Slashdot posted yesterday a news item about some people which try to create a laptop that would sell for less than one hundred bucks. To me, an x86 such laptop this seems like a dream that can’t come true with today’s OEM prices. However, there might be a way to achieve this, if the “laptop” in question will not really be a laptop, but a handtop, a hybrid between a laptop and a PDA.The idea is of course to create a cheap machine, without creating something unusable like the Simputer. The machine in question would look a lot like the Zauruses, but it will have a plastic case, no swivel parts, no touchscreen and it would not be a PDA at heart. In fact, the case would be about 20% bigger than the Zaurus shown above, and with a bigger screen. It should be a mini-laptop rather than a PDA with a keyboard.
As for the software that would power it, it can be a highly modified Opie or GPE, modified in a way that they feel more like real DEs rather than single-fullescreen-window PDA interfaces. Below I am proposing some hardware specs that might be able to be put together for $99 and also a higher-end model with more features. In fact, I feel that getting the software right on this hypothetical handtop would be more difficult than putting the hardware together for $99. Software is as important as the hardware, and if we want people to use such a machine as their primary computer, these must include needed software by today’s standards, like a web browser, an email app, IM etc.
Surely, the machine described below is not a speed demon, it has no 3D, no CD-rom, no PCMCIA. But it is still a good basic solution and it can be extended via USB: users will be able to attach usb keys, CD-Roms, printers and other peripherals. As for games, well, 2D games will have to do for now (until the higher-end ARM CPUs and their integrated 2700G accelerators become cheaper).
This machine should do everything that a basic machine should do and that would make it a great “first” computer for students too as well as the developing world. Why kids at schools today must use expensive laptops? Such a mini machine can do everything kids need to do at school, and by being so small, they would be easy to carry around in their backpacks.
Hardware specs:
5.5″ color TFT 640×480 “real” VGA (not touchscreen)
208 Mhz ARM XScale (or Geode/Cyrix CPU)
32 MB RAM
256 MB internal storage (180-200 MB free)
CF Type II/Microdrive slot (empty)
two USB 1.1 ports
line-out jack
ethernet or 56k modem jack (BTO option)
integrated speaker, integrated microphone
Qwerty mini-keyboard
touchpoint-mouse with 2 buttons (like in IBM laptops)
IrDA SIR (115 kbps)
1000 mAh battery, ~1.7 hours battery life
weight: about 420 grams
PRICE: 99 USD
More advanced model with additional features:
300 Mhz ARM XScale (or Geode/Cyrix CPU)
64 MB RAM
Bluetooth, WiFi
ethernet and 56k modem jack
mic-in, line-in
1200 mAh battery, ~1.5 hours battery life
weight: about 500 grams
PRICE: 199 USD
Software included: highly modified Opie or GPE desktop environment (with AA fonts), Linux 2.6.x, enough drivers.
Applications pre-installed: Web browser with JS/CSS/SSL support (Konqi, or Minimo if made to work with 32 MBs of RAM), mini Kontact-like PIM app, stripped KOffice, 4-5 games, file manager/search, Todo, text editor with HTML syntax highlighting, PDF viewer, video player and equivelant browser plugins for popular formats, music player, Flash plugin, Java-lite, Calculator, enough Preferences/Settings, IM for 5 protocols, simple painting app, image viewer, un/zipping utility, RSS reader, Skype, SSH/Terminal services/S/FTP/WebDAV/SMB/VNC stuff, a terminal and maybe a Blog client & IRC client.
Third party software: Opera, Netfront, Quanta-mini, others…
I have a couple of laptops I’ve inherited that aren’t worth over $100.00 today: One’s a 200mhz PII, and the other’s a 100Mhz P1.
Both the boxes are Dells, so it’s not like we’re talking no name, throw-away quality computers here. Either of these laptops will surf the internet, let you write papers, email, and so on. In fact I’ve had both Linux and BeOS running on the 200mhz one!
But neither would fetch more than $100.00 if I were to sell them today, even though they’re still capable machines, They’re just not what todays users (myself included) want in a laptop.
But for a 3rd world country, such slow, cheap, but reliable laptops would be ideal! In most cases, they’ve never had a 3ghz machine to mess around with, so they won’t immediately be dismayed at the relatively low specs of such machines.
And it’s not like these machines are worthless… They’re the same types of pc’s that we all used here about 10 year ago. They were used for business purposes, writing documents, spreadsheets and such, and they’re still useful for this kind of stuff. But again, us geeks all want the latest and greatest, so most of us will just laugh when it’s suggested that a 200mhz machine will do the job.
My point is that a $100 laptop is more than do-able right now. But such a low price means you’ll be using slower, more outdated technology, instead of the cutting edge stuff that we all drool over at the tech shows. This will be fine for their target audiences though. Throw Linux, or even (ugh!) Win95, or Win98 on them, and you’ve got a very reliable, albeit underpowered system.
Now that I type this, I have to wonder why there isn’t a non-profit group out there soliciting for older, obselete laptops to clean up/refurbish, and donate to needy countries around the world. As it is, most laptops such as these, although they’re still capable of being used, are ending up in landfills around the country.
Doesn’t Cable and Wireless in conjunction with AMD have a headstart on this with their Geode CPU driven MAX – now being marketed in the Caribbean – among other C&W global properties? MAX even preceeded the Apple mini in concept – BYOKBM.
I believe that the biggest problem with recycling older hardware is that not all hardware is the same. For example, when you have a school in Ukraine trying to buy 500 computers, they would want the exact same model for all 500 computers, otherwise they will be having nightmares supporting all those the same way.
That’s why a “new” (but still basic) solution would be better for consistency in these markets than dumping them our old hardware. It might in fact be cheaper that way.
I have here an old PII-mobile 333 Mhz Sony Vaio with 128 MBs of RAM running Arch Linux. It’s pretty slow, and it’s power connector comes off too easily these days. Not sure that even my brother in Greece would be happy with it, even if it’s a super-light and beautiful laptop (1.1 kg).
Isn’t what is being proposed a laptop for developing countries, to reduce costs they will be using rear projection instead of a LCD screen and will most likely send it out in kit form to save labour costs in assembling the units, also it is to be a not for profit venture, ie the people making it won’t be taking a profit (but the manufactures of the components will). This isn’t something I’d want to uses, but it will probably be better for those it is targeted at than your idea, and you aren’t very clear who you would be targeting with your proposed design.
Buying 500 computers for a school in Ukraine (even for $100 each) is definately beyond budget capacities. At least, not for my taxes. I’d rather support spending those money on decent salary for teachers.
And if they will ever buy PCs, I’d prefer ~30 $300-500 modern units. That should be enough for average ukrainian school, will cost 2 times less, and will not allow throwing plain crap hardware and “limited” software editions (like XP starter) at my countries children
.
What makes you think that children need more than “XP STarter edition” or a stripped down linux version? Do you think that children really need XP PRO or RHEL? What for? If the basic apps they need to run already run on these OSes, there is no reason to pay for more.
As for the 30 computers for $300-500, that depends on the school. Not everywhere the needs are the same.
“But for a 3rd world country, such slow, cheap, but reliable laptops would be ideal!”
3rd world wants newest and fastest stuff around. The machine should be able to run all the stuff you can buy in the streets, like encarta (US$ 7), Dreamweaver (US$ 5), the newest games etc etc.
So old stuff is for thrash, unless you use it as a terminal client and still then the age of the video susbsystem and the difficulty to get memory modulesm akes the terminal a slow performer.
Better to go with something new and shiny, make it a pda with a terminal client over WIFI using NoMachine/FreeNX…
Eugenia, I’ve worked in Ukrainian schools
And still live here. Hence the reply about the needs.
As for software – I’d prefer to see full-fledged modern free *nixes (debian, slackware, *bsd, whatever) instead of (that is not an assumption, that’s the fact) stolen XP Pro+MS Office the schools are running now.
Not some semi-pda environment running on sub-par hardware, which will give very little usefull experience for the future real life.
But all of that will not happen, as we are gradually becoming microsoft’s reservation (govt officials are too cheap here
) software-wise.
“But for a 3rd world country, such slow, cheap, but reliable laptops would be ideal! In most cases, they’ve never had a 3ghz machine to mess around with, so they won’t immediately be dismayed at the relatively low specs of such machines. ”
3rd world definitely want that … for free. Like the 1st world. There’s a saying , were too poor to afford cheap things,if you catch my drift.
Old stuff is for trash , that’s one thing for sure.No one in the 3rd world will pay for that.
There is a morbid quality to seeing threads where people always want to drive down the price of computers to levels where a toaster is more expensive. It’s amazing.
What would be the absolute lowest price you’d be willing to pay for a computer where you would stop asking for even more cheaper machines?
Wouldn’t it be far better to allocate the available money to worthwile causes like, say: making sure the average man is able to make a living and buy something that hasn’t got “Suckware” stamped all over it?
The incessant drive for the lowest common denominator -1 is reducing every kind of experience into the ground. By devaluating everything we lay our hands on we devaluate the experience of living itself. I’m not talking about a sensible and rational use of limited budgets, you can’t lead a $1,000 lifestyle on a $100 budget [not for very long at least], but expecting the best [and I know we’re talking 10 year-old technology here] for next to no money is just not living.
I’m sure the people who adhere to this kind of philosophy like the fact that the food they eat is full of steroids and anti-biotics, because it’s cheap right? Why pay more when you can have 2 of them for half the price, right? ‘good food’ isn’t -that- much better in the first place, right?
Who makes money off of a $100 dollar laptop? And what if you connect these technonewbies to the net and they see all kinds of neat applications that their machine just won’t run. How many days after they first start the thing up are they going to say “Wait a minute, this stuff is junk! Those cheap bastards are offloading their junk here!”
I think the $100 laptop is another example of the callous, wasteful attitude of modern users. If you can sell it for $100, you can sell it for $25 too. So I’ll buy 10 for $19.95 each and I’ll ship them to the troops in Iraq. You know, to take their mind off the war for a minute.
Have the army ship a few hundred thousand old artillery shells, take out the parts that go boom and mount all the hardware in there. Dirt cheap computing on a shoestring budget. And when the thing melts when you launch Windows Explorer you won’t mind because the housing kinda gave the idea away that this thing was going to bomb anyway…
$15 and a pack of gum and I’ll buy one. Hell, I’ll buy two if you give me a complimentary t-shirt that says “I run crud but at least it didn’t cost anything”.
>And what if you connect these technonewbies to the net
> and they see all kinds of neat applications that
>their machine just won’t run.
If the machine can do most of the common things someone wants to do with a computer today (as described in the article) and by knowing that they only paid $99 for it, why be unhappy? They got what they paid for. Nobody promised these people much more.
I drool for dual G5s with 8 GBs of RAM as well. But I got a G4 Powerbook 867 Mhz instead, and you know what? It’s more than good enough for what I need it for.
In fact, I drool over for geek things all the time. But in reality, I don’t really need all the crap I buy every so often (see: my four PDAs or that IR keyboard I bought the other day
).
Not all the 3rd World want 3GHz wintels. Many parts of the 3rd World would like to have (order insignificant)
1) Water of any kind
2) Water fit to drink
3) Electricity
4) Jobs
5) Healthcare
6) Anything beyond a basic primary education
The majority of people in the worlds poorest 20 countries would like the above and more so please think more carefully when you talk about the 3rd World. Have you been there?
Even $100 is expensive if your annual income is $240.00.
(See the UN website and look at the GDP for places like Madagascar)
As far as place like Russia/Ukraine etc there are literally dozens of local white box makers that sell their stuff pretty cheap.
I’m puzzled by all this if ukraine is a third world country, what would you call african and south american countries, forth world?
This is getting kind of complex, how many worlds are there?? I always thought that there is only one world,earth, but I guess I was wrong.
I would like to give a personal salute to Nicholas Negroponte for developing a laptop PC that will go on sale for less than $100.
He has recognized a need that developing countries need these tools. I will go a little further and say that a lot of educators in the rural educational environment in which I work, non-profit organizations, and many charitable groups in the United States need this equipment as well.
I agree with his perspective that it can make a difference in the life of a community and the extended neighborhood. It can go beyond the textbook concept. It can be used to run small community businesses. It can be used to run small community schools. It can drive down the costs that non-profits must pay to proprietary-oriented software vendors. The list goes on.
Being a Linux user myself, I agree these units could drive a Linux-based operating system or another open-source operating systems as-well-as open-source based applications.
Getting rid of the fat is true is just as true for Linux as it is for any operating system. I would suggest Beatrix, Ubuntu, Slackware, or BSD among others. Maybe even Haiku when it completes development.
I don’t need the fastest processor myself. I am quite sure there are many that don’t need it as well. I am not a gamer – I am a worker. I don’t need a video card that runs somewhere short of an oven or that needs to be liquid cooled.
The broken laptops may be more of a classroom control issue. It may also show the need of a technician or at bare minimum a need for a knowledgeable person in the community manage or maintain them. While teachers are wonderful people, they truly are, they have a tendency to work way too hard and may have no time to repair these machines. As a technician at a college in New Mexico, I see where a sub-100 PC laptop would fill the need of an administrative or teachers unit and units for the students.
There is also not so steep of a dollar loss when a unit is broken or stolen. I hope Mr. Negroponte’s dream of laptops becoming as common as mobile phones comes true in my lifetime.
Oh! Come on! . Noone is talking about replacing modern computers with this cheaper ones. I’m big defender of very-low cost computers for people who only want to DO THINGS, not for experienced users, or professional use.
Some years ago, most of us used to get our work with 486 computers, and they did that well ( except win95 ).
I think it is much better for a kid to get in contact with computers AND have resources like books in it for an affordable price, that not having anything but last P4.
Sometimes i see posts with no global perspective in it, I mean, ideas like this one are not suitable for you but for others.
I reckon you could push at least 2 hours out of those laptops.
And for a nice small footprint os, riscos, nice and fast, and there’s a unix porting effort and a new browser coming. Also easy to use for people’s first os, and can’t go wrong too much.
btw, I stand corrected, what I would REALLY like to see (and even more sure it will never happen) on Ukrainian school PCs are Demos, RAFOS and dozens other, now dead operating systems and software sutes, killed by really superb MS policy – they practically did not fight piracy here for 15 years, waiting for 99% of the competition to die, as nothing can beat free, and NOW, when we’re hooked, we are going to pay for all.
The laptop would have to use an ARM cpu of some sort for risc os to run.. I didnt read the article so I dont know what cpu if any was mentioned.
The 100 dollar computer maybe misses the point if it can’t run the software the rest of the world uses. Would you teach a US computer class using Wordperfect? No, the business world uses Word and Wordperfect knowledge isn’t going to get anyone an entry level job. How is a third world country supposed to use nonstandard software to interact in a world working with the latest and greatest software? If my company doesn’t upgrade Word regularly, people start to send me documents I cannot open. In a lot of ways, this is the great equalizer that Open Source could be.
$100 is just so unrealistic.
Where I live, in South Africa, I’m most definately one of of the priviledged few, but I do know of some of the realities of those “have nots”
$100 a child is totally unfeasible and unrealistic – there’s simply NO way it would be possible on a wide scale unless it was part of a charity drive.
We’re talking about families whose total monthly income is $100 – that’s just to feed and clothe thier school-going children ! – they are the luckier ones.
We have 40% unemployment over here. Some families rely entirely on meagre government grants – to all intents and purposes existing on $2 or $3 a day !
Where on earth would they get $100 for a laptop ?
Rather use second hand standard ugly beige boxes – even over here, these are frequently turfed out onto dumps.
The specs they are talking about, complete with old monitors, could be had for $50 for a complete working PC.
Mongolia is fourth world.
If you are a client state you are living in the third world.
Look at Somalia’s burgeoning cell phone industry. No government, just warlords, yet even with no steady public service or utility of any kind, the people STILL WANT THEIR FREE NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS.
For The flying boolaboola:
When was the last time you paid $2.50 a pound for organic fruit?
I’m all for natural foods, but unless you are rediculously wealthy, or anorexic or a farmer, you can’t afford to live on organic foods alone. Most of the world does it, but try to sustain a greenhouse on your own and work a day job — you’ll never have time for anything else.
Also the “I would like to have potatoes in 6 months for dinner” factor kinda hurts recipe decissions.
At least the public has balked at irradiated foods and olestra-based products even though, some how, the FDA thinks these are acceptable products.
anal leakage as a side affect isn’t even good for a diuretic.
Canned ANYTHING is bad for you. Nothing like a little alzheimers from too many canned foods. Go to your local superstore-supermarket and see if you can find regular corn in a can. UNSWEETENED, UNSALTED, REGULAR CORN. It is an impossible task in 4 of the supermarkets in my area. EVERYTHING SEEMS TO HAVE HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP IN IT.
Ask someone who works for Coke or Pepsi (in the plant, not at the office) if they actually drink the stuff on their own.
WOW super off topic–
Anyway, yeah, I don’t think people living in the third world are a good “market” for small cheap portable laptops. Most of the third world has very limited power and frequent brown outs in the summertime. Much of their infrastructure is old and is not likely to be updated anytime soon.
I reccommend you market your cheapo laptop toward the gadget crowd / linux device crowd because at least their you can get an audience.
I could see your $99 device, ironically, manufactured in the 3rd world, for sale in South Korea.
I have a couple of laptops I’ve inherited that aren’t worth over $100.00 today: One’s a 200mhz PII, and the other’s a 100Mhz P1.
Yes, but those machines are cheap because they’re old and used. The question is, can someone produce those same machines now, sell it for $100, and make a profit? I don’t know, because things like plastic cases cost a certain amount. Ever notice that an 80GB hard drive doesn’t cost twice as much as a 40GB hard drive? Well, a 4GB hard drive would cost more than 1/10th as much as a 40GB. So, yes, old used underpowered laptops are cheap, but it’s not clear you could produce NEW unused underpowered laptops as cheaply.
However, it does seem to me that there’s may be a market being missed by big companies. Maybe you could produce a very small, lightweight, underpowered laptop with stripped-down features using PDA parts. You could install some optimized version of linux, have basic web/email/office apps. Maybe there would be a place for that in the market– basically a PDA with a big screen and full keyboard.
USB keys and internet cafes? They can go to town and plug in their usb key into a terminal, boot up Linux and do their thing. It might be a good intermediate step.
Ohh, and I forgot, this would be a perfect opprotunity to do recycling and start donating old machines to 3rd world people. I was in a store the other day and they had a stack of P166mmx compaq workstations for $29.99 a piece. Add a $20 14′ monitor and another $10 for a mouse, keyboard, and speakers, then load Linux and you still have $40 dollars left for shipping. And those off-lease computers are all over the place. Often, computer stores throw out old machines themselves due to lack of demand. There’s no money in dealing with $15 486’s, but connecting to the internet and sharing so much knowledge would be worth the trouble of dealing with lowend machines.
do you have any actual evidence that organic food is healthier?
not just that it sounds better, but that it is in fact.
actually the engineered food SHOULD be healthier since it is usually fortified with various vitamins, etc.
Unfortunately “healthy” is extremely hard to define. If you eat healthy foods your whole life, you may still get a heart attack because your genes make you at risk.
tough call.
Lots of adults and children are obese NOW. I single out High-fructose corn syrup and other excessively sweet chemical sweeteners which are add into EVERYTHING from pasta sauces to canned corn to cereals. Try writing down a list of products that don’t have it.
The only evidence I know of relating to organic foods is that they are really expensive, usually smaller and don’t taste as powerful a flavor as engineered foods.
I’ll never give up my Uncle Bens microwaveable rice pouch, EVER!
we are offtopic plz delete
“I have here an old PII-mobile 333 Mhz Sony Vaio with 128 MBs of RAM running Arch Linux. It’s pretty slow, and it’s power connector comes off too easily these days. Not sure that even my brother in Greece would be happy with it, even if it’s a super-light and beautiful laptop (1.1 kg).”
Hmm, it’s probably slow, i speculate, because you’re probably using Gnome, and programming, or other cpu intensive chores.
I got a PII/266 with 128 MB RAM old Dell desktop (1998), with IceWM on a minimal Debian Sid install, and it’s pretty fast. I write translations with my editor ‘ee’ (147 kb) which formats paragraphs, wordwrap at 72, and other options, and i send everything in .txt (no complaints) and open .doc files with Antiword, no OOo. I use Pine for emailing and Opera mostly without images (just press G if i want to see an image). Xfe for file managemet (it looks pretty nice once you configure the fonts and base/background colors) and it’s fast as lightning, and Xchat for reading tech channels.
A df -h shows i’m using 590 MB of space on my hd.
Anybody who wants to give away an old laptop, get in touch with me, i have a friend with a PO box in Miami, that brings stuff to him down here in Panama.
http://www.computerworldexchange.com or whatever. They send you a container of 400 used machines for US$ 27,000 (cost to South America, they say to shipping to Africa is cheaper). 10% dies in the transport. final cost: US$ 75. Will work nice with LTSP they say.
The difficulty is getting together US$ 27,000 without getting it lost.
Where I work people get US$ 250 a month, teachers get US$ 200 íf they get it and farmers can make US$ 80-100 a month. Harvests get lost because of lack of water. Irrigation project are big, cost a lot and should be done by the government. Government doesn’t do it and leaves you powerless. Computer and Internet give you power.
Oh, and yes organic stuff is healthier. Not only for you, but also for the farmer, his wife, their kids and their land.
Of course–the obvious answer. Yes, organic foods fund actual farmers and not mega-corporations like United Fruit Company (Chaquita.)
Negroponte’s idea is a worthy one and viable in the third world if somehow it could be community property paid for by a community of users. That idea has already been put to use: in 2000, a group of Indian scientists designed a machine for the masses costing (then) $200. The total price would be lower today, given the way component costs have declined. For more info: simputer.org on the WWW.
1. Have the display connect through a standard interface. Make it like DVI. The connection should provide power for the display. These computers should have a center socket that will accept these displays. The display can provide the hing. This will encourage the best display technology to be available. It should also allow users to balance quality and costs.
2. Include no memory and no storage. Essentially, when purchasing thise system one must buy A) Computer B) Display C) Memory D) Storage. This will save costs for users with wide differences in needs. A child can purchase a 32 MB RAM card and a 128 MB storage card. A professional can purchase a 512 MB RAM card and a 4 GB mini hard drive.
3. Include no battery. Spend the money on an excellent internal battery changing system that can be programed through software to work with today’s batteries and tomorrow’s as well. Have voltage profiles that will charge NiCad, NiMH, Lithium ION and Polymere batteries. Each battery pack can have a small chip to report its vooltage needs to the charging system. Plug in an AC adapter to the computer and your battery will charge. This will let users choose the battery technology that they can most afford. It will also leave an empty battery bay for fuel cells in the future.
He told the BBC World Service programme Go Digital he hoped it would become an education tool in developing countries. He said one laptop per child could be ” very important to the development of not just that child but now the whole family, village and neighbourhood”. He said the child could use the laptop like a text book.
Being that I myself am originally from Africa, I find this statement hilarious. $99 is in some instances a few months’ salary (and thats doing well). POWER for the laptop is not available. A $99 laptop in developing countries is a laptop for the wealthy.
I also see other comments regarding ‘add an interface for component x but leave that as an option’. Adding support for the interface and the header itself costs money.
And Eugenia, did you figure in board design, engineering, testing, prototyping, and other costs? Is your cost per product based on a realistic BOM? Building new hardware involves more than just finding cheap pieces to use for components.
I should also note that a custom handtop is more expensive to build than a laptop, simply due to the scale of the components and the manufactured quantity out there.
A better idea would be for 1st world nations to require people to not ‘dispose’ of their old systems, but rather turn them in for a small tax incentive. Result – almost free systems that probably require no more than a checkup, battery, and new harddrive (or flash).
One day they’ll come up with a $49 laptop with 32MB RAM and Linare as OS.
Gimme a break…
The computer could be like a zaurus with a ARM processor. There are lots of apps for it and the operating system could be openzaurus;)
100 dollar desktops
100 dollar laptops
Things that a bunch of geeks sitting at *some* computers costing upwards of 4-5 thousand dollars think will help 3rd world countries. Help them do what?
Everything and nothing.
You want the world to be on an even field technology wise, you need to come up with a device that anyone can use, in any language, has a re-newable non-toxic power source, easily manufactured and distributed, and instantly recognizable.
Ladies and gentlemen, after about 200 years of industrial revolution and advancement we have come up with exactly one device that meets these requirements.
The wind-up wristwatch.
Somewhere deep down inside, I think most scientists, engineers, nerds, geeks, etc… just want one of those nifty communicator badges from Star Trek.
That will take some time.
A small computer that would fit in your pocket is great for students. They will never carry around cheap laptops that weighs 3+ kilos. The lighter weight laptops are usually too expensive for students.
I used to have a Psion 5mx which had more or less the configuration mentioned here and I loved it and had it with me all the time. I used it for notes, word processing and read books on it. It’s software was wonderful and you could transfer word documents and PDFs back and forth. I would still be using it if it had bluetooth.
“A $99 laptop in developing countries is a laptop for the wealthy.”
Or rather it’s a laptop for the hip crowd wondering, “If I’m travelling light on the African continent, what would I need to keep blogging?”
I always find funny these geeks trying to make the world a better place by shipping computers to “third world” countries., like the computer is some sort of liberator machine. First, you need to define this “third world” thingy, is it for the nomands in saharan africa? or the shanty towns of brazil? a 100$ laptop may/may not be useful for all these circumstances. what about internet connectivity costs?, the highest prices of access are precisely in the “third world”
>> I’m puzzled by all this if ukraine is a
>> third world country, what would you call
>> african and south american countries,
>> forth world?
Nope. Ukraine is a 2nd world country 🙂
The limiting factor for the target population is power. Used systems just aren’t practical, they use too much power. Even price is less important than low power.
Think of a single computer shared by a village, if that’s all that the economy can afford. One per student, if that’s possible. But these computers need to work without a power grid – small human cranked generators, solar, or other independent power sources.
You could have a library in ROM. The printing press created the industrial revolution. Duplication of electronic data costs even less than printing.
Cell phones are spreading throughout the third world. Hook up a computer, and people can have email, and look up information not available locally.
Free markets are driven by information. For people to shift from subsistence to market economies, they need access to communication and information. An affordable, low power computer can be part of improving life for millions in the third world. Only part; radio is also key.
They’d be handy everywhere, but essential for the third world.
“fanatically extreme leftest site such as Slashdot”
Stop inhaling from that fat propaganda pipe and ditch the dated and inappropriate political terms while you’re at it! Yes, prices for any half-decently chosen unit of computing power or storage capacity are continually on the slide, but that armchair observation doesn’t come anywhere near to approaching a balanced consideration of the issues in designing and producing a computer system that can be deployed and operated effectively in the third world.
Sure, the latest case mods may appeal to the Slashdot crowd, but this topic goes a lot deeper. If you can tear yourself away from biased corporate media for just a few seconds, you might get to understand why the story made it here in the first place.
my laptop’s a PII/450 with 192MB RAM running Xfce on Mandrake, and I’m fine with it. I even used it as my primary machine for a long period last year. It’s pretty slow filtering mail through spamassassin and it takes a while to rip CDs, but aside from that, it’s fine…
It is just a term coined by the Western part of the world to look down upon the Eastern and Central part of the world. India is one of the fastest developing nations when it comes to tehnology and research. GE and Intel have transferred their key research facilities to India and alreayd amazing results are being seen. No matter what no Western country will ever recognize India as being a 1st world or whatever kind of country category they come up with to describe themselves. This is an attitude problem.
A PII/450 with 192 MBs of RAM is way faster than a PII-*mobile* 333 with 128 MBs of RAM. You see, 128 MBs is the absolute minimum today. I have removed almost all servicse and still, Gnome consumes 114 MBs of RAM when nothing is loaded. If I had 192 MBs of RAM too, even just that would make things much better. XFce or IceWM would have been better in 128 MBs of RAM, but I prefer Gnome, so…
I can go to 99% of the USA and drink water out of any Tap and not get malaria. Can I do this in India or Mexico?
Except on rare occasions and in California, I get 24/7 electricity on demand, as much as my wires can support.
Plumbing always works here unless there is a natural disaster.
Most of the GNP of the united states and most of the area is not based on farming.
India has many of these services NOW, but they are not wide spread. If you think the 3rd World term is offensive, you really need to look it up. It has ONLY TO DO WITH THE LEVEL OF INDUSTRIALIZATION of the country. It is not derrogative in any way and is not a reflection of the people there, it merely states how most people make a living (industrial or farming.)
Before replying, I do not have any problem with India or its people or the people from any 3rd world country.
http://www.ncoretech.com/
Also, 1st world, 2nd world, and 3rd world do NOT have to do with level of industrialization. otherwise Germany would be 1st world and US would be 2nd world. It has do with Cold War:
* USA or USSR (1st world)
* Direct allies (2nd world)
* Non-allied (3rd world)
yeah, the extra 64MB helps. I ran it at 128MB with early GNOME 2.x releases for a while, though…I got by, heh.
My Toshiba Satellite got 160 MB ram and AMD K6-II 380 MHz. It runs FC3, GNOME, OO.org, mplayer, Firefox and xmms. Definitely not snappy but usable. Here in the Philippines, for school and home use Sempron-powered machines (w/ display) for $250-300 would be nice, but the thing is, a PC does not belong to the ‘basic needs’ of the common people. Food, shelter, clothing and medicine must come first. Sad but true (TM).
“I can go to 99% of the USA and drink water out of any Tap and not get malaria. Can I do this in India or Mexico?”
You can here in Chile (a 3rd world country isn’t it
)
“Except on rare occasions and in California, I get 24/7 electricity on demand, as much as my wires can support.”
Sure, you also can here.
“Plumbing always works here unless there is a natural disaster.”
Again, you can do so here.
“Most of the GNP of the united states and most of the area is not based on farming.”
And yet again, most of the Chilean territory isn’t based on farming.
“If you think the 3rd World term is offensive, you really need to look it up. It has ONLY TO DO WITH THE LEVEL OF INDUSTRIALIZATION of the country. It is not derrogative in any way and is not a reflection of the people there, it merely states how most people make a living (industrial or farming.)”
You’re absolutely wrong and you’re ironically discriminating. Chile,a htird world country isn’t a farming country. Most of its exports are industrialized (copper for example). Ecuador (where I lived for 16 years) is a third world and features one of the most industrilized ports of South America. Argentina and Brazil have very high levels of industrialization (but both countries have terrible income distributions overall).
Actually, you have to define well what do you mean by third world. Noone in south america will buy $99 laptops. At least here, you have, people who can afford a decent low-mid range desktop computer (USD $300+). Most public schools have books that cost way below $99 each, with a quality than can match any published books of the same topics. Even some rural schools have internet connections and computer labs, all afforeded by the State.
Third world does not necessary mean poor or dumb. Finally, in places where a better education is needed, its better to give/donate the students material and try to achieve a better level of teaching, or even to afford a better infrastructure.
A $99 laptop is just as ignorant as an ignorant teacher.
NO I am not discriminating:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/t/thirdw1or.asp
And yes, ORIGINALLY the term referred to countries not aligned with the US or the USSR. I’m referring to how it is defined… NOW. I don’t think anyone is intending on selling a laptop by going back in time and distributing it in 1955.
Just like the term “liberal” now has a completely different meaning that it did originally.
If you read the first part of my last post out of context it may SEEM discriminating: It wasn’t meant to be.
The poster from India felt that people from the Western part of the world don’t consider India an industrialized first world nation and never will.
There is a reason why India is popular with many companies for outsourcing: cheap labor. It was cheap because India’s economy wasn’t providing an evenly distributed standard of living until recently. The same can be said of China since the 70’s, Taiwan since the 80’s and South Korea since the early 1990’s.
With the influx of jobs from outsourcing, India’s economy is growing at a VERY fast rate, but government services are still hurting like clean water distribution, electricity. Hell there’s 250+ languages in India I can understand the difficulty.
If Mexico is any indicator since NAFTA, removing trade barriers will significantly increase the economy, stability in terms of government and social services of poorer nations.
A rule of capitalism is to find the cheapest suitable labor to produce your finished goods. Once Mexico and India “Become too expensive” in terms of labor cost, production will move en masse to another under-developed country where labor is cheap.
Argentina should invade you! (kidding)
This is a good idea.
Hardware specs are fine, but remove ethernet / modem.
Better to have usb 2.0
Perhaps 64 mb ram too.
Perhaps USB keys is the way for exchanging information
A solarcharger panel as addon?
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Developing countries need tools to educate them.
If they need food and water. Education is the way to do it.
Think e-books as application.
It does have a use, i think
A laptop this cheap would make it great for dedicated tasks that computers haven’t really broken into yet. Like:
1. Being the basis of an mp3 system in your car
2. Being the security video monitoring station in your house
3. Being the recipe book in your kitchen
If you have a reasonably fast internet connection, you can use such a laptop as a remote terminal, connecting to your home or office computer remotely. This way you can do serious development while on the road. That’s what I did while I was abroad — just used my laptop as a remote terminal, to connect to my office, and did serious development. The most important things on a laptop are the good display and the good network connection.
Remember Balmer asking for a $100 PC? ((http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/11/27/1946202.shtml?tid=137&tid=…)) Well the $100 SolarPC will be on site at SCALE 3x on Feb 12-13 at their booth. SCALE will be at the LA convention Center. If you want to check it out sign up on their website with the promo code “FREE” and get a free exhibit hall pass. If you use “NEWSP” you get a discount on a full access pass. See their website for details: http://www.socallinuxexpo.org
Haven’t read thru all the comments yet, but I’d have to say that I’d like to see the AMD Geode availible in something like this. It would give (barring any other non-standard hardware inclusions) give enourmous flexibilty of use for the device, whether it be assembled or a kit. Several different x86-based OS’es could be used to target a wide variety of potential uses, with a much easier ‘upgrade’ path in the future. Plus the Geode family hss had many improvements, speed and otherwise, since many here have looked at them I’ll wager. Granted, X-Scale is nice, but lack much flexibility once in the hands of the public.
X-86-based OS’es for embedded platforms could be adapted, trimmed down desktop versions could be used, or an OSS project could be easily rolled as many of the Linus-based and others have been done for other ‘defunct’ hardware. QNX and BeOS/BeIA-Haiku are also prime candidates to use.
I hate seeing the general ‘across the board’ push for more and more power and speed in everything when I don’t believe al that can be gotten has been achieved with many things that are being thrown away commonly. I see these as more a great basic device that ‘could’ be used as a ‘laptop’ of sorts, but also as a basis for so many other projects as well, and bring along the benefit of a ‘shared user knowledge base’ with many projects branching off it. Sort of an advanced “Heathkit” system like so many started out with years ago. An “Open Source Experimenters Platform”.
There are oppourtunities for use in out-of-the-way and poorer areas if power use is kept down (lower mem usage for graphics and other tasks, etc) and USB add-ons are used (hot plug and only use what is absolutely NEEDED at the time) where there is part-time generated power or solar and wind power is availible.
I really like this guy after reading some of his stuff. To really get to know someone though, you have to read ‘both’ sides of them. Here’s some of Negroponte’s ‘other’ side.
http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/media-lab.html
On Google, it’s described:
“… Here’s part of an open letter from Nicholas Negroponte and Michael Hawley (then the X-Consortium Assistant Professor Of Computer Science & Media …”
philip.greenspun.com/humor/media-lab.html – 16k