

Cory Doctorow: One Laptop per child - what went wrong? - twampss
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jan/13/one-laptop-per-child-cory-doctorow

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bdfh42
Don't bother with this link if you are expecting any sort of analysis.

You could sum it up as "Notebook PC's are a good idea for the third world -
better even that mobile phones". That's it - nothing more.

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jamess
Yep. Worse still, he's wrong even on that small point.

I'm working on Delay Tolerant Networking for mobile phones, mostly for
deployment in isolated communities in the developed world. Mobile phones are
everything OLPC strives to be, cheap, portable, power optimised, connected and
hackable. Better still, they do all this now. They're already available in any
country in the world, manufactured in extreme volume, we don't have to wait
for some philanthropist's wet dream to bear fruit.

Any of the software I write could be trivially repurposed to suit the needs of
the third world. Then people could get the benefit of access to modern
information networks without necessarily having to have all the modern
infrastructure in place first.

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eru
Could you elaborate on the 'hackable'? Thanks!

