[IAEP] Yunus and Intel

[Edward Cherlin]

Does anybody here have contact with Muhammad Yunus?

I sent the author of this piece a note about Sugar for Caixa Mágica.

http://www.advogato.org/article/986.html

 Venezuela orders 1 million Intel Classmate PCs

Many people in Free Software may lament the fact that Venezuela is
ordering Classmates not OLPCs. The simple fact is that Negroponte has
lost the plot. Confidence, Software and means of Communication is far
more important than a lovely piece of hardware.

I used to think that it was really bad that Intel is behind the
Classmate PC. I held the view that they were a big corporate bully,
knocking down the OLPC effort with biased newsreports that weren't
vetted or researched properly, even by the BBC. Then I learned that
the CEO of Intel had met with Professor Mohammad Yunus, and instantly
my view on the matter changed. utterly. If Professor Yunus can inspire
Intel to do the same thing that Danone did, I am 100% behind Intel.
It's also worth mentioning that I'm 100% behind the SUGAR software, as
well, and anything else like it.

What's fantastic about Intel is that they can help fill one important
piece of the puzzle, and people - governments - believe and trust them
to be able to deliver. With guidance from Professor Yunus, Intel will
not be performing a "profix maximisation" exercise on the buyers of
the Classmate PCs. This is borne out by the evidence you can see
before you: Intel is selling the design of the Classmate PCs to
Portugal (for Venezuela to buy 1 million of them, whilst the Portugese
government takes a further 500,000).

When the OLPC first came out, and governments announced they were
buying orders in the millions, those orders were stalled when they
realised that they had no training, and that this "support" issue was
simply... non-existent. Of course, the fact that it's often the
children who teach the teachers how to use the machines was entirely
overlooked - but it's that confidence that needs to be inspired...

The other thing that's great about the Classmate PCs is that the
machines can have WIMAX in them. Not the restricted version of WIMAX
that's choked off by U.S. companies, so that it only talks to
base-stations; the proper version of WIMAX that performs collaborative
networking.

Medium-rance Collaborative networking is vital in areas with little to
no communications infrastructure, as that wonderful article on an OLPC
deployment in a remote village described. The children use it to talk
to each other, outside of school hours. However, WIFI is restricted in
range - even in areas where there is relatively little metal to get in
the way; WIMAX has a range measured in kilometres, opening up the
possibility to cover an entire town with only a few machines.

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