The $100 laptop
My brother likes death squads
Sub-$100 laptop design unveiled
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, has been outlining designs for a sub-$100 PC.
The laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply.
Professor Negroponte came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.
His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.
A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.
Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.
The following year, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in the state.
Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007.
Virtually indestructible
The laptops will be encased in rubber to make them more durable, and their AC adaptors will also act as carrying straps.
The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory instead of a hard drive which has more delicate moving parts.
Jen
If these things came with full immunizations and a personal water-purification tube, this would be perfect.
So, who writes the software?
It's not like you can use Office, can you?
I think the next governor of Massachusetts might well pass on this when parents and school districts start bitching about support issues. Someone has to develop software to run on the code, educational software, which now comes in Mac and Windows. They have to train people to support these machines.
Wi-fi. Interesting. If you can set it up, that is.
This isn't a bad idea, but it seems to be less thought out than you would think.
posted by Steve @ 5:35:00 AM
