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.

Comments

How adorable!!

[Rob T Firefly]

Awwwww, look at their little ears! I just wanna pet them!

Re:How adorable!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Awwwww, look at their little ears! I just wanna pet them!

What an incredibly racist thing to say. They're human beings, not animals.

Re:How adorable!!

[TheGavster]

Wind over IP is one of the great technological triumphs of our time

These look great!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

Re:These look great!

[coop535]

Belinda and Gates are attacking a different set of problems and they're doing it everywhere. I think their viewpoint is that this project's priorities are out of whack. Education is great, provided the person will live to use it.

Letter from Bill and Melinda Gates

We believe health is the cornerstone of human development. When health takes hold, life improves by all measures. Conversely, poor health aggravates poverty, poverty deepens disease, and nations trapped in this spiral will not escape without the world's help. In Africa, the cost of malaria in terms of treatment and lost productivity is estimated to be $12 billion a year. The continent's gross domestic product could be $100 billion higher today if malaria had been eliminated in the 1960s. And if HIV infection rates continue at their present levels, the world will likely see 45 million new infections by 2010 and lose nearly 70 million people by 2020. That's 70 million of the most productive members of society - health workers, educators, and parents.

Therefore, the foundation's Global Health program works to ensure that lifesaving advances in health are created and shared with those who need them most. Our primary focus areas are HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, child survival and childhood immunization, and maternal and reproductive health.

To begin, we invest heavily in research to help discover new and better products, particularly vaccines. The foundation also supports work to develop products that can be manufactured and distributed. Then, once a product is developed, we work to make sure that there are systems in place to adopt and sustain these new drugs as they become available. The foundation is a major supporter of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). This alliance has provided basic immunizations to over 8 million children who would not otherwise have been immunized. As a result, GAVI has already saved an estimated 500,000 children's lives.

---

The most pessimistic person could view this project akin to what Apple did when working with schools to get Apple software & hardware in cheap: become the defacto standard via goodwill. Get in early so that when they leave school they come back. Besides, that same person's pessimistic view will believe that they'll be stolen from schools as they'll be the most valuable thing in the school. (due to the fantastic engineering fortitude which is obvious to all).

Re:These look great!

[harrkev]

Well, a lot of problems can be traced back to lack of education. The solution to AIDS is obvious. Abstinence is guaranteed to be effective. Condoms help a lot. There is no magic drug that will make people practice either of these. Focusing on AIDS drugs is like working on a better way to put out a fire -- much better to not have a fire in the first place. Simply stated, AIDS is spread by behavior. Education can help to change behavior.

Let's look at other problems. Many countries in Africa are politically unstable. Certain tribes/countries/ethnic groups want to kill the others. They are raised to think of the "other group" (whoever that may be) as the enemy/evil/not-to-be-trusted. It has been proven that the Internet can break down borders. On a forum (including ones like this), you can have people from dozens of countries putting in their opinion. It helps people to understand their near and distant neighbors.

Finally, some countries have a culture of corruption. When aid gets sent from foreign countries, there is sometimes lots of "palm greasing" just to get the supplies to those who need them the most. And even if the supplies get there, sometimes a few guys with guns take it all away. This is "just the way things are." So, what happens if the children are educated to realize that things do not have to be that way? It is possible that in a decade or two, opinions could start to change.

This is not just about reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic. This is about changing the way that people see the world.

I do admit that this OLPC is not LIKELY to do all of that. But if it changes the life of even a few children, maybe those children will grow up to be the next president/prime minishter/grand poobah of their countries.

Re:These look great!

[cwgmpls]

1) You can't run OSX on a 400 MHz AMD processor with 128 Meg of RAM. (If you know how, please let me know!)

2) Apple would never allow an OSX laptop to retail at $300 in the U.S., which is what OLPC is doing.

3) One of the design goals of OLPC was to be totally open source, to allow third parties to tinker with it and improve the entire system at will. I don't see how OSX could be part of a purely open-source project.

Re:Hand Powered?

[Trigun]

From what I've been reading on these ones, is that the pictured ones are not crank-powered. The dynamo ones will be made available though.

Re:Freedom where art thou?

[benjjj]

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.

Software Question

[rlp]

Does it come with the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer?

Re:Freedom where art thou?

[MindStalker]

Did you even read the pledge to buy one page??

It specifically stated that it was not associated with the MIT project and that infact that MIT has specifically stated that they cannot garantee that this is even possible. BUT it was implied that given a large enough order it may be. So some guy setup a website to see if he can meet a goal of 100,000 pledges in hope that MIT will agree.

Re:Freedom where art thou?

[Fhqwhgadss]

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.

For the cheap-arsed geeks out there

[Nijika]

So we all dig these laptops for their day to day durability, and their lack of moving vital parts (HDDs), and their portability, and their flexability.

And we all want one for $100, and we'd all gladly pay up to $400 for one. I've got a PowerBook, and I'd still love one. I wouldn't have to worry about it, but it would be really handy.

This may indicate a market for such a device. Not a PDA, not a full-on "outfitted for war" laptop, not a (god damned useless) e-reader, not a handheld gaming rig, but the space between.

This is the space for essentialy a portable, truly open device that will let us surf the web, and run shells, and edit text files or to-do lists, but that won't break us financially if it's snatched from us on the subway.

MIT is showing us the market, and they're refusing to compete! Why have none of us embraced this yet?

My formula would be a Gumstix and an eInk display, maybe? Anyone have any better ideas?

BSD

[Catskul]

In that red/orange color and with those ears/horns, it kina makes me think it should be running bsd.

It amazes me too

[SmallFurryCreature]

How people like you keep not getting it.

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?