Birmingham, AL totally confused by OLPC purchase
Posted Jan 23rd 2008 6:34PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Laptops
We knew we were in for some rough chuckles when Birmingham, Alabama signed up to provide an OLPC XO to every K-8 student student last December, but we didn’t think they’d be this silly from the get-go: apparently the mayor’s office, which negotiated the deal, is now saying the school board needs to add WiFi to every school for the laptops to work. That’s news to us — the mesh-networking XO was designed to be used in rural parts of the third world, after all — but we’re still puzzling out what mayoral advisors John Katopodis and Bob McKenna meant when they said they’re “trying to make the whole city WiFi,” or where they got a quote of $39 per school to enable wireless access. Of course, the only response from the school board was one member who worried about students accessing porn — which seems to be a real theme with the XO — but for some reason we’re not at all surprised that bureaucratic officials have totally missed the point of the OLPC project.
[Thanks, Jay]
Tags: plasma, computers, hdtv, electronic toys
