Same thing. 'unveiling' a tablet for a price is nothing until a tablet is actually sold for that price on the market. This times two in a place like India, which is plans-heavy and implementation-light. This really doesn't mean much.
If they can only fix their corruption, bureaucracy and the totally broken governmental system, thousands of entrepreneurs can emerge and create millions of gadgets...
In a country where the GDP per capita is around $1300? You can play up the "market will solve all ills" all you like, but if everyone is too busy scrambling to get enough calories to get by then they probably don't have enough to buy the latest iPad.
Subsidized government programs exist because this is where the market fails and governments have a larger and more important mission than just maximizing profits and putting on fancy keynotes for drooling fans.
//In a country where the GDP per capita is around $1300? You can play up the "market will solve all ills" all you like..........governments have a larger and more important mission than ....
GDP per capita is around $1300 precisely because the governmnet always felt it had a LARGER and MORE important mission than (simply doing their job with no corruption). And these larger and more important missions almost always end up channeling tax payer's money into politicians via some crazy project like this
You're mixing up two different issues, corruption and socialist tendencies.
While corruption in socialism is bad, corruption in capitalism is just as bad. Even the most developed capitalist countries have failed to remove corruption. (hence the 2008 subprime crisis)
To India's credit, its socialist tendencies kept the country unaffected from 2008 subprime crisis.
> To India's credit, its socialist tendencies kept the country unaffected from 2008 subprime crisis.
No boom, no bust....
> While corruption in socialism is bad, corruption in capitalism is just as bad. Even the most developed capitalist countries have failed to remove corruption. (hence the 2008 subprime crisis)
The 2008 "subprime crisis" wasn't capitalist corruption, it was govt corruption. The US govt decided to subsidize home ownership via various means, which created a property bubble. Bubbles eventually pop, and the govt then decided to "socialize" the losses and try to restore the bubble.
The Irish govt went one step further - it decided to guarantee all bank losses.
At first glance, you're right. The problem is, though, that the word "capitalism" has different meanings for different people, and has also undergone a general shifting of the meaning of the word. This is not unlike the word "liberal" (as in politically liberal), which has changed in a similar fashion.
This snippet from the Wikipedia entry for capitalism synthesizes it pretty well: "Classical liberals such as Mises, Rand, and Rothbard define capitalism as a market system with no interference by States (laissez faire). Some define capitalism as a system governed by capital accumulation regardless of the legal ownership titles."
anamax is referring to what could be referred to "classical capitalism," while you, ramchip, seem to be referring to "state capitalism".
No GDP per capita is around $1300 cause there are over 1.2 billion people. There are just too many people living on the land. It's grossly unsustainable.
Things are bad enough for the vast majority. If left to the "market" 3/4 of the population would be starving.
By the way, there is no such thing as government without corruption. There is always corruption. Always.
As a learning device, it's amazingly well priced. See it as a replacement for 1,000 textbooks and it suddenly makes beautiful sense and all for the cost of a single textbook.
If India now creates a national or city wide free wifi network, their economy would skyrocket in the next two decades.
The government isn't making tablets in the same way they make watches (HMT Watches) or artificial limbs ( Artificial Limbs Mfg. Corpn. Of India). The government floated a tender and a private company developed the tablet. There is a huge difference between the two.
Also, if this device proves to be the best way to deliver essential public services (e.g. education, tele-medicine, etc.), it most certainly is the job of the government to make tablets. If this is a platform on which people can innovate and build apps on top of, it is not a stretch to compare this to US federal funding of basic science.
Here we go again with false dichotomies. Having such cheap tablets will disseminate more information which will help people in multiple ways. Just 5 in 100 having access to the internet is appalling and needs to be fixed, government or not.
But I've always wondered, what came first, the corrupt government, or citizens who don't pay tax?
I see the same thing in Greece. The government is corrupt, but the people don't pay taxes.
Does the government become corrupt because there isn't enough money to pay civil servants, or does do people refuse to pay taxes because they will be misused by a corrupt government?
Again? The 'Indian Government' makes an announcement like this every three to six months. There is really really weird politics surrounding this vs the OLPC project in India. Start believing in these releases when you have consumers purchasing them, and/or deployments greater than 100.
I doubt it. I've used one of the $80 Chinese tablets with ostensibly better specs and the thing was barely usable. It really depends on the details though. 366 MHz doesn't tell us what type of processor, nor whether it has hardware decoder chips in there too.
I think you overstate the situation greatly. I have in fact written school assignments on my iPad. I have also written a pretty large body of personal notes on ideas on it.
Granted, a seven-inch screen will make it harder. But for creation of content there's always actual paper and pencil. They can keep doing whatever they're already doing in that regard. And if they can't now, there's at least the theoretical ability to attach a keyboard.
The way I see it, the first goal is to be a lighter, more flexible textbook. This is exactly content consumption. It will likely do a good job of this. If it does anything else as well, that's a bonus.
The article switches tense from "on sale" to "will have", which is a similar uncertain time detail to other articles about vaporous sub-$50 computers that have been published in the past.
Is this device shipping at the claimed price right now or not?
The first step is to offer them to university students , they probably have WIFI and electricity.
And yes, rural electrification is a huge challenge, but it's much easier to deploy a solar panel per school , to power some tens/hundreds of low power tablets.
In a video about this tablet, the researcher behind it (or so I believe) said the goal is to have power-consumption be low enough to ultimately allow it to be solar-charged.
Regards the Nano, why would people rather walk than be seen in the 'world's cheapest car?' Given the funds and the availability I'd grab one in a moment---a mountain bike in a snow storm makes a very convincing argument that there must be a better way! Is this a cultural thing---if so move the market to where such hangups don't exist would be my suggestion...
I see that the context is missing.
The alternative is two wheeled vehicles (scooters and motorbikes). In India a big percentage of people use two wheelers for commuting. Nano seems to be a slight upgrade from two wheelers. However with rising gas costs, moving from a two wheeled vehicle to the cheapest car does not make much economic sense. Also with Nano being branded as the cheapest car, it does not make much social sense either.
Anyone who remembers the initial events would remember very well that the Nano was overbooked initially. So it is not the price point that led to lowered sales.
Cheap in price is in general associated with cheap in quality as well - market psychology. People buy it only when they feel it is good enough. Nano having been already branded and popularized as cheap in price got severely damaged by a few glitches and got rebranded as cheap in quality.
Essentially, production delays and a few unpopular news items made people reconsider their choices and before Nano could recover the market is filled with cars in the small segment made by Honda (who thought of a Honda car in small segment), Maruti/Suzuki, Ford, Hyundai...etc. Also remember that it was Nano which spawned a new generation of small segment cars by various manufacturers who would otherwise have not considered the option at all.
Tata should pump some money into the perhaps now forgotten Africar project.
A plywood car might suck some of the perceived stigma off the nano.
Perhaps though, it's time to think about alternatives to building yet more 4 wheeled polluters, though it's morally hard to tell Indians that they should stick with their scooters.
I really want to know what the plan is? How will poor people who cant afford a decent computer have access to WiFi? Its not like India has free Wifi spots in many of these locations. Is there a plan to provide Wifi in the schools where these kids go? I wish this article had more information regarding the whole plan
My comment a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600780
Same thing. 'unveiling' a tablet for a price is nothing until a tablet is actually sold for that price on the market. This times two in a place like India, which is plans-heavy and implementation-light. This really doesn't mean much.