The vaunted 'USD 100 laptop' that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers dreamed up for international schoolchildren is becoming a slightly more distant concept. The USD 100 laptop has many innovative features including a pull cord for recharging by hand. Leaders of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of MIT acknowledged Friday that the devices are now slated to cost USD 188 when mass production begins this fall. The last price the nonprofit announced was USD 176; it described USD 100 as a long-term goal.
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Member since:2005-07-24
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Like schoolkids should have laptops anyway. The ubiquitous cell phone is bad enough,
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*sigh*
I would agree if we were talking about 1st world kids and 1st world schools. If I could round up every cell phone in the U.S. and have them all melted down and recycled into something *useful* I would do it.
But the XO is not a luxury item. It is a lifeline. It is a more cost-effective way to get *books* to the children who need them. It has other benefits as well. But primarily it is a *substitute* for resources which their schools could otherwise not afford.
Paper books are expensive to produce. PDF's are cheap.
$188 would buy you about 3 paper textbooks here in the U.S.
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2006-10-10
Ok, let's go on for a minute and believe that the 3rd world actually *needs* cheap computers....I'll then ask this, "So what?" To what end will result from our apparent "supreme benevolence" as the most powerful nation giving away virtually-free computers?
For arguements sake, let's forget that the only reason the 1st world can obtain cheap goods is because the vastly ignorant and poor 3rd world produce our garbage for less than slave wages. Let's also forget that we (as a "civilized" society) can hardly keep our PCs in check from viruses, malware and the like. Now you've got literally hundreds of millions of people, who can hardly afford basic necessesities, expected to now maintain an OS, let alone actually know how to use apps that are loaded on it. And don't give me "these things are running the Yippy-Skip Linux distro which is the raddest thing known to men and baby cows...no viruses ever!" We all know that's crap.
This cheap laptop thing tailor targetted to less-fortunate countries is probably the most dumb idea, in a long list of dumb ideas from the computer industry. This can serve no purpose, other than to add to the bottom line of the companies that make these devices.
Member since:2005-08-18
Oh how I wish that was only the case but alas...
I see people here who lives in shanty towns and can hardly support their families yet they have at least one cellphone. People of all ages, genders and classes are text messaging like there's no damn tomorrow.
Lets not even get started on the curse that is Internet cafes (or CounterStrike/MMO cafes, as it would be).
Presuming these laptop even reach the schools, that is. If the target countries are anything like here corruption will run pretty rampant and I somehow doubt they would reach their intended schools. Seeing the abysmal conditions that schools in the poor provinces here are in I doubt a laptop is much help anyway. How about paying teachers a salary they can actually live on? School improvement projects where 50% of the budget doesn't go to someones pocket? Seriously, I see the budget of projects here, school and otherwise, and think "Holy shit, that would be way over budget in Sweden for this kind of project. Even if you convert from pesos to dollars. And Sweden is an expensive high-salary country!".
No doubt there are, at least some, noble intention behind this but there are just SO many other things urgently in need of fixing in these places.
Member since:2007-09-06
Your forgetting that this is a project to provide education and open information to children who live where books are expensive and do not stand up to the weather very well.
Hm.. a book that cost the school a lot of money, must be leant out if able to leave the building at all and turns to mush in the first rain storm or a notebook the child owns, can carry through rain and sand storms, runs on little power and provides an open window to information.
Yeah.. it's all about getting tech into kids hands huh? Maybe consider the goals of the project rather than the hardware component that supports those goals.
I'd be more polite but I can't stand when someone too free with there opinion bashes a project like this without having any clue what it's really about.
Member since:2006-10-10
"How would I recommend the children learn." - Are you joking.....wtf!?! You're right, the obvious problem with education today is that not every kid has a laptop. 20 years ago, how did kids learn? Here's a hint: NOT ON LAPTOPS!
So let me be crystal clear with this proposal, these kids can't afford shoes or running water, but they'll be able to plug in their shiny-new rugged laptops into their electrical outlets to charge up, and then connect to their local ISP because their families obviously have the income to afford that? Am I getting this right?
Seriously, though, you can't get the impoverished too smart; they might just figure out how our great nation has been f'ing them for all this time.
Member since:
2006-10-10
Like schoolkids should have laptops anyway. The ubiquitous cell phone is bad enough, now you've got some schmuck kid watching youtube when he should be listening to the lesson.
Friggin' kids these days.