It’s a pleasure to inform my friends that I’ve been selected to speak at DevTeach, an important conference that will take place in Toronto, Canada from May 12th (http://www.devteach.com).

The session schedule is not ready yet, but you can see the selected speakers at http://www.devteach.com/Speaker.aspx.

I will deliver three sessions. You can check them at http://www.devteach.com/Session.aspx.

Mr. Negroponte complained about countries that promised to order the One Laptop Per Child (XO) by the millions and then turned cold on him. One of these countries is Brazil and as a Brazilian I am qualified to talk about this.

First of all, it’s very presumptuous to think that our clueless president has the power to spend US$200 million dollars from the treasury by fiat on anything he wishes. Only who has a “banana republic dictator” view of the third world can suppose this. We have laws about competitive bidding. Even if he president wanted to buy this crap, he would have to go through a process not dissimilar from other rich countries, including the USA:

• He would have to find the US$200mi in somebody’s “equipment” budget – an Herculean task because most of it is “pre-allocated” with things such as salaries;
• Failing in finding room in the already approved budget he would have to secure specific funding in a new, voted budget, with all the pork barreling and negotiations so familiar to Americans;
• After securing the money, he would have to do go through a bidding process. This process in itself has two very important phases:

1. An accredited institution such as the Education Ministry and/or some university would have to write the “caderno de encargos”, a document that describes what is being bought. This is a committee thing and quite possibly, without any external influence, the target of the acquisition would need to have characteristics that the XO lack, including “details” such as a country wide training network. At this phase there’s also heavy political mingling in order to favor this or that supplier by describing the product in such a way as to favor some bidder and exclude another. Political and corruption power speak loud here and I doubt the XO crowd would prevail with such a clunky product and no profit margin to “grease the wheels”.
2. The bidding itself, with all the usual political and legal maneuvers. Brazilian law makes specific claims as to whom could participate in the bidding and how.

Oh, there are taxes (some 25% or more) that can only be waived by a law in the National Congress. And there’s the “Consumer Code” that demands free warranty and reasonably priced maintenance, within easy geographical reach from the end user.

If there really were the political will to buy laptops for schoolchildren, the most likely outcome is this: A local supplier with good political connections and already established manufacturing plant in a low-tax place would make a deal with the likes of ASUS and “assemble” in Brazil a much more capable computer such as the Eee.

That’s reality, something that Mr. Negroponte prefers to ignore. By his own admission Mr. Negroponte "is not good at selling laptops, he is good at selling ideas." (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119586754115002717.html?mod=home_we_banner_left). This candid statement is highly suspicious and even sinister. Even sci-fi writers don’t sell ideas, they sell books. Bin Laden sells ideas.

As you know, I am not crazy about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative.

Now The Economist Magazine has an article/review about it at http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10472304 in an article entitled “One clunky laptop per child”.

The article is quite cavalier and says it was a good idea with bad execution. As I stated previously, it was a bad idea from the get-going.

An excerpt:

“IT WOULD be a stunt, but one perhaps worth performing, to write this column on the tiny, green and white, $200 XO computer from One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that sits idle before your columnist. Alas, he cannot.

This is not because the keys are too small for his adult hands (though they are), or because the processor’s slow speed makes the machine frustrating to use(though it does). Nor is it because the track pad sometimes goes screwy and the keys lack the normal pressed-key response that allows smooth typing. It isn’t even because moving the column from the word-processing application to the web-mail system is prohibitively difficult.

Instead, it is because the XO, which your columnist has explored since it arrived a few days before Christmas, has bugs that cause occasional crashes. A discreet message sometimes flashes when the system boots up, warning of some sort of data-check error. This, along with the host of other hiccups, necessitated the use of an ordinary, expensive computer for this column.”

Update: A friend of mine who actually bought one of those things says that the article is dead on. His seven year old son much prefers a real computer. Which brings back the old paranoid argument about rich people sending crap to the poor of the world and even more credibility to my “the US$100 computer is the used computer”.

Update II: It gets juicier: “Intel cited disagreements with the organization's founder, Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte reportedly had demanded that Intel stop selling its own laptop in developing countries and stop supplying its chips to other laptops marketed to schoolchildren in those countries.” (http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2007/12/31/daily40.html).”

Humm…so the kids deserve a computer as long as it’s his! Of course Mr BlackBridge is setting up the stage for a claim that “Big corporations didn’t let him fulfill his dream”.