First Photos of MIT $100 Laptop

An anonymous reader noted that MITs $100 laptop was unveiled at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting. It runs a special version of the Fedora linux and it comes with native wireless lan support. You can see the photo album, and you can pledge to buy one at triple price... in order to donate 2 of them to children.

Hand Powered?

[eldavojohn]

I don't understand something, these are supposed to be crank powered to solve the situation where there isn't any electricity. On the blog link, you can see the crank in the back. On the Flikr account, I can maybe see it being concealed in the blue-ish laptop but I can't figure out where it is on the other two. Perhaps it is folded up?

Why are they showing us pictures of them just sitting there? Why aren't their pictures of people powering them up or people checking e-mail/forums?

Possibly the biggest problem working on this laptop is its small 12' screen. I wish I could see what kind of resolution that results in but I can't see the screen in any of these shots.

If you want to make the pledge but don't know the specs, check out the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on it.

Substitute screen?

[RobotWisdom]

Are they claiming that screen is the production version, or just a placeholder? Because last I heard the (specially lowcost) screen was still being developed...

Re:Hand Powered?

[Trigun]

From what I've been reading on these ones, is that the pictured ones are not crank-powered. The dynamo ones will be made available though.

Dupe?

[blcamp]

Photos have been out for some time, actually.

http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]

Re:Hand Powered?

[mwvdlee]

Check this for better pictures of these:

http://www.laptop.org/download.en_US.html [laptop.org]

Still not sure what the "ears" are for.

I'm in...

[PenguinBoyDave]

I'll pay for three and donate two any day of the week. I'm not rolling in cash mind you, but if I can help by providing something for those that can't afford it, then I think that is my responsibility, especially if I espouse the Free Software ideal.

Re:Freedom where art thou?

[MindStalker]

Did you even read the pledge to buy one page??

It specifically stated that it was not associated with the MIT project and that infact that MIT has specifically stated that they cannot garantee that this is even possible. BUT it was implied that given a large enough order it may be. So some guy setup a website to see if he can meet a goal of 100,000 pledges in hope that MIT will agree.

more useful info

[user24]

http://www.laptop.org/map.en_US.html [laptop.org] gives a colour coded map of planned distribution areas

and from the FAQ (laptop.org/faq.en_US.html):

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display--both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Re:These look great!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

If you recall, Steve Jobs offered to license Mac OS X to this project for free and they refused.

I do recall. But frankly, that's about as much use as slap in the face with a medium sized trout. It was simply a distraction to:

1) Make Jobs look good.
2) Distract attention from red hat.

Jobs wasn't nasty about it, they way Gates was, but to think that he was being helpful offering OS X is... well, lets just say a little bit of self deception would have to be involved.

Specs here

[ylikone]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%24100_laptop [wikipedia.org]

Features: * CPU: AMD Geode GX2-533@1.1W * CPU clock speed: 400 Mhz with 0.25 W power consumption. * SVGA 7.5 diagonal transmissive and reflective liquid crystal display used in one of two modes: o Reflective "sunlight readable" monochrome mode with 1200 by 900 pixel resolution (for ebook reading outdoors--this is 200 dpi) o Transmissive Color/DVD mode with approximately 693 by 520 pixel resolution with backlighting (for laptop use) * 128 MB of DRAM * 512 MB of flash memory * Wireless networking using an "Extended Range" 802.11b wireless chipset run at a low bitrate (2 Mbit/s) to minimize power consumption. * Conventional layout alphanumeric keyboard localized for the country of use. * Touchpad for mouse control and handwriting input * Built-in stereo speakers * Built-in microphone * Audio based on the AC97 codec, with jacks for external stereo speakers and microphones, Line-out, and Mic-in * 3 external USB ports. * Power sources: o AC Cord that doubles as carrying strap o two C (R14) or D size rechargable batteries and a hand-crank generator o four C (LR14) or D (LR20) alkaline batteries.

Intentionally omitted features: * no motor driven moving parts o no hard disk drive o no optical drive (e.g. CDROM or DVD drive) o no floppy drive * no IDE interface (as there are no drives with which to interface) * no PCMCIA card slot

Fedora is bloatware, why not something smaller?

[ylikone]

Fedora seems to be too large of a desktop Linux to put onto these machines... same with Mandriva, SuSe, Ubuntu or Mepis. Why not a customized version of Damn Small, Puppy or Vector Linux? Would seem to be better choices in my opinion.

Re:For less then $1.00 a day...

[linvir]

The priorities seem out of whack to you because of your bigoted views of the developing world. Not everyone is starving to death [wikipedia.org]

Not Hand Powered

[timeOday]

At least according to this [com.com]:

As initially envisioned, the laptops sported a hand crank on the side to generate power, but Negroponte has scrapped that idea because the twisting forces that would be bad for the machine. Instead, some form of power generation device, likely a pedal, will be attached to the AC power adapter, he said.

"I was the longest holdout for the crank being on the laptop. I was wrong," he said

4 colors

[SmallFurryCreature]

4 colors [flickr.com] and 4 models if you look closely. Orange/red, Yellow/orange, blue and green. The models with orange are different in the plastic around the screen (one seems to lack speaker and leds)

Green wins by the way. Not only does it miss the hump of the blue one but it got Neko ears instead of bunny ears. Neko for the win!

Re:For the cheap-arsed geeks out there

[Anonymous Coward]

You can already buy such a thing (sort of). The psion 5 - a tiny computer that uses 2xAA cells that last an order of magnitude longer than my old laptop batteries used to. Although they were tiny, you really could touch type on them.

My question about this new computer is simple: what's the keyboard like.

I buy laptops based on the keyboard and screen quality. Large hard disks; fast processors - they're nice but they take 2nd place

Re:These look great!

[macphile84]

The solution to AIDS is obvious. Abstinence is guaranteed to be effective.

Unfortunately, that just isn't true. I don't know the number off the top of my head, but a large percentage of AIDS victims are so not because of sex, but from unclean medical and drug environments. People get HIV/AIDS from blood transfusions, immunizations, and illegal drug use as well.

Hardware specs

[VincenzoRomano]

The USD 100 laptop hardware specs can be found here [laptop.org] for the sake of completeness.

Re:Hand Powered?

[maggard]

A foot pedal is excellent until you try and drag the whole kit to school. Then back home. Then back again. Then home. Repeat. Then an integrated hand crank becomes easier to handle (so to speak.) Also these things are expected to run a few HOURS on a good cranking, not "having to stop using the computer every few minutes to crank it back up." If these kids can walk to school they can crank for 10 or so minutes to get their laptop running before class, and the same at home when they're in for the night.

Regrding the electrical supply, I expect the problem isn't so much technical as regulatory. There are fairly specific rules, which are defacto laws, regarding where & what sort of power supplies can be integrated into consumer products. While these rules come from the 1st world nations (many countries just ditto US or EU or whomever for whole blocks of construction & product codes) they apply as well to 3rd world nations - it IS a global market, global standards, and everyone deserves safe products. So what sort of electrical supply is installed, and how it plugs in, isn't entirely up to designers.

On a tangent, there used to be a metal bar in second generation IBM PC's called the "Rube Goldberg connector". Underwriters Laboratories & such required that power-supplies be placed in the rear of PCs, so that was where the "Big Red Switch [catb.org]" was also located, as part of the power supply. However this was awkward to get at, so IBM innovated and put a button on front. They still used the equivalent of the "BRS" internally, all they did was run a small metal bar (wire coathanger gauge, but a bit stiffer) from the front power button across the inside of the PC to the power supply.

Lastly, it is interesting to note that there is only one existing glabal standard for power, adopted in every nation: Power Over Ethernet [wikipedia.org]. Same plug, same supply, same logic, all over the planet, for the few folks that use it.

Re:4 colors

[AnalystX]

Wouldn't that make it five colors (Orange, Red, Yellow, Blue, Green) and four models if we were to be picky about it?

Re:Software Question

[rlp]

The YLIP was Stephensons vision of the ultimate adaptive AI teaching tool. Clearly nothing like that (or even close) exists. However, w/o a collection of good cheap (or free) CAE software, the laptops are not likely to have a whole lot of impact. Ideally, the educational software would be open-source, free, very modular, extensible, small (quick downloads), user friendly, easily internationalized, and compelling. This is an opportunity for the OSS community to dramatically leverage MIT's work. And who knows - maybe some group of developers WILL create the YLIP.

Re:Flash Memory

[drinkypoo]

The number of write cycles a flash bit can go through have improved, but only slightly. The biggest change improving the longetivity of flash memory is the rotating-block circuitry integrated into flash modules/controllers. Your average SD card (or similar) receives requests to write data to a certain block; it tells the OS it's done so, but writes it to a totally different block, and remembers which virtual blocks map to physical ones. It uses a LRU (least recently used) algorithm to decide where to write a block of data to. This is probably all way more simplified than the way it really works, but the upshot is that most flash manufacturers have gone from rating flash memory storage devices at 10,000 writes to 100,000 writes. I would imagine this only works particularly well when the device has a lot of free space, and you are writing smallish files that don't fill it up.

Re:Hand Powered?

[Stellian]

Also these things are expected to run a few HOURS on a good cranking, not "having to stop using the computer every few minutes to crank it back up." If these kids can walk to school they can crank for 10 or so minutes to get their laptop running before class, and the same at home when they're in for the night.

You are wrong [wikipedia.org]:

The minimum acceptable crank time to operating time is 1:10, i.e. one minute of cranking the generator powers 10 minutes of operation. The hoped-for power consumption in ebook mode is 1:40 to 1:60, i.e. one minute of cranking powers 40 minutes to one hour of ebook reading.

It's much harder to produce energy by manual labor than people think. For example lifting a 100Kg weight for one meter generates 1KJ = 0.3Wh = 10 minutes of operation for a 2W laptop.
That's even worse than what Bill Gates said:

...get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type.

Re:Jobs' offer was grandstanding

[snuf23]

Ugh. Look - the core of OS X is a BSD/Mach kernal. The primary "behind the scenes" OS functions are BSD. This is what is called Darwin and it is open source. The entire UI and graphics system (AKA Aqua) is proprietary.
Darwin = open source. OSX != open source. Simple as that. If OSX were open source, we could compile and run it on any x86 we felt like - but legally WE CAN'T. Why? Because it ISN'T OPEN SOURCE.