Apparently the big brains running OLPC can’t manage to ship the machines on time and now people like the editor of PC World are bitching because their precious XO machines still haven’t arrived a mere three months after they placed their orders. Which means, of course, that the people complaining are racists. And they hate kids. And they hate freedom. And they’re probably getting paid by Intel and Microsoft.

Because, in the mindset of the freetard, the problem with these delayed shipments isn’t OLPC. In fact, OLPC’s super-smart MIT logistics and supply chain experts have totally reinvented the entire concept of how a supply chain and distribution network operates. It’s another one of the huge advances that this OLPC project represents.

The problem is just that Western customers are accustomed to doing things in a certain way and they have a set of built-in biases which lead them to believe that getting a product very quickly after you’ve ordered it is a sign of competence. In fact that “quick order” is a sign of wastefulness because it means the manufacturer has stocked product in warehouses and invested lots of unnecessary effort in things like tracking software and shipping labels and transportation by sea, air and land. OLPC has eliminated almost all of those unnecessary steps.

Negroponte and his team have offered to share their new distribution model with Intel and others but naturally the commercial computer vendors believe they know best. Typical.

Money quote from this story about the Beastmaster’s “creative capitalism” idea and his involvement with Bono’s Red campaign: “To date, Red has provided $50 million to a global fund for treating AIDS and malaria, and nearly 2 million people in Africa are receiving `life-saving’ drugs today, Gates said.”

Negroponte’s response? He’s furious because that $50 million could have been used to buy OLPC’s XO laptops, and he’s really pissed that Gates is getting involved with Bono instead of focusing all his attention on OLPC. Says the Double-N: “Fighting AIDS and malaria is all well and good, but what is the point of curing diseases if children can’t learn about the world and explore the Internet? A lot of people just have their priorities backwards. If the children had laptops they could do the research and cure AIDS and malaria by themselves. People are just stuck in the same old way of thinking. Which is a pity, honestly.”

That’s a real quote from Nicholas Negroponte from a video interview he did at CES. See the BBC article about it here. And see the original video here. Seriously, who does this guy’s PR? Do they actually write this stuff for him? If not, do they at least check it out before he says it? I sort of imagine them all sitting there cringing every time he starts to speak.

Full quote is this: “2008, for us, is a big change because up to now we have been more like a terrorist group, threatening to do something and making big claims. 2008 is where we become not a revolution but a civilisation [sic, it's the BBC, ed.] and we actually roll out laptops within countries.” Stick with the video a while and you’ll get another howler — now he says that OLPC did not throw Intel out and did not want Intel to leave. Even though, just a couple weeks ago, he went around saying that that was exactly what happened, and that Intel had been on “probation” with OLPC and, like a strict headmaster that he seems to think he is, Saint Nicholas had been given no choice but to expel that troublemaker Intel.

Oh, and now Double-N says OLPC would love to see many different laptops made for kids, including the Intel Classmate, and that OLPC never insisted that Intel stop promoting the Classmate. You straight on that? It never happened. And if you say it did, you’re against the kids. And against freedom. Or something.

For the record, Intel does not “make” the Classmate. Intel publishes a reference spec, and hardware OEMs in various countries use that spec to build a machine for schools in their country. Which, oddly enough, creates jobs for the parents of the kids who will use the machines. What a wacky idea, right?

Photo above shows Negroponte and Richard M. Stallman discussing their plans to destroy Microsoft and Intel.

Check out this photo from Valleywag showing some freetard socialist pecking away on an XO laptop while some moron films the event and others stand looking on in amazement. Folks, if your machine is so fucked up that the fact that someone can do stuff on it is itself a newsworthy event, you know you’ve got problems. You can see the whole article here on Valleywag about how all the bloggers at Macworld were salivating over this butt-ugly XO machine that some freetard brought to the show with him — despite the fact that our Air notebook was only a hundred yards away in the Apple booth.

Frankly I think this photo is just crying out for PhotoCrank captions.

In this case I mean the other Beast, Mr. Bill. Apparently he has infiltrated the OLPC project and convinced the freetards to make their XO machine a dual-boot Linux-Windows device. See here. Says Negroponte: “We’re working very hard to do both.”

In this they are probably just caving to customer demands. No doubt some of the countries that are balking on XO told Saint Nicholas that they might actually consider his machine — if it ran Windows. Because much as the freetards might hate to admit it, real customers (even those in Third World countries) want to have Windows because that’s what everybody else has. (Except the truly blessed who run OS X, but let’s face it — we’re not made for the masses.)

Problem is, Negroponte’s right-hand man, Walter Bender, supposedly recently said he would quit if the machine shipped with Windows. So the drama unfolds.

By the way I did actually meet personally with Negroponte back when this whole project was starting out. We were offering to help and offering to make a version of OS X for his box. I told him how education is one of my big interests and I shared some ideas I had about how kids learn. You know what he said? “I’ve spent my entire career in academia. I’m not here to get ideas on education from a dropout.”

(FSJ FICTION ALERT: This last paragraph is made up. Please don’t write letters to Negroponte or Dear Leader about this.)

See here. They’ve got Chris Crocker defending Nicholas Negroponte. Sweet.

That was the teaser headline on the front page of the Business section of today’s New York Times. The headline appeared in the print edition only, so I can’t provide a link to that headline. But the story itself is here. Grim stuff. Meanwhile check out the little Peruvian dudes in the photo from the Times. I’m not sure how you say “What the fuck” in Peruvian but at least two of them seem to be saying it. (Photo by Martin Mejia for AP.)

See their incredibly brutal review here. Headline is “One Clunky Laptop Per Child” and goes downhill from there. Keys are too small. Processor is too slow. Trackpad is “screwy.” Moving files from word processor to web mail is “prohibitively difficult.” Worse yet are the “bugs … crashes … errors … hiccups.” And check this: “The implementation of the technologies is terrible. In their zeal to rewrite the rules of computing for first-time users … OLPC tried to reinvent the wheel and came up with an oval.”

Ouch. Meanwhile Negroponte, keen PR man that he is, today lashed out at Intel and blamed them for his woes. Plus ca change, as the Portuguese say.

Much love to the many readers who sent in links about Intel bailing from the OLPC effort. If you’ve not seen this yet, check out this quickie from Reuters. The Journal also has a piece this morning. Gist of the divorce seems to be that Saint Nicholas demanded that Intel drop its Classmate PC, a rival to the OLPC XO machine, and Intel wasn’t willing to do that. Also worth noting in the Journal story, if you can find it online, is the paragraph toward the end which says OLPC claims its “Give 1 Get 1″ program has been successful, but declines to provide numbers.

You know the whole OLPC thing started out as this big freetard experiment with loads of rhetoric about peace and love and sharing and openness. Now suddenly they won’t operate out in the open. They won’t share sales figures. Their CTO just quit to start a company and sell OLPC technology at a profit, with no details disclosed on who owns what and who’ll be keeping whatever money gets made. Now we find out that behind the scenes Negroponte has been bullying Intel over the Classmate and trying to eliminate competition. He’s like one of these petty dictators who talks a lot of shit about democracy but only holds elections if he’s certain he’ll get 99.9% of the vote. This is coming from the guy who was raving about the wonderful free market goodness of competition back when he was telling the world how he was going to make a PC for a hundred bucks and totally fuck up all the big players in the market. Oh yeah. In those days competition was a good thing.

See, that’s how it goes with freetards. They’re like a bunch of guys with a weekend touch football team who go around talking smack about how they could totally beat the New England Patriots — and they could, as long as the Patriots would agree to the freetard rules, which is that when the freetards take the field the Patriots must stay on the sidelines, watching, and let the spastic freetards run the down field over and over, clumsily scoring points. Touchdown! Another touchdown! Field goal! My goodness these freetards are amazing! They’re beating the New England Patriots, the greatest football team in NFL history! God forbid the Patriots might finally get fed up and decide to take the field and beat the snot out of these guys. God forbid the Pats should simply do what they do, which is run, hit, tackle, block and pass. That, my friend, would constitute cheating. And the freetards would start leaping up and down demanding a penalty call.

Freetard football is what we call it. The best part is watching when they’re playing against an open field and still can’t get a first down. Negroponte takes the snap, he fades back, he’s looking, he’s scrambling, he’s under pressure from the non-existent pass rush, he’s searching, but he can’t find an open receiver … oh! He trips over his own feet and sacks himself! Ouch! That one’s gonna hurt … but wait, he’s back up now and he’s looking around for someone to blame! He’s pointing at the Patriots on the sidelines and yelling at the referee, demanding an instant replay and a penalty call …

Mary Lou Jepsen, designer of the XO machine, is history. See a story from IT World here. Her reason for leaving? She wants to make money selling stuff she developed for OLPC, presumably the screen technology. As IT World puts it, “Jepsen noted in an e-mail that she was starting a for-profit company to commercialize some of the technologies she invented at OLPC.” Money quote from Jepsen: “I will continue to give OLPC product at cost, while providing commercial entities products they would like at a profit.”

Frankly, I’m shocked — shocked! — at the idea of someone making money this way. I mean shouldn’t all ideas be free to everyone? Why not just share the design with the world? Isn’t that what OLPC was all about? Has anyone told Richard Stallman about this? Ahem.

At the very least shouldn’t OLPC be the one making money on this stuff? They could license this super valuable technology to commercial companies and use the money to buy laptops for poor kiddies in the developing world.

Another question worth asking is whether Mary Lou Jepsen actually managed to retain ownership of her designs while working for OLPC, a 501(c)(3) organization. If so, doesn’t this mean that in effect taxpayers subsidized the R&D for whatever “for-profit company” Mary Lou Jepsen is now about to launch? Well, much love, taxpayers — and a big namaste to all the corporate sponsors and the good folks who paid $400 for the Give 1 Get 1 program. Not to mention those poverty-stricken nations who’ve placed orders. Thanks for the seed money, kids! How’s it feel to be venture capitalists?

Hoo boy. Freetards.