Posted on 09/29/2005 1:54:28 PM PDT by Graybeard58
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.
The machines' AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there's no electricity. They'd be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunchboxes.
For example, to keep the $100 laptops from being widely stolen or sold off in poor countries, he expects to make them so pervasive in schools and so distinctive in design that it would be "socially a stigma to be carrying one if you are not a student or a teacher." He compared it to filching a mail truck or taking something from a church: Everyone would know where it came from.
As a result, he expects to keep no more than 2 percent of the machines from falling into a murky "gray market."
And unlike the classic computing model in which successive generations of devices get more gadgetry at the same price, Negroponte said his group expects to do the reverse. With such tweaks as "electronic ink" displays that will require virtually no power, the MIT team expects to constantly lower the cost.
After all, in much of the world, Negroponte said, even $100 "is still too expensive."
For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.
And surrounding it all, the laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly, because "they have to be absolutely indestructible," said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader who offered an update on the project Wednesday.
Negroponte hatched the $100 laptop idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also tote home to use on their own.
Those computers had been donated by a foundation run by Negroponte and his wife. He decided that for kids everywhere to benefit from the educational and communications powers of the Internet, someone would have to make laptops inexpensive enough for officials in developing countries to purchase en masse. At least that's Negroponte's plan.
Within a year, Negroponte expects his nonprofit One Laptop Per Child to get 5 million to 15 million of the machines in production, when children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa are due to begin getting them.
In the second year -- when Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hopes to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high-school students in this state -- Negroponte envisions 100 million to 150 million being made. (He boasts that these humble $100 notebooks would surpass the world's existing annual production of laptops, which is about 50 million.)
While a prototype isn't expected to be shown off until November, Negroponte unveiled blueprints at Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.
Among the key specs: A 500-megahertz processor (that was fast in the 1990s but slow by today's standards) by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and flash memory instead of a hard drive with moving parts. To save on software costs, the laptops would run the freely available Linux operating system instead of Windows.
The computers would be able to connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks and be part of "mesh" networks in which each laptop would relay data to and from other devices, reducing the need for expensive base stations. Plans call for the machines to have four USB ports for multimedia and data storage.
Perhaps the defining difference is the hand crank, though first-generation users would get no more than 10 minutes of juice from one minute of winding.
This certainly wouldn't be the first effort to bridge the world's so-called digital divide with inexpensive versions of fancy machinery. Other attempts have had a mixed record.
With those in mind, Negroponte says his team is addressing ways this project could be undermined.
Is that cost? Is a reasonable margin included? Warranty?
Sounds like my daughter and the truck I gave her a couple of years ago. She drove it for about a year and started having transmission problems. She called me to tell me about it and while not outright saying it, the implication was clear that it might be a problem for me to solve.
She wound up selling it for $1,000 "as is". But do you think the dad saw any of that $1,000? HAH!
I hate to break it to him but churches get robbed all the time all over the world.
As I remember, michelle jackson wanted to create a "Neverland" in Africa so that the kids there could ride on a ferris wheel.
Brilliance.
Long ago, I came to the conclusion that many Americans have NO idea what a horror a third world country actually is. You have to LIVE there for a year or so to get the full impact. Jetting in, staying in hotels and getting soundbites and pictures doesn't even begin to get the point across. If Negroponte actually had to live in one of these crapholes, drink the water and eat the food, for a year or two he wouldn't be worried about laptops for children. He would be sending AK-47's and ammo.......
It's a really old-fashioned way of posting to a thing called the Internet without using telepathy. Isn't that weird?
It's like that idiotic IBM commercial which portrays a little Asian girl and saying she can't go to school 'cause she lives on a farm in China.
Naturally, the jolly fat man at the desk goes on about "virtual classrooms" to help the little tyke...never minding the fact that the average farm in China has neither electricity, a computer, or access to the Internet.
Very weird.
P.S. -- Sick, dude. She's your sister!!
I'm oppressed. I want a FEMA debit card or something.
Ha!... 100 bucks for "World Kids" 450 bucks for American kids...
Your telepathy is a bit off.
I'll take 500! Then I can use them like toilet paper.
Whoops. My bad. Had it set on "Id."
Right then...carry on.
Will more "winding" cause blindness? My parents warned me about that.
Perhaps these children can get factory jobs producing them at 3 cents per hour.
I could go for a laptop with a hand crank, a high impact plastic case with kraton inserts, hermetic waterproof o-ring seals, an am/fm/shortwave/weatherband tuner, and a secret compartment large enough to stash a 1911 4 magazines and a good fixed blade knife.....
But seriously, I never have understood why the computer (and cell phone companies for that matter) don't try marketing "gorilla" cases with full line features. There are certain elements in society that are rough on their equipment and the currently produced flimsy plastic cases while economically more feasible are simply inadequate.
Thanks for the link. I saw similar stories about the tsunami aid. That's why there will be no real end to the poverty of the Third World or terrorism without genuine political change.
It provides them with knowledge. Knowledge is power.
Also they may become exposed to FR. ;)
Yes, but because they are Americans they are by dint of cultural inheritance members of the Oppressor Class, and therefore must assume secondary importance in the Global Village < leftie-liberal-academic-moonbat_mode off>
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