First Photos of MIT $100 Laptop 659
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.
These look great! (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be noted that the 'horns' are for directional wireless (and also cover USB ports when not in use) - remember that if you want to mock them!
I say kudos to AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat for making this possible. It's a pity Gates & Jobs couldn't join in rather then attempting to downplay the fine efforts of this group.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:2, Insightful)
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The suggestion has been made that he also offer it for sale for ~$300 to the rest of us so that we do have an interesting macnine and can help to support the cost computers for the developing world.
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What bit of "also" do you not understand?
FatPhil
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just like being nice and giving to public radio, and they give you a sweet tote bag in return. Here, you're paying $300 to charity, as a nice, charitable human being, and you're getting a laptop in return.
Don't be so whiney.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell you what. Why don't you move to Africa with no money or resources, try to find work or an education, with little food, little to no medical care, the constant threat of violence, an unstable government, while relying on the kindness of strangers to even have a stab at making a decent life for yourself?
Then we'll let you pay $100 for a laptop. Hey, maybe someone will even pay $300 to buy one for themself, and you can get one for free!
Until then, STFU and pay $300 for the privilege of owning a toy you'll probably barely use.
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ethan Zuckerman - one bit short of a nybble? (Score:1, Insightful)
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I wonder if the hinges are going to be a problem - the current design requires a hinge for the gasket and a separate hinge that allows 340 degrees of freedom between the screen and the keyboard.
"""
Yeah, right. How about you learn what engineering terms mean before you use them in _completely the wrong way_.
Sheesh, and such blog journalism is the future, eh? ${DEITY} help us.
FatPhil
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the free market is a bitch like that.
Re:These look great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which Jobs are you talking about? The only one I am familiar with (Steve), offered free Mac OS X licenses to this group for all the laptops. His offer was declined [macnn.com]. You can argue all you want about his motives, but you really can't say that he "downplayed" anything.
Gates, on the other hand, mocked [informationweek.com] the group's effort.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise, I'd find some bum on the street, pay him fifty bucks to go into the medical center and get my "care," then buy it off of him for less than I'd actually pay.
There's a reason you don't see too many 'sliding scales' used for physical goods: it's too easy to turn around and resell them. Really, you can only vary the prices by less than it would cost to transport the good to an area where prices are higher. (Unless you have some artificial scheme for preventing the movement of goods, i.e. DVD region codes.) Otherwise, it doesn't take Adam Smith to figure out that people will just ship the low-priced goods to the areas where they sell for more, undercut the "official" channel, and make a profit.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just a new interesting attempt in another direction, if you don't support it feel free to contribute for something else.
Would Jobs have liked the pledges? (Score:2, Insightful)
(But yeah, you're right, Jobs "got" this project, whereas Gates displayed his usual defensively arrogant mediocrity.)
Re:I would love to buy one (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:3, Insightful)
The group producing these is producing them for charity. Not so you can get a cheap PC. It's not a corporation with servicing you as a customer in mind. It's a charity trying to provide things for less fortunate people who need them.
Why don't you try going down to your local soup kitchen and tell them you want to buy a meal, but they better only charge you want it costs to make the food, because you don't want to have to donate to the other folks standing in line. See what kind of reception you get.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:3, Insightful)
Addressing your point, however, how do you expect kids to learn about IT without access to computers?
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hand Powered? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Software Question (Score:5, Insightful)
On a more serious note, I think that your comment has more going for it than just that. Considering the people who will be using these devices, I almost think that it should have something along those lines. After all, all the laptops in the world can only be of so much use - one needs ways to educate people on their use as well. Sure, there'll be the precocious ones out there who will tinker around with the laptop and learn it front to back within a year or two without anyone teaching them.
Most, like the rest of us mere mortals, will need some help and instruction along the way. Are there enough teachers in the wide world to go along with these laptops? I don't know. Bundling them with a sort of interactive and adaptive user's manual (not just for the computer, but for a total education) wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Aiming it towards the empowerment of women in the third world would go a long way, too, I think.
Sign me up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hand Powered? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I think the best thing they could do is make a charging circuit that accepts a very wide range of input voltages and frequencies, and then provide a variety of methods for providing power. Hand cranks, foot pedals, stationary bicycles, whatever. It's not hard to make a little generator out of an old AC motor and the back end of a bicycle set up on blocks (it's not terribly efficient either, granted), and you could charge a whole lot of laptops at once that way. The thing that's prohibitive about setting something like that up in the third world would be cleaning and regulating the power to the requirements of most portable devices. But if you designed the device to accept a big voltage and frequency range, I think people would figure out how to power it, if you gave them some ideas. In many cases, people may already have a source of mechanical power that's superior to muscle power, it's just a question of making the system adaptable.
Oh, and use a plug that's not horrendously obnoxious to work with. I'd say the best thing to do would be to use dual-bananna plugs as inputs on the laptop itself (maybe half-depth), since you can pretty easily shove a piece of bare wire in there if you needed to.
Re:Donating money to 3rd world countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
It amazes me too (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't for areas where people are starving. This is for areas where people have food but now need to advance to the next level. Education is the only tool to prevent people from collapsing to starvation again.
Why PC's instead of books. Because 1 internet capable pc can contain all the books in the world in their most recent version with an infinite amount of paper and pencil.
Books are expenive as hell, ask any student, and schools in poor countries often got to work with hopelessly outdated material and practice books that gotta be reused time and time again.
Cheap PC's make sense, not in starvation areas but in those countries were the basic needs have been taken care off and now education is the most pressing concern.
Because hopefully educated people will be more concerned with creating a better world and not with waging war on each other. Right?
Re:Hand Powered? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I'd consider a twelve-foot screen huge.
But even a 12" screen is plenty large for a laptop like this. I had a 10.4" screen on a Sony Vaio and loved it. I replaced it with a 12" (different brand) because it was cheaper but would have loved another thin 10.4". It's the same pixel resolution, so it's not like you're losing any desktop space by going to the smaller screen.
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, books are important. Those $100 should be used to buy books for schools in developing countries, instead of buying useless gadgets for them.
Hey, I have an idea! Instead of buying paper books, it would be better if we spend that money on e-books, so they can get new and updated books every school year, at almost no cost. But in order to do that we would need an e-book reading device...
I hope someone came up with such a device...
Oh wait...
Re:For the cheap-arsed geeks out there (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't understand this. "We don't want to sell 'first-worlders' these laptops for $100." I sort of understand, if they're taking a loss. But why not sell them for $249*, and advertise that all profits go to subsidize further development and deployment of these laptops in their intended role?
The other reason to do it this way is that you really ought to get these laptops in the hands of "first world" open source developers and users, so they can start working on making these things even more useful. Since you really can't target just "open source developers", you need to let them out to everyone. (Besides, open source communities are generally robust in proportion to the number of people in them, because developers are attracted to larger population communities for a lot of reasons. You can't just magically create a developer-only community of any size.) Hopefully someday the intended users will be able to help, but that will take a while because first they've got to work their way up to "computer literacy" before they're going to be developing.
(*: If $249 would not itself be a profitable price point, then the $100 laptop project has failed in the $100 goal. A $1000 laptop is $100 with a $900 loss/subsidy, but who cares?)
Re:These look great! (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Apple would never allow an OSX laptop to retail at $300 in the U.S., which is what OLPC is doing.
3) One of the design goals of OLPC was to be totally open source, to allow third parties to tinker with it and improve the entire system at will. I don't see how OSX could be part of a purely open-source project.
Question about keyboard (Score:3, Insightful)
So what's the plan for including appropriate keyboards? Special keyboards for each locale, that only work there? Some scheme for a general-purpose keyboard that can be easily be used by children who speak/read/write Macedonian or Greek or Arabic or Cantonese or Mongolian or
I'd really be interested in the latter. I've been trying to develop "internationalized" stuff, and I've found that information about how to enter the above language on my keyboard is pretty much impossible to find.
Of course, this could be because I'm in the US, where vendors see no reason to provide any help for any language other than English.
Jobs' offer was grandstanding (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:These look great! (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, helluva donation... OS X is ready, paid for, so giving it away costs him nothing and serves only as a publicity stunt. Or free marketing, whatever you want to call it.
And huge tax writeoff... Just sit one day and do the math: how much some software company makes "donating" their software to schools, government agencies etc. Because, giving away single license for a program that costs $100 while boxed, on the shelf, is a $100 loss. And the bonus is that those people will be already trained to use their software, while making software purchase decissions later...
If he wanted to donate some funds for R&D etc, I bet people from OLPC would accept it gladly. But they don't look like morons to me.
Robert
Re:Freedom where art thou? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you suggest, by way of your post, troubles me:
1) Children must be taught, or compelled to learn
2) Material must be dumbed down because children aren't capable of assimilating it in its original format.
3) Teachers will only accept this abbreviated "curriculum," perhaps due to their own incapacity to teach directly from the masters, or because teachers must be mass-produced and don't have time for deep learning.
4) Learning doesn't happen without a curriculum.
The $100 laptop is merely a tool - one capable of providing access to the greatest library that the world has ever seen.
I'm reminded of a story that Richard P. Feynman told, about how he used to check books out of the library when he was a boy. One day he brought a book about calculus to the librarian, with the intent of checking it out. He then related the criticism that he received from this librarian, who couldn't conceive how a book on calculus could possibly be useful or interesting to a mere boy. You remind me very much of that librarian. That a child should step out of the commitee-mandated curriculum and pursue advanced topics of interest is inconceivable!
It may be that much important literature is written in language foreign to many people. The mind would necessarily need to be expanded in order to understand the principles of those great individuals who originally thought them. And what is wrong with that? You discount the power of human passion, once that desire to learn has been ignited. We have classics suitable for all types of people, and need only the right access to them. Instead of teachers, they need mentors to inspire them.
I'm sure we can find a place for "school" somewhere. Unfortunately, most of us waste too much time in that pursuit for entirely economic reasons. When has school ever produced a master artist or statesman? Instead we make employees and complacent citizens.
It may be that your ideals are realistic in our estimation - we live in a mass-produced utopia every day thanks to our state-mandated curriculum and business-sponsored systems of bureaucratic education. Having all found good jobs, we're now too busy to pursue our real interests (recreation makes us feel better about this sad loss), and certainly there is no time left for reading classics. Let's not export these chains to our neighbors who we wrongly consider less fortunate.
If anything, access to the world's literature is a prize worth more than many a mediocre teacher.
Just my opinion on the matter. As it is, the $100 laptop might end up becoming yet another way to export our Western excesses and vices (gambling, porno, etc), and not be used as a learning tool at all. I'm worried about it in that regard.
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs new that - therefore his motivation for making the offer was not altruistic.
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
What on earth are you talking about? It might not be useful to you, but to some kids who now have word processors, spreadsheets, the ability to send and receive email and chat and so forth, it would be absolutely fanstastic. Jobs would have to commit to supporting the laptop for some time, though.... they couldn't just donate 100,000 licenses.
But still, while I can see white Linux was a better choice, I don't think the offer was anything to sneeze at - it was quite generous, even if ultimately self serving. What's wrong with an arrangement being mutually beneficial?
Re:These look great! (Score:2, Insightful)
The goal of the project was to help jumpstart Computer Literacy [slashdot.org], not just give them a word processor and spreadsheet.
For these laptops to actually have a deep affect and teach a lot, they need to be able to get into the deep parts of the OS. If a kid learns how to type up a report, that might help himself, but if a kid learns how to hack a kernel, it would help his community.
Re:Question about keyboard (Score:3, Insightful)
Even double-byte languages like Chinese or Japanese can be easily done on English keyboards as the character's pronunciation is typed in roman letters and the space bar hit to bring up a list of charcaters matching that pronunication.
Re:How adorable!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Er... right.
Apart from rape. Or AIDS transferance via blood transfusions. Or sharing needles.
That said, your point of education leading to behavioural change is very true and very important.
(Full disclosure: I work for an international development charity which has HIV/AIDS as one of it's highest priorities.)
Re:Yet another well meaning 1st-world-centric idea (Score:3, Insightful)
As I understand the OLPC program, they are looking for governments to buy in bulk and provide them universally to children -- but I don't think they are concerned that they are distributed exclusively to children. So, if a government wants to provide them to everyone, OLPC probably won't object. Plus, since a major concern seems to be getting big enough orders, it would probably be a positive thing.
The more universally distributed they are, the less attractive they'll be to thieves. If virtually everyone has one anyway, there may not be a lot of resale market for black market ones. Well, except to third-world
They are designed to create mesh networks. Now, you make a good point that getting a connection to the broader internet may be a problem, and may require a trek to an access point. Then again, there is a lot of stuff you can do without a persistent, or even more than very-occasional, internet connection that would be useful, though us spoiled first-worlders may have forgotten about it.
Persistent internet connectivity for the masses is a fairly recent development in the first world. (Heck, internet connectivity for the first-world masses at all is mostly a feature of the last decade and change.)
With these, with the right software and education, even a remote village without power or phone lines could receive and send e-mail and get some other benefits of the internet, just by having someone bike into town with the village "mail server", make a wireless connection with a system persistently connected, and bike back and mesh with other servers in the village.
Sure, exploiting the potential will take an educational effort along with the delivery of hardware and software, plus will take people thinking about using the system outside of the context of expectations framed by first-world patterns of development and computer use, but, heck, the thinking outside the box that will require will probably have unexpected benefits even in the developed world.
Well, yeah, that's a valid aesthetic issue, though not a major substantive drawback.
How about clean drinking water? (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, what's the leading cause of death in the world?
It's not a cheap laptop deficiency:
http://http//www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005
The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage. VOA's Jessica Berman has more on the story. A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink.
Re:These look great! (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think you understand what they are trying to do... here are these people with no computers at all, no way to IM or email people, no word processors, no way to look up information on the internet... and you're going to complain that what they're getting doesn't allow them to "tinker" with the OS?
Most PCs come with windows, there seems to be an awful lot of people using Linux on them. If people are REALLY interested in doing that with these laptops, more power to them. I'd prefer to see the 99.999% of them that just want to send email and communicate with the rest of the world be happy then to "artificially" restrict those laptops because it didn't include an OS that they could look at the source of.
It's a moot point, they're using Linux, but the offering of OSX was as generous as it could be.