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$10 Laptop Downgraded By Reality; Now Fancy Storage Device
Ian Lamont writes "The news last week that the Indian government was working on a $10 laptop was too good to be true. It turns out that the project is actually a wireless-enabled storage device, not a laptop." Update: 02/04 21:36 GMT by T : Always-illuminating Liliputing has a short article with a picture of the device.
I can use it in my lap, right?
I am not a *blank*, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
They mean it has no wires. It's actually an Etch-a-Sketch.
SD card slot, Microcontroller chip, Radio chip. Viola, low power, moderate bitrate and range wireless data storage device for $5. Development costs furnished by the Indian tax payers.
That still sounds pretty cool to me, I'll take 3!
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
would you believe, a a storage device that plugs into your wireless router for $10? how about, would you believe, a usb dongle that plugs into a laptop that could have wireless, for $10?
Wives also make good laptops, i hear.
Plug the vents and they overheat?
Did the India Times succumb to economic pressures and outsource their reporting jobs to the US?
Wait a second. What started off as a laptop has devolved into a flash drive with a bluetooth chip & a battery! Another week and it'll be described as a "spiral-bound notebook and a pencil with a string tied to it."
and in Himachal Pradesh, it's ok to share her with your brothers too
Wives also make good laptops, i hear.
how the hell we are suppose to know, asshole
839*929
it will include a preinstalled copy of Duke Nukem Forever
Couldn't they just have said it was a glorified USB mem stick? Why the hoopla? Oh, yeah, no one would have cared otherwise. Smart.
Yes, I can see it as possible, in vast mast production, but $10 is a bit ambitious. Still, if any country were going to do it, India with it's semi-socialism, semi-capitalism and very large population is certainly a candidate. It needs to be very simple, no physical buttons, no moving parts, built in solar cell on the back, screen on the front, complete touch interface. Simplify, simplify, simplify. What might be a better idea, is to plan on a cost tag of $100, again with all possible simplification, and then subsidize the cost down to $10 via advertising on the device. Turn all those kiddies into future consumers. With what one asks... $10 is possible, if it's kept simple and there are no middlemen adding to the costs. Products we make get doubled or quadrupled in price before they get to consumers. The wonders of retailing. The real cost of manufacturing is generally about a quarter to a tenth of the price.
The project was not a laptop but actually a cob of corn.
Not necessarily just western media..
Wives also make good laptops, i hear.
If they are Japanese made maybe. My North American made model barely fits on the desktop. Also it's loud and doesn't do well in the closet (needs plenty of ventilation.. but that's a whole other issue). Buy american my ass.
I'd upgrade if possible, but with the poor economy that's just not financially feasible at this time. Heck, I can't afford the disposal fee for the current one let alone how much it is to procure a better slimmer model.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
So, who else is shocked that Team $10 laptop didn't actually have the magic bullet? No hands? Hmm.
Although the new form of the widget is rather fuzzy, I don't think I understand the point. Very low cost computers, designed with the particular attributes of low budget education in mind, are something that hasn't seen much market focus, and are thus a logical target for a special development program. Mass storage, though, has been cheapened and commodified with ruthless efficiency by the mainstream tech market. As have wireless communications mechanisms(GSM is super cheap on the WAN side, and for LAN/PAN you have zigbee, bluetooth, and wifi, depending on your budget). In either case, I'd be shocked if a special charity R&D project could outpace the standard R&D driven by people's desire for cheap gadgets.
Perfectly respectable 2gig USB drives can be had, retail, quantity one, now, for under 10 dollars. If sneakernet isn't good enough, wireless chipsets can also be had for under 10 dollars a unit. What niche, exactly, does this thing fill?
Maybe they're hosting the article with pictures on one of these $10 laptops? ;)
Didn't the original reports tout this as a "portable computer"? This is still what it appears to be. It was the western media that labeled it a "laptop" and ran with it.
No, they didn't. According to TFA (as well as TFA this is retracting), the Times of India reported that it was a laptop and other news sources picked it up from there. I'm a little curious as to how this left the blog-level and made it to NPR, but the government itself was hyping it as their answer to the $100 laptop, which is clearly not the case.
Sendou Wave Kick!!
...doesn't do well in the closet...
Well THERE is your problem. Your wife needs to come out of the closet.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You know when your company is considering outsourcing something, and the team that's bidding for it all have twenty years experience (in something that's only existed for two and a half weeks, but hey, they're keen! I like a can-do attitude) and actually speak reasonable English?
And then, reality dawns...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Having worked with outsourced Indian coders, I, for one, am shocked that Indian engineers overpromised, underdelivered, and were overbudget.
Evidently it's not suitable for being a webserver, either.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hmm, being part of the EU makes Hungary pretty western in my book, but YMMV.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
What are you on? That link only proves my point... he's looking for the interjection, not the musical instrument.
The whole "but does it run Linux" meme is valid!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
That's exactly what he meant.
"Damn, I love it when a pedantic twit has one blow up in his/her face!!!
Thanks for making my day more amusing than it already was!"
I think it's your face that it is in.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I've had my fair share of laughs from this whole turn of events, but giving this some serious thought (after cutting through all the Indian government's political BS), I surmise this will grow into some sort of distribution platform for schools across rural India. Imagine a low-cost, alway-on media server for educational materials that is more current than several-year-old textbooks, and is available to students at virtually no cost (hopefully the government will subsidize the hardware). I would imagine schools might be able to buy a notebook shell type accessory, which has just a display and keyboard. The accessory plugs into this unit (or perhaps connects wirelessly) and can then access all materials available to the educational institution. It cuts the cost of storage and some motherboard electronics from the individual laptops that students can own, making the system viable and inexpensive.
The sad thing is that I don't actually think that a $10 computing device (no screen, but wireless and storage) is out of the question.
For example the C64DTV was an entire computer, with flash storage, and ability to attach a keyboard, and they were dirt cheap. There are also the Megadrive/Genesis in a Joypad devices that are cheap and have screens.
Therefore you can make computing devices cheaply, with a TV/VGA output.
Of course what you would do it create something like your typical ARM SoC, connect it to an SD card reader and internal flash, 128MB RAM, etc, and stick it in a small box. Sure, it would be an ARM9 at 100MHz with framebuffer 256 colour graphics outputting to TV or VGA, but that might be ideal for that market. You can probably build a keyboard for a dollar in India as well.
Basically it would be a generic cheap-ass phone without the phone parts, just the CPU, RAM, Flash and necessary interfaces.
Anyone else want one? It would make a neat demo hacking machine :)
Jeez... I have a Type II CF microdrive that's three times that capacity! Couldn't they just design it to accept any Flash media or microdrives? They're kinda reinventing that wheel again, only less round this time.
Alright negative Nancy's since your not using them I'd give your left one for a $10 wireless storage unit.
This is like me putting linux on a portable hard drive or USB drive, booting from it while it's connected to another computer, and calling it a laptop just because I can walk around with "my computer" and all my software and file and use it anywhere...as long as there's a computer to plug it into lol.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
See it's stuff like that that really shows you why women simply aren't ready for the desktop.
Given that this is Slashdot, I'd say that "The Father, The Son and The Holy Goatse" were more like it.
Why does this remind me of the $10 "Educational Computer" which was basically a NES?
chloroform
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
In other news:
* $100 Car Downgraded By Reality; Now Used Bicycle
* $75 House Now Tent
* $1 GPS System Now Toy Compass from Box of Cracker Jack
We're wanted men. I have the death sentence in 12 systems!
Looking at the picture and having read about it on a few outlets, it seems to be a 10"x5" handheld with a small builtin LCD and a micrcontroller which allows the device to go online (don't know how). User can download more content on the device and presumably use the LCD to view it.
So to me it looks like an ebook reader which can then be used to potentially replace expensive books and possibly offer a richer multimedia learning experience to the kids. From that perspective, it may not be that bad an investment and I would dare say, it may be more useful than OLPC in the Indian context.
What's under yellowstone?
I remember the Linux Simputer ---
which emerged from the same process as the OLPC and whose failures have much the same roots.
There is much to be said for "the ruthless efficiency of the market." Not least its deafness to ideology.
Too many people want something for virtually nothing. A $10 laptop is pure fantasy.
Wives also make good laptops, i hear.
If they are Japanese made maybe. My North American made model barely fits on the desktop. [ ... ]
I'd upgrade if possible, but with the poor economy that's just not financially feasible at this time.
You know how it is with laptops, the slimmer ones are always way overpriced.
They may look better when you take them out at the local café but they're often underpowered.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
the Sakshat ZX81! ;)
4 slow USB ports, 2 cheap ($2) microcontrollers, 1 IR port, 2 swappable 32k rams, hardwired.
Reused small display, and 4 piezo sensors on a card to act as keyboard/mouse.
You buy thumbdrives to act as your disk storage.
You communicate with USB and IR.
The piezo sensors interpret your typing on the card. You want better, you buy a USB keyboard.
The two microcontrollers act as an I/O controller (one), and full-time processor (two). The I/O controller swaps out data to the thumbdrive disks, allowing full multitasking.
You want to add a monitor? Use USB. You want to add ports? USB. You want to add a keyboard? USB. You want a printer? USB.
Technically, yes, it's slower. But the paired processors will minimize the slowness.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Why does it appear to be underwater in this picture? Is it radioactive? It looks like pictures of 'swimming pool' reactors. Or maybe it has a P4 processor.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1109663&cid=26675327
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Buy american my ass.
I originally read that as "Buy American ass." Stimulus package for Vegas, maybe?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!