front of it. Just about the only decent thing for a 5 year-old to do with it is to play the memory game or to practice typing in a word processor that makes Word 5 for the Mac appear supersonic (and tends to crash).
In fact just about the only thing you can do well with the laptop is drop it— which is good because I promise that after a couple of hours with it, you'll want to test its resilience to impact.
The OLPC foundation would do better using its clout to buy Eee PCs and tweaking what is a much more usable system overall. Or even getting old laptops reconditioned and re-imaged with stripped down versions of their original operating systems.
As always, Fake Steve says it better than I could.
Comments
Josh commented, on January 8, 2008 at 10:31 a.m.:
Okay, just checking out the system ...
This is a pretty harsh backlash post Antonio! I think it's based mostly on your unfulfilled personal expectations for the laptop.
The real gauge of the OLPC's success will be whether it advances education among kids who wouldn't otherwise have access to their own computers. And don't forget, those kids will be in classes, where a) they'll be part of the mesh network the device was designed to use, and b) they'll have instruction on how to get started, which isn't provided to the rest of us.
DHK commented, on January 8, 2008 at 12:37 p.m.:
Antonio
You have an impressive cv and are over experienced to use an XO. OLPC is designed for children in poor countries where they do't have school - if a school is there it has neither a building nor teacher; here is no teaching let alone learning. Electricity, chalkboard and textbooks are all dream stuff. OLPC offers a hope to children learn learning independent of such facilities available in the better countries of the world. Imagine a country of 160 million with 30 million children out of school because there are no schools, and where 50% of those enrolled will drop out before completing the primary level. Schools do not offer any thing exciting to retain children. On the other hand, pilots in these countries indicate that children have quickly adapted and discovered to use OLPC (remember children are more intelligent than adults)learning has begun and communities are demanding OLPC for every kid.
I don't know if this is a good parallel to where you live - Boston is blessed with the best of best institutions of learning under the sun. Please think of a child who has only heard of a computer and is now using OLPC for learning. I would highly appreciate it if you reconsider your comments within this context.
nacho commented, on January 15, 2008 at 11:01 p.m.:
I have no clue as to the functionality of the XO since i never received one through the give one get one program, nor did i get an e-mail response or a call back from a supervisor, as promised, when inquiring about my donation/ Based on my experience with the ever unreachable, incompetent and deceitful OLPC foundation all i can say is that i hope they offer better support and communication to the poor, third world children than they have to me and mine.
Hi, I'm Antonio, living in Boston and working this whole net thing out...
Josh commented, on January 8, 2008 at 10:19 a.m.:
V1agra