Education means nothing when you live in a country with no jobs. [...] Better to teach them how to grow food and sanitize water first. Those are skills they can actually put to use…

And finally: the actual project website http://design4dev.wetpaint.com/page/TV+Computer?t=anon What amuses me the most is that indigenous "third" world entrepreneurship, by unde…

UPDATE: The MIT design team referred to in this post is basing its design not on the Apple II, but on the Nintendo Entertainment System, which used the same processor chip. We regr…

Food prices are going up because fuel prices are going up. Industrial agriculture is highly fuel dependent. Fertilizer is made from natural gas. And fuel price has pushed up the…

I'm hoping it is a II clone myself. The pool of ready made software that would be unleashed is huge. Imagine stock control and accounting software for a small shopkeeper who is d…

These things make the system more resiliant. Click to expand... Until the population increases and you depend on those optimizations, it's like raising the barrier on the high …

Food prices are going up because of poor management, not because optimization makes things brittle. I agree that optimization can make things more brittle. That is particularly t…

Simply put, computers allow us to optimize stuff. Click to expand... The more you optimize and then depend on those optimizations the more brittle you make the system. A resili…

It's not just a matter of saving time, it's a matter of how efficiently other resources are used. Growing food can be as simple as scattering seeds on the ground or a cow in a fie…

So many of the jobs that involve using a computer can be done without them, it sometimes just takes a bit longer or a bit more attention on the part of the worker. Click to expa…

It's a very interesting project, and thankyou for linking it. I'll be passing it on to some OLPC developers I know, amongst others. I think the idea of basing it on an Apple II i…

Eh? Are there any jobs left that don't involve using a computer? Click to expand... So many of the jobs that involve using a computer can be done without them Click to expan…

Wow. Never expected this to go in such a different direction. I just thought it was an interesting project, especially for retro-collectors like us. Still, you all make very …

The number of knee-jerk, clichéd preconceptions about the "third world" in this and other XO/OLPC related threads astounds me.

I would love one of these... I'm not contributing anything to the debate on whether it's useful or not, but the thing does sound pretty cool, especially if it'll be Apple II softwa…

Eh? Are there any jobs left that don't involve using a computer? Click to expand... So many of the jobs that involve using a computer can be done without them, it sometimes jus…

Education means nothing when you live in a country with no jobs. [...] Better to teach them how to grow food and sanitize water first. Those are skills they can actually put to use…

Perhaps one of the problems with the $12 computer is that it is being designed as a computer. I seem to recall that one of the stated reasons behind the XO-1 (the "$100 laptop") w…

lets sell to some 3rd world kids dying from hunger and have no electricity! Click to expand... What about the kids from the 3rd world who have electricity and aren't dying from…

You could make a simple password like 1211 or 0000 Click to expand... I might have to, because even running in user mode (not root mode like before) the Vine Server process kee…

lets sell to some 3rd world kids dying from hunger and have no electricity! Click to expand... What about the kids from the 3rd world who have electricity and aren't dying from…

lets sell to some 3rd world kids dying from hunger and have no electricity! Click to expand... What about the kids from the 3rd world who have electricity and aren't dying from…

Yer the IIe sounds good. Need to researh it a bit more, most sites are from the US.

Me and a freind liberated a IIe from school and it works great, and is sweet to look at and play with but with no software it is just eyecandy. I was wondering how can I get games …

Me and a friend saved an IIe from school, and I *used* to have a II growing up as a kid, so I would say go with the IIe just because it is the beefed up II and would have more soft…