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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.
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...
>a laptop is "mated" to a child
Ever read Snow Crash?
>selling the laptop on the black market for food,
Though I do suspect that if you need food that badly, then hanging onto a laptop in the face of starvation isn't the best demonstration of priority management.
(And now for something completely different...)
>...wonder whether so many of us would still be strangers to the ladies
Slashdotters may be strangers to the ladies, but the ladies are stranger!
...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!
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?
If a family is so poor that they can't even afford food or clothing, shouldn't we be spending money to provide them with this, rather than spending money on biometrics to prevent them from acquiring these basic needs?
If everyone sells off these laptops in order to buy food, the conclusion to draw is that they need food more than they need laptops.
As for the hand crank, I wouldn't mind on of those for my phone...
The reason that "disadvantaged children" are "disadvantaged" is not because they don't have computers, but because it's hard to get food, hard to get clean water (for drinking and for cleaning - a huge factor for being healthy is hygeine), and hard to be protected from the environment.
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".
Until I see how something like this can actually reduce the cost of living for these folks, I don't see that it's worth putting my support behind. I'm also not sure it's the best use of resources to help educational efforts either, but that's about the only area in which I'm not quite sure of the cost/benefit analysis. After all, the costly part of textbooks and the like isn't the printing, but paying for the content, so unless there are lots of "free" e-textbooks out there, this won't save much in that front. There's also the hidden aspect of supporting technology out there.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Oh but they will be, for everything short of nucular weapons can be bought on Ebay. It's not like people aren't going to try and resell these things when the demand is there.
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]
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
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.)
Though I do suspect that if you need food that badly, then hanging onto a laptop in the face of starvation isn't the best demonstration of priority management.
I guess it's a question of whether they would really starve, or whether the sale simply achieves convenience for the parents at the expense of a brighter future for the kid.
Moreover, my compassion for my fellow human beings extends across all dimensions, not just space. Carving out a chance for a really poor kid to grow up to become successful could mean feeding so many more people for that $100 twenty years from now than feeding a single family today.
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.
a very poor family might look towards selling the laptop on the black market for food, clothing, etc.
How dare they!? Damn poor people...practicing their right of first sale...
Seriously, just because they're not well off doesn't mean you need to treat them like they're children.
Then get off your ass and work on it. Don't criticize someone for doing their part to help disadvantaged countries if you aren't doing yours.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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....
and you are the winner of the shortsighted contest.
the people that are recieving these laptops are already recieving food.
it is the whole concept of teach a man to fish...aka they become educated and suddenly their country gets better as a whole and starvation is pretty much gone.
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.
the people that are recieving these laptops are already recieving food.
And if they had enough food, why should we assume they'd be selling laptops for more food?
it is the whole concept of teach a man to fish...aka they become educated and suddenly their country gets better as a whole and starvation is pretty much gone.
I have no problem with teaching people to fish. I do have a problem with spending money on biometric fishing rods, especially when that money could be better spent on helping the poor (either by giving them more fishing rods, or giving them the food and clothing that they also need).
And it is you who is short sighted. What happens when the child receives or is able to buy a better laptop a few years later - the old laptop may still be useful to someone poor without any laptop, but thanks to the OP's short sighted scheme, it is useless to anyone else.
Just to be absolutely 100% clear, there are many, many, many people in many, many, many developing areas who could really use the education and social infrastructure these guys are working on but aren't really in immediate danger of starving. In fact, *most* people aren't in immediate danger of starving. Which isn't to say that they all live with the sort of luxury and immediate access to food that we have in the US or other first world countries. I would say abosultely, yes, in many cases getting them a laptop is at least as important as getting them food. Because not everyone who lives in the third world is a bloated fly-eaten starvation victim.
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.
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.
I call bullshit. Take Finland for example (the place where I happen to live in). the climate is not exactly the nicest in the world. Without adequate protection, the environment will kill you pretty quickly (you would survive in the summer, but in winter....). Yet we were able to build a prosperous and wealthy nation. What exactly is preventing the people in Africa (for example) of doing the same? Climate is harsh in both places (our climate is cold, theirs is hot). Yes, it's hard to get food in Africa, but Finland isn't really the breadbasket of the world either. Africa DOES have humungous amount of natural resources, something Finland lacks.
I seriously see nothing that prevents Africa and other poor places from improving their situation. Well, constant civil-wars, corrupt leaders and the like withstanding. But those are IMO their problem, and not ours.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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
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!
If a family is so poor that they can't even afford food or clothing, shouldn't we be spending money to provide them with this, rather than spending money on biometrics to prevent them from acquiring these basic needs?
There are different levels of poverty. At the very lowest levels there are the people that can't even get food. Obviously this type of program isn't targeted for them, that what UN food aid, and unicef are for.
But if you go to some '2nd world' countries (Brazil comes to mind), it's very common to see TV antennas sticking out of wood shacks. At this level people have enough money to survive, but not move themselves up in society. So if you are born poor, you stay poor. And you end up with a country with no middle class, and 95% of the country being owned by 5% of the population.
A low cost way to access the internet would do wonders for educating the populace. This could be a real catalyst for social change in those sorts of countries.
Finland is prosperous because the government doesn't actively try to starve the people, and there are no significant wars killing the able and destroying crops. Both of the above are large problems in Africa. There is plenty of food in the world, but it does no good when you cannot get it to those in need. Many relief efforts have faltered when tons (litterally) of food was left sitting in the sun until it was destroyed, not far from those in need. Active effort prevented those from getting it.
Remember the Irish potato famine of the 1800s? There was plenty of food grown in Ireland, but it was grown for the rich land owners elsewhere who didn't care that the farmers could get grow enough food on the little land they were allowed for themselves.
I'm not sure how to solve that problem.
There are areas of the world where the government isn't killing the people, and there are no wars. Those people are able to grow enough food for themselves, and have a small surplus. Getting them education, will help their lives. Getting them computers (after or with the education) helps them more, particularly if those computers have internet (even dial-up) so they can download the information they need.
Sure were should help the starving, but there is no easy way to do that. There are easy ways to help those are poor, but want to improve their life, and nothing is standing in the way. That is also a task worth doing.
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.
If they sold them for $200 to people who can afford it, they could donate one for each one sold and not lose all that money
This is a fantastic idea. If the $100 price to sell to foreign govt's is not a loss, but actually covers the cost, then why license the machine to commercial ventures to sell for $200 and only see $20-30 out of it like Negraponte suggests. Why not sell meone for $200 and take the $100 profit to cover the entire cost of one donated
The article does not say these will be donated, it says they wil be sold to the governments to distribute. The real question becomes does the $100 that the govt pays cover the manufacturing cost, in which case a $200 sale to me would buy one to donate as well, or is it only partial to minimize loss.
I'd personally love to have one of these as an eBook reader is nothing else. Doesn't need storage... I have a USB pen drive, holds a GB, and that is a lot of books. Something with those specs just might make eBooks a bit more popular. Its a functioning computer that can actually be used for something other than eBooks, power consumption is not a real problem, the screen will have a mode to read in daylight, it can fold like a book or tablet... and its fairly small.... something you can carry into the john with you. Put me on the waiting list, I'm ready, and $200 is a nice price point as well
I reject your reality
"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".
I don't like to be rude, but you are one amazingly arrogant and potentially ignorant dimwit.
The african continent has been raped of resources, of stable social structures, of people, of its own history, for many centuries. "Civilizations" from Europe, the middle and far East and more recently from the Americas have all played a role in this.
If you want to get a handle on how this particular imbalance of power might have happened, read "Guns, Germs and Steel".
Blaming Africans for the state of their continent after what has been done to that continent for so long is not just ignorant, its callous and disgusting.
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.
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.
It's easy to shift the blame entirely on to poor Africans themselves, and to a certain extent, I agree that they are not totally without responsibility in the effort to make their own societies more livable.
However, looking at the historical treatment of the African continent, it seems that perhaps the folks there are entitled to some help. I mean, we're talking about an entire continent, filled with mostly technologically unadvanced, tribal societies, that was chopped up into arbitrary territories and colonized by European nations. Now, I know that every society has been subjugated at some point in the past, and probably done their share of subjugating as well, and it's a slipery slope, blah, blah, but the scale of that subjugation is rivaled in recent history only by the near total destruction of the native in north and south america, and you can see how the victims of that colonization turned out - dead.
Heap on top of that the not-so-trivial slave trade, in which American and European traders deliberately turned African societies against each other in order to capture the most slaves...I don't think you have to be a bleeding heart to see that a society subjected to this sort of treatment might not be so healthy afterwards.
So, if you agree that Africa has seriously gotten the shaft in the past, which seems pretty unarguable, it's hard to justify expecting them to just fix everything themselves. It's like breaking your dog's legs and then refusing to feed him until he runs as fast as the other dogs. Good luck.
I think it's fair to argue that 'we' should help 'them', because for the last 200 years, the various western colonial powers pitted tribal groups against one another in order to divide and conquer them. They conquered them to exploit their natural resources. This exploitation of tribal groups and resources around the world allowed western Europe to become the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world. Once they started relinquishing their rule in the 20th century, they left a power vacuum where there are now countless wars, famines, and tragedies. In short, the west created this situation, through both action and inaction. I believe organizations should be held responsible for their actions, and they certainly have the werewithal to make up for their mistakes now.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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
I'm doing my part, so I think I've earned the right to spout. I donate more than a couple craptops worth of cash to Heifer each year. I like Heifer's approach, which emphasizes agricultural sustainability.
I'm not the only one that thinks laptops are a poor way to address poverty. In 2000, Bill Gates put a damper on the Digital Divide conference in Seattle with a similar message. When, as the article states, 80% of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day, desiging them a $100 laptop is frivolous. If someone gave me a laptop worth three months of my salary, I'd put it on eBay in an instant and buy something I really needed.
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.
The technological community has come up with much more creative ways to address poverty. I liked the clay pot refridgeration system for storing food that was mentioned on /. a while back. I read in Spectrum about a guy wiring villages in South America with solar-powered LED lighting so families wouldn't have to use kerosene lamps. The lamps are dangerous, the fuel is expensive, and the smoke causes searious health problems. I'd like to see more attention given to people with geniunely helpful ideas and less to Negroponte's schemes.
So if a bunch of Nigerians, Chinese, Pakistanis and Mayans marched into your own particular culture, wiped out most of the existing cultural and historical power structures, ripped natural resources from your land for a few hundred years, routinely sold your society's members into slavery overseas, took control of extraction resources like oil (largely through offering bribes and control to politicians), built and then abandoned a civil society again and again and so on and so forth, that we should blame you and your neighbours for failing to throw off the past? I am not a big fan of historical determinism (the idea that the past determines the future), but fer chrissakes, what has been done to Africa over the last several centuries goes beyond "well why can't they just get *their* act together?"
Oh, you horrible, horrible person. Speaking the truth like that will destroy the whole "donate to the hungry tearful children and save the world" enterprise.
Oh well, what the hell...
I've played wiht Linux on 500MHZ cpus, Linux crawls on this.
I first ran Linux (0.99) + X on a 386SX25 w/ 9MB RAM. Worked fine. Of course these days I'm running 2.6 on a 2xPIII@1Ghz w/ 1GB of RAM, so I'd say that "crawls" is a relative term.
FreeSpeech.org
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.
I have to say that I agree with you - on the surface, it appears that poor countries have bigger issues to deal with, such as arable land, clean water, adequate food, etc.
But these problems cannot be solved by first-worlders who mean well, yet have no understanding of the local knowledge base. That's why this laptop idea is great - it allows people living in the third world access to first world ideas - think engineering, innovation, etc. And it has the added bonus of connecting people who often have similar problems, but perhaps live hundreds of miles away, which encourages working together to solve mutual problems. But it does not impose a first-world solution to a problem, but rather offers tools to help those in the third world diagnose and fix their own problems.
... 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.
"E Ger"? Come on.