Manufacturer Picked For $100 Laptop 236
IZ Reloaded writes "MIT has picked Taiwanese firm Quanta to manufacture its $100 laptop. From PCWorld: 'Under terms of an agreement with One Laptop Per Child, Quanta will devote engineering resources to develop the $100 notebook design during the first half of the year, according to a statement issued by the group. At the same time, Quanta and the non-profit organization will explore the production of a commercial version of the laptop.'" Apparently they don't think it's ineffectual either.
"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish? (Score:5, Interesting)
I then speculated that this could also be applied to nations. A country's greatness may be able to be measured by the ease at which its citizens gather information. And if you look at today's countries, this might be true.
Perhaps this initiative to deliver cheap laptops to students of poorer nations will help boost their economy and the rate at which information travels from person to person. After all, isn't internet access the fastest and cheapest form of communicating?
Just something to think about. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way--I know this is a very altruistic view. On top of that, I realize I've just mentioned Bill Gates in a somewhat positive manner. *sprays himself with flame retardent foam and begins to pray*
What about older laptops? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why not take donated laptops and refurbish them.... get donated spares from the orginal OEMS, etc Fix them up and then you kill two birds with one stone... No more computer waste in the landfills and cheap laptops for Ghana.
Considering the cost of labor in Ghana, why not send donated laptops to Ghana... Bring a few hundred people from Ghana to this Taiwanese company to train on how to refurbish the laptops...
Re:"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish? (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole problem I've seen with this "one laptop per child" initiative is an inadequate focus on infrastructure. Sure, your laptop won't need a power cord due to its crank handle. But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.
I want a permanent fix, not a band-aid (Score:2, Interesting)
What better way to free a people then to allow them the means to learn how to grow the food or purify the water? What I'm trying to say is that teaching someone how to help themselves is worth more than you helping them along their entire lives.
That's why I like this laptop idea so much. It's not a temporary bandaid with a few truckloads of food or mercedes. It's a possible permanent fix for people in need if it is done correctly and used by the people.
Laptops are powerful devices considering the amount of information they make available to you.
Interesting that you would say that (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I would have to say, that this has the potential to truely change things.
Re:Coming up next, $1000 Mercedes for every child (Score:3, Interesting)
Take, for example, the new-evolving web 2.0 boom. This is a time where web software runs king, that is, software that is globally accessable, promoting a free exchange of information. There is a ton of money flying around this universe, moving from one great idea to the next. Where will the next great idea come from? Africa? South America?
If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. The $100 laptop initiative is handing out fishing poles, who is going to collect?
Re:What about older laptops? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why were they there? They very likely don't work, have dead screens and/or batteries. One important feature of the $100 laptop is the wind-up battery. Even if these Goodwill laptops were working, what a nightmare to support; all with different batteries, weird custom parts, expensive RAM, and many needing special drivers to work at all that probably haven't been updated since the machine was made, thus limiting the software it can run.
Re:What about older laptops? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you imagine the nightmare of trying to install a standard operating system on 1,000,000 random previously-junked laptops? Or providing any kind of support? Or spare parts?
I think those donated laptops are probably better utilized in smaller-scale scenarios like a drop-in centre. Take a look at what these guys [sourceforge.net] have done in creating a standard Debian-based distro for use on marginal hardware. (It's a very impressive project, proves what kind of talent exists in the K/W area)
There's poverty close to home, too, and close to home in the developed world is probably a better place to use this kind of hardware, where there are lots of geeks close by to lend a hand.
Re:What about older laptops? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. The $100 laptops are designed with durability as a primary concern. These things need to last. Refurbs are notoriously bad at that.
2. The $100 laptops have a hand power crank. While this is a nonissue to many people, even I (as someone who camps fairly often) can see some small utility in something like this. In countries where there isn't much of an electrical infrastructure at all, this could make the difference between being able to use the laptop at home, and having to go to the library to plug it in -- or even more.
What will happen (Score:3, Interesting)
while this is a cool idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting that you would say that (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but you need tests, grading, etc. That should be standardized. Currently, it is a hodgepodge of different programs.
Of course, the textbook publishers will detonate a nuclear device on Taiwan to stop it from happening, if they can.
I suspect that we will see a lot happening when publishers start running to congress to get this stopped. Plain and simple, this has the same disruption capabilities as the Internet and mp3 players have had. The internet has change society and impacted everybody. The mp3 players (and more video players to come) have impacted RIAA and the music industry. This small computer may have the same impact on the educational world as well as on computer manufactuers. One of the bigger mistakes for large manufactuers is to ignore this.
Re:"Business at the Speed of Thought"-ish? (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed.
Without wide data paths between groups, teams don't know what other other teams are doing and either work to cross purposes, or make incorrect assumptions that lead to product failure.
I'm certainly not going to argue that wide data paths are important. However, the amount of information they carry is not indicitive of their importance or performance. Take Atari as an example. Here was a company generating TONS of data on schematics, games, technology, pizza restaurants, mind reading devices (I'm not making this stuff up), holographics, and billions of other things that were completely unrelated to their business. Atari was in trouble for a long time before they finally folded in a reverse merger. If you use the formula that Health == Information Quantity, then Atari should have been the healthiest company in the history of mankind.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Apple. In the days of Mac development, Information did NOT flow. At all. In fact, information was kept to the minimum necessary to do the job. They didn't generate tons of documents, prototypes, interdepartment memos, or millions of other things that would be considered Information creation and flow. Yet the Mac was extremely successful. In part, its success was because information flow was tightly controlled. It flowed as it needed, but only as it was needed.
To create a parallel with computers, the slowest part of any distributed system is always the communications channels. As a result, you always get a bigger bang for your buck if you reduce the amount of information flowing through the pipes. That's why SETI@Home or the Distributed Key Cracking Contest both download the necessary data to you once, then make as much use of your machine before turning over the data. Imagine if every computation was exchanged over the network!
The contractor (Lockheed Martin?) assumed that certain data was being received in standard units. NASA, however, assumed that all data would handled in metric units. The result: the probe burned up in the atmosphere, after failing to slow itself properly. If the teams from NASA and the contractor had communicated more often, it would have been easier to weed out these incorrect assumptions.
Your own example betrays you. The problem was not the quantity of communication. There's no guarantee that more open lines wouldn't have meant more confusion and bickering. (In fact, that's a far more likely outcome.) What was needed was more precise communication that covered issues like this in detail. That's a matter for engineering planning and testing. Throwing more communications bandwidth at it wouldn't have solved the problem any more than throwing 100 Chevettes at a quarry would help transport 30 tons of rock.
Re:1 GB Memory? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quanta's specs (Score:3, Interesting)
Not fastest, and not cheapest. Best, maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I don't think the internet's the cheapest form of communication. Sitting across the coffee table talking to someone is the cheapest. Well, and fastest, too, as far as that goes. Using the internet to do the same thing - even if you ARE using a $100 laptop - only works if your country has billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, training, and souped-up techno-culture in place to make it all go. Solid power grids, not-too-corrupt entities watching over things, etc.
In the poorest parts of the world, lack of basic rule of law is the biggest thing in the way of growth-by-information-flow. If you can't assume that invested money/time/resources are going to retain their value (or work at all) over the long haul, then no fancy networked anything will get built, at least not at reasonable prices.