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The Hundred-Buck PC
skreuzer writes "MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte has a plan to build a $100 PC for the developing world, which is supposedly going to have a 14-inch color screen and run on Linux, has the backing of AMD, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp. Apparently they're all getting mixed up in a joint-venture to produce the PC, which will be sold directly to governments only."
But, to reaffirm what others have said in this thread, this machine is being designed to be sold to governments, not to families.
And I wonder how LCD compares with CRT to power. Favourably, I'd guess.
Pretty favorably, a desktop LCD consumes maybe half to two thirds the power of CRT for the same size screen? Mind you, my primary displays are still CRT.
I was thinking exactly the same thing, and then I realised what the problem would be - standardisation. Too many machines, too many different combinations of hardware to troubleshoot effectively. And who would do that job? I suppose a country could get their high school geeks on the cheap to do some of the maintenance. However, I think this is one of the reasons why the recycling programmes already in place haven't been successful on an international basis -- in terms of the number of PCs that get turned into landfill, as opposed to the number that do get shipped abroad, the ratio must be ridiculously bad.
That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with you and think it should be done regardless. I guess in principle I object to just simply throwing things out and buying new stuff when older equipment could, with a bit of work, be perfectly serviceable. (I'm typing this on a crappy old 1998-vintage 633mhz Celery II as I'm broke too right now! But I do think it's fine for what I need at the moment)
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
International pricing for the Amida Simputer is $300 USD for gray-scale, $480 USD for color, shipping extra. No modem. Amida Models and Pricing.
Having been born in a developing country or LDC in short, both governments and their people need computers and networking - badly. Not just ''toy'' PCs for ''games'', considering that massive government work is still executed in the ancient ''pen and paper style'' and actual document filing is so antiquated it involves actual file and cabinet and vaults for security. A building fire and..........
/.ers, Citizens in remote locations sometimes wait weeks if not months to ''get a document verified'' ;a birth certificate for example which if not faxed to some head office where computerized records are kept has to be sent by inter office mail and a response takes a similar channel and duration to get back.
There is a huge need to digitize government record keeping which would cut on ''labor'' costs for pushing paper thus reducing government budget spending on ridiculous tasks not to mention all the other benefits. FYI
There is a saying in my village that he who does not travel thinks his mother cooks best. This MIT thing is a top-down approach to address a conceived problem for which the designer and planners have little touch with. I wonder how many of those involved have visited a truely LDC country. It will only result in cheap and unworthy PC toys dumped all over LDCs without addresssing real needs. On one end are people looking at profits and at the other are ''carputers'' as the parent article puts it.
So for you slashdotters who think ''games and code'' when thinking of PC specs, let me point that in developing countries, its not a disaster waiting to happen but one in progress and there are no jokes here.
Governments in Developing countries need massive computing power to automate their operations and processes, they need huge networking to bring the systems together, training to run the systems and money to do it, before their citizens can surf the net. Think of that next time you surf for pr0n.
in india there is already a project under development called the simputer by picopeta solutions.. which is based on a standard 2.4 linux kernel and runs off a 3oo mhx strong arm cpu..with a touchscreen and battery . many state governments have started to use it on a trail basis for stuff like data capture and so on.
.. subsidy and mass production should maybe get it down to $100...
there are plans to subsidize it so that it can be widely used in rural areas.it even has a nice speech to text feature for the local languages.
though it costs around 160$ right now
regards
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Nicaragua is the poorest country in Latin America, but I think cheap computers could help there. Being an American who married a Nicaraguan I've visited Nicaragua three times, spending about three weeks there each time. It is very poor. For instance, someone in my mother-in-law's neighborhood was killed over a computer. But that doesn't really tell the story because in a lot of ways people are happier there than here.
.. these were modern machines. You'd pay something like a dollar an hour to rent one (you might imagine I spent a non-trivial amount of time in the internet shop--"then internet" as they called it). Two dollars a day is pretty much market wages there. But there were plenty of people using the machines. I'm thinking I could go there, have a beefy server box running linux and some pretty cheap client boxes running a full gnome or KDE environment and do it cheaper than the competition, thus opening up the market for the middle and lower class Nicaraguans. Maybe this kind of box would work for that.
The thing I really want to say is the last time I was there I was _stunned_ by how many internet shops were in town. There was one every three to five blocks! I mean it was something like 7-11s here. You could pretty much find one at will. People were using them a lot to call the states, surf the net, look at videos, you name it. And I'm not talking 486 machines