CrunchGear

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.