It seems to me that there are a large number of people in the world, who have nothing better to do with their time than tell other people how they should be spending their time.
I think that pretty much all of the OLPC critics fall in to that category.
Why is it that people who sit around and do nothing feel that they should be the ones telling those that are investing large amounts of time and money doing something that they’re wasting their time and it’s all going to fail?
The best way to ensure a project fails, is to never start it.
Before criticizing someone else’s project, how about you stop and ask yourself what you hope to achieve by your criticism. Obviously you have a right to your opinion, you even have a right to spew it out to anyone that will listen, but if you spent less time shouting the deficiencies of a project to the world and more time thinking about how you could contribute to make it work better – or even starting your own project – then maybe the world might just be that little bit more of a better place.
(OLPC is the One Laptop Per Child project, that is developing a cheap ($US100) laptop for the purpose of education. They’re not trying to create a general purpose computer, they’re not trying to solve world hunger. What they are doing, is trying to fill a gap. Maybe it’ll succeed brilliantly, maybe it’ll fail dismally, but I think they should be allowed to at least try)
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Right on, mabinogi, you have got it just right.
All real progress is made by optimist misfits. You have to be a misfit to try to change the world rather than adapt to it. If you’re not an optimist, you don’t bother to start. It may be the definition of crazy to keep trying in the face of repeated failure, but that is often what it takes.
We have electric lights because an optimist tried again and again and again with filaments that just burnt out immediately, after intensive effort to put each one in an evacuated glass envelop to be tested. Even when he found one that sorta worked, someone else found a much better filament within a year or two. So naturally his effort was classified a massive, expensive failure and nobody remembers the fool.
Except me. We share a birthday, though the year is off a little.
This CAPTCHA system is rude when you mistype the five character key. Firefox let me retrieve my carefully constructed text, but it should have been easier.
Where do I complain that might possibly make life better for future comment makers?
I think EVERY web page should have feedback links for the various authors of the content and the mechanisms. And every web site should have wikis instead of just chains of comments. That way we get to practice kaizen.