40,000 XO PCs destroyed in Peru fire
Lima residents warned of pollution as One Laptop Per Child project burns
40,000 XO computers, the model used in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, have gone up in flames in Peru.
The computers were in a Peruvian Education Ministry warehouse, along with 20,000 conventional laptops. That warehouse burned down last Friday.
The OLPC project says that no-one was hurt and quotes Peruvian President Ollanta Humala as saying the fire won't slow Peru's plan to roll out one million Xos as contigency plans are in place.
6,000 solar panels intended, in part, to power the XOs were also lost, along with a significant number of books in Peru's indigenous languages. Local newspapers have volunteered to reprint the books. ®
COMMENTS
MS?
All the hallmarks of MS?
Embrace,Extend, Extinguis.. oh wait.
Re: And here *I* though...
I still don't understand why they couldn't just sell the laptops worldwide for $99 + shipping. Surely the more of them they make, the lower the price of manufacturing becomes.
Sure they had a short period where you could buy one for yourself and one for someone else, which came in at like $240. But come on, just sell them to the masses at a dirt cheap price and it will eventually help the whole goal of the company.
Hell, If you offered us geeks one of those laptops for $99 plus shipping, I'm sure most of us would jump on it. Just for the sake of seeing how well a laptop really can run on solar+winding power!
This is all just pure speculation but I imagine right now, sitting in a nearby office there's an Apple-Peru office staffer with a bunch of empty gas cans scattered around him and the burned out left-over stub of a safety flare in one hand.
In a day or so, we'll all be reading about Apple starting a huge lobbying campaign in Lima to put iPads in all the schools down there.
Yeah. A shitload of government pork in an insured warehouse. Call me a cynic but....well call me a cynic.
