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First Photos of MIT $100 Laptop
An anonymous reader noted that MITs $100 laptop was unveiled at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting. It runs a special version of the Fedora linux and it comes with native wireless lan support. You can see the
photo album, and you can pledge to buy one at triple price... in order to donate 2 of them to children.
The final photo in the set shows three different colours - they all look fantastic - this photo shows the fedora desktop. Also looks great!
It should be noted that the 'horns' are for directional wireless (and also cover USB ports when not in use) - remember that if you want to mock them!
I say kudos to AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat for making this possible. It's a pity Gates & Jobs couldn't join in rather then attempting to downplay the fine efforts of this group.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
How is it forced charity? Forced charity would be if we were paying taxes for third world orphans to get gov't-funded laptops.
This is just like being nice and giving to public radio, and they give you a sweet tote bag in return. Here, you're paying $300 to charity, as a nice, charitable human being, and you're getting a laptop in return.
Don't be so whiney.
That's also price discrimination; it only works because you can't easily resell medical care.
Otherwise, I'd find some bum on the street, pay him fifty bucks to go into the medical center and get my "care," then buy it off of him for less than I'd actually pay.
There's a reason you don't see too many 'sliding scales' used for physical goods: it's too easy to turn around and resell them. Really, you can only vary the prices by less than it would cost to transport the good to an area where prices are higher. (Unless you have some artificial scheme for preventing the movement of goods, i.e. DVD region codes.) Otherwise, it doesn't take Adam Smith to figure out that people will just ship the low-priced goods to the areas where they sell for more, undercut the "official" channel, and make a profit.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I heard the juvenile colors were intended to discourage light-fingered adults against stealing them from kids.
Dark Reflection
Oxfam does this. But if you actually gave a shit you'd know this already instead of blindly bashing the $100 laptop project. After all there's more than one way to try to help others and nobody is forcing you to do it their way.
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
If I was lucky enough to have moderator points today, I'd mod that up for a well-placed geek cultural reference.
On a more serious note, I think that your comment has more going for it than just that. Considering the people who will be using these devices, I almost think that it should have something along those lines. After all, all the laptops in the world can only be of so much use - one needs ways to educate people on their use as well. Sure, there'll be the precocious ones out there who will tinker around with the laptop and learn it front to back within a year or two without anyone teaching them.
Most, like the rest of us mere mortals, will need some help and instruction along the way. Are there enough teachers in the wide world to go along with these laptops? I don't know. Bundling them with a sort of interactive and adaptive user's manual (not just for the computer, but for a total education) wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Aiming it towards the empowerment of women in the third world would go a long way, too, I think.
This isn't for areas where people are starving. This is for areas where people have food but now need to advance to the next level. Education is the only tool to prevent people from collapsing to starvation again.
Why PC's instead of books. Because 1 internet capable pc can contain all the books in the world in their most recent version with an infinite amount of paper and pencil.
Books are expenive as hell, ask any student, and schools in poor countries often got to work with hopelessly outdated material and practice books that gotta be reused time and time again.
Cheap PC's make sense, not in starvation areas but in those countries were the basic needs have been taken care off and now education is the most pressing concern.
Because hopefully educated people will be more concerned with creating a better world and not with waging war on each other. Right?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Possibly the biggest problem working on this laptop is its small 12' screen.
I don't know about you, but I'd consider a twelve-foot screen huge.
But even a 12" screen is plenty large for a laptop like this. I had a 10.4" screen on a Sony Vaio and loved it. I replaced it with a 12" (different brand) because it was cheaper but would have loved another thin 10.4". It's the same pixel resolution, so it's not like you're losing any desktop space by going to the smaller screen.
bp
You're right, books are important. Those $100 should be used to buy books for schools in developing countries, instead of buying useless gadgets for them.
Hey, I have an idea! Instead of buying paper books, it would be better if we spend that money on e-books, so they can get new and updated books every school year, at almost no cost. But in order to do that we would need an e-book reading device...
I hope someone came up with such a device...
Oh wait...
And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one.... MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete!
I really don't understand this. "We don't want to sell 'first-worlders' these laptops for $100." I sort of understand, if they're taking a loss. But why not sell them for $249*, and advertise that all profits go to subsidize further development and deployment of these laptops in their intended role?
The other reason to do it this way is that you really ought to get these laptops in the hands of "first world" open source developers and users, so they can start working on making these things even more useful. Since you really can't target just "open source developers", you need to let them out to everyone. (Besides, open source communities are generally robust in proportion to the number of people in them, because developers are attracted to larger population communities for a lot of reasons. You can't just magically create a developer-only community of any size.) Hopefully someday the intended users will be able to help, but that will take a while because first they've got to work their way up to "computer literacy" before they're going to be developing.
(*: If $249 would not itself be a profitable price point, then the $100 laptop project has failed in the $100 goal. A $1000 laptop is $100 with a $900 loss/subsidy, but who cares?)
OS X wouldn't even begin to fit on this laptop, and without having free source, not only could they not slim it down, they couldn't use it is part of the learning environment it is meant to provide. He knew the requirements, he knew OS X was useless, so his offer was nothing but grandstanding.
Infuriate left and right
I laud your efforts to benefit our fellow human beings in the way you see fit. Certainly I have no criticism for you on that count.
What you suggest, by way of your post, troubles me:
1) Children must be taught, or compelled to learn
2) Material must be dumbed down because children aren't capable of assimilating it in its original format.
3) Teachers will only accept this abbreviated "curriculum," perhaps due to their own incapacity to teach directly from the masters, or because teachers must be mass-produced and don't have time for deep learning.
4) Learning doesn't happen without a curriculum.
The $100 laptop is merely a tool - one capable of providing access to the greatest library that the world has ever seen.
I'm reminded of a story that Richard P. Feynman told, about how he used to check books out of the library when he was a boy. One day he brought a book about calculus to the librarian, with the intent of checking it out. He then related the criticism that he received from this librarian, who couldn't conceive how a book on calculus could possibly be useful or interesting to a mere boy. You remind me very much of that librarian. That a child should step out of the commitee-mandated curriculum and pursue advanced topics of interest is inconceivable!
It may be that much important literature is written in language foreign to many people. The mind would necessarily need to be expanded in order to understand the principles of those great individuals who originally thought them. And what is wrong with that? You discount the power of human passion, once that desire to learn has been ignited. We have classics suitable for all types of people, and need only the right access to them. Instead of teachers, they need mentors to inspire them.
I'm sure we can find a place for "school" somewhere. Unfortunately, most of us waste too much time in that pursuit for entirely economic reasons. When has school ever produced a master artist or statesman? Instead we make employees and complacent citizens.
It may be that your ideals are realistic in our estimation - we live in a mass-produced utopia every day thanks to our state-mandated curriculum and business-sponsored systems of bureaucratic education. Having all found good jobs, we're now too busy to pursue our real interests (recreation makes us feel better about this sad loss), and certainly there is no time left for reading classics. Let's not export these chains to our neighbors who we wrongly consider less fortunate.
If anything, access to the world's literature is a prize worth more than many a mediocre teacher.
Just my opinion on the matter. As it is, the $100 laptop might end up becoming yet another way to export our Western excesses and vices (gambling, porno, etc), and not be used as a learning tool at all. I'm worried about it in that regard.