What every government should ask itself when considering an ebook deployment
The viewpoints expressed hereunder do not necessarily reflect the opinion of OLPC. They are an input by the free and volunteering community supporting OLPC.
| Questions and answers to the Competition | OLPC |
|---|---|
| What do you recommend? The laptop, the tablet or an ebook? Eh ... | What do you recommend? The laptop, the tablet or an ebook? The worldwide OLPC community has discussed this thoroughly. All have their advantages. The OLPC XO doesn't put your for a choice. It is all three at the same time: a laptop for real intensive working and typing. When you twist the screen and fold it backwards, the XO is an ebook, with buttons as our youngest kids don't have the small hand coordination necessary for some applications on the web. The XO-4 Touch also has a touch screen so you have a tablet. |
| Are you selling a throw away product or an easy to repair and update product? Throw away and short after registering, we offer your fast device a free software upgrade so it gets bloated with stuff that's irrelevant and so your machine slows down. Our specialists will then consider your problem and advise you to buy a bigger hard disc or upgrade the processor or buy additional RAM, only to offer you a couple of months later again a free software upgrade, so your device becomes bloated again with irrelevant stuff and you get into a cycle of continuous upgrading, printers that don't work anymore because of compatibility issues and eventually you'll throw everything out and buy a new one. And a new printer. | Are you selling a throw away product or an easy to repair and update product? At OLPC and the worldwide OLPC community, your kids/our kids, the minister of education are not considered a market nor a product. Universal Primary education with an open hardware and software rugged laptop for our and your kids is our mission. The XO's have been designed with rough kids handling in mind. Basically what you want for kids is a very rugged box that protects the laptop, rounded cordners, strong hinges, a strong handle so kids automatically take the laptop right at hand, and two strong holes where the computer can be attached to a belt e.g. The XO is 3 devices in one: a pc with a keyboard, it can be twisted and flipped backwards and becomes an ebook, and with the XO-4 you also have a touch screen and it becomes a tablet. Never buy tablets without a strong protection for the screen. The XO is honest and gives a very very strong protective cover on all sides. The XO is made for the hardest environments out there: kids hands! You can drop it on the floor, on pointy stones, drop it on its corners... it will survive. And even if something breaks, the XO is made with easy repair in mind: with one and the same screw-driver you can open de laptop and see what causes the failure. Spare parts and upgrades are very cheap and most repairs and update replacements can be done by and in the school. There's plenty of people in the OLPC community that help out to help you detect the failure and help you repair an XO. More on the dedicated repair pages of the world wide OLPC community: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair |
| How do you protect the device from kids rough handling? What additional adaptations have you made to make it kids-proof? Eh ... nothing really. | How do you protect the device from kids rough handling? What additional adaptations have you made to make it kids-proof? OLPC-XO's have been designed with rough kids handling in mind. Basically what you want for kids is a very rugged box that protects the laptop, rounded cordners, strong hinges, a strong handle so kids automatically take the laptop right at hand, and two strong holes where the computer can be attached to a belt e.g. The XO is 3 devices in one: a pc with a keyboard, it can be twisted and flipped backwards and becomes an ebook, and with the XO-4 you also have a touch screen and it becomes a tablet. Never buy tablets without a strong protection for the screen. The XO is honest and gives a very very strong protective cover on all sides. The XO is made for the hardest environments out there: kids hands! You can drop it on the floor, on pointy stones, drop it on its corners... it will survive. And even if something breaks, the XO is made with easy repair in mind: with one and the same screw-driver you can open de laptop and see what causes the failure. Spare parts are very cheap and most repairs can be done by and in the school. There's plenty of people in the OLPC community that help out to help you detect the failure and help you repair an XO. More on the dedicated repair pages of the world wide OLPC community: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Repair |
| How do you reduce costs for the Ministry of Education, the kids and families? How do your laptops put themselves in a wireless network? Not | How do you reduce costs for the Ministry of Education, the kids and families? How do your laptops put themselves in a wireless network? With OLPC you connect to the worldwide open source and open hardware community. The laptops put themselves in a network automatically and become the internet. Before wifi, and when not part of data-providing institutions, s.a. universities with databases full of useful information, or the public transport company, or the government with websites with loads of useful information, one needed the service to get access to these linked computer databases and networks that form the internet. Since the introduction of wifi, our laptops can bridge and help connect to sites holding interesting info. With their two "ears", the OLPC XO laptops can communicate with other wifi equipped devices 200 m in the round. If you want to video talk to a little friend that's 600 m away, then the laptops of your friends will help to reach your friend. Even so, if the Ministry of Education can put a wifi antenna to the server hosting its website and eradiate the website for free. This will be captured by the OLPC kids and they'll help pass it on and make it freely accessible via the spare computing capacity on their machines. Kids and people actually visit 80% of the time the same websites: the wikipedia, when the bus leaves, when the airplane leaves, grant forms at the Ministries'websites, or other useful data. All these data providers want you to get access to their data for free. So if they equip their server hosting their website with a wifi antenna, the kids and schools can pick it up for free and distribute it for free around them. The OLPC XS - Server holds copies of these most visited websites and a website with the 10.000 ebooks that have been selected in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Teachers. The OLPC XS - Server is also a very fast calculating machine/processor, so kids with their XO's actually first get the information - e.g. copy of the wikipedia that's stored on the OLPC XS - Server - and only once a week or once a day, the XS-Server updates itself with the original website. This way the kids have a very fast user experience when surfing the internet, even if - in a couple of years - their processor speeds are not among the fastest anymore. This way, upgrades can be postponed to the maximum, reducing costs and avoiding getting trapped in a cycle of continuous buying and upgrading. The open source / linux community, open office community, OLPC community, make sure the software proposed is as small and hence as fast as possible. You dont' get "free upgrades" immediately after you've "bought a laptop". This way your laptop doesn't get bloated with irrelevant software and code that will slow down your computer mulching through irrelevant lines of code. On the contrary, you get the smallest operating system - thus the fastest - and only the parts of the programs you really need. If ever you would need a part of code, you can add it in blocks according to what you need. You don't get the 1001 pieces that 1001 people indeed needed because they have a very specific job to do, that only a handfull of people really need. Your kids get what your kids need. Nothing else. |
| How many of specifically these laptops have you actually sold? A couple of thousand? Note: propriety software, version x and hardware component y will react differently to e.g. printers/internet/etc. than a twin copy laptop with propriety software, version x+1 and hardware component y or propriety software, version x and hardware component y+1. Let alone all other combinations. The fact is there isn't a single producer that comes near the numbers as OLPC: OLPC has NATION wide deployments! | |
| How do you help protecting our kids against porn and crap content? You can subscribe to a list with such sites and then block their access. | How do you help protecting our kids against porn and crap content? The OLPC community contributes to such list. But even more basically, we don't pay for connecting to internet sites that don't provide access to their sites for free. Doesn't the Ministry of Education want kids and parents and teachers to be able to reach its website? Then why doesn't the Ministry of Education put a wifi antenna to the server that hosts its website? All our laptops are equipped with wifi antenna's. Our kids can capture the website of the Ministry. Idem the hours of the bus. Doesn't the bus company want us to know that for free? Let them also connect a wifi antenna. Our OLPC kids will help distribute it to each other. What site do you actually want to visit that you have to pay for? The wikipedia? It's open source, you can host it on an OLPOC XS-Server and distribute it for free. The only websites that are not free are porn sites and those of the same sort. They want you to pay to get access to their data. But, we don't take them up in our networks and certainly don't distribute them via our wifi equipped OLPC XS-Server. Remember, the internet with interesting info, that you and us, the internet are we. Our OLPC-XO kids have free communication, video webcalling among them. Switch to Open Source and join ! |
| How many of specifically these laptops have you sold? A couple of thousand? OLPC: The fact is there isn't a single producer that comes near the numbers as OLPC: OLPC has NATION wide deployments! Hundreds of thousands of laptops, not made for making a profit, but where the child and the education comes first and is the only place. The children are not "a market", they are OLPC's mission! | |
| How many different screws are there in the laptop? 8 Different types, needing 3 different and difficult to find screwdrivers and some other tools to lift things! | How many different screws are there in the laptop? OLPC laptops/ebooks have 1 type of screws, can be unscrewed easily with the same easy to find standard screwdriver. OLPC laptops are made to be repaired, even by kids !!! Again, kids nor the ministry of education is to be considered as a market, they are OLPC's mission ! |
| Are you an open hardware and software project? No. | Are you an open hardware and software project? Yes. OLPC is just like the wikipedia, like linux and open office ... we combine the power of massive collaboration with massive orders to get minimum prices. |
| What are your ideals? Make as much profit as possible. E.g. use tiny little hidden screws, so that when you want to repair the laptop, you break something beyond repair and you void the warrenty. We sneak in a laptop very cheaply and we don't tell you we're actually going to make money by selling you all kind of "services", proprietary soft and hardware that's programmed to fail and things you don't need afterwards. We make you good consumers. Look out for the next container load as they have the newer and improved charger 2X which of course doesn't fit with the original charger, which you'll have to dispose off, but the 2X is so much better looking :) ? | What are your ideals? Millennium Development Goal nr. 2: Bringing Universal Primary Education. The OLPC laptop is both an open hardware as software project. The hardware and operating system is dedicated to kids. Hardware: the keyboard is made for children's fingers. They are no use to adults to prevent stealing. They are also the greenest laptops in the world. They consume very little power. No toxic elements have been used. There is a special recycling program. The little energy the laptop needs can be provided by a PV panel. Kids are not our market, kids are OLPC's mission. Connect with the largest educational initiative ever undertaken by Humanity ! Don't go for anything less! Another laptop has a little nifty something? Wait until we place an order of 1 million of these components and leave competition behind us. Laptop deployments in education are not just hardware projects. It's about developing the highest average speed: open and free soft and hardware where everybody in the educational sector in the WHOLE WORLD can collaborate. It's about allowing kids to collaborate, not about one kid having the latest / fastest gadget at 3 times the price because one parent can pay for it. They are not match to a world wide community continuously improving, building, exchanging. The kid with his high-tech machine will be just left out of that crucial topic what it is all about actually: collaborating, sharing, building improving. And how much technological advance does he/she actually have? It's just a matter of a couple of months when OLPC shifts gear again - continuously - in speed and other characteristics. Sometimes OLPC is a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. But it's average speed in implementing new things is unmatched. How is any other distributor going to get better prices than whole governments worldwide ordering laptops that can be folded to ebooks all together and all the time? |
| Can your laptop be powered straight by a PV panel? No | Can your laptop be powered straight by a PV panel? YES, OLPC laptops are quoted to be the greenest laptops around. They need very little power and the little they need can be provided by plugging in a light flexible PV panel. The screen is so that kids can read them even when they are in direct sunlight. |
| Is your laptop designed for kids? No | Is your laptop designed for kids? Yes, OLPC laptop are very tough and can stand rough handling, falling, etc. Basically it's a strong box that can be flipped around, like a laptop but also like an ebook. 2 for the price of one ! You need a keyboard for serious working. A tablet for reading or playing games. Here you have both. The keyboard is made for kids hands and of no use for adults. This helps preventing theft by adults. |
| What experience to you have deploying your laptops nation wide? None | What experience to you have deploying your laptops nation wide? In all over 2,5 million laptops have been deployed. Several countries have nation wide OLPC deployment. Many island states, but also countries like Peru and Uruguay. 100% of all kids in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands, start-ups in S-Korea, Nigeria, Rwanda and more and more countries are rolling out. More: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment |
| Does your laptop's vision aligns and helps the Ministry of Education / Schools / Principles / Educators / Kids connecting with Open Source collaboration projects? No | Does your laptop's vision aligns and helps the Ministry of Education / Schools / Principles / Educators / Kids connecting with Open Source collaboration projects? Yes, that's one of OLPC's founding principles. With connected laptops, learners are liberated to actively engage with others with similar missions and harnassing the free power and intelligence that is available world wide: connecting teachers to collaborate in making the BEST book for their discipline, connecting to wikibooks, a sister project of the wikipedia, and many many more. |
| What anti-theft strategy do you have? None ... buy software to prevent and relocate laptops? | What anti-theft strategy do you have? Theft has been taken into account from the concept. After all OLPC was meant for the poorest first. Every laptop is unique and can be switched-off from a distance. All parts are logged. Apart from that there's some other factors: OLPC goes for region wide deployments, every kid gets a laptop, no one gets left out. So why steal one when you have one of your own. An adult running around with these very distinguishable OLPC laptops? You'd make a fool out of yourself. Everybody knows they're for kids only. Besides your adult fingers don't fit on the keyboard. You'll get very annoyed very quickly. And who are you going to sell it to? Everyone has one. And it's switched off from a distance anyhow. And we CAN trace you .. it's all networked after all, isnt' it? |
| Do you come with a solution or with a problem? Just throwing in some laptops inside a school is a problem. Where to turn for free support? What software should be on it? How does that software work? Didn't we want interactive ebook versions of our school-books? My laptop doesn't reboot, what now? | Do you come with a solution or with a problem? 100% spot on! OLPC is an education project, not a laptop project. Just throwing in some laptops inside a school is a problem and can be a drain for very valuable money. With OLPC you connect to a worldwide community of supporters that go for open and free soft and hardware. Indeed, the OLPC laptops are easy to open and to exchange some component with a newer version. That way you always have an up to date machine. OLPC laptops are made to last, not programmed to fail ! OLPC is not a laptop project, hence OLPC doesn't "throw laptops" inside classrooms and then let's the teachers and the minister of education take the heat. OLPC comes with a staged approach:
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| Do you have an open platform for collaboration among users? No | Do you have an open platform for collaboration among users? Yes, several. OLPC offers a wiki, discussion mailing lists an even chatrooms for instant feedback and solution providing. More and more schools and governments make financial resources available to be present in these chatrooms to feedback governments / ministries / teachers and kids that have questions; be they organizational, hardware, software, or whatever. |
| Does your laptop generates money? No, it just costs money. | Does your laptop generates money? Yes, OLPC educational project normally print CO2e certificates, i.e. CO2e money. A normal laptop uses x+1 kWh, an OLPC laptop only uses x kWh and whatever that little bit of energy is, it produces it with PV panels. For every ton of CO2e NOT emitted into the atmosphere, the OLPC project "prints/generates" a CO2e certificate. More:--SvenAERTS 15:27, 17 April 2013 (UTC) |
