Nicholas Negroponte is on a mission to bring IT to everyone. It's a noble mission. I hope he succeeds. Here is a quote:
The device is intended to be a computer, e-book, games console and TV all in one, and its promoter, MIT Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte, evangelised about a production run of millions within just one year.
4 comments :
Yeah, well, how will the users get trained?
Good question. I'm really not sure how it will play out. Although I recently read about a hopeful-sounding project in India, in which computers were embedded in walls facing the street. Apparently children took to it readily.
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/kids.html
And, of course training will be even harder to accomplish without access to the machines.
How do most people get trained on computers? By personal motivation and a lot of looking at source code.
While this home-grown learning can get people in the door and "up to speed" it can definitely hurt sometimes as I see in my job everyday. If I have to flesh out the specs to one more freakin Access "database" built by someone who took a 1 day class for conversion to SQL I might have to squirrel myself away in a white room and start saving my fingernails.
On another note to this story, Steve Jobs, offered OS X up for his laptops for free but Negraponte declined saying he wanted "Open Source" software. This has to mean that if Negraponte is successful there will be millions of home-grown users of some flavor of Linux. I don't know what that means yet but I am sure there are analysts in MS and Apple working on it full time. Probably not profitable.
I think both my cousins are missing the boat on how these users will get trained.... can you say The Halliburton Institute of Technology !?!? KA-CHING BABY!!
My only question is what company is going to try to get their grubby fingers on this potential cash cow...why do people call me paranoid? :)
I did see this on pbs the other night and it looked pretty cool.
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