I opine that to receive the a href="http://lowest-rate-loans.com/topics/mortgage-loans" mortgage loans /a from banks you should present a good reason. However, one time I have got a collateral loan, just because I wanted to buy a house.

The only thing poor countries need is honest competition. Beurocrats never achieve any goals, onle business can work it out. Obviously smartbooks are enough for educational purposes +they will be affordable even for the poorest. May be there will be special educational versions of smartbooks. And is new version of Windows CE very bad?

The quote from Negroponte in the article stating that they plan to distribute OLPC's in "Afghanistan, Haiti, Ethiopia, as well as places like the West Bank and next month Gaza." might give a person the idea that the target market isn't stable countries where the subsistence needs of the population are being met.

Why is it that, every time someone mentions “poorer countries” or “developing nations”, certain types immediately jump to the conclusion that we’re talking about places where people are starving to death or don’t have houses to live in or properly functioning societies?

That’s not the market for OLPC. The OLPC market is those places which are already socially stable and have at least a reasonable chance of feeding and housing their people. Its purpose is to take them to the next level—to help them educate themselves so they can make their own societies even better, more affluent, more like part of the developed world.

When judging the success of OLPC, the number of units shipped is hardly a relevant measure. Whether 1 million or 7 million, the program is a fundamentally misguided attempt at "aid" which does little more than make some aristocratic geek feel good about himself.

Giving kids free laptops is pretty useless when they are living in impoverished countries where their rights to land, water, and other natural resources are being stolen from them.

What good are computer skills when you can't feed yourself?

As far as all of this techno-utopian nonsense goes: why is it that wealthy people in the west can afford to sit around playing with computers all day? Is that a productive activity in which the entire world could be engaged?

Get real.

All OLPC could really achieve is providing children in poor countries with the basic computer skills to staff off-shored call centers when they grow up. Perhaps they should include training software for improving your mid-western american english accent.

The entire project was derailed by proprietary interests.

The original conception was to be entirely free & open source so anyone could make the reference design and cooperate on progress. Both ARM & Sun offered entirely free core designs for systems on a chip. Instead, the project was hijacked to more expensive, more power hungry, less documented, closed source systems & wireless chips to run a closed source OS.

PS - off the shelf netbooks that can run XP can be bought for as little as $160 retail, quantity 1. OLPC is a porkfest.

Intel would not work on the project when Ego-ponte demanded that they ONLY work on OLPC and offer no chips to any competing companies/products... kind of odd for a program that is all about getting as many cheap laptops on the market as possible. One would think competition would be good and drive down prices, enable better solutions, etc....

This would have been a great program had the person with the vision not confuse having a vision with running things. Ego-ponte needed to be less concerned with getting credit and more concerned with getting things done and should have brought someone in who knows manufacturing and who knows how to work with other companies instead of blustering in the press.

There is also ZERO closed loop feedback - there are many complaints about training, support, deployment and OLPC buries there head in the sand when they are asked these questions in interviews. Merely shipping a cheap laptop with SW is not the total solution.

VIA C-7M is half the performance of a VIA Nano...And to bring things into perspective; A VIA Nano 1.3Ghz performs the same as an Intel Atom 1.6Ghz.

The one in OLPC v1.5 scales from 400Mhz to 1Ghz.

Someone has tested a VIA C-7M 1.6Ghz on a pre-Beta version of Windows 7...To give you folks a rough idea.
= http://www.hpminiguide.com/windows-7-pre-beta-on-the-mini-note/

Still, its much better than the OLPC v1.0...Here's a comparison of the old one overclocked to 500Mhz compared to the VIA C-7M one.
= http://www.liliputing.com/2009/09/olpc-xo-laptop-1-5-with-via-processor-demoed-video.html

Despite what is being said..MS did make an effort to help out, regardless that the driving motivation was getting these kids to learn windows instead.... what Intel did with Classmate is pure evil greed and as Simon says ...probably motivated by use of AMD chips.
At least MS didn't try to derail the project cus they use Linux.

...more spin there?

Seriously, where's the one I can buy? Change the case a little, sell it on the market. They could of hit the ground running with millions of commercial sales, funding the operation.

Instead, well, the screen tech will get here at some point via PixelQi, and Classmate PC's are selling well..

didnt Intel tried to undermine the efforts of OLPC just because it uses AMD?

"....At the end of the day, it's not for us to judge whether OLPC has been a success. It is down to the more than one million underprivileged kids all over the world who have been give an opportunity to expand their education using the tools that the rest of us take for granted.

It's amazing is to see what kids do when they see each other on a mesh WiFi network in the classroom, and can share the same document or activity in Sugar," enthuses Daly. "This is perhaps the most special part of why OLPC works in the classroom, yet sadly, very few journalists or pundits have been able to experience it...."

This pretty much sums it up. The West has no right to criticize a well meant attempt at bringing much needed educational tools into the hands of these otherwise worse-off kids. Instead of bitching let them help out.