[Olpc-open] Responding to misinformed criticism of OLPC

[Ivan Krstić]

[I speak only for myself, not my employer.]

On Dec 13, 2007, at 12:40 AM, James Sayre wrote:
> Some of you may know that a nasty attack on the OLPC concept was  
> written
> by John Dvorak of PCMag and ZDNet recently.


Dvorak is a professional village idiot, and has been entirely  
irrelevant for two decades. I should remind you of some of his  
previous choice bits:

"The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'.  
There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
   -- Dvorak, San Francisco Examiner, February 1984

"The noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging  
use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions  
using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this  
technology succeeding is zilch."
   -- Dvorak, PC Magazine, September 1995

"When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is  
hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's  
cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"
  -- Dvorak, PC Magazine, September 2003

"The absolute deterioration of the wiki concept is just a matter of  
time."
   -- Dvorak, PC Magazine, July 2005

Just smile and nod at what he has to say. Or point people to Bill  
Thompson's response at the BBC:

    <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7138061.stm>

Cheers,

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org