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Working Model of MIT $100 Laptop a Hit
capt turnpike writes "The One Laptop per Child association and its chairman, MIT Media Labs's Nicholas Negroponte, unvelied a working model of their $100 laptop at the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX) show, and the little laptop that might was a hit. It's got a version of Fedora Linux, is rugged, and each unit will work as part of a wireless mesh automatically. From the article: "However, as Negroponte put it in his address, One Laptop per Child isn't all about the laptops. The main goal is to tap into the ability of every child to toss away a manual and figure out how to make gadgets work on their own, thus helping children help themselves to learn." eWEEK.com also has photos."
Isn't that the $130 laptop? Or did they manage to bring the cost back down?
This isn't trolling or anything, I am still in American public schooling (public uni.), and this quote struck me as odd.
The main goal is to tap into the ability of every child to toss away a manual and figure out how to make gadgets work on their own, thus helping children help themselves to learn.
I'm in an engineering degree, and I'm shocked at the lack of this ability in college students at american schools! I'm tickled by the fact that we're so set on helping foreign education, when our own educational system is in dire need of....some bloody education.
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As another commenter noted in the previous slashdot article, the colors are also a deterrent for potential theives stealing laptops from kids. Anyone who looks older than 18 and is carrying a fisher-price laptop probably stole it from a kid. Easy way to spot.
Yes, because we all know that all third-world countries shouldn't be provided with anything that would help their economies move forward. Instead, they should only receive insufficient food handouts, remaining in their impoverished third-world states forever.
I've heard it described as the technology gap will, and has already started to push the first and third worlds further apart. More importantly, it is becoming ever more difficult to improve the living conditions and economies as this gap widens.
This device and plan, if it can be pulled off, could be the single most import thing in helping third world populations on a large scale over the long term.
It's not the technology itself, per say, but the communications that it enables. Getting cell phones into places is a similar type of project. Things as simple as finding the market price of lets say rice, can apparently make big diferences in building economies.
Soccer Goal Plans
Not everything is about the very bottom of the impoverished ladder.
This is for children that have overcome the daily quest for food.
Why do people insist on thinking this is for children that dont have any food and live in ditches.
Not every poor person falls into that category.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
No you are thinking of the western POV. You believe that Africa has one class of people, dirt poor, barely surviving and in a constant struggle for food and shelter.
In reality this isnt focused at those people, but rather the ones that have overcome that daily struggle and have what is considered a decent live there, education is the next goal for them.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Typically, people starve in the third world because they lack the skills and/or resources to provide anything to the global economy that can be exchanged for food, and because the subsistence agriculture that they do have the skill to do is inherently risky, threatened by pollution and climate shifts, and often not the way that the people in power can make the most money; further the crop failures are as often the result of bad agricultural methods as they are by actual drought.
Enhancing education helps deal with the underlying problems that cause starvation. OLPC is certainly neither the whole solution, nor the component most related to short-term needs. But there are lots of other groups involved in addression the problems of the developing world, and pissing on OLPC because it doesn't address all the problems, or the one piece you think is most immediate, is idiotic.
The people doing OLPC aren't hurting the efforts of organizations like the Red Cross or Food for the Poor. Indeed, it seems to me like it goes hand-in-hand with the efforts of small business development and microcredit in the third world that have demonstrated that building economic capacity by providing basic assistance aimed at enabling individual productivity can have considerable effects in dealing with the crushing poverty that produces hunger.
This is, really, about helping developing societies develope more of the tools they need -- in terms of human capital -- to feed themselves.
[quote]I know schools here in the US who can't even put a computer on the desk of any of the kids; many share 5 crummy machines between two (or more) classes. There are many places here that could use these things; I don't understand why there is no interest in marketing them right here. It seems like having electronic books would be cheaper/easier too [/quote]
Forgive me for saying this, but:
b/c those same kids have PSP's, Ipods and cell phones... If their parents wont buy them a computer why should the public give them one for free.
The other big thing I see here is a screen that works under sunlight. Why can't I have that on my $3500 Thinkpad?
For the fifty millionth time, not all of them are starving! This isn't for the kids you see on the adopt-a-child commercials, this is for the semi-stable states that would hopefully, through the education of its children, begin modernizing and bring wealth, prosperity, education, and infrastructure to the entire region. If, say, 7 African nations were truly on their way to becoming first world nations, imagine how it would affect their neighbours.
If all we did was feed starving people, they'd be dependant on us forever, and would have rampant overpopulation and disease. By educating the parts of the continent that is slightly better off, they can help themselves, and then help their neighbours help themselves.
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