You just can't make this stuff up.
It isn't enough that the American Enterprise Institute, particularly Nick Schulz, and the Wall Street Journal's editors hate the children of the poor. Here is Digital News piling on with mixed Marxist metaphors.
Nicholas Negroponte, formerly of MIT, was the Che of cheap computers, heralding a new era of low-cost, long-lasting laptops that would destroy the digital divide. He started out with a radical agenda, promising sub-$100 laptops to children around the world.
The OLPC laptops would not run a bourgeois operating system like Windows. Instead, they would run Sugar, a special version of Linux, the people’s platform. They would even use Marxist technology like mesh networking, which shares an Internet connection "from each computer according to its ability, to each according to its need."
I never heard of Marxist technology before. Do you suppose that it is anything like the Nazi ideas of Jewish mathematics and Jewish physics?
Yes, we crossed the Godwin line right in the Intro. So sue me. But there is so much more.
Have you heard about Jewish mathematics? For example, the work of Hermann Minkowski, Richard Courant, or Emmy Noether. How about Jewish physics, especially Albert Einstein's Relativity? If anybody wants to know more, I can Diary about it sometime.
But today the attack is on education for a billion children of all nationalities, ethnicities, and religions, and on getting them jobs afterwards, and definitively putting an end to poverty. Well, I can see how some on the Right would consider all of that to be Marxism, in their current vacuum of ideas other than racism, bigotry, and kleptocracy.
Be that as it may, here is the text of the article, with my notes interspersed. And all the snark I can muster.
The Netbook Revolution is Over. So What Did You Win?
Apparently that would be the Marxist netbook revolution.
August 25 2010
Congratulations! The netbook revolution is over and you won.
Wait, we're the Marxists?
Monday, Intel announced the general availability of new systems from most major vendors featuring its dual-core Atom N550 processor. The company also shared that it has shipped over 70 million Atom CPUs since it first launched the low-voltage, low-priced platform back in 2008. Yet with so much success has come massive stagnation—and even declines in sales. The problem isn’t that netbooks have failed. On the contrary, they’ve succeeded so well that they have become irrelevant.
Oh, no, I get it now. We, in the person of Intel, are the anti-Marxists. The netbook is dead! Long live the netbook!
No, no, actually I'm still confused. Here, for example, is an announcement from Marvel and OLPC.
One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World
Marvell and OLPC Empower Education Industry to Revolutionize the Classroom Experience through Advanced, Affordably-Priced Tablets
Specs for the Moby tablet:
- low-power Marvell ARMADA™ 610 application processor
- gigahertz processor speed,
- 1080p full-HD encode and decode,
- intelligent power management,
- power-efficient Marvell 11n Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM/GPS connectivity,
- high performance 3D graphics
- support for multiple software standards including full Adobe Flash, Android™, Windows Mobile, and Ubuntu Linux
The target price is $75 each in quantities of 10,000. (Unlike the XO-1, this will be available at retail at a higher price. You can still get an XO-1 on eBay for under $150.) So if children around the world keep them for four years, starting in first grade, with replacements in fifth and ninth grades, that's about $20 per child per year, plus ancillary expenses such as electricity and Internet. Less than textbooks.
Have you heard that South Africa has commissioned a set of digital textbooks covering all of K-8 and the math and science courses for 9-12, for free distribution, starting next month? They are in expert proofreading right now. So schools changing over to computers for all can actually come out ahead. But only by embracing "Marxism" in the form of the destruction of the Free Market textbook publishing industry, whose profits are far more important than education or even school funding.
To understand where the revolution went wrong, we must go back to its roots. Like many movements, this one was started by a few idealistic academics [elitists, don't you know]. Nicholas Negroponte, formerly of MIT [Media Lab], was the Che of cheap computers,
Yes, indeed, shot down in the hills of Cambridge, MA just outside MIT, when he was trying to raise a rebellion against...Wait, what?
heralding a new era of low-cost, long-lasting laptops that would destroy the digital divide.
Oh, evil destroyer!
He started out with a radical agenda, promising sub-$100 laptops to children around the world.
The OLPC laptops would not run a bourgeois operating system like Windows. Instead, they would run Sugar, a special version of Linux, the people’s platform. They would even use Marxist technology like mesh networking, which shares an Internet connection "from each computer according to its ability, to each according to its need."
You mean like the mobile phone network? Cable TV? Broadband Internet? Google and eBay?
However, as with many radical movements, OLPC’s populist ideas didn’t put bread—or in this case, little green computers—on the table.
Populists—those are the Tea Parties, right? So the Tea Parties are Marxist radicals?
Am I confused, or are you?
Shortages were commonplace and One Laptop Per Child was often more like half a dozen laptops per village.
Fail.
More than 2 million XOs have been ordered for 40+ countries, and more than a million and a half deployed. See Deployments on the OLPC Wiki. Apart from individual sales through Give One Get One, the minimum deployment was in the thousands, with a requirement to supply them to whole classes or, better, whole schools at once. In some cases, as in Uruguay, whole countries have them in every school, or are in various stages of the process of rolling them out to every school.
Worse still, trying to surf the Web or compose an e-mail with the XO laptop’s cryptic Sugar UI and cramped keyboard
Yes, they were designed for children, not you, you ageist.
was more difficult than trudging through twenty miles of Siberian winter for a tiny ration of spoiled borscht.
Uphill both ways, he forgot to mention. Your mother wears army boots, too, you, you filthy do-gooders. She'll need them in that Siberian winter.
I don't know about Siberia, but we have heard that the batteries freeze solid at 30 below in the Mongolian winter and won't power the laptops. But they don't eat borscht. Mongols drink fermented mare's milk, and run 150 kilometer ultramarathons. They've been through real Communism, too. You can't scare them.
Tough kids, those little Mongols, if they are sitting out in the snow at -30° computing. Go inside, kid. Warm up the computer. It won't kill you.
As the OLPC-kevites
If you can explain where "OLPC-kevite" comes from, write me a comment. It isn't Bolshevik, or Trotskyite, so...? Unless it has something to do with Australian Labor politician Kevin Rudd's followers, the so-called "Kevites"? Or was that a Jewish tribe, perhaps in Life of Brian? ^_^
struggled to gain power and influence among the people, their core ideals were co-opted by the man. ASUS’s Eee PC 701 gave lip service to Negroponte’s radical agenda: small 7-inch size, long battery life, and a Linux OS, but when you pe[e]ked below the hood, you saw capitalist components like a Celeron processor and a licensed, proprietary version of Xandros.
What does that even mean, a proprietary version of Linux? I mean, I know how Apple has a proprietary version of BSD Unix under Mac OS, because the BSD license specifically allows that. Anyway, Xandros Linux is a version of Corel Linux, which is derived from Debian Linux, the most resolutely Free/Open Source mainstream Linux distribution. Yes, Xandros has proprietary additions for compatibility with Windows, but you can get the full source code for the base distribution.
Still, the original Eee PC had an ideology; it was designed as a secondary device for surfing the Web and sending e-mail only, not as a smaller laptop.
First time I heard a marketing strategy called an ideology. Oh, no, silly me. This is such a clever allusion to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and friends calling Linux "Communism". How could I miss that?
During this early revolutionary period, many interesting ideas were floated. Some companies, like Everex, thought that a gOS-based platform was the future. Others, like Emtec with its Gdium Liberty 1000, wanted to start an anarchist state, so they built a netbook without an operating system or
The storage device that holds your OS, programs, and data.
hard drive, and invited the people to bring their own flash drives. In its original Mini-Note, HP even tried a VIA processor that ran hot enough to sterilize a Federline.
I don't know why these notes are stuck in the middle of the text, nor how the other stupidity fell in. Look, fact-checking is one thing, but I am not going to search Google for "sterilize Federline". I prefer not to know some things.
Nor do I see what Everex or Emtec netbooks have to do with this story. I'm sure you can find out all about them at Liliputing.com.
But despite these unique experiments, the bourgeois class began to demand creature comforts like 10-inch screens, 5,400 rpm hard drives, and familiar operating systems. Intel obliged by developing its Atom platform, which first appeared in late Spring 2008. Suddenly, everyone from Acer to Viewsonic was building netbooks and Microsoft even lowered its prices for the new category, saying "let them have Windows XP."
Yes, by all means, let them eat Windows XP, and bloat Microsoft's profits further, so that Bill Gates can donate a fraction of that money to African schools and get all the press.
But why do you attribute this progress to bourgeois demand rather than to the inexorable working of Moore's Law? Integrated circuits have been increasing in capacity and decreasing in price at nearly the same rate since the hippie 1960s, and have not become visibly more capitalist over the decades.
Since that time, the entire notebook world has changed, mostly for the better. Netbooks helped PC manufacturers to focus on low-cost and long battery life. They proved that, for many users, having the fastest processor isn’t nearly as important as having a light-weight system that lasts all day on a charge.
Hey, facts!
So netbooks began to morph from the hippie on the corner shouting "down with optical drives" to the CEO in the boardroom, editing spreadsheets on his HP Mini 5102. They grew as large as 12-inches in size, started carrying huge hard drives, and offering HD screens with
Graphics chips are responsible for processing all images sent to your computer's display.
Something must have fallen out here.
So after all that ranting and raving about Commie netbooks, I guess the moral is that Capitalists will take over any market that is proven to exist, and bring out bigger and badder and more expensive products, whether the public asked for them or not. I'm sorry. The unworthy hippie Commies didn't ask for them, the worthy (because of having more money?) bourgeois did.
The hippies want even lower-cost computers in order to get them to those billion unworthy children faster, and teach them to take over the world, using their computers as the distributed Communist means of production for the Information Age. And nobody has to die this time! Wait, is that the problem?
Maybe I'm still confused. Are we in Thorstein Veblen's realm of Conspicuous Consumption, where you need the biggest screen, and the biggest hard drive, and the fastest multicore processor in order to play Solitaire more impressively? Is information inherently Communist, from the point of view of the Right, in the same way that facts have that famous Liberal bias?
Ultraportable notebooks began to get more affordable too. Where 12- and 13-inch notebooks were once the exclusive province of business executives with over $1,000 to spend, a new generation of ultra-low voltage consumer and small business systems appeared with prices under $600 and battery lives close to those of their netbook counterparts.
So what are your considerable spoils from this revolution? Cheaper, lighter, longer-lasting portable computers. In other words, a huge win.
However, dual-core processors are just the latest in a long line of improvements to the netbook that make it nothing more than a 10 or 11-inch ultraportable laptop, a far cry from its radical beginnings as a secondary web-focused device.
Because the OLPC XOs with all kinds of education software that this story began with don't count. Because children aren't even as worthy as hippies, it would seem. Or maybe children are just more dangerous.
How long until vendors give up the ghost, stop calling them netbooks,
That's not quite what "giving up the ghost" means.
and begin to market them as 10-inch notebooks? Tiny as they are, many people use them for Microsoft Office, photo editing, or even playing World of Warcraft at a low resolution.
Today’s revolutionaries come from the smart phone and tablet worlds. Companies like Apple, Google, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung are the new radicals pushing a web-connected future of secondary devices with many of the leading netbook vendors (ASUS, Acer, HP, MSI, etc) looking to join the insurgency. Let’s just hope this generation sticks to its ideals.
So now the good guy capitalists are the Marxist radical revolutionaries, while holding to the kleptocratic Free Market ideal? No, no, you can't be saying that they have all gone—Chinese!? Well, that is where XOs are manufactured. And almost all other netbooks and laptops.
Online Editorial Director Avram Piltch oversees the production and infrastructure of LAPTOP’s web site. With a reputation as the staff’s biggest geek, he has also helped develop a number of LAPTOP’s custom tests, including the laptop battery test.
Notebook batteries provide power to the system whenever it’s unplugged.
Catch the Geek’s Geek column here every other week or follow Avram on twitter.
Um, thanks. I think.
Mokurai is, among other things, the education geek's education geek, and you can follow him on Twitter, too, along with the It's An Education Project mailing list.
Note: There wasn't room for the following links in the Intro, about how the OLPC XO is useless to children and will fail, whereas the Free Market will solve the problems of poverty in half no time. Because, as you know, Free Markets are perfect and magical, so there is no poverty in reality. Poof! All taken care of. You were just imagining it. And we all get magic unicorns, because we are all so rich. Republicans can have all of the liberty and ice cream they want, all supplied by the Market. That's how Markets work, and they can't claim otherwise without us pointing and laughing.
Oh, and, uh, </snark>
I have lots more of these Translating Code Diary Entries in the queue. I think I'll post "School Choice" and "Republicans will take back Congress" next.