Is anyone familiar with how much of the time learning is spent on the Chromebook? Is this normal in other countries?
2 - olpc was as much about making computing hardware cheaply and as accessible as possible to communities that didn't have any access to reliable electricity, let alone computers. Hence the built in hand crank
3 - to my knowledge, olpc distributed globally, but hardly addressed US or EU countries at all, so I'm not sure what you mean by "is this normal in other countries."
i don't see that people who can't afford technology would have any less spare energy than people who do.
I imagine if the company hadn't gone belly-up because the predicted demand didn't really materialize, they might have refined that further, but.
It might be kind of fascinating to revisit how powerful you could make such a device in this day and age of manufacturers having spent many more years trying to improve power/performance in small form factors, but I'm not sure anyone would professionally touch such an idea now, given how visibly it went belly-up...
As far as the human energy cost not mattering - have you ever tried cranking something with mechanical resistance for 6 minutes straight to get an hour of battery life? It's draining, even with practice.
Something interesting might have been something more like a bike pedal mechanism, since that's something a lot of humans have practice at doing without exhausting themselves, but that might still have problems with the amount of resistance required to turn it into electricity...
right, exactly.
As far as the human energy cost not mattering
i think you misread that, unless you are not responding to me. what i am saying is that the human energy of poor people is no different than the human energy of wealthy ones, so the argument that poor people in particular would not have the energy to use a hand crank is nonsense, because, as you rightly say, turning a handcrank is exhausting, but it is exhausting for everyone. (and i know that from experience. we used to mill our own flour with a handcrank)
bike pedal mechanisms for electricity have been spotted in some OLPC deployments, as far as i remember. but a laptop is not the only thing using electricity, so if pedal mechanisms are a good idea, i'd expect to see them more often. my impression is that they are only good as a last resort, when better options are not available.
The OLPC project said "we can help kids by designing $100 laptops just for them", and rich westerners heard "$100 laptops."
The mistakes happened way in the beginning, along with a certain economic downturn. In retrospect, the interest of (on-average) wealthy people in cheap disposable laptops was obscene, and it's a shame the market allowed that interest to be entertained the way it was. Netbooks happened because we are incapable of accounting for the long term costs of crap electronics outside of futile attempts to educate consumers. Thus, netbooks and then equally disposable Chromebooks were dumped into the market without scrutiny, and computers are Google now.