Tired of One Laptop Per Child

Just because I have time to kill and don't feel like doing actual work...

I'm actually really sick of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. I'm tired of hearing about it. Every time I read anything about it, that quote about the road to hell being paved by good intentions bounces around in my brain.

Fundamentally, I don't like it because it won't work. $100 for a laptop sounds like a cheap price tag, but in fact it's way, way too expensive to accomplish what they want it to (i.e., laptop availability for education purposes for children in the developing world). Remember these are places where people live on a dollar a day. But even if it weren't too expensive, it's the wrong model. Specifically, laptops are the wrong model. It's just too fucking expensive to give every child their own laptop, and you don't need to. What you want is to have some kind of computing terminal to be a shared by some group of people, and then a way for each child to individualize the terminal when they use it. Having a simple cell phone with some added functionality that would allow it to support a roaming profile would be nice since you probably _do_ want each child to have a simple communication device, but if that's too expensive as well (and it very well might be), you could get away with a simple keychain flash drive. Those things are already cheap as dirt.

Plus, why pay the money to have a display on the laptop (which, I'm guessing, is a significant part of the cost)? Hook the fucker up to a tv, for fuck's sake! Maybe a significant portion of the families in question don't even have a television, but my point remains: the way you save money is by using hardware for multiple purposes. There is a reason that the world used mainframes when computers were ridiculously expensive, people! Sharing expensive resources drives down per-person costs! This isn't that hard, damnit.

It's not that these are bad people. They are just going about things in a bass-ackwards manner, and my concern is that money will get blown on this type of project that should be going towards more useful endeavors.