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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!)
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You didn't know.
More information on the $100 laptop can be found here.
A bit of bad news from this page:
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~ |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...
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.
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.)
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.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a hand-cranked laptop, and your employer will outsource your work to him on the grounds that he'll work for fish, whereas you want tens of thousands of dollars per year.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
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.
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.
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
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
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'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