All day we’re inundated with news about this One Laptop Per Child project. I write up story after story about how these do-gooders are spreading technology to the third world, how interconnectivity and self-organizing networks will change the way these people communicate and allow otherwise deprived children to grow up capable of interacting with computers and thriving in a modern environment. But I have to ask, how exactly do they figure this is going to work when the OLPC hardware is not Vista-Capable?
I somehow doubt these cute little units sport the 2 gigs of RAM needed to fuel the memory-hungry Aero interface. What’s their UI called? Sugar? Yeah, that sounds next generation. What’s more, I seriously doubt that there’s a DirectX 10 video card hidden under those child-size keys; I probably wouldn’t even be able to fit my 8800’s heatsink in there. How are these kids going to be able to compete in the modern world when the computers they grow up with aren’t even capable of the most basic normal mapping? I bet Call of Duty 4 would be a slideshow.
When their candy computer gets trampled by a wildebeast, I bet those kids are going to be wishing they had Volume Shadow Copy going on their external hard drive. They’re going to be wishing real hard — but no amount of wishing can put a “Vista-Capable” sticker on that green machine.
I appreciate the effort these OLPC guys are putting out to arm each kid with a state-of-the-art etch-a-sketch, but let’s face it: without training on the world’s gold standard OS, they’re going to be totally unprepared when they arrive for a job interview a year from now, and show themselves completely incapable of organizing their Sidebar. Of course, I guess the businesses might be running XP — yeah right!
Unreasonable Stance is a column in which one CrunchGear writer tries to argue for the other, not usually accepted, side. Sometimes it’s satire, sometimes it’s trolling, sometimes it’s gibberish. Most importantly, however, it is an attempt to see a technical issue or product from another perspective, something we rarely do in our compartmentalized, partisan world.
Great post, definitely worth a look or two in regards to cultural leanings.
I know this is an Unreasonable Stance post, but I think you could have committed yourself more to the issue. I just wasn’t convinced that you were trying at all, sorry.
“not ready for vista” is a bad thing!?
Whoa, sounds like you work for Microsoft.
Unfortunately, stupid ramblings like this seem to be the norm on this topic in the blogosphere. If you really wanted people to see it from a different perspective, you might have looked at it from the eyes of a child in a child world country. Taking a capitalistic, “power to the man” approach is hardly a different point of view.
Sigh. That would be THIRD world country.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Don’t worry, I got it. I STILL thought it was a poor attempt at satire. Why? Your wit wasn’t that witty and your ridicule is, unfortunately, not ridiculous enough. There are plenty of more ludicrous blogs out there on the topic and they are meant to be be quite serious. The point I was making was that if you are trying to enact change (which was a bit of a leap on my part), you’re going to have to swing the other way. The people who believe that none of the children in third world countries have food or water are not sophisticated enough to understand the subtlety of satire, especially since yours sounds like their actual arguments.
Hmm, was this supposed to be satire? Or serious? Bc if satire, then it’s not funny, and if it’s serious, it’s sadly expressed. I guess it’s just sad all around.