Setting things straight

I don’t know why Francotirador got upset when I told him he was a skeptic about the OLPC project, when his latest post proves it.

The truth is I’m perfectly clear on his position. Christian doesn’t believe the project will work because he doesn’t believe Negroponte.

OK, fine, but that doesn’t entitle him to insinuate that I’m one of Negroponte’s acolytes, writing things like:

..no Eduardo, unfortunately Negroponte doesn’t have answers for everything…

I suggest the reader look at my original post, and you’ll see that when I used that phrase it was about the exchange between Zuckerman and Negroponte:

Zuckerman grilled Negroponte intensely about the system’s power, and he seemed to have answers for everything: 12 volts of power? There are adapters for that; voltage surges? No problem given the system’s modest power use. Cooling? The machine won’t use a fan, since it has no hard disk and the processor is relatively slow. The only area where Zuckerman wasn’t satisfied with Negroponte’s answer was wireless network support.

(Excerpted from OLPC 2)

I’m not saying Negroponte has answers for everything; all I did was translate fragments of Zuckerman’s article, rather badly written I have to admit, which is probably what causes Christian’s confusion.

In fact I don’t value the project because of Negroponte; to me it matters more that Seymour Papert and Alan Kay are involved. Negroponte may have come up with the idea, but I think the ones doing the serious work are others.

As a predictor of the future, Negroponte has an expected hit rate similar to a medium’s, or a “psychic detective’s”, but he’s clearly superior to the capabilities of an Arturito (the Chilean treasure-hunting robot) :)

Remember that Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to build it, and in that sense Kay is more consistent than Negroponte, which is why I think the project is serious and has a high probability of success.

So I’m taking Christian at his word, and if it turns out he’s right I’ll pay for a good bottle of wine instead of beer. So at the end of 2006 we can get together for a drink, and I suggest inviting Huasonic, whom I congratulate, because I didn’t know about his gifts for the iconography of saints; there’s an unsuspected vein there he might be able to mine.

Is it possible to build a 100-dollar laptop?

Christian’s article includes only one technical reference of any weight, the article by George Ou, which doesn’t actually present any real argument against the OLPC. He just says it doesn’t seem possible to him. The only thing that sounds remotely like an argument against the OLPC is that Ou thinks it would work as a Citrix terminal and that putting Java on the OLPC would be impossible. He ends up explaining how to put together cheap machines, and even hands out a discount coupon code for a Dell notebook. As Homer says: boring!!

However respectable George Ou may be, it’s obvious he hasn’t looked into what the project is really about. Remember it will have a Linux kernel, and on top of that kernel go Logo and Squeak. All of us who have used Squeak know it’s the most efficient virtual machine there is. It has a footprint of less than 1 MB. The other thing the columnist forgets or doesn’t know is that this is an educational project; it isn’t meant as a replacement for laptops. It’s an educational tool.

Oh, and yes, you could run Java on the OLPC if you wanted to (though you’d need an open source JVM).

The rest of the arguments against the project are just arguments against Negroponte. So Christian hasn’t given any solid reasons for us to doubt the project’s technical feasibility.

I’ll grant that the project could fail for political or bureaucratic reasons. That’s the most critical area for this to work, because without at least several million units you can’t reach the economies of scale the project requires.

For the Chinese, doing this project doesn’t mean access to any technology they don’t already have. Every element of the OLPC exists; the only novel thing is the screen, which uses a different mechanism to bring the cost down, but it isn’t a screen we could call cutting-edge.

Oh, and Bill Gates might well end up making a hundred-dollar laptop, so one way or another the 100-dollar laptop is going to become a reality. I’d rather MIT did it, but if this project makes other manufacturers jealous and we get US$100 laptops out of it, then I’ll buy 2 bottles of wine and start celebrating.

To finish, the following paragraph worries me:

First, there’s the laptop… which isn’t really a laptop (a synonym for notebook), as my editor pointed out, but a device, since instead of a hard disk it would have 1 GB of flash memory.

It’s incredible that a columnist at mouse.cl and its editor can’t tell a computer from a device. Something’s going on here….