[Olpc-open] Responding to misinformed criticism of OLPC

[Charbax]

I'm actually a fan of Dvorak and I have seen all episodes of Cranky Geeks
and listen to all Twits. I am just a bit dissapointed on his opinion about
the OLPC project.

I also think that he was recently wrong saying nobody would find a use to a
device like the Kindle.

Perhaps we can instead simply show him the XO and convince him a bit that
his column was relaying the sentiment that some of the critics out there
have towards the project, but that they should consider if they are just
misinformed.

And perhaps Dvorak will write his next column appologizing to having mixed
up the need to bring food to starving people and the need to bring cheap
laptops to people who need education.

So if I was at OLPC, I would make sure that Dvorak gets to see and try an XO
as soon as possible (it seems from his column that he has never even seen
one) and give him some of the most relevant links so that he can learn a
little bit more about the project.

On Dec 13, 2007 7:56 AM, Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
wrote:

> [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
>
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> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-open
>



-- 
Charbax,
Nicolas Charbonnier
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