Manufacturer Picked For $100 Laptop

IZ Reloaded writes "MIT has picked Taiwanese firm Quanta to manufacture its $100 laptop. From PCWorld: 'Under terms of an agreement with One Laptop Per Child, Quanta will devote engineering resources to develop the $100 notebook design during the first half of the year, according to a statement issued by the group. At the same time, Quanta and the non-profit organization will explore the production of a commercial version of the laptop.'" Apparently they don't think it's ineffectual either.

Comments

"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish?

[eldavojohn]

So perhaps some of you have read Bill Gates' Business at the Speed of Thought . No, not the Necromonicron, I'm not referring to anything written by Satan (just one of his understudies). I have read this book and a very interesting concept that I gathered from it was that a business could be measured by the speed at which information passes through it. This makes sense as the easier it is for employees to gather information or to pass information increases the amount of brainstorming and learning that occurs at your company.

I then speculated that this could also be applied to nations. A country's greatness may be able to be measured by the ease at which its citizens gather information. And if you look at today's countries, this might be true.

Perhaps this initiative to deliver cheap laptops to students of poorer nations will help boost their economy and the rate at which information travels from person to person. After all, isn't internet access the fastest and cheapest form of communicating?

Just something to think about. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way--I know this is a very altruistic view. On top of that, I realize I've just mentioned Bill Gates in a somewhat positive manner. *sprays himself with flame retardent foam and begins to pray*

Re:"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish?

[quanticle]

The whole problem I've seen with this "one laptop per child" initiative is an inadequate focus on infrastructure. Sure, your laptop won't need a power cord due to its crank handle. But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.

Re:"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish?

[AKAImBatman]

Information sharing is what allows one part of the company to see what the other part is doing and adjust accordingly, with a minimum of fuss, thus producing your "well-oiled machine" analogy.

Agreed.

Without wide data paths between groups, teams don't know what other other teams are doing and either work to cross purposes, or make incorrect assumptions that lead to product failure.

I'm certainly not going to argue that wide data paths are important. However, the amount of information they carry is not indicitive of their importance or performance. Take Atari as an example. Here was a company generating TONS of data on schematics, games, technology, pizza restaurants, mind reading devices (I'm not making this stuff up), holographics, and billions of other things that were completely unrelated to their business. Atari was in trouble for a long time before they finally folded in a reverse merger. If you use the formula that Health == Information Quantity, then Atari should have been the healthiest company in the history of mankind.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have Apple. In the days of Mac development, Information did NOT flow. At all. In fact, information was kept to the minimum necessary to do the job. They didn't generate tons of documents, prototypes, interdepartment memos, or millions of other things that would be considered Information creation and flow. Yet the Mac was extremely successful. In part, its success was because information flow was tightly controlled. It flowed as it needed, but only as it was needed.

To create a parallel with computers, the slowest part of any distributed system is always the communications channels. As a result, you always get a bigger bang for your buck if you reduce the amount of information flowing through the pipes. That's why SETI@Home or the Distributed Key Cracking Contest both download the necessary data to you once, then make as much use of your machine before turning over the data. Imagine if every computation was exchanged over the network!

The contractor (Lockheed Martin?) assumed that certain data was being received in standard units. NASA, however, assumed that all data would handled in metric units. The result: the probe burned up in the atmosphere, after failing to slow itself properly. If the teams from NASA and the contractor had communicated more often, it would have been easier to weed out these incorrect assumptions.

Your own example betrays you. The problem was not the quantity of communication. There's no guarantee that more open lines wouldn't have meant more confusion and bickering. (In fact, that's a far more likely outcome.) What was needed was more precise communication that covered issues like this in detail. That's a matter for engineering planning and testing. Throwing more communications bandwidth at it wouldn't have solved the problem any more than throwing 100 Chevettes at a quarry would help transport 30 tons of rock.

What about older laptops?

[cejones]

After recently visiting my local Goodwill computer store, I saw hundred of old laptops laying around for sale.

Why not take donated laptops and refurbish them.... get donated spares from the orginal OEMS, etc Fix them up and then you kill two birds with one stone... No more computer waste in the landfills and cheap laptops for Ghana.

Considering the cost of labor in Ghana, why not send donated laptops to Ghana... Bring a few hundred people from Ghana to this Taiwanese company to train on how to refurbish the laptops...

Re:What about older laptops?

[1u3hr]

After recently visiting my local Goodwill computer store, I saw hundred of old laptops laying around for sale.

Why were they there? They very likely don't work, have dead screens and/or batteries. One important feature of the $100 laptop is the wind-up battery. Even if these Goodwill laptops were working, what a nightmare to support; all with different batteries, weird custom parts, expensive RAM, and many needing special drivers to work at all that probably haven't been updated since the machine was made, thus limiting the software it can run.

Re:What about older laptops?

[MaxQuordlepleen]

Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to install a standard operating system on 1,000,000 random previously-junked laptops? Or providing any kind of support? Or spare parts?

I think those donated laptops are probably better utilized in smaller-scale scenarios like a drop-in centre. Take a look at what these guys have done in creating a standard Debian-based distro for use on marginal hardware. (It's a very impressive project, proves what kind of talent exists in the K/W area)

There's poverty close to home, too, and close to home in the developed world is probably a better place to use this kind of hardware, where there are lots of geeks close by to lend a hand.

Re:What about older laptops?

[amalcon]

There are two advantages of the $100 laptops and refurbished laptops:
1. The $100 laptops are designed with durability as a primary concern. These things need to last. Refurbs are notoriously bad at that.
2. The $100 laptops have a hand power crank. While this is a nonissue to many people, even I (as someone who camps fairly often) can see some small utility in something like this. In countries where there isn't much of an electrical infrastructure at all, this could make the difference between being able to use the laptop at home, and having to go to the library to plug it in -- or even more.

I want a permanent fix, not a band-aid

[eldavojohn]

Well, you're right about an immediate form of aid. But have you really helped them by giving them this water, food or mercedes handout?

What better way to free a people then to allow them the means to learn how to grow the food or purify the water? What I'm trying to say is that teaching someone how to help themselves is worth more than you helping them along their entire lives.

That's why I like this laptop idea so much. It's not a temporary bandaid with a few truckloads of food or mercedes. It's a possible permanent fix for people in need if it is done correctly and used by the people.

Laptops are powerful devices considering the amount of information they make available to you.

Interesting that you would say that

[WindBourne]

This is being designed to be used by 3'rd world kids. Lets assume that it makes it into these countries. One of the first things that will happen is that software will have to be designed. In adidtion, many of the text books will be re-designed to work on this. That will mean fewer sales for book publishers. More importantly, if MIT does the smart thing, they will come up with a library/software that encourages this. There will be a whole new industry rising from this, and a wounding of a monopoly. Interestingly, this may encourage new text that is targeted to different thoughts.

No, I would have to say, that this has the potential to truely change things.

Re:Interesting that you would say that

[WindBourne]

Yeah, but you need tests, grading, etc. That should be standardized. Currently, it is a hodgepodge of different programs.

Of course, the textbook publishers will detonate a nuclear device on Taiwan to stop it from happening, if they can.

I suspect that we will see a lot happening when publishers start running to congress to get this stopped. Plain and simple, this has the same disruption capabilities as the Internet and mp3 players have had. The internet has change society and impacted everybody. The mp3 players (and more video players to come) have impacted RIAA and the music industry. This small computer may have the same impact on the educational world as well as on computer manufactuers. One of the bigger mistakes for large manufactuers is to ignore this.

Re:Coming up next, $1000 Mercedes for every child

[TedCheshireAcad]

You are not seeing the big picture in this project. If each child has one laptop, they can all be interconnected with one another, and with the rest of the world. The Internet is the greatest communications device ever invented. With such a level of communication, third world children could take it upon themselves to create their own means.

Take, for example, the new-evolving web 2.0 boom. This is a time where web software runs king, that is, software that is globally accessable, promoting a free exchange of information. There is a ton of money flying around this universe, moving from one great idea to the next. Where will the next great idea come from? Africa? South America?

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. The $100 laptop initiative is handing out fishing poles, who is going to collect?

What will happen

[thecpuguru]

Here is what will happen when those laptops hit the street of those impoverished nations: 1) They will be sold to local pawn shops or richer people for food, clothing or medical treatments that these people need more than this type of technology. 2) The ones that are used, will be used very little or mis-understood, because technology with out proper training is utter folley. 3) They will end up in secondary or used markets and provide litte to no benifit to those that have them due to the reasons listed above. sad but true

while this is a cool idea

[ChrisGilliard]

Dell is already selling desktops for $299. http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category. aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs By the time these things get down to $100, what price will it be to buy from Dell or another manufacturer?

Re:1 GB Memory?

[CastrTroy]

I though the RAM manufacturers were already convicted of price fixing. We've known this for a long time. Also, RAM you buy is at retail value. Obviously these laptops will have a cost value of $100, and will be sold for no profit.

Re:Quanta's specs

[drinkypoo]

1. (USB ports == necessary) == true. All the cheap peripherals are USB. What are you suggesting, firewire? Or maybe a LPT or RS-232 port? Which is to say, useless today?
2. Made of rubber. They can not possibly mean this literally. For one, display panels can't take the kind of flexing this would result in.
3. Cellphone enabled. You clearly have no idea of what the cellular phone uptake rate is like in third world countries. Cellular infrastructure is many times cheaper than wired, and in many places it's not possible to get a land line, but every fifth person has a cellphone. Even if there's only one cellphone in your village or whatever, in many places that's infinitely more than there are land lines.
4. I agree with the memory expansion but if you need this functionality, you can get it through USB.

Not fastest, and not cheapest. Best, maybe...

[ScentCone]

After all, isn't internet access the fastest and cheapest form of communicating?

No, I don't think the internet's the cheapest form of communication. Sitting across the coffee table talking to someone is the cheapest. Well, and fastest, too, as far as that goes. Using the internet to do the same thing - even if you ARE using a $100 laptop - only works if your country has billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, training, and souped-up techno-culture in place to make it all go. Solid power grids, not-too-corrupt entities watching over things, etc.

In the poorest parts of the world, lack of basic rule of law is the biggest thing in the way of growth-by-information-flow. If you can't assume that invested money/time/resources are going to retain their value (or work at all) over the long haul, then no fancy networked anything will get built, at least not at reasonable prices.