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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."
From Negroponte's address in TFA:
Negroponte then went on to say:
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I know it's meant for children, but damn that thing screams Fisher-Price ugliness!
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.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I'm sure what these starving, malnourished children across the third world will enjoy trying to eat these plastic and metal monstrosities.
Seriously, aren't bright reds and oranges supposed to make you a little nuts if you're surrounded by them too much? The orange would make me ill after a while. Are we trying to make the users hyper-active or something?
Everything else is great, but PLEASE TONE DOWN THE COLOR.
This will all be worthwhile when we have first African child get first post on Slashdot (and then gets modded down. Welcome to the interweb, n00b!).
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Also, does it offer USB or a built-in way to control a mouse pointer? I didn't see one in the photo I saw but I got to figure there's a way if they're using a windowed GUI...
I was there at the event and got to try it after Nick spoke. It is definitely not a toy. He said people might be able to buy one in the U.S. next year (paying double so half could buy a kid in another country one). It was very light and the screen (which has two modes) was really nice (1200 x 900). The orange plastic was cool and the little rabbit ears (looked almost like devil horns) move freely to get optimal wi-mesh signal. It's definitely Fedora, but is "skinny" as it has been modified somewhat.
The specs?
500 Mhz chip
128 MB RAM
512 MB Flash Memory
what? this isn't what it was supposed to look like! Where's the 3D holographic interface?
I thought is was to reduce the desireability for theft.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
>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.
So in other words, a global pandemic of people who don't know how to RTFM.
I thought in initial designs this thing was supposed to have a hand crank to generate power for people in areas with no electicity. Is it gone or is it tucked away somewhere in the laptop and wasn't be shown in the pictures?
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
I say congrats to the MIT team for making this possible. They deserve our support.
So this is not a toy, and I believe it. But why make it look like a toy? And a very ugly toy, at that?
It's cute! It's almost kitsch!
It'll be a hit with the /. crowd which will drive up the price through demand.
Heck, I already want one for the kitchen!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's the page where you can pledge to buy one for triple the price, donating the other two.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
How long before we find these on eBay for $200? Money and food probably means a lot more to many of these people's immediate needs then a laptop for their child.
Does anybody else think the demo model resembles a Speak & Spell, with its bright orange color and its handle? :)
All your sig are belong to us.
If you, you know, live in poverty, you probably don't care about the stylishness that much. Also, if you live in, say, Africa, you probably have gotten used to the color orange.
FUCK the new layout
FUCK YOU slashdot
im out
Niggers don't need Laptops they need plantations. What the fuck are Niggers going to do with laptops? Maybe use them as toilet seats. They need the whip, not technology.
and it's better (and cheaper) than the obvious alternative...
Actually, now that you mention it, Ubuntu would be a perfect fit for this machine just because of the color scheme.
I love Ubuntu, but I hate the colors.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
tell that to the people who live in the projects who drive escalades on 20's
... so that by age 18 they can change their professional name to "Bob" and tell Americans weaned on PlayStations that "WiFi connections do not involve 'gremlins,' sir;" "any software company offering free pornography for each install probably should not be trusted" and "there is no 'feng shui' component on your iPod, and if there were it would not be defective, and if it were defective then no, it would not be covered by AppleCare."
Yay capitalism ;->
Actually, I've heard that orange is on average one of the most annoying colors for human beings. For instance, a room with orange painted walls would drive you nuts sooner than Russian pop music.
Totally with you there. My first thought upon seeing the pics just now was "What, was this funded in part by Ronald McDonald??"
Software is like a goldfish - it'll grow to fit the size of it's bowl...
I'm assuming this is a joke. It is in very poor taste. Grow up,
you're not shocking anyone.
I guess I would buy one myself, even when I'm not a child left behind. ;-)
Weren't there plans to create one for the western market too? Even an ugly laptop would be worthwhile, for such a low price. But it shouldn't go above 200 euros', otherwise they will just create a black market where 3th world countries (at least, their citizens) will sell it back to rich western dudes.
Ah, well, give it a black color, and put in something which doesn't need the crank always to power it up, and for 100 euros, you have a nice little inexpensive thing for doing minor stuff on, or for your kids to play around with...
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Sorry ... forgot to mention this crappy mathematics philosophy is called Everyday Math
Seriously, aren't bright reds and oranges supposed to make you a little nuts if you're surrounded by them too much?
Not really. Colors have different effects depending upon the culture. For example, Americans tend to associate orange with hunger, but in the far East it is considered soothing. Some colors do have cross-cultural implications, like splatters of red increasing blood pressure and stress, but those are usually less prominent. Offering a variety of colors provides options for different regions.
"you're not shocking anyone."
Says Mr Dildo.
I quit!
Oh that's right. $800 back in 1997. By Moore's law, that should be about $25 now. So with a color screen, USB, and wireless, $100 isn't bad. Lost the touchscreen though. :-(
You said you could get it done..more than half the world did not believe you. You have got it delivered within such a short span. Its sheer brilliance compared to certain companies promising certain products and the timelines getting forwarded by years. I remember a specific company doing that about a product called Vista :)
Speaking about the OS, great that it uses fedora core.. Open Source for a Good Cause. Way to Go.
BTW, fire the designer for that orangey look..uh..wait..may be this might catch on like the old ibook..keep him for the timebeing.
"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..."
As a future warning for Fedora community, expect sudden jump in n00b questions in several different languages. Also keep in mine that those n00bs are mostly children. Please refer "RTFM" as "Read The Fine Manual" and "STFU" as "Stop Talking Fast, User".
And most importantly, every time you use "LOL" and "ROTFL" and "LMAO", just remember; You are laughing with them, not at them.
Thank you,
concern citizen from Softer Gentler Linux community
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I was responding to a racist and immature post that was removed. Now that it is removed, my post makes no sense.
I don't mind now that the post is gone.
This has been addressed many times.
Yes, kids need water, food, vaccinations, a place to sleep, and if they and their communities are to be successful and self-supporting an education also.
Is a $100 laptop extravagant for supporting an education? No,because it's multipurpose tool offering information, tutorials, communications, and soon after distribution locally built & relevant applications. By offering these kids access to the larger world, to an education in their own language, to contribute and distribute materials, it gives they, and their communities, opportunities to break their cycle of poverty.
It's not an either/or proposition between food and education, BOTH are needed, one fills the short-term need and the other the long-term.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Notice how the screen stays frozen on that one calulator app with the window open in the background? They seemed to be keeping everyone from actually USING the device.
"Oh look! The screen turns!"
I'd like to see how fast it boots; what the email looks like; what the networking prefs look like...
*sigh*
JB
this point. He said they never necessarily assumed it would be precisely sub-$100 - rather the media picked that idea up and ran with it like crazy. He also went on to say that it will cost what it costs when it gets built, and there is little they can do to impact the precise dollar amount once down into the $100 range. He does however expect the price to fall as they build more and more - and eventually he expects the range to be closer to $50.
So there :-)
Will this laptop will be shipping with a Vista compatible sticker? How about the lowest version? Maybe M$ could make a $100 version especially for this laptop. :D
Excuse me, but aren't those people starving because they don't have jobs and education?
I have the impression that your idea of third world country is one with overpopulated towns filled with beggars. Seriously, you need to visit South America once in a while.
I have strange feeling that this laptop will be more popular in western world than in developing countries. I, for one, will definately buy it, just have a nice new gadget. $100 is cheap for any gadget.
:)
But hey! I have an idea. Let's make the price $200 in western world and each computer that we buy, will give one for free to someone in developing countries! $200 isn't much for a working computer. Plus, atleast for once, you get a good feeling for buying something that you don't really need
Wait, I thought the US computer makers said a $100 laptop was impossible. 8 months later, it's done.
But then, IBM said it was impossible to keep its HD and PC businesses before selling them to Hitachi and Lenovo. Those companies are making big profits continuing the business.
Making money and new products when you're positioned at the top of the computer business is now so easy that it's looped all the way around from "impossible" to "inevitable".
--
make install -not war
Ditto.
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?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
If they let kids access the shell and hack away... I fully support the laptop initiative. If the idea is that kids will run board-approved educational software... this is a complete waste of time.
The suppliers of educational material are inept. My kid doesn't want a toy cell phone, he wants to play with a real one. He doesn't want a heavily restricted laptop, he wants a real one... not that Leap educational laptop-shaped abomination.
If these units are regular Linux laptops, a bit light on the hardware specs, you can use them for almost anything... albeit, light processing load. I can't help but suspect that the powers that be will restrict the heck out of these units, all in the name of "saving the children" from **fill in the blank here**.
Kids should be encouraged to code, explore, and exploit these units to their fullest potential... otherwise... these are just expensive books that will display the same mass produced content. The calculator app... awesome. Now kids with laptops don't need to learn how to add or subtract in their head. I'd much rather they let kids use calculators, if they write one themselves. When a kid graduates, he/she'd be able to take the self-made "tools" with them.
But no... these will probably be only slightly more useful than the Apple-II's, Logo, and Oregon Trail in my elementary school's computer lab. I got yelled at whenever I started coding in Basic. I can only hope the same won't happen here... that this seemingly good idea will be executed intelligently... not being restricted to book distribution and "approved" web page browsing.
For example, Americans tend to associate orange with hunger ...
I'm curious as to why. Care to explain?
I'm an American, and the only thing I can think of is Ronald McD's hair. Doesn't make me hungry at all.
Oh, you're speaking of the laptops. I thought you were speaking about Slashdot.
Nick said that by making them look very distinctive that it would reduce the "gray market". Everyone would recognize it as a child's free laptop and as Nick said, if an adult had one, you knew it had been sold or stolen. He gave the example that people don't steal U.S. Mail trucks because they are ugly and distinctive looking, even though other vans and trucks are stolen all the time.
How many people from developing country's could afford $100 US?? Yes the software initially has a zero cost, but why charge people over 1 years wages for crap (and ugly) hardware. If you put the hardware under a free license that gave the local industries the ability to make their own free hardware and software then I would think this would be a good idea. If you think "RMS free" software is a good thing then you should thing that "free" hardware is also good.
Yay, now that Nigerian prince can email me directly!
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
It certainly does, and if you were paying any attention you'd find lots of organizations devoting to addressing those immediate needs.
OTOH, if they don't deal with the longer-term needs of education and economic development -- both of which dirt cheap, mass-produced computers that are nearly universally available can help with -- those underlying problem driving those "immediate needs" that are temporarily alleviated by cash and food will simply worsen, and more cash and more food will be required to acheive the same results.
Fedora, right?
Can anyone tell if that's a Windows key on the keyboard?
To me, "Fisher-Price ugliness" is an oxymoron.
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004543.html
I found this bit fascinating:
As always with laptops of any brand, the most important thing which also happens to be the one which is different in every model - the keyboard layout - is unknown, and it seems impossible to find a straight picture of it.
What are you suposed to do with a laptop? Well, type on the keyboard, no? So the accessibility and position of cursor keys, Home/End, Page-Up/Down, Backspace/Delete etc. are important. I want to know where they are and make sure there are 8 cursor keys, not 4. Even if the laptop is only $100 or $130.
And does it have an Alt-Gr key, or are you expected to only ever write in English on it?
Great! He's got one booting!
Now what does it actually DO, besides impress Linux fans?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
damn that thing screams Fisher-Price ugliness!
;-)
Rumour has it that the physical design came about because they were originally considering Windows XP as the OS platform and thought it would be best if the hardware and software were "visually integrated"
I think this is an excellent project, but the silly cover "ears" must go! They will be the first thing to break off. Maybe if they slid down into the cover...? My 0.5 cents worth.
Also, please try to use correct spelling and grammar (where practical, and excluding 1337-sp33k), as a good example to impressionable young minds.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
The project organizers never intended it to be bought *by* the students. It is intended to be bought *for* them, by charities, governments, aid organizations, and so on.
When did you get a guy named "Bob" or "Mike" to say anything that even remotely resembles that? Usually my conversations with them go something like this: "Okay, is the power light on?" "No, the thing won't power on." "Okay, please unplug the power for 30 seconds. (waits 30 seconds in complete silence. I swear they teach them not to BREATHE over there!)" "(Thinking I already did this) Yeah okay, that didn't work." "Okay. (silence)" "Can I have an RMA number now?"
Uhm... I believe that Apple already did this 10 years ago. Again, ahead of their time.
And how is that different from long division the way we learned it, exactly?
Lets say you're trying to devide 123 into 24723. If you're doing
long division, you write:
_______
123 / 24723
and then you guess where to put a number above the line. You
put a 2 above the 7, and you write 24600 underneath -- what you've
just done is guessed 200 and found that 24600 is too small,
and that 300 (36900) would be too big.
Next having established that in long division the way we learned it
you subtract out the 24600 part, and work on the rest. But that's
just bookeeping to establish that we have a guess on the digits so
far...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
What a rant. Pay attention. Sheesh
Um, it's not so ugly. Colors and case design can be cleaned up in the design lab. that's easy to fix.
The screen could be larger, but who's really happy with anything less than 17"?
And is that the mother of all touchpads below the keyboard? woof!
Seriously, if this were in some pastel or benign colors, and a little slicker design, I'd hit it. I'd pay $300 or so if it were marginally powerful.
There is a market out there for simple. Of course, here I am waiting for Conroe or better, and plotting to saddle my wife with a Mac Intel Mini...
Never satisfied.
rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I can Google and order food off the internet with my laptop, but I can't afford it because I have NO MONEY.
As I have said before, improve the infrastructure of most third world countries so that every citizen has access to food, clothing, shelter, clean water and medicine, then I will support the idea that children in these countries need a computer.
Children need to eat before they need to learn! MIT doesn't seem to think this is necessary, they even developed a computer that will kill off a child starving of faminie more quickly by forcing them to have to use up what little energy they have to wind their computer up. I think this will be used as a form of genocide. Don't worry about sending in the Red Cross, just air drop cheap laptops, that will take care of all those poor starving children!
Sorry, this will be a gimmick product that will sell well in developed countries but I don't believe for a second they will improve the life of third world children.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It offers 3 USB ports and there is an oversized mouse touchpad below the keyboard (a bit hard to see)
There's already lots of education in Africa supplied by organizations like the Peace Corp and churches. Trouble is, it's targetted at the best and brightest children, who, after they do well in school, tend to leave and never come back. What 3rd world countries need is broad education that includes adults. The networking aspects of this machine could help with that. The children could be less likely to leave if they are in constant contact with their peers, learning from and teaching them and their parents. Imagine, distributed schools. Imagine a beowulf cluster of them. (:-)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
"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."
Training the 1337_h4xx0rz of tomorrow, starting with the children of today. Way to go, team.
Who else is reminded of the really old home PCs from the 1980's that you could program and whatnot that got kids learning to code way back when? Not that this is a bad thing, I think it's great. Just saying.
No explanation, but I've heard this many times. Supposidly that's why many fast food chains use orange in their colors (burger king, hardees, etc)
Those specs arn't much worse than the old hand-me-down laptop I use when I'm on the road. I would like to buy one of these to replace my current laptop when it dies.
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
Actually, now that you mention it, Ubuntu would be a perfect fit for this machine just because of the color scheme.
Actually Edubuntu would be better, and it has a Green and Orange/Red color scheme.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
I thought his hair was red?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Kofi Annan broke it off when he tried the demo model he was shown. But that got them to thinking that kids just don't have enough arm/hand strength to generate enough power. There's a reason why kids bikes have backpedal brakes rather than handbreaks. You're more likely to see some sort of foot power.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
GREAT! :(
That's just what we need, some dude in the middle of a jungle or deep in a desert controlling tens of thousands of zombie windoze boxes.....
LOL (It's a joke..you may now laugh!)
I don't even begin to think of it in those terms. I divide 24723 by 123.
I don't write 24600, I write 246, subtract and then bring down the two to yield 12
I see that 12 is smaller than 123 so I write a 0 up top and bring down the 3.
... or it doubles as a personal floatation device.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
1: Dump the desktop metaphor.
2: Get rid of menu bars, status bars, process bars, window borders, titles etc.
3: Go full screen for every application
Unfortunately we're still getting portable machines, handhelds, pdas with very limited screen real estate ridiculously cluttered by windows, borders, menus, button bars, status bars. Qtopia for instance is a pain in the arse because of this.
Deleted
I'm curious as to why. Care to explain?
I'm not sure why it is and I doubt anyone else does either. Most of the research has been done for practical reasons. What color do restaurants want to paint? I remember orange, yellow, and red were all winners, while blue and to a lesser extend purple were not. Given the same food, with different, tasteless dyes people generally preferred to the taste of and to eat more food if it was orange and disliked blue. Ever notice that hospitals in the US tend to use a lot of green and hotels a lot of beige? Green hides blood almost as well as red, but does not cause raised blood pressure or stress. Beige tends to calm people, sometimes even making them sleepy.
If you're interested, there are numerous books on the psychology of color. Most of the research you'll find tends to be most applicable to America, with some surprisingly different results for the same sort of tests in Europe and Asia.
I thought I hit preview, but it submitted it. However with this post, it's been doing preview eash time, so bleh!
I was at this demo, and got to use the OLPC. Negroponte related an extremely funny anecdote. He described a conversation with a flatscreen vendor that went something like this:
NN: "We need to buy some small, 640x480 LCD screens 6" across. They can have poor color consistency and even a few bad pixels".
FSV: "I'm sorry, we're focused on 50" screens with 10,000:1 contrast, perfect color consistency, and no bad pixels".
NN: "We need 100,000,000 of them".
FSV: ".......oh......."
As a side note, this unit was *fantastic*. Say what you will about the look -- in person, the thing was a work of art. It had the weight of a paperback book.
India's middle class is larger than the entire US population. I've been to my friend's house in Mumbai. He has an apartment on the third floor of a coop. It's not large by US standards; five rooms (LR, BR, BR, K, Bath), but it's well appointed. No question that they'd want a laptop for little Siddhartha. He's probably just getting old enough to play games on it.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Thief makes off with case of laptops
Thief: Ha ha! I'll eat like a king for..
opens box, throws contents away in disgust
Thief: oh man, these things are so GAY! Back to square one.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Whats the problem with man pages ?
Get help on a certain subject by just typing two words.
Please tell me the OS with an easier to use help system ?
I would be incredibly impressed if tech support were this good. I really would be. Anyone who can speak that coherently and actually seems to know what they're talking about deserves a technical support position. Judging by the dialogue you just wrote, any technical support personell with those kinds of speaking skills would be better suited for the job than about 99% of all technical support personell I've had the displeasure of speaking with in my lifetime.
As for the gremlins, everyone knows that gremlins are too busy screwing up airplanes to sit down and take the time to hack into a WiFi mesh network. At least, I hope everyone knows that.
You don't understand. Governments will be buying these for the kids, not taxpayers!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
isn't always based on one's ability you will see many who should never have gotten in.
You do realize that a good number of kids in colleges today didn't necessarily get there on their academic credentials don't you?
The same idea that is being proposed for children across the world, and for adults as well, with this low end laptop could go a long way in pre-elementary schools across the nation. It would also be interesting to see what children in 1st through 3rd grade make of them as well. That is the one thing that always hit me wrong about this laptop. It needs to be aimed at children in developed countries even more than undeveloped countries. Creativity and curiosity is boundless in children and should be encouraged everywhere and everytime it can.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"Guess and check" is common in more advanced algorithms, from Newton's method in high school calculus to non-linear lifting-line theory in undergraduate aerodynamics. One could argue that "guess and check" underlies the field of genetic algorithms. It may seem crude, but interation through semi-random solutions can produce accurate results more quickly than other methods in many cases. Particularly in engineering, the quality of the final result is often more important than the solution method's elegance.
Would the color really matter if you could resell it for a month's worth of food?
Naturally kids and adults need to eat enough food to be well. Then kids and adults would not have destoyed immune systems - and wouldn't come down with ever dis-ease possible. There is more than enough food to feed ever person on this planet. But, the self apponted elite - the Rich, who control the flow of food on this planet - are not the least bit interested in feeding people. In fact they are interested in the reverse - destabilization. Keeps the price of oil/gasoline up!
The $100 communication/learning tool can be a way out for Africans. Not the only tool needed; but, one of the tools needed. An "internet system" is part of the $100 laptop notion. With a well developed "Peer Interdependent Learning" systems approach - people can quickly learn rapidly. An example of a simple outcome:
a) The farmer's kids will then get weather reports via the internet to assist in planting of crops etc.
b) They can also get info via the internet on drought resistant seeds - if need be.
c) They can find out the market price for their crops in the nearest big city via the internet to see if the middle men are screwing them finacially.
Etc.
Just look at the map
Interest seems worldwide.
No problem, the system libraries and development environment is the same as any standard linux distro, just learn to make fast and efficient applications and teach yourself to package RPMs
Nicholas Negroponte, unvelied a working model [CC] [GC] of their $100 laptop
I don't know what that word means, but it sounds painful.
I've heard that these colour effects motivate not just the outside colours of your typical fast food place (McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy's all use reds/oranges/yellows), but also the inside colours (often light blue/green). I've heard that they use the "hungry" colours on their exterior and on their menus, so you get hungry, come in and order lots, then they use "non-hungry" colours in the seating areas to encourage you to leave (since they've already got your money by the time you're sitting down).
:)
Of course, they could also be using the light greenish colours to hide blood.
Is it just me, or does this laptop remind anyone else of the short-lived Apple eMate? In fact it seems to me that the concept of the computer was lifted from Apple. Gaudy colors, slimmed down OS and functionality, built rugged for students. Obviously the tech in the machine is a decade newer and as such likely significantly more powerful, but the same principles apply, low power footprint, small screen, readable outdoors.
s tats/emate_300.html
Outside of some modernization of the concept and technologies can someone show me what this device does that the eMate didn't? The eMate even lasted up to 28 hours on a single charge. I don't want to discount what MIT Media Labs has accomplished, but it looks to me like another rip-off of Apple technology.
Here is a link to a picture and the specs of an Apple eMate 300.
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/messagepad/
It gets on the web, from day one. The laptops self-configure into a mesh, and they are working on deals with indigenous ISPs to provide free internet access for OLPC laptops. Once you've done that, you have the world at your fingertips.
"they'd be dependant on us forever"
You are joking here aren't you? Who is dependent on who! African slaves built the entire U.S.A. economy, the entire USA industrial infrastructure, created all of the old wealth - that exists today.The slaves built Europe as well.
And at the same time, the idiots in the fast food burger industry in the USA decided it needed more cheap beef for the super sized burgers. The idiots went to Somalia and convinced the waring factions that they could buy more guns and rocket launchers if they switched from traditional crops to beef grazing. They switched, produced beef - got more guns - which were then used to kill USA Marines! What happened next? The cattle overgrazed - which resulted in a "dust bowl" - no grains to feed cattle - no cattle. Naturally no traditional crops to feed people = starvation.
The USA and other western countries as well as Muslim countries owe countless trillions to the starving Africans for enslavement and for stealing resources from African over several hundred years. It's payback time.
Changes mind, takes out a can of white spray paint, sprays it
Theif: Now that is better, next I will just put a Apple decal on it and sell it to suckers for $1099+!
Yes, but will they have Tux Paint installed by default? ;^)
Aonymous Coward is leaving? He's our most brilliant and prolific member! Please don't go. We'll change it back.
There's definitely a place for teaching kids how to find the answers, but the current educational model sometimes focuses too much on that and leaves any instruction in actual facts completely out. (I was a teacher, so I know whereof I speak)
As an example, basic math facts (multiplication and division of single digit integers) should be memorized. If you commit 5 x 5 to memory, the next time that you come across a math problem that entails this multiplication, you won't have to "discover" that 5 x 5 = 25.
"Discovery" is the current hot fad these days, but there are some things that either aren't easily discovered, or where the process of discovery doesn't make sense.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I say let the profits generated by the initial consumer demand (which should be white hot) be used by the OLPC group and not some ebay sharks*.
* ebay sharks: buy low and sell high on consumer demand. Evil = no. Legal = yes. Moral = yes. I just want OLPC to beat the sharks on this one.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
What? Oh... you typed most of the first sentence in the subject line. I bet you do that with your emails to.
Has an actual breakdown of manufacturing costs been made public yet or are we all just assuming the numbers the Media Lab is coming up with are realistic? As an engineering student I can easily see the situation where they're costing the parts out and say "this keyboard costs a total of $20 in parts to produce now, I guess it'll cost $10 when production really ramps up and forget about labor since it'll be robotic." If they do actually make their price point what will the quality of the units be? They don't have any budget at all to throw into good materials or quality assurance, both enormous costs.
If I could ask Mr. Negroponte one question it would be: How long do you expect one of these laptops to function? I've seen some amazingly cheap things come out of Chinese factories but few of them have been worth the price paid.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Why are we calling college students children? Why, why why?
Or, for that matter, high school students. They're young adults. Not children.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The laptop works, bleh! Nobody ever doubted that one could build an orange laptop. The question is if one can build a usable laptop today for less than $100. So far all he has produced is a model produced at a cost of tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even at mass production rates, the cost of the LCD alone remains over $100. Yes, by the cost will go down with time, but by that measure you can already buy my original Toshiba laptop today for less than $100, or even my original IBM PC/AT for $30.
Everything I've seen about Lenovo the last few months says they lost over $100 million the first quarter of calendar year 2006 and are facing a tough market in China and North America.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
... why everybody's so infatuated with this project. It's not because it will benefit millions of third-world children, though that's a definite plus. It's that we're all so sick of the bloated, power sucking laptops we use now.
..."moo!" The Windows user says, "Linux? The Mac user says, "I wish it cost more so I could feel special!" The Linux user says, "C'mon, guys...it's got Linux!" And the kids say, "Hooray! Myspace.com...here I come! Woo hoo!"
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Nooooooooooo
s p
"We are also talking to Microsoft. They're going to make a Windows CE version" for the machine, Negroponte said. "We're going to help them make a Win CE version, so geez, why criticize me?"
from
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945984,00.a
As a small child I used to play with my mother's old pedal sewing machine, and it could deliver a surprising amount of mechanical power with little apparent effort. Also many years ago a remote area education program was carried out using pedal radios in my country with a great deal of success. The School of the Air in Australia is still going, but electricity is much less scarce in remote areas now so the pedals are not used anymore.
I thought I read that they were going to be sold in the US, etc. for $300, the extra $200 going to donate more to the third-world kids. ------- 100% genuine handmade sig.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Beowulf cluster anyone?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Or is there another kind of Russian Pop music?
"Gratuitous complexity is akin to chaos" - True Vox
will a cracked black market copy of Windows Vista run on it?
Oh well, what the hell...
In addition to the color, the designers wisely chose to equip the laptop with only a small flash drive, in order to deter theft by adults and teenagers who have no use for a computer that can't store a decent collection of porn.
I put it up on the internet at: http://wcitvideo.com/?p=16 Full 28 minute keynote of the One Laptop Per Child chairman at the WCIT in Austin texas last month.
Am I the only one who thinks this thing looks like a TI Speak&Spell?
p e5.jpg = en&q=speak'n'spell&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
http://www.antiquetech.com/pictures%20thumbnail/w
http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- Voltaire
I guess he faded in the sun. I'm colorblind anyway, dammit.
Orange is not appetizing, except for a real orange. That's why they call it an orange -- everything else is just a cheap fake.