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MIT Unveils Prototype for $100 Linux Laptop
Examancer2 writes "MIT is showing off a prototype of a $100 laptop. It uses a 500MHz AMD processor, stores everything on flash memory, and runs Linux. The AC adapter acts as the carrying strap, and there is a hand crank so if you can't find a source of electricity you can charge it kinetically. The prototype laptop is also much more flexible and durable than your average notebook. In addition the unit has a screen that has a special daylight-friendly black & white mode that makes a great ebook." From the article: "Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations. Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries--Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa--to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children." More coverage of this story available from ITWorld, InformationWeek, BBC, ZDNet, and the Associated Press.
My first concern is that once given away, a very poor family might look towards selling the laptop on the black market for food, clothing, etc. How much expense would be added if biometrics were incorporated into the design so that once a laptop is "mated" to a child, only that child can operate it, thus rendering its worth on the black market so much less?
So you end up manufacturing fewer laptops, but maybe that means more of them end up being used as intended?
(and the hand crank is too cool to leave to the kiddies. I am forced to wonder whether so many of us would still be strangers to the ladies if required to produce our own power. Two hours coding, three hours debugging, and four hours pedaling the stationary bicycle that powers our boxes to allow for the coding and debugging would reduce global warming, save on healthcare costs AND yield superior breeding material, all at the same time!)
--
You didn't know.
Well, by "they" I mean our presidential candidate... wait, I mean governor... aparently wants to buy them for all the students in MA schools.
Of course, he's really just campaigning right now, not really trying to do anything in MA so it'll never happen, but they did mention it on the news this morning.
More information on the $100 laptop can be found here.
A bit of bad news from this page:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
They are really pursuing a great cause but I would like to see some of these features, like the hand crank and black and white screen mode, in other laptops as well. Not paying out of your ass for higher levels of durability would be cool too...
One full stomach per child.
Of course, as other articles in different papers have said, you won't be able to walk down to your local computer chain and buy one of these. They're strictly for developing countries.
Let me just say: Thank You! It's guys like these that really push mankind forward! Now, where can I get me one of those....
...in contrast to many others.
;) :/ )
:/ I'm too rich apparently :|
I wonder what exactly are the processors inside...the big question is whether those are Geode (x86) or Alchemy...I wonder if choosing NON-x86 architecture would be a good way to prevent gray-market a bit and convincing parts manufacturers to supply them considerably cheaper (since the laptops wouldn't be a competition for their primary wintel market). And since it's Linux it's not a big deal when it comes to architecture...
128MB of RAM? probably similarly low...HOVEWER there's one very important difference to our typical laptops/desktops - swap is to be avoided at all costs (flash based - limited number of read/writes and...slow). Personally, I would modify the kernel/desktop enviroment (or something) that it will not allow launching of new apps when physical memory limit is closing in (eventually - allow, but display something like "to assure longevity of your laptop, please close applications you're not using)
Also, worth noting IMHO will be software choice once it's announced - simply because those software titles will become one of most widely used IN THE WORLD, no only when cosidering Linux desktop.
What are your guesses?
Since I think this laptop will be a bit RAM limited, I think they'll choose something light as possible, but easy to use also...XFce perhaps? Epiphany/Kazehakase? Opera? (I wouldn't be surprised if Opera agreed to port their browser...it's free anyway, and they would get HUGE usage boost; of course there's the question what licensing principles this project has...)? Abiword? (KOffice would be nice also...but KDE wouldn't
BTW...too bad probably it won't be available for me probably
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'd buy it just because of the hand-crank
Seriously, I run Ubuntu on a thinkpad A22m (550Mhz), and the only thing is that X11+[Gnome|KDE] isn't very snappy (isn't X11 due for some kind of ground-up rework, or just a better replacement), and actually getting to the desktop interface takes longer than it does in windows. But, its as reliable as as usable as one could want.
I sat my roomie down in from of it (she's garden-variaty end user - "what's an operating system?"), and she had no problem going to web sites, viewing attachments with MS-formats, viewing flash pages, doing term papers, etc., etc.
Granted, I installed it, but that wasn't very much more difficult than installing windows - only marginally more so. Also granted, i wasen't reared on windows either, so figuring out things from a more generic understanding of how computers work helps in non-windows scenerios.
Its about as easy to maintain as windows - apt-get update; apt-get upgrade.
Oh, here the BBC news link for those who want to skip the lengthy beta news intro.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I've played wiht Linux on 500MHZ cpus, Linux crawls on this.
Unless this distro is *highly* modified with a very lightweight GUI, I think people are going to be unhappy with it.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Heck, I'm gonna buy one and I'm living in Europe.
Cheap and better power management then a notebook. Perfect, since I don't use those kind of devices to run heavy duty applications. A good editor or groupware application doesn't need that much horsepower and all.
Give it wireless and it will be perfect for _MANY_ people.
I don't know a lot about electrical stuff, but wouldn't it take a real long time to get a decent charge out of a hand crank?
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
Linux? Duh. Son of a!
It strikes me funny that someone somewhere will pay $50 per month to online with a $100 device. This person obviously isn't in the initial target audience.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
useless toys to the developing world, and then making some money out of servicing?
All good fun, but ultimately beneficial?
in all seriousness...
Where can I get one? For $100 in total, hell...I'd pay almost that much for the crank. Maybe. Something about a generator/battery combo with a 110v outlet...that's just sexy. Are they more readily available than I think?
...but I tend to ignore anything that sums up as an announcement. Which is all this really is, or worse, because they mention they will not be available. Ever.
But wait! I am formally announcing a $100 laptop, right here on slashdot! It'll have a 3gb 64bit processor! 1gb of ram! 100gig flashbased storage! Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g all built in! It'll even come with a special edition copy of World of Warcraft!
See how easy that is? I just announced something. I have no intention on carrying through with it, why would I? I've already pumped up my stock price, or made myself look good to others.
I wish there was a way to filter "announcements" from slashdot.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
For once we'll be able to *afford* a beowulf cluster of these. :-)
A simple lightbulb on a retractable shaft would likely solve a lot of issues with this. In places with undependable power like Iraq and as we've seen in New Orleans having a light source is important. Mounted on a swivel as a flashlight or room light. Durable like an LCD.
Remember that their needs are not our needs. I remember one boondoogle from the early '60s (I think) were they shipped are great expense fresh milk in a jet to starving people who promply dumped the milk and used the containers for water. It was like trying to get a rural Mid-westerner to eat Sushi.
If you pay no attention to the real needs of those you help, your not helping them.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
This way, someone can use their last dregs of energy to crank the dynamo and spend their dying moments reading an ebook as they starve to death or bleed out from a landmine-inflicted wound. It's great that someone is addressing the real issues in international development at last!
If any corrupt officials want to steal a bunch of these that are destined for kids, I'd be interested in buying some off of you...
kidding, kidding... sheesh
How is the end user supposed to surf porn and crack at the same time?!!
Although I can understand them not wanting to market this to average consumers, why not offer it to geeks for a higher price ?
I for one would happily pay more than $100 for a $100 laptop just for the geek factor.
Not to mention the free qa service they would get !?
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
The problem is that you can not use the latest/greatest software on it. I have deployed several toshiba P-II 350 laptops with only 64 meg of ram and the hard drive replaced with a CF card in a drive adapter. linux with xfce and smaller tightly written apps on it work absolutely great. I built several of these over a year ago for poor kids with fatal diseases. put a few games on there, a nice wordprocessor (ABIword kicks everything butt) web browser,gaim and a nice small email client. it all fit on a 512 meg CF card very easily. the company gave away dial up accounts (preconfigured for the kids) at a local ISP for them so they could get online in a manner. they work great and fast.
this is not hard to do, the hard part is manufacturing sometihng new to meet this price mark. and I would love to get my hands on a couple for evaluation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...personal computers have helped the impoverished third world. Check out this IBM Global Services success story.
You wind it up, it plays Pop Goes The Weasel, and after the song is done the screen pops up with Tux The Penguin on it!
How ya like dat?
I first ran linux (with X11) on a 25Mhz 386. It was perfectly snappy. I imagine the processing power is of the same league as the Sharp Zaurus line, which are also perfectly snappy. Even with today's bloat, there is no reason why it shouldn't run just fine on a low spec, low horsepower CPU.
Can someone please tell these people that computers are, barring a massive paradigm shift in how they are used for education, merely 90% distraction from the real learning that must go on in schools at these ages? (That is, unless you want to make a society of mindless forum posters.)
in all seriousness...
Where can I get one? For $100 in total, hell...I'd pay almost that much for the crank. Maybe. Something about a generator/battery combo with a 110v outlet...that's just sexy. Are they more readily available than I think? (damn format changes...)
All of those configuration modes are really neat. If it was both light enough and powerful enough, it would make an interesting competitor to the OQO. Another interesting possibility is if they GPL their source code, the community is going to get source for an e-reader and a tablet.
At $200-$300 or maybe more. If they only cost about $100, the $200 fee would help to subsidize giving them away to the poor.
will be Stamped
CALTECH
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"Software has gotten too fat and unreliable, so we started with Linux," he said.
;o)
No KDE desktop then, hey?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer.
... low-lifes that find ways to abuse this feature (Virus, spyware, etc) should be dealt with swiftly and severely. They should be sentenced to a lifetime of supporting end users with "infected" machines.
It is going to happen
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
to go online and find plans to make water purifiers http://www.makezine.com/02/makeshift/ and solar ice makers http://www.thesustainablevillage.com/servlet/displ ay/microenterprise/display/14. Also, they can use wikipedia to gain extra education over what they currently have, and howstuffworks to gain basic mechanical knowledge. They will have the knowledge resources to overcome their(sic?) situation.
i am so very tired....
Now let's wait for the Gates foundation to buy these linux laptops for 3rd world kids.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
OT...
I've found that at night OSX's high contrast mode does wonders to relieve eye strain (and conserve a little battery power too)
To enable/disable high contrast mode press :
Apple+Option+Control 8
You can also raise/lower the contrast with
Apple+Option+Control , (for lower) and . for higher
Kinda neat...anyway what's this about cranking it up to charge? w00t! Sore arm means somebody's going to bed lonely...kekekeke
...does it run Linux?
Oh, right.
Ydco co
This'd be a rocking machine, more than enough for my day to day usage, where do we get them?
Deleted
There are fast GUIs out there, IceWM is my favorite. fvwm2 is ok.
Anything but KDE and GNOME probably works fine.
Or maybe just a terminal window, and you get 4 by default in linux (shift F1-F4 maybe?) lynx, vi, elm, and nethack, what else could you ever want?
As a missionary who works with poor street children I find this project very interesting. Part of our ministry is providing money for kids to go to school (public school here is not completely free). I can definitely see how increasing educational opportunities gives a child a boost to a better life. Can they get a similar boost from a laptop? We will see. Given the physical environment of the targeted nations, it had better be pretty rugged or else they will wind up in the city trash dumps.
A starving kid can't eat at $100 laptop, but with this perhaps he or she will be able to one day "learn to fish."
While a situation like that may no benefit the particular child, it will benefit the entire economy/society by flooding the nation or region with cheap laptops.
Eventually they would become cheap commodities, like cheap shoes or some other common item. Then more people would have access to them and help 'bootstrap' the techology of the region.
My main issue is what to do with the broken ones. THe 3rd world already has too many gabage disposal problems as it is.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Yeah, because that band-aid solution's been working incredibly, right? That's the first thing. Second thing is it's a lot easier to solve this problem since it requires a lot less infrastructure. Food is big and perishable. It's hard to get to the source. Most of it doesn't make it.
And the third thing - what, the entire world has such tunnelvision that it can only work on one thing at a time? Should I be berating the crew fixing potholes outside my apartment because they're not solving world hunger?
Charity is about applying the skills you have. I doubt the people involved know crap about solving world hunger.
Also, that assumes that the entire third world is starving. It's not, mostly. Many need education more than anything. This helps solve that.
This is an excellent idea. The specs are light but it'll give kids a chance to learn about Linux from the shell on up. That's where great programming begins. I won't be surprised to find the future worlds best programmers coming from what are now third world countries. At least their youth aren't being distracted by the day to day burden of consuming consumables, playing PS2/Xbox and forgetting to do their homework, right?
MFG: "The system supports both the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP) platforms."
In Soviet Russia, MIT laptop's crank you up!
Why didn't they just give out toasters from wal-mart running netbsd?
and all that.
Best Slashdot Co
Presumably their cost is about $100. Why not sell it to us 'wealthy' Western nations for $150 or so? We get a neat inexpensive laptop, they get $50 to fuel their production/distribution mechanism.
It's a really nice idea, but there's two problems with it. First, I doubt that people - or the government - in developing countries would be able to pay for one of these for each child. Second, I don't understand the inclusion of Flash memory - Wouldn't a small 1GB HDD be less costly?
Otherwise, I really like it. It's a more-or-less perfect use of free software.
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
Do you turn it upside down and shake it to reboot it?
Is this MIT or Playskool developing this thing?
Now my arm's going to be sore from cranking out TPS reports for my third world boss.
My work here is dung.
The digital divide exists even in First World nations. I do wonder if some effort will be made for the percentage of poor people who have no internet access in the West as well. This is especially important as more and more public services provide information and application forms via the Internet. I'd like to see the $100 computer available for them too.
That's no prototype. It's is a spec sheet and a Photoshopped "artist's conception". These devices do not yet exist.
By the way, this was reported about 6 months ago.
The mass market appeal might actually make them cheaper to give to those in need. I'd pay $200 for a laptop if it meant that another one went to someone who could not afford it. 500 MHz is faster than my machine at home, give it a good chunk of ram, and it would probably make a fairly good laptop. It would be at least good enough for typing documents, and checking email.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Didn't they say not too long ago that hardware needs to get cheaper?
I somehow doubt that nations with serious starvation problems will be giving out many of these laptops -- especially to people who are starving. Programs like this are more oriented towards areas where food is already being taken care of (like China), but the local government wants to accomplish more than simply keeping people alive. Your point is well made, but there's probably no actual conflict here between food and technology.
With the amount of turning you'll have to do, this will be the first thing to go. That is, if you'll be able to keep yourself from tossing the thing against a rock after the first 100,000 spins aren't enough to finish a single game of minesweeper.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
Very cool concept. I'd love to see some of this technology trickle down to the consumer level (hand crank, cheap ruggedized case etc). In fact, I'd love to see these available to the consumer at $200. For every unit you buy at $200, you are buying one for a developing country. It'd be like buying a cheap laptop and donating to charity all at once.
My biggest concern with this, and all other laptops-for-schoolkids programs is that they actually do proper class programming with them (programming as in lecture design etc, not Objective-C/Java/etc). It's not simply enough to hand kids a laptopo and expect them to suddenly learn more. You have to shape the classes and the materials in such a way as to be well-suited to a classroom full on network-connected, laptop-toting schoolkids. This can be done, but it does take thought; hopefully the school boards engaging in such programs have done this planning.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Link to article on how broadcasting grain prices helps standardize the market and prevent the small-time farmer from getting screwed.
Thats a direct example of not just technology, but technologically aided flow of information directly "empowers" (read: gives them more money) a person.
Who knows how laptops could be used!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
It certainly IS interesting. It means that within 2-3 years Linux will be the defacto PC OS worldwide, and sMegmasoft will begin the rapid decline into irrelevance and insolvency that it has deserved for so long...
And of course their paid trolls will be looking for work also.
Thats got to be the first time that people in America have been jelous of a third world country.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
but my only concern is that having a standard machine like that means that as soon as any weakness or security is found, hackers could have thousands of easy targets.
Wow-wee! We then can make a beowulf cluster with them!!!!
Sure, anybody works faster running on Crank!
but what about all of the disadvantaged children in Canada, Mexico, USA, etc...
TFA speculates that third parties will be allowed to build and sell these for $200 with approx. $30 of that going to purchase laptops for the third world.
Let's see, I can get something that meets my needs and help someone else in the process. I am SO there. This thing is actually more powerful than the laptop that I now use (which usually is SSHed to a server where the programs actually run.)
"The idea is simple. It's an education project, not a laptop project. If we can make education better--particularly primary and secondary schools--it will be a better world."
My question is, how does a laptop help education? I live in the U.S. and I have yet to own my own computer. I was a Computer Science major at an Ivy League university and I am now working as a computer consultant. My schools provided small labs where I could do any computer work needed and my parents had computers that I could use. I was schooled in mathematics, algorithms, data structures, logic, the arts, chemistry, physics, biology, history, language and others. None of these required the use of any computers. I'm only 23 years old. Why do we need laptops for children again?
What we really need is paper displays. Cheap, reusable ways to give kids 80 books so they can read. The fundamental problem with learning from a laptop is that you get used to looking up information and you don't gather that basic set of skills that is so crucial, such as math, logic, and grammar. Again, kids here in "first world" countries don't have laptops in schools, not by far. They don't even have books in many cases. WTF are we doing "helping" other countries give laptops to the kids. I'd say lets give them libraries and internet access in their homes, not screw up their education by allowing them to IM each other and play flash games while in lecture.
I'm not saying (as I think some that responded to my original post) that these devices are useless and have no value, it's just that their value is a little far removed from the core needs. Of course, as other posters suggested, perhaps the target audience is not those who don't have any resources at all, but who have some base resources but just can't get out of the hole their in. I'm still not sure how these can get them out of their hole, because the only way to typically get out of a hole is to either suddenly have a glut of resources so time is freed up to invest in something else, or the willingness to take a risk and forego what resources one does have to journey somewhere else. Of course, the possibility to perhaps communicate with someone willing to donate resources to get someone out of their situation makes the analysis more complex.
Anyway, education doesn't do much if one cannot do something with that education; that was my point. Knowledge in and of itself isn't useful, it's the application of that knowledge that comes in handy. Now, the tricky part comes in where some knowledge is where to go to use other types of knowledge. ;)
Anyway, after taking a minute to think about it, if these things are distributed along with a plan to help those who get them understand how they are supposed to be used, I'd be more accepting of the resources (after all, 15 million units x $100 is $1.5 billion, which is still a lot of resources) required for this program.
And for those other posters who feel I'm trolling, I'd challenge them to try subsistence farming (when I was a young child, my family grew about 30% of our food ourselves. That was hard enough on good land, not to mention storing all that food, chopping wood for the furnace, etc...) on marginally arable land without a machine shop or hardware store around for a year and see just how much free time you have to poke around on the internet, or find/make the materials and tools required the makeshift water purifier for which you provided a link.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Who's up for subjugating a third world government to get a hold of a shipment of these?
On a more serious note, what's to stop the third world government from filling its coffers by, say, selling these things on ebay? Assuming these are ever even produced, there remain huge challenges in getting these down to the people they are meant to benefit and training educators to be able to use such a device.
Which would you choose?
Help the third world by expending millions to distribute these to third world countries and assist in training educators in their use
-or-
Rake in profits that would make Steve Jobs drool by selling these units for $199 a piece in the developed world
I doubt it. Do you think every poor person will be able to afford one, or their governments? I know alot of you are here only because identifying with "Linux" is the only thing that makes you feel cool, which is your own business, but lets be a little rational here. This thing, while neat sounding, is not likely to sweep the world in one fell swoop. I would also venture to say that many of the poor have no interest in technology. They care about having something to eat and somewhere to stay rather than some piece of technology that you are wanking about on Slashdot.
"And of course their paid trolls will be looking for work also."
Forces me to answer. 1) No, it will probably not. 2) I would have prefered BSD, as we all know (ohnoz, one more troll moderation coming) all Linux dists are crap. 3) I'm not paid by m$. 4) I don't troll for m$. 5) I've got no work. 6) I don't look for works.
Would be much cooler if they came with MacOS X.
in all of the poor countries I've been to, the weather would prove very detrimental to a laptop (no matter how rugged). Pervasive humidity, dryness, DUST, insects, extreme heat.. how would this hardware hold up to that challenge? i know they say it's "rugged".. but what does that really mean?
I thought the times of crank-powered computers ended in the first half of the past century :) ;) - Cool! And the price: I WANT ONE!
Ok, I don't like the crank idea, but the rest seems very cool. CPU: More than really needed. Display: Finally! 1GB of RAM: Whoa! No moving parts (except the crank
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Actually computers are very useful for growing food. It just requires a bit of lateral thinking.
My father is going to africa to set up some education centers with donated computers. Whilst he was doing this he spoke to some people (might have been geekcore, but i can't remember exactly) who are actually doing projects to build databases and coms equipment to pool things like farming practice information, local methods and various other things to help farmers and other locals to get the most out of the land they have.
+ remember that starvation in africa and other areas isn't always the fault of drought and famine, most of the problems come from civil war and conflict. Education can be used to combat the ignorance which is exploited by individuals and groups to get backing for their coups and armies.
Working for the (other) man
Come on people... surely there are countries where people (children included) are starving and they need help desperately. And there are also those countries that are not exactly starving for food, but they are desperately need to hold their own and take care of themselves.
My point is that if you live in a poor country the first thing you would want after your stomach is full is to find out how you can work to get this stuff for yourself. Computers are the ultimate pieces of machinery to help educate the mind and also with the ability to connect to the International Network to get all the information they need about farming, building, etc. whatever they need to build up their communities into shape. Replace all the missionaries with materials and these laptops.
What makes you think natural selection isn't taking its course? For example, you will be processed from ignorant animal into meat soon enough by your own government, and you probably won't even realize it until the moment the light goes out.
Also, there's no apostrophe in "its".
-FL
So many people on Slashdot are saying they'd like one of their own, it seems like MIT ought to take advantage of this.
Why not let the sales to the general public subsidize the sales to the third world? Not only would this enable greater economy of scale in production, they could even market these as a "one-to-one" program -- sell them to the general public for $200 each, with the understanding that for every laptop sold in the first world, one would be donated to the third world. Start a nonprofit, make the $200 donation tax deductible, and you might even see corporate customers embrace this idea.
With the new AJAX applications coming down the line, it's not inconceivable that some businesses, both first and third world, might start using these in unique ways. Stake your claim while you can, folks, because there are a lot more prospectors on the way.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
You can get those children books for much less money than the electricity's cost for reading an entire book from a monitor, which can only be done once for that price, while a book is there to stay, and can benefit thousands before its retirement. Saving the money on the machine itself, you get a great head start on that cheap education.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
The finished product rocked. I lived with a room mate who owned a couple of them, and they worked wonderfully. The weird thing, though, was the price-tag.
In the third world, a wind-up radio cost about ten bucks. But here in the West, where money grows on trees and the streets are paved with gold, the average Yuppie had to shell out up to $200 for the gizmo.
I don't know if I agree or disagree with this kind of marketing, but it'd be interesting to see how the story goes with MIT's do-hicky. Not that it'll probably make much difference; from their web-site; "these laptops are not in production. They are not--and will not--be available for purchase by individuals."
For my part, I am partial to the HP Jornada 820 when it comes to small and ultra-portable computers. Word-processing with no moving parts other than the flip-screen and lap-top keyboard means an 8 hour battery life. --It runs on flash cards, and so long as all you want to do is write and store data, you can't do much better. (Forget gaming, though, but I couldn't care less about that.)
I think there should be more devices like this generally available; they're just so useful. Dedicated word-processors with good key-boards and screens are hard to come by and too damned expensive for what you get generally. The Jornada is the exception, which is probably why the plug got pulled on it. --HP stopped making the Jornada 820 back in the late nineties; I got mine off Ebay for about $250, and I use it all the time. I wish it could run on wind-up power. I wonder if there's a charger out there which has a hand-crank. . .
I think there's a subconscious conspiracy to make sure people don't have access to useful tools for writing and creating which don't come armed with severe operating limitations, (the standard lap-top with lame battery life), and a million and one mind-numbing distractions, (DVD players and game and music options. Bah. Writers write, they don't waste time messing around with toys.)
-FL
Don't know exactly what Negroponte's plan is, but in the aid community it is pretty well known that it's far better to charge some money for your product/aid than to give it away for free.
Example case: a water well that is given to a communited is used but not taken care with or cared for, and will generally fall in disrepair soon. However, if you can get that community somehow to shell out $100 to buy a well, people will take much better care of it. "Ownership economy" is not 100% GOP wank, it does have a basis in reality.
Same goes for these laptops: if people are not willing to save up their equivalent of, say, 3 months' wages for one of them, they probably don't want or need those laptops and giving them away for free doesn't help them one bit.
Wait... you don't have a job, you don't need one and nobody pays you anything. You are sitting in your bedroom, and your parents are downstairs!!!
Water purification in particular is quite doable with even limited resources, assuming you have the know-how (although not necessarily in the huge quantities that richer nations can afford). And computers are superb tools for accessing and sharing know-how.
... could someone tell me who Somone is? Whoever he/she/it is, 'e deseveres a medla for thunking fo teh childrentypes.
Sponsored in part by DELL tech support...
Now, lets see them marketed in the *developed* world for 2-300USD -- with all profits going into financing the project, or similar non-profit projects.
I can't be the only one that want one of these, and is willing to donate a few hundred to charity for the privilege of getting a standardized linux laptop/ebook reader I can use *anywhere* without need for batteries or power, that just happens to be a politically correct good looking tool ?
Add a few after-marked parts for adapting it to genereate power from a bicycle, say, and everyone owning an "e-bike" would want one too... In fact some standard way to adapt this to mechanical powersources, such as motors, bicycles, wind mills, mills, etc would probably be a great idea for use in devolpment countries also.
As for "biometrically locking the laptop to a child" -- it's even more silly than anti-piracy drm tech. It solves the wrong problem. I can't see a problem with a family *selling* one of these, but if theye're in short supply theft might be a problem.
but what do them third worlders want with laptops anyway... To paraphrase Barbara Bush, it's kinda scary that so many of them would want to become a part of our virutal community!
I want want, I'd swap a half a dozen live chickens and go the shipping in trade fer one. And since they got the laptop all we gotta do is hook up on ebay... does paypal accept live chickens?
I see your point. But if an NGO can hand out these laptops with enough resources to get them through, perhaps they will be able to solve their own problems. The issue here is access to information, ceterus parabus. If they live in areas that don't provide enough raw resources, then I must hark back to the late reverend Sam Kinison: "Move to where the food is!".
i am so very tired....
That's all fine and dandy, great, a $100 laptop, but you know, you have to worry about the poorer folk who are more apt to sell the $100 laptop on eBay for a slightly higher mark-up so they can get a little extra cash to support their crack habit. The other problem I have with this is more severe than selling a laptop for nose candy funds. It seems the United States of America has fallen to #9 on the most-educated list. What happened to us being the knowledge super-power? If anything, we should stop being so charitable towards other countries since many of them have surpassed us in technology and manufacturing as we're plummeting deeper into stupiderness.
Is it just me that believes we should fix problems at home first before stretching an arm out to third-world countries?
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Why can't I buy one?
I would pay plenty for a rugged Linux laptop with 500 MHz AMD in it. I say I cannot buy one because in an article I read they said it should be a stigma to use it as an adult. The Simputer people were the same way (I twice contacted their sales asking for info, it said on the sight it was as good for people in NY as India, no response). If these companies are making products that are a good value, but still prophitable lets defray the cost some. If it is truly durable I would pay $500 for it over a low end Dell/Gateway. Then they can donate 4 to a school and everyone wins (I would be far more likly to buy one sub $250 though).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Well, the deal is that India and China are very quickly adding over a billion people to the global economy. A lot of companies are using this to persue a strategy that goes something like: "it is a hell of a lot more profitable to make a $1 avg profit off perhaps a billion people than maybe $100 avg profit off perhaps a million people is the saturated western market".
Make no doubt about it, this is not about subsidizing the poor, it is 100% pure market force profit motive at work here. In the next two decades, it is far more likely that the "poor" countries will subsidize us, as westerns get some of the advantage of cheap products taking off all over the world.
An open comment to the "Don't give them a computer - feed them first" crowd:
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish, he eats for life.
However, the problem is that it takes WORK to teach a man to fish - usually much more work than to catch a fish and give it to him. So, since most folks are stupid-lazy (minimizing work right now) rather than smart-lazy (minimizing over-all work), they give him a fish today because that takes less work today than teaching him to fish today does - even though he'll just be right back tomorrow demanding his free fish.
So, think about it like this: you spend $100 to feed somebody for, what, 100 days? Then what?
Or you give them the ability to learn to feed themselves, and you feed them for life.
www.eFax.com are spammers
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Um, why didn't the article address the fact that most of these poor nations don't speak English? Are they going to have writing tablets for non-romanized languages or scripts that have complicated ligatures? The use of a computer as shown tends to imply literacy... I think working on that first might be money better spent for many children.
For a moment I thought "oh my god, the MIT Media lab for once actually did something useful", but then I read the article and realized that the computer exists only on paper. The article is just press-seeking vaporware release, all hype and little substance in true Media Lab style.
MIT Media Lab motto: purveyors of snake oil since 1985.
It would be nice if a program could be developed where someone could buy three laptops, donating two to the project and getting one for their own.
This would be a very nice way of supporting a worthwhile cause while at the same time getting something for yourself. I'm attracted to this PC for several reasons. First, I like the overall general design, secondly I think the hand-crank would be usefull to me. It would never be my primary computer but I could see using it on weekends, while camping, and for reading.
I'd also guess that the machine would be quite "hackable" in the good sense of the word. I imagine people retasking the machine for other purposes (like as a control device for other equipment). I can see other people developing add ons for it so it could be used with various devices (printers, external storage and so on).
I want one, I'd buy three to get one. Seems like a wonderful way to fund the program.
I think a lot of people would. This could be a good fundraising technique, especially if the machine is well-designed enough for grandma to use for email.
I've heard from reliable source that, although they will indeed not produce $100 machines for first world countries, they are thinking of licensing the machine's design to companies which could produce the same machine for about $200 for the rest of the world. Of that $200, a royalty would go back to the MIT project.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
It's a cool computer and great idea to supply the developing countries children with them.
That aside, as earlier posters noted why not just help feed them? The current food supplies are enough to feed the entire world and people are still starving (food supplies are increasingly becoming a problem though). So how will making these low-cost computers available to developing countries be any easier than making food available? How will they "fix" the supply chain problem?
Also, did they take in to account the cost to assemble these things? Is it 100$ for parts or parts and labor? If it's made in a developed nation the cost will probably double. Why don't they have them assembled in the developing nations? That way they can provide jobs and computers to families.
Again, great idea, but I'm suspicious of the reality to delivery upon this idea.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
This link is simply copied from the link in the second sentence of TFA. Anyone who read the article, even just two sentences, and investigated the links has already seen it.
Furthermore, anyone who actually read to the bottom of TFA would already have figured this out from this paragraph:
Mods, please read the article before rubber-stamping redundant posts "informative."
Shouldn't you be doing something useful?
"Move to where the food is!"
thats the whole point really - Most people who live in areas that can't grow food well don't have enough resources (cash) to move someplace better. There are whole countries in this situation. Many people there would cut off parts of their body if it meant they could move, even just to a place where they could grow food.
I am stunned when a person who, most probably, cuts their lawn repeatedly because it grows too well says that these people should; "Go out and get a job" or "Move to where the food is".
you can't do no man-U-facturin' in an ivory tower!
As soon as these over-educated, operpriviledged twerps come up with an idea they write up a business plan and shop it to investment capitalists, incorporate, go public, and then outsource (maybe to the very underpriviledged kids that come up using one of these laptops).
Instead of sewing soccer balls the sweat shops will be building asp.net pages, we have to save the children from this dastardly plot!
hell, G.E. tried saving the starving children of the world by developing genetically engineered crops that can grow under tough environmental circumstances, yet people still complained and protested, calling it "playing god".. its just never good enough for some people..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
You must be joking. I have a P2/400MHz/128MB laptop at home running Slackware 9 and it works like a charm - plays movies (mplayer), browses the web (Opera), edits anything I need (vim/OpenOffice), compiles and runs everything I need (C,C++,Java,Python,Octave...). Doesn't seem sluggish at all. Ok, maybe Open Office is a bit slow, but not in a way that would make working with it uncomfortable. The only thing I miss is a larger HDD and a working battery - it's a laptop, but a stationary one. ;-) More memory might be useful for heavy multitasking, but I don't really have that problem.
;-) But the system as such is not sluggish at all, and since I have access to a better machine for computations, I don't really need anything more. Maybe if I was a gamer...
Hint - scrap KDE, Gnome, Mozilla/Netscape (especially old editions), stick with Xfce, Opera (or Firefox, but I haven't even tried it there, may be slow, who knows) and you're all set. Really, once you get past 300MHz you CAN do almost everything comfortably (ok, 400MHz for most movies, 500+ for some).
Ok, it's slow when it comes to number crunching, which is my job. NS2 simulations also take a lifetime. On the other hand, in this area no computer is fast enough.
While it would be nice if it were available for general purchase, that's a bit irrelevant. This could FINALLY serve as a reference design for an Open Source laptop. MIT simply needs to make the schematics available, preferrably under the GPL, so that anyone can ship the design to an online shop and have it built.
Granted, you couldn't do that for $100 - not at first. But what would happen is that businesses would sprout up selling this in volume. Which would bring down the cost for the average geek, as well as MIT. The spinoffs from this would mean that we could FINALLY get commodity parts for a laptop.
Or, in short, MIT has the opportunity to do to the laptop what IBM did to the PC.
I, for one, would be willing to help with whatever work is involved, if they GPL the schematics. I am sick and tired of dealing with the rediculous prices for proprietary laptops.
Where do I sign up?
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
Small children need what most parents are wise enough to provide when they can afford it--colorful, sturdy story books with lots of pictures. Children like the pictures, the color and the fact that the book and its story never changes. This cleverly cheap computer offers none of that. It's dull, b&w, complicated, erratic and for the world's poor, too valuable to put in the hands of a child.
It should be sold inexpensively to adults to do precisely the sorts of things a computer is used for in the homes and businesses of the more affluent, developed world. Farmers could link to weather reports and agricultural news. Businesses of all sorts could use it for financials and communication. Mothers could use it to get medical advice about a child's illness. It should be seen as a tool for adults rather than a toy for kids. When the kid gets a bit older, he can borrow mommy and daddy's computer for his schoolwork.
Fortunately, despite the efforts of these clueless eggheads, however they're distributed, these computers are likely to end in the hands of daddy and mommy. There'll be a dreadful outcry about that, but it'll all be for the good. The computer will help the parents earn enough additional money to buy their children what all kids want--colorful, old-fashioned printed children's stories.
--Mike Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
$100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.
The amount of prejudice on this thread is mind blowing...
Children in developing nations are *not* automatically STARVING! for Gods sake!
China, India and even Russia for that matter *are* developing nations.
Although there is considerable poverty in developing nations, it is NOT UNIVERSAL.
So please STOP saying that the children need to be FED and CLOTHED before they can even take a look at a computer!
This is as if those in the US and the first world are privy to some sort of Heavenly gadget that the developing nation children simple don't require.
On the other hand, there has been considerable study done in many countries that show that computers in school generally and comparitively motivate students into learning and exploring.
In a study in Nepal, a school was donated used WIPRO computers... a network was setup with a dialup connection to the net. This school saw students faring much much better then the neighbouring school with the same profile of students. Reasons were attributed to wider exposture, generation of interest in graphical programs on the computers, outlet for creativity and hardware tweaking.
The MIT notebooks are precisely made to satisfy the needs of such school going children. And yeah, these notebooks aren't going to be just thrown at every child in a playground, there is going to be a system with accountability and such.
Ah.. remember, these children who will get access to the notebooks are potentially the ones who will graduate in Computers and head over to the US to work in the IT or start off shore business in their own countries!
Atleast the notebooks are going to generate tremendous goodwill amongst the next gen. That is worth billions.
Look at their top 5 priorities ..
Girl`s education is right at the top.
If the MIT can produce such a cool laptop (I mean, I dream of having the same screen as this one, and to charge the battery with a few spins) for such a low price, howcome we have to pay 2000$+ for a laptop that isn't even this cool ?! And by the way, someone slipped the idea of selling them to everyone for $200 or $300, and I just think it's great! If the organisation is indeed non-profit, they can use the $100 or $200 margin to give away twice as many computers, and make people who buy them feel good, because they know they won't be giving money to greedy corporations (damn, I must be a hippy!)
I don't think just giving away laptops will teach people to use computers. I mean, the software you're talking about them using is fairly sophisticated, and not always intuitively designed. It's silly to give away computers and then expect people to learn to use them through osmosis. A lot of people they're talking about simply do not have the time or the inclination to learn to use software when they should be out figuring out how to feed themselves.
Foreign aid to developing countries is completely upside-down. We think that we can give them education and political stability, in the mean time providing direct aid and the resources for prosperity will naturally develop. It doesn't work this way, education is a luxury that only wealthy people can afford. If we really want to help these countries, we need to eliminate trade barriers and allow them to sell us low-cost goods. This will allow them to develop infrastructure, resources, and as a result political stability. Then they will have the ability to educate their population and develop into prosperous nations. Just giving people laptops is meaningless, wasteful, and stupid.
Also, keep in mind that open source software developers would need some of these to test their apps running on these boxes.
Before everyone gets their shirt in a knot, look at these important words from the article: The proposed design. Yes that's right, there is NO EXISTING MACHINE with these specs. MIT have just said "we think a machine with these unknown parts might cost $100".
I want one of these babies!
I can tell you that this type of computer is going to be a huge hit, especially in the urban areas. There's a huge untapped market for a product in this price range and huge potential. A lot of families have the money (at least in the cities) to afford a unit at that cost and they will purchase them for their kids - education is a huge priority and a lot of parents want to get as many modern tools in the hands of their kids as possible.
I have a lot of experience supporting equipment in places where these things are being considered, and a lot of the comments are spot on - the elements are extremely hard on any equipment (dust, humidity) as well as power surges. I'm not as concerned about dealing with curricula or proper usage - kids overseas are the same as they are here - they'll figure out creative meaningful ways to use these things and schools/families will figure out meaningful ways to teach/make them valuable learning tools. Don't assume just because folks are dirt poor they don't get it.
I remember taking my Powerbook overseas all the time into the bush in Africa, out to Mongolia, or in the South Pacific - it took a beating but always worked. We also considered (and I traveled a bit with) the eMates (http://www.msu.edu/~luckie/gallery/emate300.htm) - which are sort of the same thing - I loved that thing and it was really rugged. To me the bigger hurdle is not so much hardware, but connectivity - a 100 dollar laptop that can't get to the internet cheaply isn't as valuable. If this can be combined with cheap broadband access, then you won't be able to make them fast enough.
Kind of reminds me of Apple's Newton eMate 300, which was killed, along with the rest of the Newton line, by Steve Jobs.
Too pricey to survive the competition from desktop PC's, but Apple had the right idea. A ruggled little portable for schoolkids that offered basic functionality, and would be a complement to a Mac desktop system at home.
All three functions can be performed much better with cheaper, established technology.
1. and 2. are most easily achieved by radio. Transistor radios are almost laughably cheap now, and it is possible to get shortwave sets to broadcast to very remote areas. Radio has two additional benefits: localization is very easy (simply ensure that the person speaking into the microphone speaks the language you want) and it does not require literacy. If your main priority is getting information out, then it is probably better to do it by speaking to the people who need it most in the language that they can understand (even if it's over the air). Handing them a notebook that they might not be able to use because they can't read the symbols on the screen is stupid.
3. is already happening through the use of mobile phones. GSM phones are cheap to buy and cheap to use, even for those with very limited means. In third-world markets, it is possible to buy a few minutes or even seconds of mobile phone time.
It's heretical to be anti-shiny on /. but we really have to think about how better to use the tools at hand, rather than trying to leapfrog from the Flintstones to the Jetstones with one laptop
100$ is still very high for poor families. I'm curious who will dish out the dough! But it is indeed a massive endeavour, it's gonna bring lot's of engaging minds together!
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
I think if they sell these at, say, $150 a pop to americans, they have the potential to sell millions. Anyone remember the failed email appliances from a few years ago? These are a lot sexier looking and far more portable.
With the tablet and e-book functionality, it's something you could use from the couch watching TV, from the kitchen to show recipes, hell, even from the bathtub for some reading material while you relax. If it's rugged enough for 3rd world countries, then it's something kids could use without fear of causing too much damage. They'd have to have an OS on it that's simple and reliable because you can't necessarily get tech support in BFE Africa, so it's got to be stable and simple enough for my grandma to use.
I think low-cost units like this are the future of app-centric computing. Gaming still requires a more intense setup, but as computers get better, imagine hooking a VR rig to this little unit and being fully immersed in a virtual world. The potential for this kind of technology is just staggering.
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
They claim at http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ "First, by dramatically lowering the cost of the display. The first-generation machine may use a novel, dual-mode LCD display commonly found in inexpensive DVD players, but that can also be used in black and white, in bright sunlight, and at four times the normal resolution--all at a cost of approximately $35."
Generally these inexpensive displays are often 480 x 234 pixels...there is a reason why they are so cheap. Text will look pretty sad on these!
100$ is very cheap, I wish I could buy one of those laptops. :D :)
:( :p
500 MHz isnt the state-of-the-art but it is enough for most things.
Enough for console mode and BitchX!
Also maybe can run a minimal WM like Fluxbox with Firefox!
Oh, btw now I saw the picture, its pretty ugly and the screen is pretty damn small.
I would not want to buy one anymore.
Who said they are giving out resources? Even if they did give them resources you expect them to be able to build everything just because they have description of it online? You could give me a website telling me how to do a heart transplat and brain surjury to read. Are you going to trust me to operate on you after i read that? They need more than just information and a few resources. They would need people to teach them how to build the stuff and teach them to do what they are reading.
I have to agree with ThosLives, this seems a little bit removed from the core problem. And not just in regards to the farming. The article stated how a $100 is cheaper than textbooks. Which may be true. However how does the laptop give them the knowledge that textbooks would? How do you teach them math, science, reading, writing, and all that stuff with a laptop? Yes the internet is full of all types of information but how can they learn everything they need to know by just having the internet? Imagine learning everything you know right now by teaching it to yourself via the internet. How would you know what to to look up? Plain and simple, you don't know what you don't know. They aren't going to know everything that can possible be learned. They aren't going to know where they need to go to find what they don't know about. The internet isn't going to give them as good of an education as textbooks. Even 40 yr old math textbooks could teach them math. Unless somebody is going to create an entire online learning center that has online textbooks, test, and all the other stuff you get in a classroom this will not be of much help. Not only that but who says they can even get internet access. As they are desinged to be used in areas with little or no power. What good are they then? Areas without power most likely have no internet connections either. How are they to use the laptops for learning then? Is somebody going to create customized learning programs for each area that will give them all the knowledge? Without some type of software bundle that contains all the information they could get from textbooks that is setup in a way for them to learn it, the laptops are useless.
I myself think that sending them old textbooks would be more usefull as that is something that is setup in a fashin to teach students the information and would contain most of the information they need to learn a given subject. As i said above an old math book can still teach you math even though it is old. Science might have changed over the years, but the basics are still the same. These laptops might be fine for the uper level of poverty, but not for the full range of people they are planning them for.
I want one. That thing is positvely Apple...
Unless your background is from Europe (I'm not sure which parts - Germany is one, but not all areas of Europe count), you cannot drink milk as an adult. No Ice Cream, nothing - it is not safe. Odds are this area was not in Europe, so milk was a (mild) poison to the people!
Most rural Mid-westerns would try Sushi once. May or may not like it, but they have eaten worse.
I'm a little surprised at the lack of imagination I'm seeing in this article's comments. Imagination is not something usually lacking at
Personal interactions will flourish. Imagine that each person has a personal presence on the net in the form of a journal, blog, etc. Innermost thoughts, musings, ideas would be posted. Access may be restricted to groups of friends, open to all, available only in a reciprocal trade - who knows? Social interactions may form that are based on more formal public personae while the unspoken web content acts as an underlying frame. Like minds will find each other. Ideas will feed on ideas. It will be an exponential extension of today's net.
Specialties would develop. Mod kits would certainly turn up. This kid might make movies, or songs, or create one page descriptive biographies of everyone he meets. That kid might develop applications, this one tweaks assembler, another is a com whiz, and that one over there...she's special, she can go ANYWHERE in cyberspace, and if it's on the net, she can find it. She's the one they ask when they REALLY need to know the truth. It could be that some strange stuff starts to happen. Stuff about how the world is perceived and how humans relate to it and each other. Stuff we can't imagine or maybe even understand. Really, really cool Stuff.
We old folks can participate. Everyone seems to crave one of these laptops. What if they didn't sell even one outside their programs? What if to get one of these babies you had to earn it? You could help develop software. Write apps, ports, translate, tutor, teach, write textbooks, moderate groups, protect the children and their net. You could EARN the laptop. How cool would that be?
Who will pay? There will be new markets, development deals, service contracts, infrastructure to build. The companies that want to play will be the ones who pay. Governments could link contracts with obligations. You want to build out our backbone? It must include wifi for the kidtops at your expense. You want to build some buildings? We need housing for a server farm here and some schools here, here, and here. You want the support contract for the government IT infrastructure. You also must support Kidnet. At least till the kids take over,which won't be long. Access? Well how much is access to a 10 million node kidtop beowolf cluster worth? Wanna trade?
C'mon guys! This is the fucking DREAM! No more secrets. No more lies. No more disinformation and manipulation from 'those who would be kings'. Maybe even 200 million proud parents of the Earth's first planetary consciousness. Hey, who knows? Not us. We can't even BEGIN to imagine.
billy - I for one will sit back and watch 'em go
This story really turns my crank.
... and then they built the supercollider.
What gives?
...a Beowulf cluster of these?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
We can't just be feeding people so they go on to reproduce and we end up with more hungry people. At some point you have to look at how to break the cycle.
Apparently we can, however, ignore the fact that according to the UN more than enough food is produced each year to feed everyone, and it is just economics (read capitalism) that prevents it from getting to people.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Sorry to be the language police here, but the terms 1st, 2nd, 3rd world are out dated. Here's what they used to mean:
1st world: Developed democracy
2nd world: quasi-developed communist
3rd world: neither 1st nor 2nd world.
The standard terms these days are:
Developed nation
Developing nation
and occasionally Undeveloped or Underdeveloped nation.
The reason for this is exactly the spectrum you describe.One finds great disparities in levels of development within developing countries these days. One region or urban area may have a sophisticated economy with reliable communication, water and electricity, but due to lack of roads or other factors, 50 miles away in a rural region, you may find subsistence farmers with no access even to basic health care. And even in that urban area, there are rich neighborhoods with pools and two car garages, and slums with tin shacks, outhouses and a community spigot. Think of the US in the late 1800s.
Look at it this way. With $20, you could give a family a flock of chicks that could lay hundreds of eggs a year, providing them with additional protein and a source of trade income. For another $30, you can get two packs of Micropur tablets, which will treat 30 liters of water each. The tablets last for 3 years, so they can be saved for when it isn't possible to boil water. Another $30 could go to seed, rice, or lentils to give the family a little reserve. Then, spend the final $20 on whatever texts the kids need for their elementary school. $100 goes a lot farther when you're not spending it on computers.
thank you for bringing some logic into this. pity that my last mod point that i was saving exprired yesterday while i was out of town.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
This power generation mech would perhaps raise even more eyebrows...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
*Ughh* are we that arrogant to believe we can solve the worlds problems by giving poor starving children a computer...what are they supposed to do knaw on the thing. How about a goerge Forman grill for a $1 some bread, cheese and affordablle electricity...not to mention clean drinking water! The laptop is undoubtably cool, but best sold to regular consumers and underprivileged kids in first world countries. Heres an idea charge me and all the other average Joes the comp for $300 bucks under the premise that if we buy 1 comp at that price 2 get put into the hands of underprivileged kids!
Why is nobody making a profit selling them right now for $150?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
ARM has much better power/performance ratios and I don't see any overwhelming need for x86 compatibility in this thing.
http://www.techempower.net/0/Editorial.asp?this_ca t=service&obj_id=934&aff_id=0
I wonder if the Jhai PC was the inspiration for this?
One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with ... China
Sounds like a platform for A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
Anybody want a peanut?
Say what you like but Negroponte has been pushing this idea a lot in lots of venues, I've heard it 2-3 times I think.
The article is slashdotted but Negroponte has said repeatedly that they are going to keep the price the same and keep improving the power etc. One key IIRC was a $30 LCD.
A representative from Nigeria did say in one conference I was at that the absolute poorest don't need computers because they need firewood and the smart people leave the towns etc.
However if Negroponte gets this to work (especially if it has solar power..) it can be a massive boost to the entire world. He is not making it for the U.S. market (though possibly people living in poverty could use them), it is to solve a specific problem.
Imagine, if YOU worked on open source educational software, especially if it is with a trained teacher, you might be able help. All you people who used to run sigs about giving a man a fish, this is what you were talking about.
The whole idea of not making the $100 computer available for sale to indivuals is really dumb for several reasons. First of all, many indivuals who are not kids may want to buy these and may of them might then write software for them, which would then really benefit kids as well. Secondly, it's not like you can stop a secondary market from forming anyway. Thirdly, as the number of units manufactured and sold goes up, the fixed costs to make them, gets divided over a greater number of units, thereby lowering the cost per unit. So, it makes sense to really open up the sale of these coputers to more people. Now, I suppose, you could do it via resellers or whatever, and that means that they would not be selling directy to indivuals. But, the impression I got is that they didn't want to sell these computers to individuals at all. And that would be a real shame.
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
1) Computers may not add that much to a child's education. Do I feel my education was any less than my younger sibling who was in a mandatory laptop program? No, and in many cases I think the lack of distraction may have helped. Of course someone in the third world might take better advantage of a laptop ("leapfrogging" older education methods?) but my gut says not that much more. They'll maybe learn to type (which without internet access, I doubt), maybe be run through something like Algeblaster or Reader Rabbit and then go and play whatever crappy open source games come on the thing before dropping it in a puddle or getting the crap beaten out of them and having it stolen.
2) 150 million of these things? Now I may not be good with numbers (in fact I'm fairly sure I'm not), but if he thinks he could find developing governments willing to pay 15 billion dollars on these things that may not even have much effect (see point 1) then good luck to him.
Personally I think this money could be better spent on paper and pencils, perhaps community libraries and certainly more local teachers. In fact, back that up a step, how about enough schools for all the people in these countries, and how about making them so you're not packing hundreds of kids into an elementary classroom?
These people apparently see computers as a silver bullet to end ignorance. Education requires time and effort, not word processors and Tetris. If these things go ahead, they should be sold to up and coming families, who will put them to productive use, not given to everybody and watching the gong show that ensues.
Dude, are you sure you know what a "water purifier" is? If you can buy one for $20 why would someone figure out how to make one for $100?
Computers are great, but they aren't very useful for growing food or anything. You need different technologies for that, and different skill sets that aren't "intellectual".
Perhaps you should try someday to actually travel to a poor country and watch for yourself how those people live. I know before I was born in Brazil and lived most of my life here. I remember once when I was chatting with the girl at the popcorn counter in a movie theater she told me she was going to computer classes in the mornings. Her salary is something like $100/month
The poorest people already have the skill sets for growing food. What they need is a different set of skills, something that lets them earn a decent living instead of just living hand to mouth. The greatest number of poor people in the world suffer from "technologic unemployment". They have no marketable skills.
There's no shortage of food in the world, so knowing how and having the resources to grow food in modest amounts is useless. What can you gain by competing against the subsidized farmers in the USA, European Union, and Japan? Unless you are a farmer with thousands of hectares and spend upwards of $100k/year in seed, fuel, and equipment, you won't reach the economy of scale needed to profit.
Perhaps you are confusing "poor" with "starving" people. People who are poor normally do not have lack of food. They starve when there is some unrest like civil war that disrupt their normal way of live. In the normal situation of poor people, the best way to help them is to put them in contact with more technology. It can be a technology for growing more and better food, if the kind of food they can grow is profitable enough, or it can be some other technology. But to be of any help, it has to be a technology that provides for better productivity than what they already have, it has to be a sufficiently advanced technology. There's no value in reinventing the $20 water filter.
some more for it. I can pay far more easily than the target audience can, so that's not a problem.
I've got wind-up cell phone charger and radio. Why not a computer as well. Having a few 12Volt items around the house, along with the human powered things is just great for outages or camping.
Crosses fingers, hoping these hit big.
The clock speed is a bit slow, but not so slow that it's a problem. If there are a ton of these out there, 500Mhz is a nice target for application optimization. It needs to get done at some point, why not target these babies?
Blogging because I can...
$100 won't even cover the licensing cost for the necessary DRM, let alone the hardware! You can't just go out and give a movie-stealing machine to every Maria, Paco and Leroy! Everybody knows the underclass likes to steal things. Just look at how those people behaved in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina./sarcasm
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...but will it run Linux?
Let's start with the assumption that everybody needs an education. Yes they need food and clean water, and a lot of other stuff too. But you can't just feed people and hope they'll be OK. You have to give them a future, and control over their own life. Otherwise, all your charity does is create dependency and destroy the local economy.
Now, if you educate people, they have to have books. Which are not cheap. I've heard stories of people learning to read from paperback thrillers abandoned at local airports, because those are the only books they have access to! Not a viable substitute for primers, math books, history, etc.
A $100 computer is a cost effective way to deliver books. That much money wouldn't buy you a lot of hard copy books. But there's a huge amount of stuff available for free, because its public domain, or because authors are willing to forgo royalties from people who couldn't pay them anyway.
Bottom line: technology delivers information cheaper. That's why you and I are even having this conversation.
In Finland, and other cold climates, if you did not have the foresight to prepare for winter, you froze or starved to death. That is cold Darwinian natural selection.
That exists. In some cases, we're talking about a plastic box that is open on bottom, has a place to attach a pvc pipe on top, and has a cheap man powered pumping system to bring water out of the end of the pipe. (Pole with a plunger kind of thing) The idea is you bury the box in the river or lake bed, pump water out with good ol' elbow grease, and allow sand to do the filtration for you. If you're in a hilly area and have a long enough pipe, you can even do away with the pumping and just siphon. Of course, that's only one possible solution mentioned at that page, but it is one I saw in action on the The Learning Channel(TM) before it became a channel infected with shows like "Trading Spaces" and "What not to wear" :-(
A handheld sized unit with a touch screen and a low power B&W screen mode, that is very rugged (flash = no moving parts), expandable (USB), WiFi ready, and that I can charge with a built in crank is the absolutely greatest thing I have every seen. I would love to take it camping/on vacation (as a communications tool, an eBook, and an entertainment device); I can see people who are backpacking around Europe LOVING this.
Hopefully the idea of licencing this to a reseller takes off and you can buy one ($200 = 100 production + 30 license fee + 70 retailer markup, seems likea good deal to me).
The real question is: is it easily scratched?
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Has anyone seen the movie The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest? It's about designing a $100 computer for the same reasons. I thought it was an interesting idea and that it should be looked into. Glad to see that it's fiction turning into fact. And Gary Busey's son was in it.
-Bob
My first Linux installation was Yggdrasil in 1995, on a 386 with 4 Mb of RAM. My current Linux desktop at work and my Linux notebook have 256 Mb each. Right now I have 10 windows open on KDE, with no apparent problems from swapping.
...but I'm a little concerned about their rankings in CharityNavigator:
r ch.summary/orgid/9654.htm
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm/bay/sea
I'm especially concerned about the fact that their CEO is making about 6% of the organization's total income.
I don't doubt the possibility that they are doing something very different or revolutionary (which I could see as justification), but honestly, why the high program expenses to teach sustainable, low-input farming? I'm a big fan of this method, but it appears to be run inefficiently.
If anyone remotely to do with this project is stroking his vanity by reading these posts about the project, here's a suggestion for the project. Don't use a hand-crank, use a foot pedal. Like the old sewing machines, a little treadle is [b]much[/b] more natural to use and you can use it while you work, for hours if need be. Compare size of muscles in your arm with the muscles in your calves. Point made?
This could be a much better selling point.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Sam Kinison has a whole rant that the slashdot nazis wouln't let me post here cuz its in caps: http://www.comedyontap.com/jokes/kinison/skjokes.h tml, see the one about hunger.
i am so very tired....
One display design being considered is a flat, flexible printed display developed at MIT's Media Lab.
If they are still considering research prototypes for the display design, this is pretty much still pie in the sky stuff.
The problem with a $100 laptop isn't technology, it's making it for $100, and to demonstrate that, you need to be a little more specific about the components and build than that.
I want the $250 iPod nano!
I for one would happily pay more than $100 for a $100 laptop just for the geek factor.
I've got an 8-year-old Toshiba P100 laptop. I figure it can't be worth any more than $100 by now.
I'll sell it to you for $150.
... you must be liberals.
Seriously, do we feed the poor and hungry and not invest in their future so that they remain locked in a vicious cyle from which they cannot escape? They will remain unmobile, uneducated, and incapable of improving their locale and infrastructure... dirty, unwashed, uneducated masses that rely on 'us' to feed them while they pork each other like rabits for lack of better, spreading sex diseases and reproducing so that future generations are assured of being the exact same predicament.
Or do we try and break the cycle? The best way to break it is education... teach them to do more than show up at a UN food truck and frack each other sensless until they die of aids, a meglomaniac dictator, starvation, or a lack of health care leaving on this earth 10+ kids who will do the same. Teach them to read, write, math, engineering, science, etc; this will help them pull their boot straps up and stand on their own legs as a nation. With knowledge they can progress, with a lack of education and full bellys they stay where they are and die after producing too many children who will suffer the same fate. With education and knowledge they can enter the world stage and act as well as build and create at home. With education they stop screwing and spreading disease, they get their own doctors and scientists, things get better. With a truck load of UN rice and no hope they die; with a decent education they become upwardly mobile and educated... hell, one day they may be in a position thanks to our lap tops to solve world problems in new ways or at least stand up for themselves politically and legally so the first world stops raping their country for resources.
Most 3rd world countries' rulers would not buy these for their population, I'm guessing. Or even 2nd and 1st. Think of China. Think of how easy this would make it for the people to overthrow the government. Do the rulers there want even the hint of a possibility for an opening to maybe create an uprising that could potentially overthrow the government or reform the social structure? Of course not. I see this as a great initiative, but I simply don't see people thinking here. MOST of the rulers up top will NOT want their people becoming more educated. Goodness knows, if that happened, they might lose their power. They might be ousted and democracy established in their place. We can't have that happen, now can we? If these countries wanted their civilizations to become more educated, they would have found ways. $100 for chickens, rice and other plantable foods, and books (encyclopedia?) would be a much more effective way to educate the masses. Then the country would have an economy ready to be educated. Laptops could educate, but they wouldn't feed the people. Books and food would, however; and my guess is if the rulers wanted this to happen it would have. A country could announce their own initiative like this one, with the plans of feeding AND educating (feeding only if education increases?), and get plenty of funding, methinks. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I think if the countries wanted reform, they'd have done it.
On the compelete other side of things, we have way too many problems here to worry about other countries. We need to get these into the hands of people HERE who can have a direct, positive inpact on our economy. Am I the only one that thinks our country will be a 2nd or 3rd world one in 75 years? The people working to get a decent education are not reproducing like we need them to (because their kids will value education higher, like their parents). However the population that isn't going for a college degree is, and at least twice as fast. Not to mention the foreign immigrants. If we don't do something to fix these problems, we won't be able to help these third world countries much longer. If, on the other hand, we concentrate most our effort on all the issues developing here, we can ensure that we are able to help them 75 years down the road. Call me a troll, but helping another country (especially one that hasn't shown any previous initiative to reform their populace) when ours is bleeding is simply foolish.
Or are you actually suggesting that a family cannot be allowed to decide what is the best use of resources they have been given?
I've always found those "don't give the bums money they'll just spend it on booze" people terrifying.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 49 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
no.
Oh, umm. Never mind.
Three words: ACCESS TO MARKET
Finland is prosperous, because after WW2 it had good access to both East Block and Western markets. It stays prosperous, because it has access to lots of markets.
African nations are poor, because they don't.
If I lock you in a prison, you will become starved, violent, corrupt and very poor in a relatively short amount of time. EU and US agricultural policies are locking these people into a huge prison, so it's your problem, too.
Case in point, closer to Finnland: Kaliningrad enclave of Russia. They are very poor. Poorer than the Russian average. Now, you can pull the racist card claiming that the people in the surrounding countries (same soviet people, actually) are superior beings or you can accept that they are poor because they are forced to sell for cheap and buy expensively by the surrounding EU and it's external trade barriers.
I always find irony in things like this. Let's give laptops/computers to third world nations. I'm not trying to be mean hear, but can they even use it?
Aid: "Here is a COMPUTER, it has buttons and you can do things with it"
Native: "Blawashe na tomo da toha"
Aid: "Yes, a computer, you can't eat it and I know $100 in food could feed you for almost a year (based on Susan Summers 50 cents a day yadda yadda) but Americans would rather see you with something you can't use instead of something useful"
Seriously - did I miss the boat or something - if they don't have electricity what good is a laptop?
http://www.freeplayenergy.com/index.php?section=pr oducts&subsection=freechargeportable
Forget "children in developing nations" - I want one! This looks nearly perfect for me, really.. Of course, a more powerful system would be nice, but this seems to have all the important stuff, and a number of features that expensive laptops don't offer. Why not sell it here? (i.e. Montreal )
Kids in third world countries? Black market?
Let's sell these to people: to anyone who wants one. Why place a restriction on it?
Ok let's look at South Africa. I constantly meet poor people who beg for money (not food) because they have no jobs. However I often find foreigners, immigrants from Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Congo etc. When I speak to one of them they laugh at me and tell me that there are
plenty of jobs, but they have to work hard to get them. They secretly laugh at the locals for being 'lazy' as they put it. The locals of course
hate them for stealing jobs but since SA has very socialist labour laws, you can't really exploit anyone too much.
Africa has arable land, sun, perfect climate etc. Southern Africa has no natural disasters. There are NO fault lines, no tsunamis,
volcanos, tornados, hurricanes, monsoons etc. There are very occasional floods and occasional droughts but much of South Africa
is well irrigated and has a great sysetm of dams and canals, probbaly better or on par to the US. The previous apartheid regime invested
a lot into infrastucture and under them South Africa could feed the entire continent. A similar thing in Zimbabwe, where Caucasian farmers
provided a source of food and foreign exchange for the economy until one crazy despot confiscated their farms and had many of them shot.
Now the population of Zimbabwe is starving and has virtually no foreign reserves, the Zim Dollar is worthless.
Who's fault is it?
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these ?
You posted the wrong link! The Heifer you linked to is a small offshoot of Heifer proper. The reason their expense to outlay ratio is so bad is because they only brought in $3 million last year.
This is the actual link to Heifer International on the Charity Navigator. The expense ratio is in line with other charities of its size. Note that the CEO still makes a fat lot of cash, as they all seem to do at that level. As always, non-profit doesn't mean you can't line your pockets on the backs of the poor. They at least manage to get 71% to the people that need it.
They're targeting children of developing nations?!
Sell me one!
This thing would need an OS that is completly, 100% reliable. I'm not saying that Linux is the answer ( although I believe it's the closest thing ). I'm just saying that if they want children all over the world to be able to use this thing, then it better have every last bug tested and fixed. Everything just has to work, plain and simple.
Also, what about internationalization* ? Not just things like translation of language, but other things that you and I take for granted? Like how to use the mouse? Some things about computer usage don't translate very well, especially from country to country.
Imagine you're working at the computer help desk for your company. Take the stupidest user, and imagine someone stupider. That's what these childeren are going to be like ( most of them, IMHO ). They won't have every used, or even heard of a computer. That will take much more planning and design than the laptop itself, I think.
*I would have spelt that wrong if it wasn't for my spell checker - the spell check function in gmail =D
God is dead -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead -- God
Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
"$100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations"
Forget that! I want one. And I'll pay $105 for it.
"E Ger"? Come on.
Having lived in a poor country with unsanitary water, I have something to say on the subject. Boiling water to purify it is absolutely the last option. If you boil it on the stove, it is really expensive, if you boil it on a wood-fire it is messy (and you need to gather wood!). Either way it takes forever to boil a reasonable amount of water. Those micropur tablets sound kind of cool, but rather expensive still. The best way I've found is using bleach. You can get a gallon of bleach for around $10, and it only takes a few drops to purify a gallon of water. And it goes fast; you can purify a 5 gallon bottle of water in 30 minutes. The bad thing is when you have been purifying water like this for a few months and then you find out the water has lead in it. That's when it's time to dig a well.........
Qxe4
Of what use will a laptop be whether $100 or free if Internet Censorship remains in place in many countries identified as "developing " or "poor"?
Proliferated Laptops which will ultimately be subsidized by US Taxpayers in some way will just be used to proliferate some Neo-Cultural Revolution, Jihad or Yeehad with the US once again being cast as the great Satan.
Was it not disturbing enought to watch recorded beheadings of individuals delivered by technology developed, financed and subsidized by the American taxpayer?
It will be even more frustrating to come to watch as these same laptops will be used to view and propagate propaganda of a Racist and Orwellian nature in places like China or the Middle East fomenting mroe resentment and hatred of Americans and all with American Ingenuity and subsidy!
How about spending some time on a real problem like how to stop the spread of idiocy which in time you will see is the real cause of all problems.
It never ceases to amaze me how very smart people can be very stupid!
AMD sells a low power MIPS implementation called "Alchemy". You can read about it here.
Okay so we have a site with E-TextBooks setup then the whole situation turns into a SimFarm/RTS game. Setup a Community SatComm Point (use solar/wind/sapien power) then deploy these laptop things with some sort of wireless connection (or have the laptops connect at the SatComm. Repeat as needed. Me i would buy one just a a mobile terminal.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If it really only cost $100 to make the laptop, then it would be available at that price to everyone, not just to kids in Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa. They've gotta be hiding the true cost somewhere, possibly in donated time and effort, and quite possibly in shipping costs and even the cost of raw materials.
In other words, $100 is a completely arbitrary figure. Give me enough donated technology and labor, and I could probably make a $1 laptop. Let me hide the cost of travel, and marketing, and shipping, and I could definitely do it.
I've actually found all those years of posting to Slashdot and newsgroups quite useful in an educational setting. By posting to forums frequently, one gets a lot of practice at using writing to argue for a particular point of view. The same skills required to get a +5 insightful are also essential in writing a good term paper.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
This is a very cool idea. There is a gig going on in little Logan, UT this week about Advancing the Effectiveness and Sustainability of Open Education Conference. (The pod-casts will be available soon.) And one of the keynote speakers (Joris Komen from Namibia) mentioned this.
Just imagine how we may learn in the future with the current OpenCourseWare movement at MIT and other colleges and universities around the world. This conference has outlined several possible ways, but more are needed. I won't entertain with the details of the conference, but if you are interested check it out and think about what you might do to make this soon-to-be-available technology actually work.
I don't think you're trolling, but you may not see the entire potential this program has.
Combine these thingies with a solid wi-fi project, and you could get millions of people onto the Internet, exchanging information. Not much help without basic literacy programs, but if the people can read, then these laptops would dramatically increase the utility of having that skill.
I think that the flow of information is a "core need" in any society, and these laptops could help greatly accelerate that flow. For example, a laptop owner might have the ability to learn about public health issues, farming techniques, potential markets for their crops, government programs, etc.
Plus, $100 laptop! Fifteen million potential Linux users! Either would be Slashdot-worthy, even without the global poverty angle.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
- (1) A computer you pay for, designed for you by you.
- (2) A computer someone else pays for, designed for you by you.
- (3) A computer you pay for designed for somebody else designed by you..
- (4) A computer someone else pays for, designed for somebody else, designed by you.
In case #1 you're going to end up with an economical design that suits your needs.It goes downhill from there. By the time you get to #4, nobody is watching the cost or features, nobody knows what the customer really wants, and you usually end up trying to give away deep-freezers to the Eskimos.
Same with these laptops-- a guy sitting in Cambridge, eyeing UN or Ted Turner $$$, is very unlikely to come up with the optimum design for a 2.5 world computer.
In the parts of the 2.5 world I've seen, a laptop computer would be snatched out of a child's hands within a minute or three.
The costs are really blue-sky too-- Go to www.digi-key.com and lookup the price of even a 640x480 LCD screen. Even in quantities of 1000's the screen costs more than $100. 128MB of flash memory is going to be $40 or so. CPU, say $30. Battery, $30. We are up to $200 and havent even touched the costs of manufacturing, testing, shipping, distributing, and support.
Sounds more like a $300 laptop at least.
And of course we've forgotten that it isn't all a 1950's USA-style world. IN many cultures, there's NO WAY a child could ever be given something the parents did not pay for, or something that the parents or elder children don't have. Or anything the local Mullah or town elder doesnt have or approve of. Kids have been ostracized, kidnapped, and killed for less than this. Remember the scene in "Airplane!" where they're teaching the natives about the wonders of Tupperware? THis isnt far off.
Exactly. I'd love to have a small "laptop" like that that I can carry out into the wilds of New Hampshire, but which actually had functioning wireless access.
...
Around here, you can get wifi, which is always-on but only works within range of an AP, which are few and far between outside the city. The blackberry that I got at work has wireless data access (GPRS) nearly everywhere, but the salesman's claim that it can be used as a wireless modem turned out to be false. Once they got the contract, ATT showed no interest in helping us make it actually work. Then Cingular bought them out, and their only interest is in persuading us to upgrade to a new model (which they say will work as a wireless modem but they don't actually demo).
But the description sounds like this MIT gadget will actually be a functioning wi-fi/cell-phone portable that works nearly everywhere. The commercial vendors can't or won't do this, but if MIT can, a lot of us will do whatever we can to get our hands on one.
Besides, it looks like a really fun toy.
And it'd be fun to try writing software for those 3rd-world kiddies. I think I'll start polishing up my UniCode skills right away
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Please note: these laptops are not in production. They are not--and will not--be available for purchase by individuals.
Until the kids they are given to turn around and create a lucrative market for themselves by re-selling the things on Ebay. How long before these laptops are widely stolen in third world countries and put up for sale online?
It really makes no sense NOT to sell them on the open market. What parent in the USA wouldn't want to buy their kid a $100 laptop so they can IM the third world kids that are using the laptops to run identity theft rings out of Romania?
Once these laptops get into the hands of kids, I suspect a huge new wave of internet crimes. Can't you just see the RIAA suing 10-year-old Janihari in Botswana for downloading an MP3?
Or am I just too cynical for my own good?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
WiFi, cell phone-enabled, USB, 500MHz, 1GB ram, and what can a $1000 laptop do that the $100 version can't? Not much. The plan is for the $100 Laptop to do almost everything. What it will not do is store a massive amount of data, and the preliminary schedule is to have units ready for shipment by the end of 2006 or early 2007. All these are from MIT's site and I dare not leave out mention of figures showing tablet style pen input. $100? Next year? For KIDs!? Negreponte found his new cash cow, and it's a non-profit cow to boot. MIT has some groovy stuff but this PR enticing crap really irks me. I do believe some of these claims could be met, but what is shown and claimed is way too much to do by late 2006 or even 2007 for $100. If this is non-profit and it is shown that all these claims cannot be met, can Negreponte be sued?
narcc wrote: A developing nation is a lot like 'the projects'. You have a population of poorly education and unskilled individuals that need the opportunity to advance as a society.
IQ and the Wealth of Nations
This is very old news. Infact, I had blogged about it way back in april. You may read my post here - http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/04/100-laptops- running-linux.html
But I am really excited about the $100 laptops. This is the right way to go if you want to bring computing to the masses. Infact, in India, we had a project called simputer (a palm top device which can also be connected to the internet). But it was bogged down by hiccups and never really took off. And the price was more than $100.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
but does it run--oh wait...
A handcranck ! Would take hours of crankin' to reload that battery ! Especially when your doing some hefty first person shooter action or some artfull fractal renderings.
...
So
If anyone would be smart enough to build a 'universal rodent interface' or simply supply us with a 'genetically adapted' rodent in addition to a universal rodent interface would this not preemptively solve any rsi on those fragile child body's cranking away in the middle of a jungle to play they favorite blast-a-way ?
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
i agree with you its a beautiful dream, BUT...
/Rupert Murdoch???
Didn't anyone notice that one of the principal sponsors of this program is News Corporation, a.k.a.-Fox News
I smell something like burning cat fur....
The concept looks like all over the place ! and will make life easier for the poor guys..... "The simple hand-held computer widely known as the Simputer, developed by the Indian Institute of Science and Encore Software Private Limited, commenced its pilot production this week and is set to revolutionise rural banking and education in rural areas" http://news.indiainfo.com/2002/09/22/22simputer.ht ml
Just saw this link few days back at liveposts