It has a hand-crank.
I just love reading about stuff like this and the idealism and ingenuity involved in keeping costs down also interesting to see Google on board.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4292854.stm
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Negroponte's sub-$100 laptop
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It has a hand-crank.
I just love reading about stuff like this and the idealism and ingenuity involved in keeping costs down also interesting to see Google on board.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4292854.stm
Hand cranking builds strong arms and hands, useful for when they hit puberty.Cinnamon Swirl said:
I mean, you know... those strong arms help prepare them for tending fields and milking goats. Life in the third world is rough. Hopefully, it doesn't come to that and they can get a proper education to go on to become professionals.
Cinnamon Swirl said:
I think the word 'novelty' is a little condescending. Those without a reliable source of electricity will find projects like this enormously empowering.
Reminds me of Trevor Bayliss's wind-up radio a huge success in many parts of the world.
http://windupradio.com/trevor.htm
Lacero said:
Let's join hands in solemn prayer. Given the pervasive poverty in developing countries, it is nice that someone like Prof. Negroponte and his research team have a keen interest in mass producing a product that will give many millions access to the info age.
And it runs Linux!
Makes sense. A single copy of Windows XP Home Edition costs as much as two of those laptops.
Flash memory is an odd choice, because Flash memory has a limited amount of times you can read/write to it. This is no problem for storage, but it makes it terribly impractical for caching (you know, when your Mac has 256 MB of RAM and you're using 300 MB; the hard drive is being used as RAM for the last 44 MB) as it will wear out extremely quickly.
As a result, you can't cache, and therefore can't run any app that uses more than the RAM it has built in.
IMHO they should have made it $120 and put an extremely slow laptop hard drive in it.
Makes sense. A single copy of Windows XP Home Edition costs as much as two of those laptops.
Flash memory is an odd choice, because Flash memory has a limited amount of times you can read/write to it. This is no problem for storage, but it makes it terribly impractical for caching (you know, when your Mac has 256 MB of RAM and you're using 300 MB; the hard drive is being used as RAM for the last 44 MB) as it will wear out extremely quickly.
As a result, you can't cache, and therefore can't run any app that uses more than the RAM it has built in.
IMHO they should have made it $120 and put an extremely slow laptop hard drive in it.
w_parietti22 said:What an ugly pos.
There reaching here... the have to brag about USB ports.
I've always wondered why no one bothered doing something like this in the US. 5+ year old hardware is more than powerful enough to to run email, internet, word processing, music playing, photo-viewing that most people use their computers for. Likewise, if as long as you don't need space for your movie/video collection, what do we really use HD space for? A nice 4 gig HD would do fine if the OS didn't take up much space. Strip away all the overhead - the eye candy and less necessary features that are built into OS X and windows and you have a computer for like $100-$200 that serves all your basic needs, has a full keyboard and probably gets better battery life and is lighter than most laptops on the market today.
This is very cool folks - I read about it last year some time, and it's good to see that this project is for real.
This machine will have a market everywhere in the world.
This machine will have a market everywhere in the world.
maxterpiece said:
From my experience, 500 MHz can easily play movies. My 500 MHz G3 and my father's 500 MHz Pentium 3 each have DVD players and run smoothly.
IMHO they should sell a $200 laptop with everything that laptop has + a small, slow hard drive + DVD player and Linux and all the software most people would need.
May be apple could make a stripped down version of osx for it.
That would be great to educate the people before they catch the windows viruses.
That would be great to educate the people before they catch the windows viruses.
Lacero said:
Given all those in the world in far more advantageous and influential positions than myself, I would not even pretend to have a solution for something like that. Over the course of decades countless sums of money have been poured into regions around the world ... results speak for themselves and bad conditions continue.
GFLPraxis said:
Most DVD players in computers are hardware accelerated, I doubt these would have such a feature.
carpe diem said:
Except that if you'd read the article or comments above, you'd know that they're using Linux on them. It's an excellent idea - although part of me is wondering why we're focusing on computers when there are still areas without access to clean drinking water or basic education.
Applespider said:
My guess is because the electrical engineers at MIT do not know how to filter water or provide an 8 year old an education nearly as well as they can design electronics.
Applespider said:
Ummm... the computers are there to help GIVE a basic education. The problem is, kids have no textbooks. Textbooks cost $50 each. One computer costs the same as two textbooks. Load them up with 20 open source e-textbooks and you've got 20 textbooks for the price of two.
The Slashdot thread on this subject points out that most people in third-world countries have access to drinking water, but most do NOT have access to education. Thus, education is the biggest problem.
Cinnamon Swirl said:
Generally, my observation has been that poor people / disadvantaged people act as profit centres for these portions of the richer world that deal with them.
.RedTomato