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India's "$10 Laptop" To Cost $100 After All
narramissic writes "In case you missed it, India's Minister of State for Higher Education yesterday announced the development of a $10 laptop that will target higher education applications. There were no specifications given for the laptop and the rock-bottom price raised questions about government subsidies. Today, the figure was corrected: It's not a $10 laptop; it's a $100 laptop. Still no specs though."
They'll have it up to $1000.
Pesky decimal points....
They must've added Windows to it?
I'm getting tired of seeing people screw up on OLPC, I think I must've seen this type of stuff at least .01 times
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
... I mean, how the hell am I supposed to sell people a $400 extended warranty on top of that?
hopefully the users of this laptop will have to call and talk to someone with a thick, indecipherable American accent to get tech support. Fair is fair.
Oh I see where this is going...
Optional accessories:
- LCD screen : 150$
- CPU : 100$
- 512 Mb RAM : 50$
- Battery : 100$
- AC Power adapter : 80$
etc.
There are things money can't buy, but for laptops accessories, there's mastercard.
But yeah... I guess the laptop could be 100$ itself.
Back to the good ol' times where GM sold there cars with "wheels" and "Steering wheel" as an option.
I'd definitely pay more than 35 cents for a candy bar whose ingredients totalled 110% of its contents, just to find out how that was possible.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
and if they stick with the same technical specifications long enough It will get down to $10.
I remember before intel was the king of CPUs that there was the Z-80, and by the mid-90's Z-80 embedded systems (like the franklin bookman electronic dictionaries) were selling for around $40, with a hangman cartridge on flash memory.. the big cost, back then was the flash memory, and sadly Franklin moved away from the command line/text interfaces to go with more costly fancier displays, etc. only to go to more simple displays again, and 'text to speech' processors...
here's the thing though, by the mid 90's the Z-80 microprocessor was so energy efficient that you could literally run it off 2 cr2022 lithium batteries, and while i didn't use the dictionary every day, it took 13 years for my batteries to fail, to be honest though i used it more for hangman than for a dictionary.
if i used it daily, it would still last a long time, though, especially since it saves where you are in the dictionary so you can turn it off, then when you turn it on again it's in the same place. very easy to use, and nice.
the reason why i know it's a Z-80 is because i took the dictionary apart to look at it once. they do have cheaper non speaking dictionaries today, as well. http://www.franklin.com/estore/dictionary/TG-450/ like that one (12 language translation! for $40) for whatever reason the language translating models cost the same as the basic english models, and they have a wide array of 'high end' speaking dictionaries, including ones with mp3 playback, and ebook reading features...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Well, I'd almost guarantee that it will have better hardware than my first computer (Apple IIe) and that didn't leave me with less of a willingness to push forward on the internet. Ultimately, I'm just kind of being a dick here, but you do have to remember that what we might consider crappy and slow, they might still consider amazing. Yeah, it sucks when it takes 2 minutes to open a web browser, but if you've never seen the web before it's still great, and if it's your only access to the web it's still worth it.