MIT Unveils Prototype for $100 Linux Laptop 668
Examancer2 writes "MIT is showing off a prototype of a $100 laptop. It uses a 500MHz AMD processor, stores everything on flash memory, and runs Linux. The AC adapter acts as the carrying strap, and there is a hand crank so if you can't find a source of electricity you can charge it kinetically. The prototype laptop is also much more flexible and durable than your average notebook. In addition the unit has a screen that has a special daylight-friendly black & white mode that makes a great ebook." From the article: "Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations. Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries--Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa--to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children." More coverage of this story available from ITWorld, InformationWeek, BBC, ZDNet, and the Associated Press.
More info, bad news for geeks. (Score:5, Informative)
More information on the $100 laptop can be found here [mit.edu].
A bit of bad news from this page:
Not for sale here (Score:4, Informative)
Lamp for local lighting (Score:2, Informative)
Remember that their needs are not our needs. I remember one boondoogle from the early '60s (I think) were they shipped are great expense fresh milk in a jet to starving people who promply dumped the milk and used the containers for water. It was like trying to get a rural Mid-westerner to eat Sushi.
If you pay no attention to the real needs of those you help, your not helping them.
Re:More info, bad news for geeks. (Score:3, Informative)
The linked article also states:
While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. "Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids' laptops. We're still working on that," he said.
So a little optimism isn't entirely unjustified :-)
Re:They want to buy them for students in MA (Score:3, Informative)
shut up, idiot
IBM THINKPAD T20 LAPTOP P III 700MHZ,20GB,128MB,DVD
$269
http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-THINKPAD-T20-LAPTOP-P-III
Re:Wouldn't it take a lot to crank by hand? (Score:3, Informative)
you would be suprised how fast you can charge something that way. 1 hour of cranking and i had a full charge as well as 4 nimh 2500mah AA batteries charged. and yes your arm does get tired for a solid hour of cranking if you are not used to it. After the week I was not noticing it as much.
Re:They should sell them to individuals. (Score:1, Informative)
"While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. "Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids' laptops. We're still working on that," he said."
Imagine all the great information you'd have access to if you learned how to read!
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Many years ago, recognizing that many white collar workers brought lunches from home but would not bear face the stigma of carrying a blue-collar lunchbox, a company introduced an "executive lunchbox", which did not look like the prototypical blue-collar lunchbox. That executive lunchbox was so heavily advertised that everyone knew one when they saw one, thus totally erasing the advantage of having a non-blue-collar lunchbox (because the social stigma was carrying a lunch, and not carrying a lunch-box proper).
Hence the advertising industry term "here goes another executive lunchbox" for a good product that was well marketed but which failed because the social aspect was not properly addressed...REALLY IMPORTANT POINT (Score:1, Informative)
By the way, this was reported about 6 months ago.
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Therefore, human power could reduce global warming. On the scale of powering laptops, however, it could not be effective; and on a scale sufficiently large to be effective, it would be intolerable. I'm getting tired and hungry just thinking about it. Somebody get me a can of soda, some Tostitos, and a bed, stat!
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Has it occurred to you that a significant amount of the third world has clean water and doesn't need A/C units?!
Not everyone who is poor lives like a child off a Sally Struthers commericial.
It's funny that the suggesting cheap educational computers be scrapped for A/C Units was modded insightful. Remarkable!
I grew up in a "third world" country very close to the equator. Even the very poor in the country had clean drinking water by way of public "water stands" and had shoes by way of very cheap mass produced shoes from China. Very, very few people gave a damn about A/C. We've lived in this climate for thousands of years, people simply build houses and dress to suit the climate.
No, I don't know. (Score:2, Informative)
Hint - scrap KDE, Gnome, Mozilla/Netscape (especially old editions), stick with Xfce, Opera (or Firefox, but I haven't even tried it there, may be slow, who knows) and you're all set. Really, once you get past 300MHz you CAN do almost everything comfortably (ok, 400MHz for most movies, 500+ for some).
Ok, it's slow when it comes to number crunching, which is my job. NS2 simulations also take a lifetime. On the other hand, in this area no computer is fast enough.
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:3, Informative)
An immediate short term fix is to design and upgrade roads with dedicated reversable right of way for busses, carpools, and motorcycles. Perhaps sell excess capacity if it is underused, but don't allow single riders in if there are too many busses or if it will impact their trip time. I'll agree, it sucks for people who can't take the bus or don't have the money for the lane, but we need people who are willing to vote in a governor who will allow for a gas tax increase to build wider roads and improve transit in general. Until then there is a good chance, at least in MN, that roads will follow this model if they are even built at all.
Another huge plus is comfortable seating -- some of the articulated MetroTransit busses in Minneapolis have nicer seats with like ~4in padding for the tush. They also have high backed seats. Makes it far more comfortable for a 30 minute ride.
Downside: when bus service improves through a far improved ride and reasonable trip times the busses fill up. It takes more people to drive busses than it does with rail service (nearly 2:1 or worse, depending on how the rail service is designed. 2:1 for our light rail vs. bus, way better (like 5:1 or more) for services like BART which can haul a ton of people) so scalability when people decide to start using it is very hard due to cost. Sometimes they do scale it up, and then run out of money because of cost of living raises or healthcare costs. Cuts happen, a fare increase, and people are right back on the roads.
Super-long busses (ie: two articulations, perhaps 4-wheel steering and dgps/computer steering augmentation?) on dedicated roadway may have the ability to match some rail services, but I've not heard of such a project yet.
Re:Different WM- IceWM (Score:3, Informative)
I have used KDE 3 on a 200 mhz machine. Works fine, so long as you have enough RAM. You can't run all applications, but for general use this machine is plenty fast.
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No, I don't know. (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I've got a P3-450MHz, 512MB RAM. Plays everything up to DVDs just fine, though HD video is beyond its capacities. Slower to boot up than my dual Athlon machine, but once up it runs just fine and is quite snappy. Running stock Ubuntu. Just for grins one time I used the mem= kernel option to limit it to 96MB, and y'know what? It worked pretty well [google.com].
Now, my P-133, 32MB laptop is another story. I got stock Debian onto it, but it took a while, and Dillo's about the only browser that works acceptably on it. XFCE works pretty well, but much of anything GUI and it'll swap like mad. If I could get even 64MB of RAM into the thing I'd be happier, but it's not worth the hassle or cost. (I remember when I upgraded my 486-100 from 16MB to 64MB... it was like a whole new machine after that.)
In short, 128MB of RAM should be plenty. That's a lot of memory if you use it right.
Water purifiers don't cost $100!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Dude, are you sure you know what a "water purifier" is? If you can buy one for $20 [submarino.com.br] why would someone figure out how to make one for $100?
Computers are great, but they aren't very useful for growing food or anything. You need different technologies for that, and different skill sets that aren't "intellectual".
Perhaps you should try someday to actually travel to a poor country and watch for yourself how those people live. I know before I was born in Brazil and lived most of my life here. I remember once when I was chatting with the girl at the popcorn counter in a movie theater she told me she was going to computer classes in the mornings. Her salary is something like $100/month
The poorest people already have the skill sets for growing food. What they need is a different set of skills, something that lets them earn a decent living instead of just living hand to mouth. The greatest number of poor people in the world suffer from "technologic unemployment". They have no marketable skills.
There's no shortage of food in the world, so knowing how and having the resources to grow food in modest amounts is useless. What can you gain by competing against the subsidized farmers in the USA, European Union, and Japan? Unless you are a farmer with thousands of hectares and spend upwards of $100k/year in seed, fuel, and equipment, you won't reach the economy of scale needed to profit.
Perhaps you are confusing "poor" with "starving" people. People who are poor normally do not have lack of food. They starve when there is some unrest like civil war that disrupt their normal way of live. In the normal situation of poor people, the best way to help them is to put them in contact with more technology. It can be a technology for growing more and better food, if the kind of food they can grow is profitable enough, or it can be some other technology. But to be of any help, it has to be a technology that provides for better productivity than what they already have, it has to be a sufficiently advanced technology. There's no value in reinventing the $20 water filter.
Re:2nd World? (Score:3, Informative)
1st World: US, UK, W. Ger, and allies (NATO)
2nd World: USSR, E. Ger, Poland, and allies. (Warsaw Pact)
3rd World: Everyone else.
Economics have nothing to do with the original definitions of 3rd world, etc.
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:1, Informative)
I'd blame religion and corporations for what's happened in the third world. I'm sorry but you can't just call them lazy and be done with it...
And who's to say they should be developing like we did. I think people can lead perfectly good lives without technology, and if not, they will invent things to help them. We don't have to poke our noses everywhere and make people dependant [wikipedia.org] on western corporations.
Re:Extremely cool, but... (Score:2, Informative)
It differs from actual darwinism, or the theory of evolution, in that it claims that although all people are made of the same basic genetic code, and are therefore the same species, some of them are more "evolved" socioeconomically, and are therefore a higher order of being. Accepting this premise, it is therefore right and just that the more evolved humans should thrive, while the clearly less evolved lower classes should toil fruitlessly and die.
This concept has been widely discredited today, primarily because of the contradictory nature of defining the "fittest" people, that is, the ones who deserved to survive. If you were rich, it was because you were fit, and therefore deserved to be rich. If you were fit, this would be evidenced by your wealth. If you were poor, you were clearly unfit because of your inability to get rich. Essentially, Social Darwinism states that if you are rich, you deserve everything you've got, and if you are poor, well, you deserve everything you've got, too.
I don't believe in creationism, and I think evolution is unquestionably the way life developed on earth, but you have to understand that "natural" evolution takes place over millions of years, involves genetic material, and is not neccesarily a good basis for a system of morality or social structure.
For example, if we really wanted to promote "survival of the fittest", in order to weed out the weak members of the human race, we could simply remove all laws. Or better yet, remove all laws and destroy all supermarkets. I would, of course have a lot of food, because I looted my neighbors pantries right away. Of course, by the logic of social darwinism, I am inherently superior to my neighbors due to the fact that I took all their food, and therefore I am entitled to the food and they, being unable to defend their food against such a superior being, are wholly undeserving of it.
Basically, the application of Darwinism to society is a clever, intellectual way of saying "I'm stronger, so I can do whatever I want". It may be attractive when you're the strongest, but the rest of the time it's just plain unfair.