Gabriel Genellina wrote: > En Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:10:51 -0300, Tim Bradshaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> escribió: > > > The electronic gadget people need in the developing world is a mobile phone > > not a > > computer. > > What for? > That requires a phone company, installed antennas everywhere, and > available power to charge batteries. Without forgetting you to pay the > bill, of course.
"What people in the developing world needs is Iridium!" Oops! ;-) I've heard of people doing interesting things with mobile phones in various developing countries, and I'm sure that the infrastructure is gradually expanding in some places, but the mobile phone is largely a "consumer" device: you pay big corporations to use their networks and to download largely frivolous content. I hardly think such things are on the same page as the OLPC vision. > I don't think OLPC would actually help people so much, but a mobile phone > would be almost useless. Like it was -actually happened- donating nice > computers for use in remote elementary schools with no power source. Yes, such things were mentioned in the FOSDEM OLPC talk [1]. It's all very well having rich Europeans or Americans (especially thinking of people like Bill Gates who seems to opine regularly on such things in a way which is unlikely to be completely disconnected to his business interests) saying that all the old kit that people don't want any more (because they must have that new quad-core laptop!) should be shipped out to places that "need" it, but the issue is whether the recipients really do need to have aging, power-hungry technology with special waste disposal requirements when it finally gives up the ghost. Sure, give people a bunch of old PCs (and why not all those CRTs, too?) which consume tens of watts per unit. Do we have any old solar panels to ship out with them? Or how about building some nuclear power stations to go with all this equipment? Still a good idea?! Paul [1] Videos are available at http://www.fosdem.org/2007/media/video - and in an open format, too. (Hint to any conference people thinking of just uploading stuff to YouTube!) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
