India Hopes to Make $10 Laptops a Reality

sas-dot writes "We all know Nicholas Negroponte's $100 OLPC. India, which was a potential market, rejected it. India's Human Resources Development ministry's idea to make laptops at $10 is firmly taking shape with two designs already in and public sector undertaking Semiconductor Complex evincing interest to be a part of the project. So far, the cost of one laptop, after factoring in labor charges, is coming to $47 but the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops."

Comments

I must be living in a story book..

[QuantumG]

Umm.. I never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor.

What a strange time we live in.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[kallu_be]

I don't think it will happen anytime soon. Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Paradise Pete]

Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$.

The article doesn't actually say it will be a computer. Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[EoN604]

The article doesn't actually say it will be a computer. Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something. Pff. 'wood'. Look at me, I'm making people Happy! I'm the magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane! Try cardboard. At best.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[JavaIsGreat]

Which Calculator, CASIO is Japanese company. Local calculators are not costly.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Holmwood]

It's the nature of human beings to compete for things. Be they worthwhile or somewhat reprehensible.

Moreover even evil capitalists like at least the idea of doing good.

I don't find it at all surprising that there'd be competition to address this need. I find it somewhat surprising that it took so long.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[QuantumG]

I find it somewhat surprising that it took so long. Yeah.. that's what I was refering to.

Hey everybody, let's all pool our money and buy a cape for Capt'n Obvious over here.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[PlanetaryAC]

It's not competition, it's nationalistic pride.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[demon driver]

never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor You won't - unless there's some major profit in it. The whole OLPC thing - even if they'd really sell the pieces covering only production costs - is about developing new markets.

Moreover, supplying laptops does not really equal "supplying education". Millions of laptops won't do any good if no huge amounts are being invested in the concerned countries' educational systems at the same time, in order to even be able to make reasonable educational use of the equipment.

This whole thing is one of the prototypical cases of industry making big business while successfully showing a friendly face, pretending pure philanthropy at the same time.

Like Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who even got the Nobel Prize for making money from copious adhesion contracts with the Indian poor, while using them to impose ridiculously far-reaching constrictions on their private life.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

Watch "Born Into Brothels", and see just how much India is trying to do for the poor and unpriveliged. I could be wrong, but I think that India is the country with the starkest difference between the amount of wealth and the amount of adject poverty.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[shutdown -p now]

I don't think it will happen anytime soon. Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$).

Are these calculators made in India?

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not education they're supplying, that's consumer training.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[QuantumG]

The whole OLPC thing - even if they'd really sell the pieces covering only production costs - is about developing new markets. That's an unfair slur and you should be ashamed of yourself.

Go do some research.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[hihihihi]

... Like Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank who ... Indian poor ...

Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank is from Bangladesh, not India!!! and seriosly speaking (though I have no idea about that Bank and its working) I have no clue from where you got the rest of the facts about it, care to cite some links???

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[kallu_be]

Some of them, but only a few people buys those. Normally people prefer to buy casio or TI calculators.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[demon driver]

That's an unfair slur and you should be ashamed of yourself. Sorry, I forgot not properly worshipping the heroes of computer technology goes as sacrilege in some circles.

Go do some research. Like reading press releases of involved individuals and companies?

Interestingly, you didn't comment on the laptop != education part at all.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

well I guess you ain't one of the rich :)) how in the world do you think money is made??? I'm gonna tell you.. by being generous! You have to think of what people like/want/need invest in it and them implement it.. money comes always if you care about what others want.. unless you do this you'll always be poor and talk about "industry making big business while successfully showing a friendly face, pretending pure philanthropy at the same time"
Some evolve, the rest comment and "get evolved" by those.
I don't know if your mind has the openess to absorb this info.. if it does.. you're welcome ;)
I won't say you're not partially right though (adds infection, corruption etc).. but try to see it as well from that point of view.

Bogdan
http://www.bluemind-software.com/

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[QuantumG]

If your research is really limited to press releases then I'm not surprised you are so ignorant.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[demon driver]

Bank is from Bangladesh, not India!!! Well, Grameen "has been working for over six years to support the microfinance sector in India"". Of course you're right, though, that it is based in Bangladesh, and AFAI now R the prize was primarily won for their efforts there. My mistake.

I'm citing what I kept in mind from going through lots of reports and discussions after Yunus being awarded. Even though most of the reports were overall praising, some of them showed some details about what the microcredit business is about. Yunus himself, BTW, pointed out he did not see himself as benefactor but rather as businessman, which I do not take to be meant as a show of modesty.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Dogtanian]

The article doesn't actually say it will be a computer. Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something. No... I've just figured out how they're going to build a laptop for $10. Here's the P-P-P-Prototype!!!

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[demon driver]

If your research is really limited to press releases then I'm not surprised you are so ignorant. Sorry, but if your reading skills were more pronounced (or your reasoning less disingenuous), you would have seen that "limited to press releases" was referring to your suggestion for "research", not really allowing inferences to my actual research.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Secrity]

$15 scientific calculators are not costly.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[demon driver]

Surely your "partially right" as well ;) - it's not quite that simple, though. Take monopolies - if you get big enough as an industrial player, and if there are enough people in a way forced to rely on your products, you can more and more sell them whatever you want and demand prices you like. No more really thinking about what people want/need, let alone being "generous". Moreover, there usually is no use for businesses to be generous especially to the poor, since there's no money to be made there. That's one of the reasons why even in the 21st century the poor tend to either stay poor or get even poorer - more and more also within in the industrialized, "rich" western countries.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[sid0]

The Indian ones are usually quite shoddily built. I remember one, retailing for around Rs 200, in which the left parenthesis key didn't work. The general feel was quite clunky. Complex operations like integration took a hell of a lot more time on it.

I'll stick with Casio, thank you.

As someone below has pointed out, the Human Resources Development ministry hasn't put out one thing of technological repute. This laptop will probably be as bad as that calculator -- if it isn't really a wooden block, that is. After all, anything that can be placed on top of your lap could possibly be called a laptop.

They should have gone for the OLPC laptops and called it a day. It would have saved a lot more money in R&D.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[hihihihi]

thanks for the information, i really did'nt knew about its operations in India.

regards.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[mrbluze]

They could of course make a laptop for $10 in the event of a massive rise in the value of the US dollar, say, ten times.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[amchugh]

Brazil is surely in the running.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Hal_Porter]

Hey there sparky! The good ole' US of A is doing it's best. Brazil and India shouldn't count it out just yet.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[cHALiTO]

Yeah, god forbid they actually try and go around building their own tools, or *gasp* even maybe gain some experience in the field!! ZOMG! what are they thinking?? I mean, after all its INDIA, right? like they live in huts and are just now discovering 'electricity'!

"Made in Japan" didn't mean much for quality right after WW2 either, you know. Look at them now. That doesn't mean India is going to pull it off, but sure as hell they should try, and that would be FAR more helpful for poor indian kids and their families than the laptops themselves.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[lambini]

What would the function be for a 10$ child computer? Push the button next to the image of the animal to learn what sound it makes......moooooooooh

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[yada21]

Like that will ever happen. Well it might, if we retutrn to the gold standard.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[sid0]

Actually, I AM an Indian. I live in India, and I have as much faith in the government as an atheist has in God.

You may be interested to know that I don't get electricity for more than 18 hours a day in the summer months -- and that a large percentage of the population still lives in huts.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh I accidentally modded you troll instead of insightful. I'm posting this to take that moderation off.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Ngarrang]

Combine a small chalk board with an abacus and voila! A $10 "computer". It has an intuitive "chalk" interface.

Hmm, wait, didn't put Google put out a patent for human-assisted functional computing? Never mind, this new computer will never work.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, imagine that: greed working for the profit of humanity! What novelty! I know - let's - because greed is desire of capital - let's call this new system capital... capital... capital-ism? Yeah, that'll be a good name! Now we can start the revolt!

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[cHALiTO]

Same thing used to happen here in Argentina (in some parts it still does), and that is IMO a even more of a reason to foster technological development in the country. The more you depend on imports for hi-tech tools which are more and more important each day, the harder it'd be for the local economy and general welfare to improve in a global capitalist society. Electronics produced in India (or in Argentina) may currently suck, but unless we push to help the local industry develop in that area, it will keep sucking.

Having kids get cheap PCs is great, but not nearly as much as having them produced in your own country, where many kids will benefit from the laptops, and many many other will benefit from their parent's jobs required to build them , etc.

Now, about the confidence in government.. well, that's a constant in 3rd world countries.. don't think for a second that I doubt my country's government is any different. However, one can't just say "they're all thieves and that's that". Sometimes (maybe in cases like this one) their interests run parallel to those of the people (win-win), and that can be encouraged, aside from obviously trying to actually do something, anything you can, no matter how little it is, to improve the situation.

Some of my friends ran off to europe or the us during the 2001 crisis to get better jobs, or to 'save' themselves. I've been offered jobs in europe and the us, but I didn't want to take them, because I didn't want to live better in another country, I want to be able to live better in THIS one.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Nefarious Wheel]

"It's a Magical Laptop, Charlie! Of hope and wonder!!"

"Listen, am I the only one getting splinters from the keyboard here?"

"It can't be that cheap"

"Damn, they took my kidney!!"

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[xarak]

Except the good ol' US of A of course...
Russia's not bad either.

I'm safe; I'm Swedish

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

I use to read zug all the time, but fallen off lately. That's was awesome, score one for the little people.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[MBGMorden]

Yes, but that's what they cost here in the US already.

Still though, if they are open minded with this thing, $10 *might* be acheivable. I'm talking about going with a non-x86 chip; whatever cheapo processor they can find. Believe me, once upon a time I surfed the web, checked email, wrote papers, and generated spreadsheets just fine on a 486 25mhz and 4MB of ram - using a full GUI. Previous to that the Amiga's and other computers were doing the same on less hardware than that.

Custom code the OS (in assembler if you have to), realize that you're targeting people who have never used a computer and as such they won't find it "too slow", and you can do some amazing things on hardware that would be considered "obsolete" by our spoiled populace. As a matter of fact, give it a cheap, low-res mono-LCD display (kinda like a graphing calculator but a bit larger - at least 8") and put a text-based OS on there. Still give it networking, and put Lynx and Mutt on there. I guarantee kids will learn from it and be grateful.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

$15 scientific calculators are not costly. That's extremely expensive when 1/4 of your population lives on less than US$0.40/day.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be true. But here, no one takes up a gun and shoots anyone in sight because of this.
Can't guarantee the same in future - Hollywood is picking up here.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[RackinFrackin]

Maybe it's just a slab of wood or something.

You mean like thisthing?

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$. Really? I was a civil engineering student in India and I bought my scientific calculator for INR 500 back in 1993 (14 years ago). All the calculators available then were imported like Casio. We are talking here about the home made computers. Are you sure you are not comparing apples and oranges?

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Prof.Phreak]

Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$.

Well, it will be a computational device that children can hold on their lap. Why shouldn't they call it a `laptop'?

(and by computational device, I of course mean pen and paper, as in, a mini-turing machine; for all practical purposes, $10 can buy you an `infinite' [lifetime supply!] amount of paper tape in India).

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[snottgoblin]

There are two sides to consider. The quality of the product for the consumer (the kids in this case) vs protecting and fostering local businesses. India was a socialist country for the first 50 odd years after independence and the level of protectionism exercised hardly fostered any innovation but the consumers had to put up with lesser quality products. Just as in the case of an individual you do not improve unless you compete against those better than you. Which is what the government is now doing slowly allowing global businesses within India at the same time allowing local businesses the time to adapt and stand up to the competition.

I just hope the government does not compromise on the quality of the end product so as to boast off a $10 computer. Given that most public schools in India probably do not have even a single computer that the kids could use, it would probably be wise to try to start out small and aim to have at least one computer per school in the short term than spew out sound bytes that probably may never take shape.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

You've clearly never left the US. We've got it pretty good here.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[fermion]

A scientific calculator in the US costs $79-$200. How can they make a laptop for just $100. One supposes no profit margin, the cheaper scientific calculators are merely graphing.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

You've clearly never left the US. We've got it pretty good here.

On the issue being discussed, wealth inequality, that's debatable—it might be true if your standards for "pretty good" are really generous. Considering only the three countries being discussed in this strand of the conversation, the United States is significantly worse than India by most measures of inequality (richest 10%:poorest 10%, richest 20%:poorest 20%, Gini index, etc.), though also much better than Brazil by the same measures. The US has worse inequality than almost any other place in the developed world (though the UK is close), and worse also than lots of places in the developing world.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

They just kill each other with other weapons. Knives, screwdrivers, things like that.

I've lived in a gunless country, people still killed each other. Instead of guns, they used machettes. I'm not joking.

steve

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India. Being "poor" in the USA is a DREAM for the poor in India (or the poor in most of the world, for that matter.)

Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor". I know people living on WIC, medicaid, housing assistance, utility assistance, tuition assistance, and more. And they live as well as the middle to upper-middle class in many other countries.

I've known single-mother families of 6 who lived basically on the charity of others, and they *still* lived a lifestyle that hundreds of millions in India would LOVE to live.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[ChrisA90278]

Scientific calculators in India cost around 600RS(15$). How come a child laptop cost 10$.

$15 is the retail cost of the calculator and include profit for the retailers and the people who build the calculator and the truck drivers who move it around several times before it got to the store. The $10 computer is to be sold with no mark-up or profit and they are to be delivered in bulk.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[babumuchhala]

What rubbish r u talking abt. I just bought one for 400 bucks ($10) and thats the retail price, that includes the retailers, dealers, distributors margins along with taxes and also dont forgt CASIO also makes money from it. So most prolly its manufacturing cost shouldnt be more than say $1 to $2. So when u remove all these factors it might very well be possible to get the price very low, maybe not to $10 as what the GOI wants.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[redalien]

GDP per capita:
USA - $43500
India - $3700

(43500 / 3700) * $100 = $1175.68

Hardly scientific, but that's about right for a cheap laptop in my books.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

The USA has some extreamly poor areas. The worst places are in remote rural areas. You just don't see or hear about them much. True, we've pretty much eliminated starvation, but we haven't gone beyond that and our rich are far far richer than those in India, etc.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[iamhassi]

" if they are open minded with this thing, $10 *might* be acheivable.... Believe me, once upon a time I surfed the web, checked email, wrote papers, and generated spreadsheets just fine on a 486 25mhz and 4MB of ram - using a full GUI. "

This is more than a CPU issue. CPU, Ram, storage, motherboard, some kind of screen, keyboard and input device all cost $$$$. I don't believe for a second they can build a "laptop" for $10. Can you even buy a keyboard for $10? I'm talking new here, they can't build a million "used" 486 laptops. Even if you could get a brand new keyboard for $10 would you want it? How well would that work? Only half the keys would work and the other half would stick.

You can just barely purchase a brand new calculator for $10, and all that has is a few buttons, a watch battery, a one-line LCD screen, a cpu running at a few mhz and a few kilobytes of ram. Is that what they're calling a "laptop"? OH and prices aren't going to get cheaper, in 10 years it'll be even harder to get a $10 laptop because of inflation and labor costs, so this is impossible now and impossible in the future.

This is either a PR stunt or a scam.

From the article:
"The laptop would be made on a single board which would make it easy to find fault and rectify it, say sources."

Aren't calculators on a single board? They're building a large calculator, and even now the prices are at $47, 5x more than their goal of $10. A $47 oversized calculator-type "laptop" I could kinda see, but $10 isn't going to happen.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

It has to be remembered that the "poor" in the USA are in a completely different class than the poor in India.

The issue being discussed wasn't "where is it worse to be poor", but the inequities of wealth, the contrast between rich and poor. Yes, on average, people who are "poor" by local standards in India are worse of than those "poor" by local standards in the US. Also, on average, the "rich" by local standards in the US are better off than the "rich" by local standards in India.

But the inequality of wealth in the US is, by most measures, substantially greater than that in India, and simultaneously (and by a wider margin) less than that in Brazil.

Once you've lived in countries with truly poor people, you stop thinking of people here as "poor".

The United States has truly poor people, though they aren't the ones whose conditiosn you mention—they are the worst off of the homeless. But, yes, other countries have more people living in worse absolute conditions than the US. But that wasn't what was being discussed, what was being discussed was the inequality of wealth, not the condition of the poorest of the poor.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolute poverty is all that matters. Relative poverty is bullshit.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I AM an Indian. I live in India, and I have as much faith in the government as an atheist has in God To tell you the truth, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any person anywhere -first or third world- who truly has faith in their government. Sure, many nations elect their government, but they certianly don't trust them. Or at least, they shouldn't.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Deagol]

You're obviously not paying off the correct public servants. ;) Seriously, though... corruption aside, what other deficiencies does the government have?

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[powerpants]

I'm confused. I thought Indians lived in teepees.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor. If you consider the poor of the USA (or many other nations) to be "poor" in the same way as the poor of India, you're comparing apples to oranges. No, you're comparing apples to small rocks.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

When you say that we haven't gone beyond eliminating starvation, you're wrong. I know people who don't work. AT ALL. And not only do they get fed, they get health care as well. And if they *want* to go to school, many avenues are available to them, anywhere from reduced to no cost. I see it in action all of the time.

Now, not everyone takes advantage of that. That's a given. But it's there if they want.

Now, compare that to India: Even if you *want* to go to school, if you're from the wrong parts of society, too bad. You won't be able to. That's it, end of story. Getting into health care... let's say that you need an operation in India. It's up to *you* to pay people to donate blood, and if you don't get enough blood donated, you don't get the surgery. That's it, end of story. You see groups of people on hospital steps BEGGING for people to give blood so that they can be helped.

It's two different worlds: One where help is available if you want it, and one where quite often, help simply isn't available AT ALL.

I'll bet that you haven't ever lived outside of a "Western" nation, and haven't seen the conditions that I'm talking about. Once you do, your views change forever.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor.

Yes, actually, you can, as they are completely orthogonal issues.

If you consider the poor of the USA (or many other nations) to be "poor" in the same way as the poor of India, you're comparing apples to oranges.

Saying that the disparity of wealth is greater in the US (which is, in fact, true by every common measure of wealth disparity) is not saying that the poor of the USA are in similar conditions to the poor in India. It says nothing about that at all. Yes, if you said that, on average, the poor of the US were equally poor to those in India you would be wrong. But that's not the issue at all. The issue was disparity of wealth, not absolute conditions of the "poor" in each country.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

only take care of poor stats around the world. the scale matters here.
for those who think India is discovering the electricity just now, i say you have to discover much more to be only a little less ignorant, just see the better scientists magazines and you can count them with you hand's and foot's fingers.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Acer500]

Umm.. I never thought I would see competition for supplying education to the poor.
Yet that is what is happening in my country. We're starting to test the OLPC project, and Intel and an Israeli company want their educational PC to be chosen over the XO. I actually submitted a story on the subject yesterday, but I'll post the details later from home.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[jamesmrankinjr]

I remember one, retailing for around Rs 200, in which the left parenthesis key didn't work.

But, but, how in the world do you write Lisp programs on a computer like that??!!? How awful!

-jimbo

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Burz]

Your sentiment about developing regional manufacturing economies is a nice one, but the details of your thinking are lacking.

China did not become a mfg powerhouse by diving headlong into the computer market. They build up a mfg base over decades before promoting such things on a large scale.

People don't mind buying cheap & clunky calculators, watches, radios and the like. But when it comes to fussy and expensive equipment like computers, consumers have a much lower tolerance.

OLPC isn't a good fit for India probably because that project's appeal centers around building software expertise. India has been there already, and is much more interested in manufacturing at this stage. But personally, I think their ministry may be picking the wrong sort of product at too low of a price-point to be realistic. The whole thing will probably be worth more to them in terms of PR value.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[clang_jangle]

You may think I'm crazy, but I envy you. Forty-seven years as an american consumer has burned me out. I plan to retire in a few years to a hut in Vrndavan and live simply and peacefully.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

>> You can't talk about the inequality of rich and poor without talking about what it means to be rich or poor.

> Yes, actually, you can, as they are completely orthogonal issues.

    Wow.

steve

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[bluFox]

The scientific calculator of Casio that some of us used for Engineering
cost 650 Rs ~ 13$ But Casio is Japanese company.

The calculator by Orpat (An Indian company) that I used for my Exam, cost
Rs 250 ~ 5$. Orpat was not as advanced as casio at that time in terms of
functions provided, but this was 11 years ago. I do not know that status
now. But starting from that, it (10$laptop) sure looks like it is doable.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet you managed to comment in /. (This being summer and all),
That tells some thing, i guess.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[oatworm]

I suspect the bigger question here is whether having a large gap between rich and poor is bad, provided everyone's needs are met? In a country like India where the poor are starving and have absolutely no prayer of not being poor, the gap between rich and poor is a big problem. In the USA, however, the basic needs are met, at least 98% of the time - most everyone has a roof over their heads, most everyone has food, most everyone has equal access to a basic education, etc. This is why the rich-poor gap and the issue of what "poor" means in different countries aren't orthogonal - they tie very closely together.
 
Note that this does not mean the US should stop looking at the remaining 2% and figure out what's wrong and what we can do about it.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lived in a gunless country, people still killed each other. Instead of guns, they used machettes. I'm not joking.

Hmm... if Seung-Hui Cho had used a machete he would have killed three, maybe four people. I'm not joking either.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

I suspect the bigger question here is whether having a large gap between rich and poor is bad, provided everyone's needs are met?

Oh, sure, the question of what is important is always out there; but I'd dispute the implicit claim that "everyone's needs are met" in any country, even the US, by any non-strained definition of "needs". And, further, I think its pretty clear that inequity is an independent problem, since there is considerable research showing that subjective dissatisfaction is as much tied to very much to relative deprivation compared to one's own past experience and surroundings, often moreso than absolute deprivation. Its also important because it has practical effects on liberty and practical, if not theoretical, political equality and equal justice.

In the USA, however, the basic needs are met, at least 98% of the time - most everyone has a roof over their heads, most everyone has food, most everyone has equal access to a basic education, etc.

I don't think this, either the generality or, for instance, the last specific example is particularly true (except, perhaps, with a very strained definition of either "basic" or "equal".)

This is why the rich-poor gap and the issue of what "poor" means in different countries aren't orthogonal - they tie very closely together.

Not really. If lots of people are very poor, on an absolute scale, that's bad, independent of whether the gap between the rich and poor is fairly narrow (as in India) or fairly wide (as in Brazil). OTOH, a wide gap between the rich and the poor is bad, for the reasons discussed above, even if it is in a fairly rich country (like the US).

Of course, its worse to have both poor overall conditions and a wide gap together than either one separately. And certainly most people would agree the overwhelming greater overall wealth of the US makes life in the US, despite the greater inequality, better than that in India, for most people (though the issue becomes less clear with developed countries with much less average wealth but also much less inequality than the US.)

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[toriver]

Are you MAD? To get a chalk input effect you need an expensive Watcom tablet and a graphics package like Adobe Illustrator. We're taling $1000 or so here. And you need a powerful computer to run it! Far from the $10 goal. :-P

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Zen: Journey is more important than the destination.

By the way, why are you crying in front of the whole world that India doesn't have this or India doesn't have that. Do you want people to take pity on you and India.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[smithmc]

  But that wasn't what was being discussed, what was being discussed was the inequality of wealth, not the condition of the poorest of the poor.

But why is that what matters? That sounds like some sort of petty "keeping up with the Joneses" metric. It's silly. The fact that Bill Gates is a bazillion times richer than I am doesn't make me any less well off, or any less satisfied with my economic situation. It seems to me that the question should not be "how big is the difference between rich and poor?" but "how well off are the poor?" And, by and large, the poor are better off in the US than they are in a whole lot of other places.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[smithmc]

  Saying that the disparity of wealth is greater in the US (which is, in fact, true by every common measure of wealth disparity) is not saying that the poor of the USA are in similar conditions to the poor in India. It says nothing about that at all. Yes, if you said that, on average, the poor of the US were equally poor to those in India you would be wrong. But that's not the issue at all. The issue was disparity of wealth, not absolute conditions of the "poor" in each country.

But again, why?

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Hal_Porter]

Well, countries with bad Gini figures tend to have a higher crime rate than ones with good Gini figures I think. E.g. moving from the UK to Sweden about ten years ago, Sweden seemed noticably safer country than the UK. And the interesting thing is that it's possible to target resources at people at the bottom of society and improve the country relatively cheaply. The Blair government managed to virtually eliminate homelessness and reduce unemployment for example with a clever mixture of capitalist things like an independant central bank setting sane interest rates leading to higher growth, and socialist ones like targetted benefits. Oh, and Blairite ones like trying to force people off benefits into jobs. Subjectively, Britain has improved it's inequality levels.

If the Tories had been in power and they had ignored inequality, I suspect that there would have been an economic upturn anyway, but a large underclass would not have been affected at all by it. And a society that juxtaposes conspicuous consumption from the newly rich with a large group of people that have essentially given up on ever having a job is not a pleasant society to live in.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

But why is that what matters?

It's what matters because it was what was being discussed, for one thing. If you don't think what is being discussed is important, you say that, you don't just make claims that aren't true about the topic being discussed.

That sounds like some sort of petty "keeping up with the Joneses" metric.

Whether or not it seems petty to you, relative deprivation is a rather significant source of human misery, strife, etc. There are, I would say, actually fairly good reasons, from an evolutionary perspective, for this to be true.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[The Cydonian]

All I can say is that things have changed quite a bit from the 1980's. I was recently reading in the Pakistani press that Pakistan was placing an embargo on importing phones manufactured in India, and how that would increase the prices of telephones out there. Which, of course, let me wonder as to why the Pakistanis would be interested in importing those electrical bricks I remember from my childhood, those (cant remember the brand names) PSU-churned sets they used to hand out with every new line.

They weren't. They were talking about Nokia handsets.

Now, you might rightfully argue that Nokia, as a brand, isn't Indian, but look at it this way:- close to 25% of all the Nokia phones manufactured in India are exported. This in a country that's already the third largest market for Nokia.

In short, we've lost Indian brand-names, but have gained some world-class production capabilities.

How bad can the HRD funk up things? Well, there's some serious cause for optimism:- the PSU (public sector undertaking, for non-Indians) the article talks about, Semiconductor Complex, is owned by India's space agency, ISRO. Which may or may not mean much, but I wouldn't be too hasty in writing them off.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[NerveGas]

You're not joking, you're speculating. If I'm not mistaken, Japan has had mass-murders with similar death counts from people with... swords. If I recall, they've had low-double-digit death counts from a guy with just a knife.

Besides, you're forgetting that the worst school-killing in US history had nothing to do with guns at all. It's really convenient to believe that without guns, people won't be able to kill large numbers of other people, but it just isn't so. Rwanda managed to kill about a million people in a very short time, and only a very small percentage of those were committed with guns.

It's also very convenient to ignore the fact that most gun-related crime is done with illegally-acquired guns. For every Virginia Tech, there are a few thousand (probably a few HUNDREDS of thousands) of murders with stolen guns, by people who are ALREADY prohibitted from carrying guns. Pass all of the laws you want. They don't care now, and they won't care then. What? You want to get rid of guns entirely? Sure. Just ask England if their criminals suddenly came up short in the weaponry department after all of their efforts.

It's sad, but it's true: If someone wants to kill someone else, they're going to do it. A lot of people can't handle the fact that some people are killers, could kill THEM, and that you can't always pick out who they are. Projecting the blame onto instruments which could be regulated or removed gives them a sense of security or control, but it's like covering your head to keep the boogeyman away... unless the boogeyman is the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal, you're only fooling yourself.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I'm an Indian too.. and thankfully we didn't listen to agony aunts like you and marched forward into the software revolution. Yes there is a substantial population that lives in huts, but how do you propose they get employed and get fed ? Do you remember the number of failures before we had a successful space launch ? I bet you never believed we could goto space.

Man you live in some other world.. India's changing. If you don't get electricity 18 hours, get you lazy ass moving and do something about it, instead of complaining and spreading your pessimism.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[Argon]

Well the problem with most governments is one of incredible inconsistency. I can sympathize with the view that this $10 laptop is a pipe dream. I know for a fact how things turn out when you give high tech electronics in the hands of the public sector enterprise "Bharat Electronics". Remember the Simputer project? After years of development the first commercial devices that were manufactured by this behemoth were blocks of chunky plastic. The UI was slick, the features were amazing - my friend worked on it. I was impressed. But as a PDA it sucked. There is a project called Light Combat Aircraft which is going on for 20 years with nothing to show for it. The parliament recently censured the project.

On the other hand, ISRO has been phenomenally successful - now doing commercial space launches. Bharat Electronics designed the Electronic Voting Machine that has been used successfully in several Indian public elections while US debates on Diebold (granted Indian EVMs and Diebold machines are in a different category altogether, but sometimes extreme simplicity is what's needed). One or two such successes like this don't justify the incredible waste that goes into Govt funded projects with no accountability.

This $10 laptop without any accountability will just end up lining up some corrupt policitians pocket. I am reminded of the joke. Visiting Indian Minister asks US congressman how he makes money. "See that bridge across the river?", "Yup", "10%". Visiting US congressman asks Indian minister how he makes money. "See _that_ bridge across our river?", "What bridge?", "100%".

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[DragonWriter]

But again, why?

Why is inequality the issue in the discussion? Because someone made a post about the disparities in wealth they perceived in India, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in Brazil, someone else made a comment about disparities in wealth in the US, and then someone else made a dismissive comment that the claim about the US was misplaced and things were pretty good in the US.

If you want to know why it was originally raised, well, it'd make more sense to do so in response to the post in which it was raised; at least, you'd have a better chance of having someone who might know the answer notice that you asked, given the way Slashdot's notifications work.

Re:I must be living in a story book..

[lambini]

Woohoo, I am troll

We have $47, do I hear $45

[zappepcs]

going once
going twice
Sold to the Redmond bidder

Coming to an advertisement near you soon...

Buy Windows Vista Pro Ultra Gold Genuine Advantage Home Platinum edition and get a free computer...

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

But could a Beowulf cluster of these beat a $100 laptop?

Re:hmmm

[edwardpickman]

Only if the squirrels running in the wheels that power them don't have heart attacks first.

Re:hmmm

[martin-boundary]

Only if you had a Beowulf cluster of pigeons to do the networking.

Re:hmmm

[coldcell]

I bet one meeeeeeellion of them could control some sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads :)

Re:hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

> But could a Beowulf cluster of these beat a $100 laptop?

Yeah, but you get 10x more using the $10 ones, so you get more nodes. more is better when building Beowulf clusters ya know.

side note:

[Hanzie]

I've always thought having a monitor that could detach to be stand-alone or attach with a standard mount would greatly help consumers. It wouldn't be too good for the manufacturers, who generally charge more for a replacement screen than a newer laptop would cost.

With these gov't subsidized deals, though, I'm hopeful.

It should help out by decreasing replacement costs (swap the main unit OR the screen, not both).

Meanwhile, I can't wait to see these Indian cheapies on eBay!

hanzie.

Re:side note:

[Bloke down the pub]

With these gov't subsidized deals, though, I'm hopeful.

The article mentiones nothing about such a subsidy. It also says that $10 is the cost, which a subsidy can't change - a subsidy would just alter the selling price.

Re:side note:

[should_be_linear]

I think that, given HDTV resolution, would be great to have computer-in-kayboard style, like Atari ST or Amiga was (but smaller, more like Mac keyboard size). It would require design with pasive cooling. You could take your computer anywhere where monitor (or TV) and mouse can be found. Price could go under 100$ for minimalist web-browsing machine, given that most expensive part (display) is not there and everything else could be compressed to one system-on-a-chip + flash HDD. Up to maybe $1000 for high performance desktops with 60GB flash disk.

Re:side note:

[mobby_6kl]

> It also says that $10 is the cost, which a subsidy can't change - a subsidy would just alter the selling price.

There may or may not be as subsidy (I only scanned TFA for tech specs), but a subsidy can change the cost. The government could subsidize the labor, material, or basically any other input that goes into production of this laptop. The govt lets the manufacturer use a factory for $1 a month == subsidy == reduction of cost.

Re:side note:

[Bloke down the pub]

a subsidy can change the cost. The government could subsidize the labor, material, or basically any other input that goes into production of this laptop.

Is that truly changing the cost, or just moving it around?

Re:side note:

[fireboy1919]

It wouldn't be too good for the manufacturers,

You know what else really helps that? Having standard-sized screens. Up until recently, laptop LCDs were many different sizes.

While most of the smaller sizes come in various settings, the biggest - 17" and 15.4" are both pretty much one size. You don't get manufacturers making 16.7", etc.

And whenever something like that happens, parts start becoming standardized. And they are.

In two years there probably will be lots of places to buy generic replacement LCD screens for your 15.4" or 17" laptop screens.

Re:side note:

[mobby_6kl]

> Is that truly changing the cost, or just moving it around?

Moving the cost around is exactly what subsidies do. The point is that subsidies can decrease costs in exactly the same way they can decrease price, because the two are connected -- one's cost is also somebody's price. For example, the government pays the manufacturer $X for every laptop to make it cheaper by that amount, it also makes the school's (or whatever) costs for operating a computer lab lower by the same amount. Meanwhile, somebody's costs in terms of taxes just went up.

IANAEconomist, so corrections or additions are welcome.

Re:side note:

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving the cost around is exactly what subsidies do. The point is that subsidies can decrease costs

Make your mind up.

Hmm...

[El Lobo]

Well, they are also trying to mass-produce a USD 2000 car

Tata.

Re:Hmm...

[JavaIsGreat]

For Your Kind Information - This will be a reality.

Re:Hmm...

[lambini]

How would they be able to reduce the resources cost? - They need cheap metal or equivalent. They have one of the biggest shipbreaking yards in the world so there is the cheap metal, hardly worth selling off since it is second rate material. - tires, probably not included when the car is bought or at an additional cost. - electronics, If they would understand electronics they would be able to buy a far more advanced car, so you can leave that out. - interior, probably just covered so people won't cut themselves while driving. Maybe some wooden chairs. I think it would look something like : http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1908/tbig.j pg

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The engine will go put-put-put and so will the driver.

Re:Hmm...

[ColaMan]

They need cheap metal or equivalent.

That would be plastic. Go have a look at the Reva sometime. Small electric car, mostly plastic panels over a minimal steel subframe. Whether it stands up to acceptable crashworthiness standards is anyones guess, however they are relatively low speed vehicles.

Re:Hmm...

[nospam007]

>How would they be able to reduce the resources cost? - They need cheap metal or equivalent. They have one of the biggest shipbreaking yards in the world so there is the cheap metal, hardly worth selling off since it is second rate material.
--
Indias Mittal steel is the world's number one steel company, with 320,000 employees in more than 60 countries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittal_Steel

Tata (the company that will build the car) is India's largest conglomerate, with revenues in 2005-06 of Rs 967,229 million (US $21.9 billion)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group

Re:Hmm...

[lambini]

They are city cars. But I wouldn't like to be sitting in one of these when the next benz comes a long and crashes into it.

Re:Hmm...

[lambini]

Ok.... And the next big thing that comes from it is??????? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocop

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I wouldn't want to be sitting in the Farmer's Market when the next geriatric driver comes along, either.

Re:Hmm...

[Russ Nelson]

Oh, great, just what Mumbai needs ... more cars. How about India doing something different, like the RUF.

10 dollar laptop, eh?

[Sneakernets]

I hope these could be sold in the states if they are made, lots of kids in the poorer southern states could benefit. Hell, anyone could benefit from a low cost multipurpose laptop!

I bought a TI extensa for $25 and it's 100 MHz with 8 MB RAM and it lasted me through high school, and part of college (the DC jack broke and my wireless PC card broke too :( )


If they could make this low cost laptop like the TI Extensa 710 (with a faster clock and more RAM of course) I think we'd find a low-cost solution. Perhaps some old technology chips could be made again for a low cost.

Re:10 dollar laptop, eh?

[Bearhouse]

That's a good point. What happens to all the old equipment when the majors update their fabs? No need for cutting-edge stuff here.

Bearing in mind the protectionist track record of Indian Govt., (admittedly getting slowly better), it would seem likely that this "$10" lapop stuff is somehow linked to nationalist feelings.

So, if they want to go it alone instead of buying stuff in, maybe the Indian Govt. could buy old stuff & build a fab, then write it all off and hand it over to the private sector. Lord knows there's enough talented and educated people in India to make it work.

Of course, that does not change the central question - what's this thing gonna be used for? What good will it do?

Re:10 dollar laptop, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What happens to all the old equipment when the majors update their fabs?

There already is a booming business in India with recycled computer equipment. With the use of micro business loans has resulted in shiploads of used castoff electrical equipment being sent to India. Every one has a part in this from just swapping parts and renovating computers, tearing them down and filling a warehouse of used parts, card board venders recycling the shipping boxes, You've seen pictures of the small peasant child smacking old brick to make gravel, move up to modern times and the child is now using her hammer to crunch up circuit boards and melt out the metals. Remember this is the nation that buys old naval ships and with hammer and chisel cut them apart and melt them into razor blades.

BYTE ME

Re:10 dollar laptop, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we only need to get a grip on how to develop short software and we'll be saved!

</whimper>

At this current rate...

[AchiIIe]

That's nothing, at the current rate I fully expect Thailand (and other developing southern Asian countries) to hit back with a $1.00 laptop, with wireless, and wikipedia, openoffice (running really fast), and even Duke Nukem Forever

Re:At this current rate...

[Timesprout]

Your ambitions are pathetic man. I am expecting China to develop a laptop equivalent to a mac probook running Red Flag which they will pay me $250 to use.

Re:At this current rate...

[cptgrudge]

Yeah, China's gotta do something with that 1 trillion+ $USD in the bank.

Re:At this current rate...

[Antique Geekmeister]

They could buy licenses for all those pirated copies of Windows and Office, then use the rebates to pay for the royalties on the Britney Spears CD's.

Re:At this current rate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Then half the world will be able to buy less than one every day.

Re:At this current rate...

[Walruzoar]

Ah, but I heard a rumour that someone is working on a -$10 laptop, powered by hot air....

Re:At this current rate...

[Hal_Porter]

Vietnam laptop! Five Dollah! It real laptop, not typewriter after backstreet chop chop surgery!

Re:At this current rate...

[TravisO]

Duke Nukem Forever? Busted, you just dated yourself. We'll be seeing your $1 laptop with DNF in 2012. But I hear DNF might be post poned for another 6 months after hardware release.

$10? This one definitely won't be...

[xrapidx]

...running any licensed version of Windows.

Re:$10? This one definitely won't be...

[aywwts4]

Sure it can, It just needs to run something older... perhaps windows... er... 98... uh... 95 ummm 3.1.... Wait, I know! MS-DOS 1.25 (3rd world Learning Edition) The main issue currently is finding a way to make those nifty holograms cheap enough.

Re:$10? This one definitely won't be...

[dirtyforker]

The last Dell I bought must have had at least $100 worth (to Dell) of crapware installed. With some hard work and building on this lead I don't see why a $10 laptop can't have windows. It should be able to be sold at a profit, in fact. If it runs linux or some other free software it will be far more of a surprise.

Re:$10? This one definitely won't be...

[flyingfsck]

Why not? That leaves all of $7 for the hardware.

Re:$10? This one definitely won't be...

[duffolonious]

People always bring up the crapware as this great monetary leverage that can be used to lower the cost of windows (as you say $100 - easily beyond the cost of windows).

I don't buy it - that they get *that* much money. I'd really like to see some actual figures (or even logical educated guesses).

My *out of my ass* guess would be pennies per crapware. Just guessing the amount payed for google sponsorship * 100.

If this were the case there would never be any incentive for Dell or anyone else to go with an alternate OS. And since Dell will be availing us with the choice of Ubuntu I can Shenanigans!

Re:$10? This one definitely won't be...

[duffolonious]

Ahem ... "I call Shenanigans!"

No info to be found...

[evilviper]

There is absolutely no information to be found here... Without some specs for the thing, they might as well say they're coming up with a toaster...

If all you want is an digital text reader and work processor, yeah, you can do it for $10, easily enough. It's not going to compete in the same league as the OLPC, though.

Adding a color screen drives prices through the roof. Adding wifi will be more expensive. Adding USB and a decent amount of Flash storage will make it more expensive... etc.

I've argued several times before that the OLPC could do it's job just fine with far lower spec than even what it originally had, but I doubt they've got it right this time, at a price of just $10, and I'm extremely sure a device that cheap can't reasonably even be called a "Laptop" to begin with.

Re:No info to be found...

[Yvanhoe]

A computer that can access Wikipedia and receive and send some mails, even only in black & white, even with only a text display, is still worth more than 10$. If they manage to do this, this could really be an impressive breakthrough in India's educative programs.

Re:No info to be found...

[evilviper]

A computer that can access Wikipedia and receive and send some mails, even only in black & white, even with only a text display, is still worth more than 10$.

They could probably (re)start producing the Osaris in India, and turn out such a (damn good) system for around $10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaris
(I got mine for $50, about 5 years ago)

Re:No info to be found...

[vhogemann]

I had a Psion for some time... quite capable system!

Another option is to build something like the Newton eMate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate

There were also some company building a greyscale PalmOS device with a full keyboard attached to it... but I can't remember the name.

Re:No info to be found...

[JavaIsGreat]

For School Children, I dont need WIFI I dont need USB ports I dont need DVD R/W I dont need CDR/W I need CDR I need HARDDISK I need screen I need KBD I need pointing device

Re:No info to be found...

[Hognoxious]

You need GRAMMAR checkor.

Re:No info to be found...

[evilviper]

I dont need WIFI I dont need USB ports

Do you live in a mud-hut in one of the most impoverished areas of India? Since you're posting to /. I'd guess not... So what YOU think you need has nothing to do with this device.

If you had no other way to communicate with the outside world, you'd damn sure want wireless mesh networking of some kind on your machine. If you want to use your laptop as a digital device for sampling data in experiments, or controlling electronics, you'd certainly want things like USB ports. Not to mention being able to print-out or at least somehow transfer any work you've done on the machine.

Re:No info to be found...

[evilviper]

Another option is to build something like the Newton eMate

Except that was selling for 10X as much.

There were also some company building a greyscale PalmOS device with a full keyboard attached to it...

...which sells for $250 today.

Maybe they can bring that down with mass manufacturing, but the Osaris is much more of a sure "sure thing", since it was already selling, NEW, for under $100, more than 5 years ago. With prices continually falling, it would probably only cost $20 even in small quantities today. You could even add a couple more features, like full audio, a small generator, and perhaps wifi, and mass produce it for little more than $10.

Outsourcing to India

[hexed_2050]

I wonder if tech support will be outsourced to India?

Re:Outsourcing to India

[walt-sjc]

Nope. I heard China, but all support calls will be spoken in French. This will keep support costs low...

Re:Outsourcing to India

[walt-sjc]

Flamebait? Oh ye of little humor...

As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the most basic ASIC chips cost at least $1ea in mass production... and a laptop has dozens of them.

Then you have to include into the price of each laptop:
- shipping/freight
- raw materials
- PCB production
- assembly/plant equipment
- labour (oh wait, this is India!)
- patent fees (as if!)

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Bloke down the pub]

I agree. TFA says:

the ministry feels the price will come down dramatically considering the fact that the demand would be for one million laptops

Utter rubbish. Producing more units allows you to spread the fixed costs, but the cost can't go below the marginal cost, which is more or less the stuff mentioned by the parent (plus a battery).

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[timmarhy]

not only that but 1 million unit's is fuck all. economy's of scale hardly even kick in at 1 million units.i suspect this will end up like the $100 laptop saga - start at $10, end up at $70. now i could see a $70 lappy being real, using surplus chips that are too outdated to anyone else to use. you could come up with a black and white display with a small amount of flash memory onboard and 32 megs of ram. the electronics for something on that scale would only set you back $50, $20 would cover the other costs easily.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dr. Evil: We shall build ONE MILLION laptops!

not only that but 1 million unit's is fuck all. Dr. Evil: Damn!

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the most basic ASIC chips cost at least $1ea in mass production... and a laptop has dozens of them.

Then you have to include into the price of each laptop:
- shipping/freight
- raw materials
- PCB production
- assembly/plant equipment
- labour (oh wait, this is India!)
- patent fees (as if!)

You're thinking western style laptop. I'm guessing this is more of a 16 character x one line display, touch screen, everything built on the back of the LCD itself. What we'd call a middle-finger-top computer here in the US, or a flash drive with added flash in the far east.

Power supply? Good to know that someone finally figured out a real-world use for the potato battery.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Dogtanian]

You're thinking western style laptop. I'm guessing this is more of a 16 character x one line display, touch screen, everything built on the back of the LCD itself. What we'd call a middle-finger-top computer here in the US, or a flash drive with added flash in the far east. Well, pedantically you could say that any computer that fits on your lap is a "laptop", but in general use there's some sort of underlying meaning that your ultra-basic computer strays too far from.

Whilst there may be a use for such a computer in certain contexts, as general purpose education tools, let alone anything approaching "I.T.", it would be laughably crude and not even remotely plausible as a cheaper alternative to the OLPC.

For $10, I don't think it's remotely possible to build a "laptop" that would be able to plausibly mimic the *functionality* and usefulness of what we'd normally consider a laptop. Even if you strip every remotely glossy feature and concentrate on what it *does*, you're not going to get something that could plausibly perform even remotely as the equivalent of a laptop PC. At best you'll have a programmable calculator or very basic computer that resembles something from the 1980s. And as I said, I can't see that being remotely useful for general-purpose educational use.

I know that India isn't the west, but I think that the "benefit" of such a computer to them would still be questionable. If the computer does have "laptop"-type functionality, expect it to cost a few times more than $10.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[bobbyandck]

Well the average cost would definitely go down, increase production and as the person above mentioned the fixed costs will be lower for every single computer (the average cost).

For a profit maximizing company the marginal profit (basically the price) must equal the marginal cost (the cost of producing that last computer), but as this would not be done to maximize profits the objective is to equal total cost and total profit, meaning that the average total cost must equal the average profit (equal to the price in this case). This allows the marginal cost to be above the $10 tag.

So getting rid of all that economic jargon, basically because the computer would not be produced for profit the quantity produced can be larger and the price be lower than the actual cost of producing the last computer.

Also I don't know why would you really need much of a battery, because I imagine the reason why they want to have laptops is not for using on a bus or train but for easier transport from one work place to another, both places having some sort of electricity available. The battery would only need to cover temporary irregularities in supply (if even)

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[vhogemann]

How much would it cost to build a Motorola68K based computer, like the old Amigas, these days? I guess an Amiga 500 could fit inside one chip... and run on 3 AA batteries longer than anything out there.

As for the display... make it an acessory. Like the lcd displays you can buy to hook to videgames, to make them more or less portable. And make analog video out, so you can plug it into any TV set.

It might not cost U$10... but will be close enougth.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Dogtanian]

As for the display... make it an acessory. [..] It might not cost U$10... but will be close enougth. Exactly. It won't be a laptop any more, and it still won't cost anything like $10.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, pedantically you could say that any computer that fits on your lap is a "laptop", but in general use there's some sort of underlying meaning that your ultra-basic computer strays too far from.

Whilst there may be a use for such a computer in certain contexts, as general purpose education tools, let alone anything approaching "I.T.", it would be laughably crude and not even remotely plausible as a cheaper alternative to the OLPC.

For $10, I don't think it's remotely possible to build a "laptop" that would be able to plausibly mimic the *functionality* and usefulness of what we'd normally consider a laptop. Even if you strip every remotely glossy feature and concentrate on what it *does*, you're not going to get something that could plausibly perform even remotely as the equivalent of a laptop PC. At best you'll have a programmable calculator or very basic computer that resembles something from the 1980s. And as I said, I can't see that being remotely useful for general-purpose educational use.

I know that India isn't the west, but I think that the "benefit" of such a computer to them would still be questionable. If the computer does have "laptop"-type functionality, expect it to cost a few times more than $10.

Aw, you missed my humor. What possible use would a one line, 16 character, display be? What use would such a touch screen be?

Really it was just attempt to get the middle-finger reference in. Having bought Sony and Dell "laptops", several times I've felt like they'd sold me the middle finger -- a very tangible and personal "fuck you", if ever there was one. And when the batteries explode or burst into flames? That's some real "added flash".

A $10 laptop is an absurdity. OTOH, I'm old enough to remember $500 4 function calculators and would have thought blister-packed $1.00 calculators an absudity.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Dogtanian]

Aw, you missed my humor. What possible use would a one line, 16 character, display be? Yeah, I should have picked up on that; it was rather silly :-)

A $10 laptop is an absurdity. OTOH, I'm old enough to remember $500 4 function calculators and would have thought blister-packed $1.00 calculators an absudity. True, but the situations you describe date back 20 to 35 years. In 20 years time, I'm quite confident it'll be possible to build a $10 "laptop" that outperforms the present-day OLPC, albeit with some corners cut (i.e. still don't expect a "real" keyboard). But the $10 laptop proposal clearly isn't designed with this in mind and- as you say- the idea is an absurdity in today's market.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[pky]

$10 is probably too low, just like $100 which is also a difficult reality, now somewhere at $176. I wonder, what is the use of a laptop in Indian or any under-developed or developing countries, where large number of kids don't go to school even when they are given food to eat and allowance at the end of the day.

OLPC probably is only a fancy western imagination. The reality is this:

"The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "pedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

Absolutely. $100 or $176 laptop makes no sense.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[suv4x4]

Utter rubbish. Producing more units allows you to spread the fixed costs, but the cost can't go below the marginal cost, which is more or less the stuff mentioned by the parent (plus a battery).

Can a governmental body understand this?
How does a government institution spend money:

1. Spend three times more than needed.
2. Promise ten times and deliver nothing.

They're doing a great job.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know fuck all about economics, but I can waffle with the best of them.

Fixed it 4 ya.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[yada21]

So getting rid of all that economic jargon, basically because the computer would not be produced for profit the quantity produced can be larger and the price be lower than the actual cost of producing the last computer.

So even if each one is sold at a loss, they can make it up in volume? I've got boo.com on hold ...

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[Hognoxious]

Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

Translation: the companies bidding for the project are not owned by any of my relatives, nor are they generous with gifts.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[mobby_6kl]

You can decrease the marginal costs somewhat by getting bulk discounts from suppliers, but of course on the other hand you will eventually have to build more factories and hire more people to produce the increased quantity, raising the costs elsewhere.

In any case, one million units is not a very high number. Asus alone sells more than that every year, and they're one of the smaller players on the global scale.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[nospam007]

So even if each one is sold at a loss, they can make it up in volume?
---
That's what Amazon told us for years.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[DragonWriter]

not only that but 1 million unit's is fuck all. economy's of scale hardly even kick in at 1 million units.i suspect this will end up like the $100 laptop saga - start at $10, end up at $70.

I'm not sure that a +600% increase above the initial price target is a whole lot like a +75% increase above the initial price target.

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Even the most basic ASIC chips cost at least $1ea in mass production... and a laptop has dozens of them.

Might be, but there is still one technology that can compress an insane computing power into a small bunch of transistors: Forth chips. So I wouldn't be afraid of the price of the electronics, just the display and assembly. Oh, and the price of programming. That might be the harder part, but I guess that if there were such need, somebody would find a way how to do it. (Chuck always did.)

Re:As if! Look at the breakdown costs...

[ChrisMaple]

There should be only 2 chips: flash memory and everything else. "Everything else" on the scale of a 1985 PC can be put on a single die costing less than 1 dollar. ($2000 for an 8" wafer means $0.06 per square mm. $0.08 after scribing and cutting. 10 sq mm should suffice nicely.) PCBs can be pretty cheap, no reason to use FR4. Calculator keyboard. Monochrome LCD display, driven directly by the "everything else" chip. Display cost will probably drive total cost.

Remember Simputer

[gopla]

Avery body here is aware of a project called Simputer, that was being run by IISc, Bangalore some 5 years ago. That project also had aim of providing computer at about Rs 5000 (@100 USD at rough rate of 50 Rs/USD). It turned out to be a huge failure.

This seems to be another vapour ware project, whose main aim is to extract government money. A present even simple mouse costs more than Rs. 500.

There is a saying in Sanskrit vachanesu kim dardratam . Why should you act as poor if only thing you have to do is to make promise. You can promise Rs 5.0 laptop, if you know that nobody is going to held you accountable at end of 5 year project and spending million dollar, and delivering nothing.

Gopla

Re:Remember Simputer

[Anonymous Coward]

A present even simple mouse costs more than Rs. 500.

To manufacture?

Re:Remember Simputer

[suv4x4]

This seems to be another vapour ware project, whose main aim is to extract government money.

This not a vapour ware, government understand technology, Indian government - twice more!
This a photo of top notch laptop:

$10 Laptop Top Quality, Future Reality

Scientists say, just $10, just attach to monitor, take anywhere. We're smart, not paying $100.
Peace!

Re:Remember Simputer

[Russ Nelson]

Well, the Simputer worked just fine ... it's just that they couldn't meet the $100 price target, and then they didn't know how to sell what they'd made.

Just Dollar arbitrage

[ghoul]

Given the rate at which the dollar is falling and the time it takes to complete govt projects in India by the time it is finished Rs 1600 will be worth more than 100 dollar. They can still claim to make a Rs 1600 laptop but it would actually be a 100 dollar laptop not a 10 dollar laptop. On the flip side the Chinese flat screen Tvs we get for 400 dollars nowadays will cost us 4000 dollars at Walmart

Re: Just Dollar arbitrage

[baboonlogic]

They can still claim to make a Rs 1600 laptop but it would actually be a 100 dollar laptop not a 10 dollar laptop.

That is 16 INR for a dollar. Despite the recent trends that is just not gonna happen! I think the parent was being funny.

US Education!!!

[ghoul]

Did IISc hire some US returned scientists? People in US academia have been playing this game of overpromising and underdelivering for a long long time.

Re:US Education!!!

[gopla]

Did IISc hire some US returned scientists? People in US academia have been playing this game of overpromising and underdelivering for a long long time.

It is true, most of IITs and the IISc has US returned Profs. They are good in producing good students, but poor in doing any worthwhile research. Most of the research done in IITs and IISc is just incremental improvment over already done things.

The students of IITs are exceptionally good, but that's because you can always find 1000 good students every year in a population of 12,000,000,000 (delibrately written in numericals)

Gopla

Re:US Education!!!

[kallu_be]

The main problem is "lack of funds", every IIT get a mere of 50crores (~10million$)/year of funding from central govt, which is just enough to do regular patch works for the campus and for the basic salaries (~10,000$/year - proff grade) for the faculty.

Re:US Education!!!

[junglee_iitk]

Coming from one of the most praised IITs, IIT-Kanpur, I will have to say, BullShit! In my stay I have seen every single hostel being renovated to look like a 5 star hotel (yes, it is better than my current "Wohnzimmer" at Germany), every fricking road built twice and then thrice for apparently no reason. Actually,in my first year the footpaths were above road, and in my 2nd year, they were below.

This does not mean IITs don't do any good. IITs do good research, but as every "hip" place where people think they are superior than others, and thus are totally cut off from real world, the researches concerning local problems remain of no consequence. Simputer and Tech-Thela (lit. Tech-Wagon, basically a rickshaw with a computer with wireless capabilities - an ambitious project from IIT-K Mechanical department, now resting in basements) are flawed because the users need food and water before computers.

Probably these tech products will look good for developing countries which have crossed a certain point of development and are help back by lack of mass availability of technology. No one can deny that India is NOT in that position. Rejecting OLPC was a good decision. This 10$ project, as someone said above, is just government's way to distribute money among "relatives".

Re:US Education!!!

[ghoul]

Hey you speak pretty good English for a non native speaker. BTW I think you are missing the point about IITs. Its not about training people or about doing research. Its about screening out the most hard working intelligent people in every generation of Indians so they can be recruited by various different foreign nations. Why do you think the IITs were built by USA, USSR, Germany and Japan (Yes none were built by the Indian govt). The whole purpose is to suck the best genes out of the Indian genepool in every generation to improve the genepool in the donor nations. Research and the development of India is antithetical to the concept of IITs.

Re:US Education!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, where did you here all this FUD? IITs were made by "collaboration", not "by" USA, USSR, Germany and Japan. There founding fathers were all Indians. India as a developing nation is debt for crying out loud. Not only IITs, but food was also imported back in those days. And India became largely self sufficient only after Green Revolution. Check that link, you will find that it was mostly funded by a New York based organisation.

And don't forget that whatever hype around technology related to India is present today, it is just and JUST because of alumni of IITs. Most of the CEOs of India based multinational companies are IITs. IIMs' intake is largely from IITs. Half the projects in ISRO were started by Indians. Man, there is no length to which you are not wrong. If it were not for investment in technological institutes, India today will be just a country for cheap manual labour for Saudi Arabia, and a Punjabis selling spices, screwing "white" women round the world and bad mouthing about India at the same time.

Re:US Education!!!

[Geminii]

They must have outsourced.

Re:US Education!!!

[ghoul]

What exactly is your point? You seem to be agreeing completely with me that these institutes were setup by 1st world nations at their own cost so as to have a steady pool of recruits for their own economy. What does Green revolution, food imports (btw the PL480 wheat sent by US to India was found to be so badly infected with pests you could almost consider it a form of biological warfare) have to do with IITs? Also Green revolution techniques were developed in Indonesia (See Rice Institute)

All the IITs have done is suck talent out of India. Very few IITians go to ISRO DRDO CSIR or any national institute. Yes some go to IIM but that is a total waste of the IIT training as you dont need to be an Engineer to be a Manager. This shows that even the IITians know IIT is not about being an Engineer; its about getting an IIT stamp which means you are hard working enough to crack the Joint Entrance Exam so you will be hard working enough to crack other exams like GMAT and GRE. What exactly is the payback to Indian society? Even when some IITians give back they mostly give back to IITs not to Indian society. India would be much better off with privatised universities rather than government run recruting stations for MNCs. With a system of private universities if the govt needs some research done they can target funds to private universities in return for results instead of subsidizing the education of people who will serve the economies of other nations.

What is it made of?

[Anonymous Coward]

E.g. what kind of screen will it have? Even PDA screens are more expensive than 10$. Is it a 8x50 array of LEDs?

Re:What is it made of?

[Bloke down the pub]

Yeah, but they're blue LEDs!

completely impossible

[N3wsByt3]

There is NO WAY in which a laptop can cost only $10, unless it is heavily subsidised by the state. Idian labour is cheap, but not THAT cheap (it's more expensive then china, for instance). Mass production will make things cheaper, but not THAT much cheaper (the raw materials and manufacturing still has a bottom price, after all).

If they're ever going to create something that goes below the $20 it would be amazing enough, but even then it would be a (technological) marginal device and completely out of the league with even the OLPC. Maybe some sort of ultra-cheap non-expandable motherboard with an integrated 386-like CPU, a solid-state HD of 128MB and with a 3 inch screen, or something, just to run a simplified Word application and a lynx-based browser.

Re:completely impossible

[Antique Geekmeister]

Yeah, the power supplies for a typical laptop alone cost at least $5, even in amazing bulk. The extremely flexible and robust design of the OLPC project that can be mechanically powered instead of needing power grid or batteries is a big chunk of its cost. Bulk manufacturing helps lower prices, but you still have to pay for the keyboard components and the screen and CPU and the power supplies.

Re:completely impossible

[mrchaotica]

There is NO WAY in which a laptop can cost only $10

No kidding. The XO (i.e., the "hundred-dollar laptop") genuinely qualifies as a laptop, but this could only be described as a "pocket organizer" or "PDA" at best.

Re:completely impossible

[Strategos]

I don't agree its completely impossible, a complex fabber might be able to do a screen with the right designs. Inkjet printed circuit boards on paper plus recycled cpus and ram from old cellphones. Internet based storage. It doesn't sound impossible to me, just difficult.

Re:completely impossible

[N3wsByt3]

Two remarks:

- That would involve a completely new production method based on dirt-cheap (e.g. paper) materials, and being ready for mass production, which is unlikely to happen within two years time. Especially since it would have to work together with mainstream (recycled) electronics.

- That paper-made device would not be new (see the recycled stuff) nor have any of the specifications needed to call it a laptop (rechargable batteries?). What you're describing is rather a second-hand, papier-maché thin-client with awful specs. Even when created no-one would want it, and it certainly wouldn't be a laptop.

Re:completely impossible

[Robotech_Master]

Sure, they'll lose money on each one--but they'll make it up in volume!

Re:completely impossible

[Prof.Phreak]

There is NO WAY in which a laptop can cost only $10

Depends on your definition of a `laptop'.

ie: Pen and paper can be seen as a computational device, that one can hold on their lap. And $10 buys a lot of paper.

Re:completely impossible

[N3wsByt3]

Well, heck, the brain can be seen as a computational device, and as proven in Iraq, it could well be placed in your lap for less then $10 (unless you use really expensive bullits/knifes).

That said, for getting a still working prototype in its original casing (where you can give some input and get some output) in your lap, it will probably cost more then $10 - well...I don't know how the prices are in India, actually, but after a few times the $10 will not cover it anymore, and the prototype will become unresponsive. ;-)

Seriously though; semantics aside, we all know they didn't meant paper and pen. You are however right in that the Indian government will be swindled again. (Ofcourse, it's quite possible *some* politicians will fare well because of it.)

laptop /læptp/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[lap-top] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun a portable, usu. battery-powered microcomputer small enough to rest on the user's lap.

Re:completely impossible

[Cafe Alpha]

I take the $10 bit to be exagguration that means "as cheap as possible".

So if the machine costs $35 at its cheapest point, the $10 promise will still have been useful as a lie to get the political machine moving... That's how this works. It's not quite a first world country we're talking about after all, and that's the whole point. We shouldn't expect Indian politics to be that precise and honest.

I just hope that any machine they come up with will have enough flash to hold Linux, a developement environment or two and some extra packages. It will be of much less use to the children if it doesn't.

Re:completely impossible

[ChrisMaple]

A good Casio graphing calculator now retails for $40. Assume that the actual production cost is no more than half that. Add some cost for a substantially bigger display. Take back some cost with lower quality components. Don't provide a manual, packaging, or a guarantee. Allow time and the advancement of technology to take out the rest of the cost.

Re:completely impossible

[N3wsByt3]

Then what you got is a low-quality graphing calculator with a bigger display and no guarantee. ;-)

That just *might* be possible, for $10 in India. I think even the people there will have bigger expectations than that for a laptop, though.

$10 Laptop?

[Asmandeus]

It's a pad of paper and a really nice pencil.

Re:$10 Laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, why not.

e-paper with touch-sensitive layer on top of it. and connection to the net, yes....

Even calculators cost more than that

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for a TI-89 with wifi and word processing that costs less than $100. Scratch that. I'm just waiting for a TI-89 that costs less than a $100....

As an Indian IT person,

[Kream]

I have to say

a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.
b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.
c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.
d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?
e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages. And as someone who works in Indic computing, the best input methods/rendering backends involve QT, GTK or MS. (Despite working on the wretched problem for years and years and spending crores of the taxpayer's money, there's still no reliable input method for entering Devanagari text on the 80x25 console.) MS is out because there's no way you can build an x86 based or WinCE based machine for $10. Maybe some ARM+Linux based machines could run QT/GTK. But, again, $10 seems awfully low.

*sigh*

Aniruddha Shankar

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[Anonymous Coward]

Please get rid of India's caste system.

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[kallu_be]

what do you expect from HRD ministry headed by Mr.Arjun Singh. He has no idea of what he is speaking of. First he promised to provide reservations for some a class of people, which later been rejected by Supreme Court as govt was not able to provide valid reason. Now he is talking some other bullshit, wait for a couple of months to announce that this project has been scraped.

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[kallu_be]

Indian caste system is not a thing to get rid off. It has deeply buried inside every Indian mentality. Even the govt is implementing some policies .. those policies are only useful to uplift them monetarily, not socially.

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just a publicity stunt where a politician is trying to ride on the wave of IT success in India.
Most people (being technology ignorant) will never follow up to check if this project ever materialized and in a year, pretty much the rest will forget that this project "got dropped". So the politician will stand to win since 99% of the people will just remember that this minister attempted something cool (since they won't even know that it was impossible to begin with).

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you take this seriously? This is another examples that Arjun Singh is senile and the glorified babu's have no idea what they are talking about. I wish I could sue them for making us Indian's look like jokers everywhere. But they can always get away by saying that they never claimed it would be a computational device. It might be something that you put on the top of your lap. Like someone said earlier , a notebook and pencil, in a wooden box (OOPs that would become more than $10, sorry, may be a box mad of clay).

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[drinkypoo]

Let me open by saying that I think that there is basically no chance of it even happening, let alone coming in under $40 or so (production cost). But I will respond to your points anyway;

a) The ministry in question has never ever (to my knowledge) developed anything that can even remotely be called technological hardware.

I doubt they were planning to build it themselves.

b) The CPU, the RAM and many of the other components will have to be imported because India doesn't have a single factory that makes them.

So?

c) Is it even remotely possible to buy in bulk a laptop-grade battery for $10 ? My low-end cellphone battery costs (retail) more.

For that price, I'm envisioning something with less power than a cellphone! I would guess a side-lit (by LED) LCD display of not more than VGA resolution, and in greyscale.

It won't be useful for video, or doing color anything, but it should be functional for everything else.

d) What will the machine boot from ? a hard drive ? Flash? SSD?

Flash would be the obvious choice. It doesn't need a lot of storage. It could run something like PalmOS... Or hell, PC-GEOS.

e) IF a laptop is being designed for India, it will have to support Indic languages.

I'd say this is going to have to be specifically developed for the product unless they can find a product which can be reworked into their OS.

You could use Linux with FBUI, but even the kernel consumes more memory than I'd like.

My first suggestion would be to get whoever owns PC-GEOS right now to donate licensing, and to run it on top of FreeDOS. You could do this on a 286-class processor (let alone anything faster) and get a gui with scalable fonts. GEOS ran on the C= 64, it runs like a CHAMP on DOS on a PC. I have a Tandy/Casio/GRiD Zoomer/Z-PDA-7000/GRiDPad 2390 which uses DOS and GEOS and it is really quite peppy. And it's a total dog by modern standards (20 MHz NEC V20 processor.)

Re:As an Indian IT person,

[flyingfsck]

You haven't heard of Intel India? India has a rather advanced electronics production infrastructure.

Inflation?

[RedElf]

Does this mean inflation is slowing, or perhaps even reversing?

Crack

[Anonymous Coward]

$10 computer? The entire call center they call a country must be on Crack. Maybe they're thinking of a graphing calculator?

$10 laptops

[ssintercept]

greatest thing since internet porn!

Re:10$ Laptops...

[Bloke down the pub]

Very impressive, Your father wasn't oil minister of somewhere, was he?

Fundamental flaw with your plan: making Y lower than X.

Why not increase the price to $85?

[MarkByers]

Then it can run Windows too.

ebay

[timmarhy]

can't wait to buy one on ebay then.

Indian idea more sensible

[Cafe Alpha]

The $100 laptop was always a bit strange in that recognizing that current color displays were too short lived and too power hungry for the third world they decided to spend years inventing a new color screen technology instead of going with the long perfected, cheap (and much lower cost and power) reflective black and white LCD displays.

They obsessed over "electric paper" because they thought it "looked like paper". What nerds!!! Who gives a damn? Black and white reflective LCDs lower resolution, but they have very high contrast and are very readable. But not cool enough for trust fund kids and Negroponte's upper crust crowd.

I understand that children may be more enthusiastic to have color toys with sound and everything, but from the point of view of really poor places having three or four times as many machines is better. It's better to have something than nothing.

Re:Indian idea more sensible

[Russ Nelson]

Wow. Your ignorance is palpable. The OLPC screen *is* reflective black and white ... in the sun. And inside, where you can see the backlight, it's color. It might cost a little more, but it's a huge advance in usability. If you think color isn't worth whatever it costs, you must have never actually used a monochrome screen. I have. It's teh suck. Walk a mile in the shoes you want other people to wear and I might believe you.

Re:Indian idea more sensible

[Cafe Alpha]

"Walk a mile in the shoes you want other people to wear and I might believe you."

I might be nice if you tried to walk a mile in the shoes of children whose community can't afford $100 machines (or medicine or books or buildings for classrooms etc. etc.).

Re:Indian idea more sensible

[Anonymous Coward]

They obsessed over "electric paper" because it requires NO ELECTRICITY when it is not being updated. That's huge. Think of the ramifications for battery life.

Why are you being such a negative nelly?

Re:Indian idea more sensible

[Russ Nelson]

Again, your ignorance is so real, so fixed, that I can reach out and touch it. Yes, I'm purposefully trying to discourage you from commenting on this issue because you really have NO IDEA what you're saying. What you are missing is that the OLPC laptop is a *book replacement*. If it can't be justified as a book replacement, then it can't be justified AT ALL. So, if a government can't afford books, it won't be buying the OLPC for its students. Period. End of discussion. Your whole "walk a mile" thing is just a waste of electrons and magnetic domains. Save a domain! Shut up!

high hopes?

[forgethistory]

How on earth are these laptops, supposedly meant for the really poor rural folks, going to be powered?
There is no electricity in 50% of the villages, and just enough to power a single light bulb in 30%
Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power perhaps?

Re:high hopes?

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth are these laptops, supposedly meant for the really poor rural folks, going to be powered?

Simple, they'll connect to Slashdot and use troll power.

Re:high hopes?

[figleaf]

Not sure where you got your figures.
Several of the affluent states had a overcapacity.

Re:high hopes?

[forgethistory]

"...87% of villages are electrified, while only 42-44% of rural households are electrified."
- Ministry of Power, Government of India, Discussion Paper on Rural Electrification Policies (Pursuant to Sections 4&5 of the Electricity Act 2003).
This paper has more details

Re:high hopes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting a reference that actually contradict what you yourself said earlier...

Re:high hopes?

[forgethistory]

well..i assume these computers are meant to be used by people (households); not villages
50% of the households still have no power
Also, if you've ever stayed in any village in India you would be cautious about claiming that power supply in villages actually works
Even in a city like Bangalore a company cannot survive without a backup power supply

Wow, a $10 laptop

[mattmacf]

And so begins the Ten-Laptops-Per-Child campaign

Re:Wow, a $10 laptop

[martin-boundary]

2007: Ten laptop per child program begins design phase
2009: Ten laptop per child program begins production
August 4, 2010: Laptop population reaches Ten Laptops Per Child (TLPC) target
August 29, 2010: Children become self aware, initiate intercontinental ballistic laptop piefight

Re:Wow, a $10 laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

640 laptops should be enough for everyone.

Re:Wow, a $10 laptop

[laffer1]

Hey they can learn clustering so they can open up firefox.

Did Tony Soprano pitch this?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Anyone else think that someone is just scamming someone else, and maybe they oversold the idea a bit?

Incredible ??

[spmallick]

Well, you never know. India is full of surprises. Read on --

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6620461.stm

OS?

[timesearch]

What operating system would this run? Somehow I don't think Microsoft is going to let India have *any* Windows product for free. Nothing costing $10 would run MacOS, but free linux would be an option. Which would give you web browsing and email. Maybe even a bigger question is, who is going to pay to run all the fiber trunk lines all over the country where not even copper pair exists? Which is way more than half the country. If you say, they'll use wireless, well, we are back to how do you fit a couple hundred dollars in a $10 matchbox.

Re:OS?

[Dogtanian]

What operating system would this run? Somehow I don't think Microsoft is going to let India have *any* Windows product for free. They certainly would if it was ultimately a cut-down version that didn't impinge upon sales of their "real" Windows (which the cheap Windows machines would be designed to work with) and locked mainstream use into that of Windows-based technologies, so that higher-end users would be strongly pushed towards using (again) "real" Windows simply because it's what 99% of the country uses.

The money to be made from users of the cut-down Windows would likely be negligible compared to the profit made from locking in a society to Windows.

Re:OS?

[WeAreAllDoomed]

Somehow I don't think Microsoft is going to let India have *any* Windows product for free.

microsoft has show a peculiar interest in india over the last few years. they apparently view it as strategically important to maintaining their dominance, so i wouldn't be surprised if they "invested" some cash to reduce the likelihood that india will embrace free and open source software at the institutional level.

Too late....

[Anonymous Coward]

The Babylonians invented the Abacus around 2500 years ago.
$1 PC anyone?

Have a Nice Weekend!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a Great weekend this coming to be, Last post on China then followed by India now.

You can ask more in life, type your comments now!.

dude OLPC cant be that hard

[kaizokuace]

if you can pick up a nintendo DS for like $120 retail you can do OLPC. Just make sure software is available for it. They already got an opera browser for it. Just make a DS with a micro sd card and the touch screen takes care of having a keyboard. Its not that difficult to read on it and its extremely portable and good on power consumption. DS FTW says I.

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[Secrity]

Are you suggesting that India clone a DS? If Nintendo adds a micro SD and touch screen to an DS it will no longer be just a video game and the price will at least double or triple. Also, touch screens are expensive

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, a DS has a touch-screen, it's like it's main selling point. You can already get a micro SD reader that fits into the DS cart port, that's how a lot of homebrew works.

So you point was?

The question is valid: If Nintendo can sell a DS for a profit at around $100, why couldn't someone make a slightly bulkier, slightly less powerful version for less? You could even drop the audio to save a few pennies and replace the DS/GBA slots with SD or some other removable storage.

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[rnmartinez]

Or just add a touchscreen to this
http://www.gp2x.com/
Dual cpus, runs linux, 64mb ram, takes sd and works with pal and ntsc

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[JCOTTON]

Look, I can already buy a color dvd player for under $70 usd, retail. It must cost about $35-40 to make. It must have a prosesor and power supply. To make it into a "laptop" computer, All you would need to add would be a keyboard and mouse, and a usb connection for internet, printer, etc. And that is just another funtion that could be integrated on a chip. Get my drift here?

The reason that the dvd player is so cheap now (they were over $500 when they first came out) is because the up-front engineering done to produce the i.c. has been financially realized, and now they just churn em out. The same could be done with a laptop type solution on a chip.

I am of the opinion that it is not in the interests of the major hardware developpers to make prices low. Instead, they add features and capability to keep prices high. If I can get a 3 GHz P5 laptop for $600 now, how much would a 100 MHz P1 cost? Problem is, you can't get those anymore.

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, I'm not sure if you've ever seen a DS, but it already HAS a touch screen. That's kind of the point of it.

Re:dude OLPC cant be that hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Add a touch screen to a DS? Why would you, IT ALREADY HAS ONE! It also has two card interfaces, replace one with an SD slot (not even micro, as the DS game cartridge is slightly larger than an SD card) and scrap the other. They'd probably save a bit of money on reduced component costs by removing the GBA slot, which would offset the cost of SD licensing.

As someone else has already mentioned, there's already a port of opera on it, several education packages. It has 2 processors, 2 screens which are easily readable, existing multi-language input (mine can do Japanese or latin characters) and is faster than the first few computers I owned. All it needs is more software, the hardware is essentially complete already

Not Today

[DrYak]

That's also what people have said about the OLPC when it was announced.
Several year later it managed to provide prototypes at ~150$ ea.

If you followed the link from TFA to "India" on-line newspaper, you got those informations :
- Their planning to creat some home made special-purpose design, instead of replicating OLPC work.
Just like this helped the OLPC going from a typical Dell or PowerBook price range to something cheaper using some specially built technology, the Indian project initiator hope to create some newer custom design.
The end product may be as different from the OLPC as the OLPC was different from a regular laptop. Maybe the end product will be closer to a PDA in terms of design and specs.
- This is a very longterm project. The first planned prototype are ~45$ they hope to lower the price in the long term (just like the OLPC started at more than 100$).
- The whole stuff will be designed and produced by cheaper Indian designers / producers, whereas OLPC is an occidental colaboration (AMD, MIT and such). Except the whole stuff to get cheaper from that too.

Biogas maybe?

[ghoul]

Most Indian villages which dont have grid power , have either solar , wind or most commonly biogas plants. As cows are there in most villages its easy to get methane from cow dung and generators running on methane

Re:side note: , it's been done!

[Adam Hazzlebank]

http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5140.html

I think it would be distributed

[pkspks]

Don't get me wrong but the term "laptop" may be misleading. The laptop may turn out to be a portable device while relies on a server for computing. There already many such deployments (even in some slum/rural areas of India). I think they are trying to reduce the cost of the portable dumb terminals.

Umm no...

[PrimeNumber]

If you read the article its a car with a 30 HP engine.
Why don't they just save time and sell these instead?

Re:Umm no...

[bloobloo]

Or a 2CV

Re:Umm no...

[Rakishi]

That's more than this thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_126p had and that didn't have trouble hauling 3 people + roof filled with stuff hundreds of kilometers. Heck they can just remake that that or another cheap soviet car and help put a dent in the population growth as a byproduct (sell large trucks to half the population and death traps on wheels to the other half then stand back).

400 LEDs

[msgmonkey]

That's 400 LEDs and you'd be surprised how expensive LED's actually are. For the price of 400 you could put a high resolution mono LCD screen.

OLPC

[N3wsByt3]

"That's also what people have said about the OLPC when it was announced."

Not true, at least not by people knowing something of IT/computers. By the time they proposed their OLPC project, there were already desktops on the market selling at $199 with better specifications (and a HD of 30GB) - though without screen, granted, but a 7,5 inch screen is not very expensive. It is fully in the realm of the possible to create a laptop with less good specifications for $145, and indeed, with mass-production even just under $100. It is impossible, however, to go below the marginal costs of a product (and still remain in business), which, for the OLPC, can be estimated to be around $80-$90 (thus; even with large volumes). The moment they will say that such an OLPC-device with the current specs will be sold for less then 80 bucks, I will call that an impossibilty too, and rightfully so. The only way that would be possible is if *completely* new, dirt cheap production-methods and materials are used, which is doubtful to happen in the next two years (which is the timeframe of the OLPC to be mass-produced and the indian-made one to be developed).

While it is always dangerous to predict long term technological development, especially in IT, I am willing to wager that anything produced for $10 in two years time, will not be worth the name 'laptop'. At most, it will be a worthless PDA-like device, with abhorent specs, probably worse than what I described in my former post - and even then the batteries won't be included. Let's not forget India already tried to make a home-made 'dirt-cheap' computer for $100...and it flopped miserably. And now they're going to make one for $10? Yeah right.

Re:side note: , it's been done!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a rip! You said it has been done but that thing costs much more than $10!

Palm w/ keyboard (was Re:No info to be found...)

[WillAdams]

vhogemann said:
>There were also some company building a greyscale PalmOS device
>with a full keyboard attached to it... but I can't remember the name.

That'd probably be the Dana AlphaSmart:

http://www.alphasmart.com/

William

$10 laptops?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll probably be a stone slab with "laptop" written on it. ...I still want one *hint hint India*

Ten bucks a laptop?

[ScrewMaster]

I guess they'll have to have them made in China, for that kind of money.

India India !

[chrisranjana.com]

$10 laptops ! Combined with FREE broadband I mean Free as in Beer http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Broadband_to_g o_free_in_2_yrs/articleshow/1955351.cms 10 + free broadband for everyone + $15 to $25 per hour salaries ..Wow is there a place to beat India !!

yeah well...

[tomstdenis]

well I'll make a $5 laptop!!! beat that India!

Frankly it's really immature and naive to think it's possible with todays tech. Even the XO is costing over $100 to make in decent bulk quantities. A $10 laptop would really be cheap, and probably of next to no use to anyone. Hell I bet the case and screen of the XO costs more than $10. Let alone the logic board, keyboard, power supply, etc...

I think this is just a sign of things to come. Intel with their version of the XO, now India ... I'm sure China has one up their sleeves too. All these people trying to ride the good will and reputation of OLPC is kinda making me sick...

Tom

heh

[N3wsByt3]

Wish I had 'funny'-modpoints ;-)

Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they use some cheap indian child labor, this thing will be a possibility!

This would teach the value of hard work - if you want that laptop you've got to earn it boy!

Not only that, it would improve the prospects for lucrative technology related jobs
for india's younger generations!

The real concern

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? Big woop if they're going to make a $10 laptop.
The real question is can it run World of Warcraft!??!?!?

Get the Indians nice and addicted so they won't keep stealing our tech support jobs

Just another marketing hypefest.

[CrystalSpherix]

Slightly offtopic regarding the OLPC. Did it occur to you that f.e. the Kohjinshas http://www.kohjinsha.com/ and rebranded Cathenas http://www.dataevolution.com/cathena_cx_info.htm are almost nothing more than the OLPC http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)#Geo de_LX with different storage subsystems, consumergrade casings and different, albeit small displays? Intended initial cost for the OLPC was about 100 USD, now it reached about 170 USD. Compare that with the price for the Kohjinshas. Do some calculations for the difference between small formfactor but larger capacity HDDs and Flash based media, and the different displays. Where would be the difference in (mass)manufacturing costs between a more rugged case which is intended for being handled by childs hands under hard conditions and a case which is more appealing to geeks? Seems like someone has a great win as spin-off from the OLPC for hardware which has been commercially unsuccessful so far. Should i feel f*beep*ed by lacking consumerfriendly (pricewise) availability for this interesting stuff? They have cryptosupport similar to VIAs Padlock integrated and supported by Linux. I just want these boards in Mini/Nano/Pico-ITX for no more than say about 80 USD, as an alternative to VIA EPIA which is overrated, i think. :-)

Re:Just another marketing hypefest.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cathena is interesting, but unfortunately -- like the OLPC -- you can't buy it yet. And it is surprisingly expensive relative to the OLPC: a proposed price of $800 vs. $200. It would be interesting to know where that extra $600 is going. Yeah, it has a 40Gb hard drive instead of 512Mb flash, and it has a touch screen, both of which are attractive features but probably eat into the battery life. And it also has Bluetooth and a memory card reader, which are not all that important as both machines support wireless networking and the OLPC will be able to use at least one type of memory card. But you give up the OLPC's camera, graphics tablet pad, higher resolution screen, ruggedization, and power-saving monochrome mode. I think that even if the OLPC were twice as expensive it would still be competitive with this device. That said, it would be nice to see either of them (or a similar item) on the market.

yes but

[bl8n8r]

will they run windows?

Education, or consumption?

[CarpetShark]

Don't forget that digital media and e-commerce are all converging around PCs. Computers may be mainly educational tools now, but one day, those laptops will be required to make the poor good consumers.

This is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE!

[jozmala]

Ever used computer with less than megabyte of ram? I have.
Ever used computer with less than megabyte of persistent storage? I have.
Now lets talk about silicon costs.
Putting few megabytes of ram, all periphelia controllers and tiny CPU, and some flash [non-compatible, designed locally to avoid IP issues], could be put on 3$ chip.

Thats right, computer as powerfull as early 90's computer could be build in single really cheap chip.
No it won't run quake 2. Perhaps you could port first quake for it though.

Re:This is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE!

[damacus]

Yes, but it's a laptop. Can you get a battery, screen, input device and the encompassing hardware for $7? Even with volume discount and mass production?

Re:This is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now lets talk about silicon costs.
Putting few megabytes of ram, all periphelia controllers and tiny CPU, and some flash [non-compatible, designed locally to avoid IP issues], could be put on 3$ chip.

Unfortunately, there are no microcontrollers available today that have "several megabytes" of RAM on-chip. The chip that comes closest that I know of is the Axis LX/FX100 multi-chip module, which costs a lot more than $3. Granted, you probably could put a C64 on a single chip for ~$3 (I'm currently developing with a souped up 8051 with 64K ram, 512K flash and integrated ethernet, but lacks a display controller - this cost around $5 in quantities of 1000), but you still need a power supply, a display, and a keyboard. No way are you going to build that for $10.

Re:This is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE!

[nasor]

Ok, you've got your chip. Now you have to build a laptop around it. I would be astounded if the power upply could be had for under $5. That leaves you with $2 to pay for your screen, keyboard, the case, some sort of data I/O port, and labor.

Re:This is COMPLETELY POSSIBLE!

[jozmala]

There is big difference between silicon cost and what you pay. 20mm^2 of processed silicon costs 1$ on modern process.
The ram density is 10Mbit per mm and Flash density 20Mbit per mm And for lowend packaging the cost is 1c per pin.
Plus of course the mask set for Million or few million for ENTIRE run. Make millions of those chips and things get interesting. Cut of the western IP companies and using locally designed controllers and CPU:s.
Powersupply is really cheap also, you DON'T expect it to create multiple voltages, nor expect it produce high current.
Its more like converter that resides inside any electronic device that plugs in the wall, not the highend powerhouse thats inside PC.
The thing is that people who see price tag in store have no idea how cheap it is to manufacture same item. The rule of thumb is that manufacturing costs 10% or less of what you see in store. However my prices of electronic costs are not derived from rule of thumbs but from actual costs.

As for costs of controllers they are really tiny and shouldn't even count for manufacturing costs. I'm not expecting them to combine more than 1mm of silicon estate.
Its all about cutting middle men to get that goal. And desinging it for the purpose instead of trying to find off the shelf components, and then manufacturing it in VERY HIGH VOLUMES.

The only potential problem for getting the there would be display, 6-12" flat panel price. Not monitor, not TV but panel price in high quantities, is something that I havent found yet.

Times Of India link

[Phoe6]

Any reasonable Indian, when he comes across this story and finds the news hyperlinked to "Times of India" is sure to ignore the news and wait for information from more worthy resources. TOI, has an habit of creating all news as sensational, and some times to the point of 'formatting a misleading' news. The project could have been yet-another-cheap laptop project with no relation to any price tag or information on OLPC.

Re:Times Of India link

[NovaSupreme]

>>>Any reasonable Indian, when he comes across this story and finds the news hyperlinked to "Times of India" is sure to ignore the news..

Correct version

Any reasonable Indian when reads this story knows it must be coming from "T O I (let)" paper of India.

Another sensational and 100% false story to appear on /. from TOIlet - http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/132 9211

They'll do it Euro-Style

[EmagGeek]

Airbus is a prime example

"We're going to make the biggest, fastest, dreamiest jet in the world, and it'll be the cheapest jet money can buy!!!!!"

"Oh, by the way, oh pretty please can we have $5 billion in free money to build it with? Thanks citizens of Europe!!!"

Re:They'll do it Euro-Style

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have funded it indirectly with defense contracts shouldn't they ...

Re:They'll do it Euro-Style

[EmagGeek]

What, exactly, is your implication? What American passenger jet was developed with taxpayer money for the express purpose of undercutting competition from a manufacturer in another country in their own market?

As Gillette said..

[Rob T Firefly]

"Fuck everything, we're doing five blades."

You can actually measure this.

[Grendel Drago]

Here's a table (sortable, now!) which ranks nations by level of income inequality; this isn't a perfect metric, since (for instance) wealth inequality tends to be far more dramatic, and a nation with high inequality but a high minimum standard of living may have fewer people in misery than a nation with low inequality, but a low average standard of living.

That said, Bolivia leads the "richest 10%/poorest 10% ratio" category, at 168.1:1 (USA: 15.9:1); Sierra Leone leads "richest 20%/poorest 20% ratio" at 57.6:1 (USA: 8.4:1); Namibia has the highest Gini coefficient, 74.3 as calculated by the UN, 70.7 by the CIA (USA: 40.8, 45). Of course, some of this data goes back to 1989, so take it with a grain of salt. The least unequal countries based on these metrics are, respectively, Azerbaijan (3.3), Azerbaijan (2.6) and Denmark (24.7, 23.2).

There's also a measure of the proportion of the population living in poverty, both in absolute (in Nigeria, about 90% of the population lives on under $2 a day) and relative (in Liberia, 80% of the population is below the poverty line) terms.

Perhaps they indeed care about education

[stgatev]

Don't get stuck with the $10 number. This is an investment in the nation building. Of course the price will be much higher, and the government will cover most of the research and even the production cost; of course, with taxpayers money. But I will say this -- I would rather pay $1000 more in taxes which the government invests in education and development, than in wars. There is nothing wrong with subsidizing the education, and every country in the world should do it, if it cares about its future.

Re:Perhaps they indeed care about education

[Russ Nelson]

There is nothing wrong with subsidizing the education,

Actually, there is. The government should never spend money that private citizens will spend (for the government to spend $1 first it must spend money to take taxes from its citizens. The citizens will spend money to reduce their taxes). Only a very small number of parents will not educate their children. Everybody else will spend what it takes for their children to live up to their potential.

Re:Perhaps they indeed care about education

[stgatev]

Russ, I believe the education must be subsidized. How else parents working for a minimum wage could afford to pay for their children's education? No way. Are their children stupider? No, at least when they were born. But with age, they fall further and further behind. To become a smart person, someone must invest in you. And some parents simply can't, although they want to. That's the role of the government. They should be building a nation of creators, not consumers. Call me socialist if you wish, but I'd rather be among equals, than sitting on an island in a sea of ignorance.

Re:Perhaps they indeed care about education

[Russ Nelson]

That doesn't violate the rule I laid down. If people are going to buy something anyway, the government shouldn't be buying it for them. If AND ONLY IF people won't buy something, then the government might consider whether the public gain is worth the public expense.

That said, you need to understand that we don't have classes in the U.S. Some people who are "rich" have not always been rich nor will they always be rich. Most people who are "poor" have not always been poor nor will they always be poor. It's not clear that most "poor" people need anything other than equal treatment under the law.

India wants to justify slavery

[Anonymous Coward]

Althought I haven't rtfa'd
my gut reaction is that India wants to justify their caste system and the dehumanization of "the other person" using the ideas of open source and charity.

That's what it is.

period.

No laptop can be made for $10 that fairly pays *any* factory worker or developer.

The poor need to rise up there in armed revolution.

Feasability

[afarhan]

Take a deep breath and now .. exhale and think about it. is it really impossible?
1. display: what kind of display? I would say use the TV. cost of display : zilch.
2. cpu? how about the atmel arm processor that comes with 128kb ram for $3.
3. keyboard? hmmm .. a membrane keyboard is little more than a single side etched pcb with rubber pads over it.
4. box? i can get an abs plastic of the size of sinclair computer for about 30 cents.

it is not entirely impossible guys. just tough to act.

- farhan

Re:Feasability

[Anonymous Coward]

"1. display: what kind of display? I would say use the TV. cost of display : zilch."

Hmm... I see an obvious problem with this, considering the target market.

I can only see one way to produce a $10 laptop worthy of being called a laptop: Huge, huge subsidies.

raw materials cost $10

[jakihairi]

The raw materials cost more than $10. According to this... http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/07/hnunstud y_1.html ...the average desktop(not laptop) pc requires more than 1.8 tons(!) of raw materials. Dirt costs more than $10 per ton. Unless they're making it out of garbage or air I think they're out of luck. And the cost or raw materials can only go up.

100 Rupee Latop?

[Ranger]

The only ten dollar laptop I know of involves a stripper named Candy.

Re:100 Rupee Latop?

[Russ Nelson]

Well, ITYM 500 bucks (or .005 lakhs), but whatever.

No need for local processing!

[Natales]

Think about this scenario: a single WiMax or similar technology deployed in every school, library, plaza or public space where the "laptops" are actually terminals in a well designed centralized server model. There is no local intelligence in the laptop, preinstalled software, or any kind of local processing at all. There is no need for it. The "terminal laptop" boots wirelessly from the network, and all sessions are server-based. No black market for the laptops and extremely low cost to build and maintain.

for 10 a buck a laptop

[homeslice3]

I'd panel the walls in a room with them and have 4 walls of porn, stupid youtube videos, sport highlights, Lost reruns, and other stupid crap running all the time.

Afraid of markets ?

[agslashdot]

Why didn't the senior from the Vellore Institute of Technology who supposedly designed this $10 laptop take his design to a VC ? Upwards of a few billion dollars is looking to park its ass in India. Any VC would fund this project in a heartbeat if the design is sound. Same with the IISc designers. Why are they so scared of the markets ? Instead, both parties approach the Government of India, definitely the most corrupt+inefficient entity on the entire planet, and hand over their super-secretive design to the Human Resources Ministry ?!! The mind boggles. Here's what will happen - the HRD ministry will make crazy hyped promises, go showboating, end up spending a few crore taxpayer rupeees ( few mil taxpayer dollars ) to prove that a laptop can't be built for $10. By then, a decade would have passed, and China would indeed be building and selling $10 laptops at the local Walmart.

Re:Afraid of markets ?

[Russ Nelson]

If they're smart enough to design a plausible $10 laptop, they're smart enough to know that nobody would be stupid enough to buy it, so they were smart to go to the government.

Economics 101

[charlesbakerharris]

Right... because we all know that high demand drives prices DOWN.

AMIRITE?

No experience, no clue

[Russ Nelson]

The problem is that the Indians haven't made enough mistakes yet. Remember the Simputer? It, too, was supposed to be a cheap computer which Indian entrepreneurs (those folks with the STD/ISD/FAX booths everywhere) could buy to allow peasants to get on the 'net. It ended up being WAY too expensive. And they think they're going to make a $10 laptop? The $100 laptop is an OPEN DESIGN. They can grab it and build it themselves. No need to redesign for the Indian market. No need to take two years. Just build the damn thing. The fact that they're talking about the design says that the point here is the design, not the computer. This is just an IIT boondoggle. And look! They're talking about environmental testing as if that was something optional!?!?

Re:No experience, no clue

[The_Wilschon]

That was actually kind of the point of the GP. By doing the design themselves, they might learn quite a bit about computer design. Of course, since we're talking about a country and a government here, rather than about individuals, I'm not sure that that really makes so much sense. But regardless, the GP said "doing the design itself on their own might be beneficial, regardless of the quality of the end product", and you said "But all they care about is doing the design itself on their own, they don't care about the quality of the end product."

Also, you point out that they haven't made enough mistakes yet, but then you immediately turn around and blast them for... making a mistake?

Re:No experience, no clue

[Russ Nelson]

Ahhhh, but the trick is to not make mistakes that you already know are mistakes. You'd really rather learn from other people's mistakes than make your own. Just like Patton said: "You don't want to die for your country. You want to make the other bastard die for his."

quite feasible

[nanosquid]

The TRS-80 100 was a great little laptop and has served journalists and writers well for a long time for word processing, calculations, and on-line access. It worked for 16h on 4 AA batteries. People use them to this day.

It's basically a keyboard, a 40x8 LCD screen, a modem, and an 8085 processor. You should easily be able to put together something like that for $10 these days, even with a more powerful processor.

$10 a laptop!

[Vexorian]

I don't know, could we get a brain please? Don't we want durability? Also, does everyone else notice that we need more RAM than 2MB to actually browse a webpage? How about reading PDFs? I think that giving them a computer that could actually be used is better.

$1 laptop

[lamz]

I just bought a laptop for my 2-year-old son: an Apple eMate 300 from eBay. I paid $1.

He loves it!

He likes playing with my MacBook, but I didn't like how he kept poking the screen. (For two reasons: first, he cannot interact with a MacBook that way, second, he could damage the screen.)

Even if you don't have a 2-year-old, pick up an eMate off eBay. It's a fun, disposable toy for programmers!

Phone support

[Anonymous Coward]

India could outsource online phone support for these laptops to America.

Uhhh... a market of 1 million laptops at $10 each?

[CatOne]

That's a total of 10 million dollars. Now much NRE would you have to do in design? Recall that really has to be included in the total cost -- I don't know specifically WHO would invest the resources for such a small return. Certainly not any company that was looking to make money.

So in this case you're looking to someone who would be willing to invest the time and effort at a loss. Which is typically government. At which point, does it really matter what the cost of the goods is?

This just doesn't make sense. Maybe India's government learns to study economics a bit more and figure out what their goals are -- getting laptops out at a certain price point, or getting them out at a sustainable volume for a private company.

Why poor Indians need a laptop?

[gbalaji]

I'm from India and I cannot fathom why my poor fellow countrymen will need laptops. But thankfully the government is not that stupid. These research folks can go on talking and if something materializes its good. But don't let the 'Times of India' fool you into thinking that this $10 laptop is a national endeavor.

Indian sport minister recently remarked that expenditure on the Asian games was a terrible waste when it could be better spent on rural schemes. Some people claim that his remark led to India losing the Asian Games 2014 bid to South Korea. So atleast few people in India have their priorities correct.

And finally I'm disappointed that /. quotes from the 'Times of India' newspaper. TOI despite its long history is kind of a joke these days. Its now renowned for publishing useless news items.

$47! That's ridiculous!

[recharged95]

ok, that's 37$ in labor--over 300%.

Since we're talking education, why do they just have kids assemble their own laptops. I mena the OLPC pc will be cheap plastic snap pieces likely. And have the kids do their own QA. In the end they're exposed & learn the technology, not just use the technology. We need more engineers & scientist, not mouse clickers.

That would cut labor at least in half, and we end up with a ~$25 computer.

Huh? I had a Tandy 102!

[Cafe Alpha]

My ignorance it palpable? Jesus, not only don't you know what you're talking about, but your an ass about it too!

Remember the Tandy 102?

It had a reflective LCD screen. Low res but VERY easy to read. Very low power. Very cheap. 1983 technology! And that's what I was talking about.

I also used a sinclair Cambridge z-88. Once again, easy to read screen, if too small. I burned an eprom to make a dvorak keyboard for one of those.

charter schools!

[Diamond Tree]

You appear to have forgotten that we, too, have competition for educating "the poor" in the U.S. (Assuming you're from the U.S.). Charter schools are exactly that - they just happen to leverage publicly gathered tax dollars and allow private entities access to them. While the results have been mixed so far, there is evidence that public schools improve in areas where charter schools start up (public school teachers *are* responsive to competitive pressures! whodathunkit). For more on the fight for school choice (via charter) see: ij.org .

Additionally, Amartya Sen and other prominent economists have written extensively on how it is that the poor in "3rd world" countries actually have a fair amount of money - it's just that they have no secure place to save funds and have little access to credit to leverage their existing assets. Which is to say that many of the "poor" aren't even "poor" in the sense of utterly destitute - they're just unable to leverage institutions and assets because of the overall social infrastructure they have to survive in. It is undeniably true, however, that there are many extremely poor people who this doesn't cover (and I'm not trying to deny the gravity of their poverty), it's just that many people we label as "poor" actually have more options than we would expect.

--
learnjapanese.poddedcell.net - Step Up Nihongo, Bobby Valentine's Japanese textbook of choice!

All taxation just moves costs around

[tepples]

a subsidy can change the cost. The government could subsidize the labor [etc] Is that truly changing the cost, or just moving it around? Production of many goods and services relies on services provided by the government, funded through income tax receipts. Therefore, income taxation is already "just moving [costs] around". So what else is new?

Check craigslist for $30 desktops

[unixdeveloper]

You can find $30 PII desktops with Windows XP in craigslist. If the government(non profit orgs) itself manufactures some lower end PCs with linux, it can bring the cost down dramatically. Distribution and support is going to cost big though.

Re:Huh? I had a Tandy 102!

[Burz]

And the number of students who used such a screen to read their textbooks?

Oh, I thought so...

Current projects for cheaper computers in India

[mohanbabu]

In 2000, Indian government and its partners launched simputer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simputer/. The license cost was too high and only 4000 units were sold. Today, another company, Geodesic, is producing low-cost computers called Amida Simputer, at Rs.12450 (aprox:$300) http://www.amidasimputer.com/. It has all the standard + fun features in a modern day laptop http://www.amidasimputer.com/features/. Rs.12000 is still a huge dent in an average Kumar's (?!!) salary. After a decade of research and development, the Indian government and IISC/C-DAC (research wing) is still unable to commercialize a cheap computer. IMHO, it is a mistake on their marketing and sales strategy. I know few developers who work on this project and they are very much skilled to implement any technology/features. If the government could spend a little more taxpayer's money and market this simputer aggressively, the cost could still go down. Also big companies and NGOs need to pitch in (they are busy minting US dollars from outsourcing). May be, they could sell the $300 amida for $100!

What Network?

[Anonymous Coward]

If constant reliable electricity is a problem, then where is the "network" they will connect with? Wired or wireless? Even in the USA there are few spots with FREE wireless internet connectivity that is reliable.

What ever happened to the web browsing via E-MAIL that was being done in Africa?

$10 laptop?

[Anonymous Coward]

HITCHHIKER
  Yeah, you wouldn't believe my idea--it's a
  home run. You ever hear of the $100
  laptop?

  TED
  The educational computer? Sure, I've seen it on
  Slashdot.

HITCHHIKER
Two million copies it sold last year. Two
million, man. But not next year--my idea's
gonna blow them outta the water. Get this:
(dramatic pause)
$10 laptop.

BEAT.

TED
I see where you're going.

HITCHHIKER
(big smile)
Think about it. You walk into a
store and you see $100 laptop and
right next to it you see $10 laptop
--which one you gonna spring for?

TED
I'd go with the ten.

HITCHHIKER
Bingo. Especially since we guarantee you'll
get every bit as good an education.

TED
How do you guarantee that?

HITCHHIKER
Well it's the company motto: 'If you ain't
happy we'll send you the extra $90 worth
in Windows 3.1 licenses.'

TED
Huh. That sounds great.
(beat)
Unless someone else comes out with
a $9 laptop.

Ted CHUCKLES, but the Hitchhiker just GLARES at him, unamused.

Total cost, not unit cost

[Software Geek]

The really outrageous claim here is not the unit cost of building a laptop, but the total cost of the whole production run. 1 million units @ $47 each = $47 million Assume that you spend $20 million on obsolete parts and $10 million on assembly workers. So far, so good. That leaves $17 million to cover such odds and ends as staffing, management, research, development, customer support, documentation, sales, accounting, lawyers, and facilities. You can't really get very much of those things for $17 million. The total cost of the OLPC project runs into the billions of dollars. They can afford to shop around for the best/cheapest parts, and build their own if nothing suitable is on the market. You just can't do that kind of thing without some serious capital.

Anyone can get their hands on $10 laptops...

[Elbowgeek]

and/or computers. Large corporations are constantly turning over their old systems on regular schedules, but many go to the knackers'. Instead, just send them to areas in which there is a greater need. There you go: machines for the cost of shipping.

where do you live?

[pkphilip]

18 hours a day without electricity?!! where do you live? I live in Chennai, India and we have round-the-clock power here.

Another question - is there anything that can be done to solve this problem? get in touch with me, perhaps - we can do something about this. prem AT songbirdtech.com

Just in case you haven't guessed already, I am an Indian too.

Re:where do you live?

[sid0]

Ah, I meant that I get electricity for less than 18 hours a day. i.e. more than 6 hours of power cuts.

Re:pr0n

[codeshepherd]

I am sure they can't watch pr0n with than.