Some of these are obviously stupid and deserve to be ridiculed, but I don’t think this site needs to be as hard on the “one laptop per child” one as they are. That seemed like a well-intentioned product designed to do good in the world, not everything ends up working out.
I think the assessment, harsh as it might be, is fair. Morgan Ames' excellent 2019 book on the OLPC project, "The Charisma Machine" [1], does a really good job looking at all the things that went wrong in the project. There was a lot of hubris in this project from top to bottom -- a lot of Ivy League intellectuals who believed they knew how to best teach the developing world and that somehow, this device would be the one to do it. It wasn't.
Well-intentioned or not, I think its broader impact is probably overstated in many circles (the notion that we wouldn't have sub-$300 laptops without OLPC is just silly), especially since many of the promises behind the device (the price, the crank, the way it would "reshape" education") were just untrue.
Is it a blind waste of investment looking for a problem to solve like Juicero? No. Is it a scam like Theranos? Also no. But given the poor-execution of the project, the imperialist nature of its whole raison d'être, and the negative effects its failure had on the EdTech movement as a whole, I think it is definitely worthy of critique.
SugarOS was really interesting and still exists [1], but the hardware was always a solution looking for a problem. Sure the hardware might have been kind of neat, but it was always too expensive and obsolete and never worth the huge investment. [2]
1. It was obviously a "toy"/"educational tool" making it less desirable to divert from the intended use case. If you had a charity unload pallets of refurbished Thinkpads to the Global South, plenty of them won't end up in the classrooms. If you visit the local petty functionary and he has a bright green toylike machine on his desk, it's obviously been misallocated.
2. A standard reference platform provides a uniform target for third party devs. Think about developing for the C64, versus a contemporary PC which could have one of four or five different video cards and a dozen memory sizes.
I think their goal was interesting for the time, but its release coincided first with the whole 'netbook' craze which meant, all of a sudden, you could buy a regular laptop for $100-$200, rather than the maybe $700-$800 low-end laptop price that had prevailed before that, and then with smart phones becoming ubiquitous and dirt cheap all over the world.
One laptop per child is why there was a netbook craze!
They basically showed it was possible to get a machine at that lower price point and then capitalism and mass market manufacturing did the rest.
Is this so often the case innovation requires someone to prove what's possible and then going down the same path is much easier for those who come later.
One thing those netbooks didn't/don't do that OLPC aimed to do was mesh networking. Internet connectivity is still... spotty, at best, in a lot of countries - even in some of the so-called "developed" ones.
I watched a video¹ today about the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, and while the video focuses on the rebels' use of 3D-printed firearms, there was a smaller point about how a lot of Rohingya villages ended up entirely caught off-guard during the most recent wave of genocidal purging because news would travel too slow from village to village; as the Junta forces would descend upon one village, there was no effective way for that village to warn its neighbors.
First thing that popped into my head: "ain't this something OLPC and other mesh network attempts would've been able to address?"
A lot of mesh networking experiments, including that of OLPC, seem to have failed - but some have shown some recent success. Maybe it's time to have another go at deploying mesh networks to the masses at scale, learning from those failures and successes?
My understanding is that they just piggyback on the nearest Bluetooth-enabled Apple device, which then pings Apple's servers; non-Apple-specific equivalents like Tile work the same way (just with different host-device-level software and different centralized servers).
At the time I believed the proliferation of netbooks was caused by OLPC. I don't think it was a fundamentally bad idea either.
The project identified a legitimate need for a small, durable, and cheap laptop, but failed on a number of specifics: it did worse as a not-for-profit than it would have done as a company, the design was child-centric instead of something adults could use too, and Linux on every machine was a design decision that only made sense in the flawed context of a not-for-profit.
The MSCHF message of "press [F] to pay respects to capitalism" is incredibly ironic when applied to OLPC, since it arguably failed due to not being capitalist enough and was succeeded by for-profit companies who remade a similar product for a wider and less charitable audience.
That same argument justifies slavery because it was legal, since slavery makes profits. Your argument is also subject to the ad-hominem logical fallacy [1], and does not actually counter the idea that Google is harming society and that employees should contribute their efforts elsewhere. Additionally, this appears to be the author's attempt to change society, to the greatest extent they can do that is unique to them. They do however, volunteer extensively, in their "Beyond Google" section, weakening a significant part of your ad-hominem argument.
Overall, the author is right in trying to promote people to leave Google, as remaining quiet weakens the whole point of them leaving.
Is it possible to use VIM as a text editor in the terminal with SN? Or are users required to use a text editors supported by SN? This seems like an application I'm looking for but I can't ditch my vimrc and plugins
How's the SE treating you in 2019? Trying to switch from Pixel to iPhone, but don't want to drop significant money until USB-C, which is rumored in 2020. Figured an SE might be good for me until then
Get an iPhone 8 instead, probably the best value out there for iPhones.
If you are worried about shelling out money, remember that an iPhone 8 isn't $449, it's $449 minus whatever you sell it for in a year (probably not much less). And it's even less if you just buy it used or Apple refurbished in the first place.
The iPhone SE works fine but the screen size is too small for many apps that get scrunched up pretty badly. You’re using a screen size that a very small fraction of Apple users are still using, which means app developers don’t care to make it work nicely for you.
The camera is bad by modern standards, I can see a big difference even for small 4x6 prints, and Touch ID is the slower 1st generation. It's just really old hardware all around.
On the plus side, it has good battery life, a headphone jack, and it's still an iPhone running full iOS.
> Get an iPhone 8 instead, probably the best value out there for iPhones.
I have an SE and love it, but this. However, consider the deals out there for something like the 7. Metro PCS has the iPhone 7 for $50, I'm sure there are comparable deals out there too.
In addition to Dangus' comment with iPhone 8 you'll also get the same CPU that powers the iPhone X, which will be more than fine for quite a few more years. Furthermore I'm confident it will be supported with major software updates for a long time. It is the sweet spot for customers on a low budget or looking for a small phone. The iPhone SE, as much as I like to form factor, isn't a good new purchase at this point.
My understanding is that the iPhone 7 has a few more common hardware issues than the iPhone 8. Apparently a lot of iPhone 7 models are affected by messed up speakers and mics, the audio IC defect. Kind of an important feature.
I’ll admit that’s a pretty big price difference but I wonder if that has to do with the 7’s hardware issues making it a phone to stay away from. Or maybe it’s just old and that’s why it’s cheap.
Ah, maybe hardware issues. I will say, I have an 8 and the camera randomly broke on mine, and when I talked to someone who repairs them, she said that lately many of the 8 cameras have been breaking.
That said, the repair was fairly easy, it was a $30 camera and 20 minutes to repair it.
I had to replace my SE battery earlier this year (well, I didn't absolutely need to, I did it because I intend to get another two years out if it). Otherwise mine is still chugging along perfectly well.
Software wise it's a perfectly fine device, definitely some limitations, but only because the processor is a four+ year old design. Some SPA or otherwise heavy webpages cause it to choke (ex: it hates USAToday), but 99% of what I try to do works great. Per Apple and MacRumours, the SE will get iOS 13. No idea how well that will run, but we'll see.
If you can get one in good shape to hold you over you'll probably be happy with it.
Yeah I replaced mine at the Apple Store this year (Apple covered it). Now I get well over a day's battery on it, amazing. Granted, I intentionally avoid installing hefty apps so that would also help achieve this kind of battery life.
Before that it would die in ~2hrs and instantly die in high heat.
I have an SE still, it works completely fine. I don't really use my phone for much besides maps/social media/web browsing so I never felt like i needed a more powerful device. The camera is great.
This is something that I've noticed too. I really want to like this but they are claiming to charge people for apps that they don't own and are already free. If they said that they simply take care of all complicated hosting or simplified the process I'd be more optimistic about this.
They are charging for hosting, administration and development, not for the apps that are just branded and provided for the convienience. You can use any app you want, or use Librem-branded apps with other servers for free (both as-beer and as-freedom).
> I really want to like this but they are claiming to charge people for apps that they don't own and are already free.
Selling people collections of software (which you didn’t code yourself, you simply repackaged) on floppy disk or tape was an old-school practice in the Free Software world and generally considered perfectly fair.
Those were disks you installed and ran yourself. This is a hosted product that runs in a (not free) data center. It's perfectly legit to charge for the service of hosting an open source or free app.
They do say exactly that, and that's what you're paying for. If you'd like to host your own versions of those open source apps, you're more than welcome to.
IIRC, there was an article on HN a few months back about how she's given away tons and tons of money, more than anyone into her family. She seemed to be a good person in her interview, but I can't find the link.
I believe this is the thread/article in question. [0] (sorry for the low-content post, just recalled a fragment of the title and figured I could help.)
