I’ll bet these simple machines will still be orders of magnitude more powerful than the Intel 286 machine I learned C programming on.
I see in the Macworld article they will be running at 500mhz; compare that to the 8mhz my 286 ran at. I know there’s not a perfect correspondence between mhz and power, but it’s close enough.
Also according to that article they’ll be running a “skinny” version of Linux. I’d be surprised if the Gnu C compiler won’t work on it from day one.
Revtim: You can run a stripped-down but very usable Linux installation on a 386 without a floating-point coprocessor and a couple megs of RAM. I know the $100 laptop is orders of magnitude more capable than that system, and new enough not to be physically unreliable as those ancient 386 boxes are these days.
(As a matter of fact, there have been multiple Unix-oid OSes for 8088-based PCs, the most famous being Minix and Microsoft Xenix. Those weren’t full Unix implementations, largely because the 8088 has no MMU and thus cannot protect areas of RAM from marauding programs, but they were useful enough in their day to garner fairly widespread adoption. Check out ELKS if you want to put a Linux-oid OS on your IBM PC-XT.)
And somebody at MIT should get the fuck out and walk through Wal-Mart once in a while:
link_text
Most of the reason that most poor shit-hole countries are poor shit-holes has to do with lacking things like “rule of law” and “democratic representation”, not cheap electronics.
~
Leaving aside the debate about whether there’s more pressing needs in the third world, there’s some confusion & inaccuracy in this thread, in particular
One of the specific aims was to produce a laptop which is an exception. IIRC from other reports, they’ve avoided moving parts entirely, using flash memory rather than a hard drive. And the robustness of the screen was a major issue.
Errrr, you realise that’s as meaningful as me linking to a £5 toy phone and asking why anyone wants to buy anything more expensive? :rolleyes:
Goodness gracious.
Are you denying that access to a computer is a useful educational tool? Because it appears the only use that you can think of for a computer is to read an electronic book, a use that hasn’t really taken off that much even in the first world. Half your post suggesting this is a silly idea applies to computer usage by regular people in the first world too!
GorillaMan fairly elegantly covers the silliness of the Walmart comparison.
And I wouldn’t consider any of the countries mentioned in the article to be “poor shit-hole” countries. I would describe South Africa, for example (since I was born and raised there), as on the high end of the developing world or on the low end of the developed world, depending on where in the country you are in. While I agree in principle with your points regarding the rule of law and a transparent and democratic administration (and claims that these are absent in South Africa are ridiculous), it hardly makes sense to immediately disregard any legitimate attempt to improve the quality of education in the country.
From DougC’s site…
snerk
I think this $100 MIT laptop is pretty cool - although I prefer the grey colour in the Macworld article to the green colour shown by the MIT photos. What I like is how small it is - I have a small lap damnit, there hasn’t been a real "lap"top for me in years! (Since the Dell Latitude LS series…)
And I think this will be great for developing nations to have in their schools. Sure, textbooks might not be made instantly available for them just by virtue of having these computers, but there are lots of wonderful internet resources that are very capable of assisting teachers in explaining difficult concepts clearly, and that are free. Hell, just giving the kids access to Wikipedia would be an immediate and obvious benefit!
Indeed it would!
Speaking of which… apparently, Wikipedia may go to print soon. I didn’t read the article, but I think it was another project focused on developing countries also.
I like the durability aspect of them. I’m not particularly good at taking care of things, and if something’s going to belong to me for long, there’s a good chance that it’s going to get dropped. I need a laptop that’ll bounce like a golf ball when it hits the floor (though I see no indication that that’s the case with these).
A question: The things are going to be Internet-ready, right? I don’t see anything about this in the article, but I assume they’ll have built-in wireless?
Also, this is cool:
That’s brilliant. For too long, power cables have been weak spots in design, prone to getting ripped out of appliances and dangling uselessly when not plugged in.
Yeah, I want one of these.
Never mind. I see it now.
“They will have four USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, be Wi-Fi- and cell phone enabled and come with 1GB of memory.”
Well, it’s always good to have a few spares laying around. 
Absolutely. In South Africa, it’s about equality - there are already some public schools there which have the resources to issue a full-spec laptop to pupils, whereas others struggle to provide the most basic education. The only way every child will have equal access to a decent modern education is (partly) through initiatives such as this one.
I think they are expecting their biggest market to be in Nigeria.
The computer only has a 1 megapixel screen?! The camera on my cellphone is 1.3 megapixels, and the pictures it takes are horribly grainy, even on the phone’s tiny 1" x 1.5" screen. Trying to surf the web with that thing might be a rather disappointing experience.
Instead of a crank, some of those batteryless flashlights have a sort of generator that you power up by shaking it (which apparently slides a permanent magnet in and out of coils around the track, charging the battery). So, instead of a crank, you ouight to be able to make a cheap computer that you power by shaking it.
You can call it the Etch a Sketch computer. All you need is a drawing program on it that only does outlines, and doesn’t do diagonals well.
You might be interested to note that there are only about 800,000 pixels in an average 1024x768 resolution desktop display. 1.3 megapixels are more than enough.
I probably have this all wrong, but isn’t an 800600 screen about half a megapixel, and a 12801024 about 1.3Mpixel? I run my 19inch LCD at the latter resolution and it’s plenty good.
I highly recommend you all read the MIT FAQ on this, since it does indeed adress most of the questions asked in this thread.
Can I add that I would happily pay $200 for one of these with MacOS on it? I’ve been hankering after a PowerBook, but if I have to pay the Apple premium, this would be the end of the market to do it at 
Apples and oranges. A 1.3-megapixel camera usually has 0.65 million green pixels, 0.325 million blue pixels and 0.325 million red pixels, for a total of 1 million. A 1-megapixel screen has 1 million each of red, green and blue pixels. Also with small digital cameras, the image quality is usually limited by lens quality and noise. The “grainy” appearance is noise.
Mmmmm… Japanese food!
A newer article here:
http://www.comcast.net/news/technology/index.jsp?cat=TECHNOLOGY&fn=/2005/11/17/266711.html
They say it’s green to make it look more like a children’s toy and to discourage thieves from stealing it (adults are less likely to want a bright green computer).
LAN Party at the GYM!!!