R650 laptop-per-child for Africa's children now a reality (video)

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Siembambaa

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http://laptop.media.mit.edu/news.html

Check out the webcast with Kofe Annan. This is BIG.

Unfortunately kids wont be able to unlock the real power of these laptops (using them as a portal to the internet) because doing so would cost more than the laptop costs PER MONTH. Thank you Telkon :rolleyes:

More on these laptops: http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html

E.g.: What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. This rugged laptop will be WiFi-enabled and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.

E.g.:What about connectivity? Aren't telecommunications services expensive in the developing world?
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost. [They will probably be banned in ZA by Telkom because of this!]
 
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fantastic. they should make it available to the public to buy (for us that are better off then the needy) And inflat the price to about 1.2k, with the profits going into funding more of these.

So for every one you buy, technically you'r donating another. I'd happily buy a dozen or so to give as birthday gifts to some kids.
 
They're not going to sell to the public and they'll only be sold in HUGE quantities to governments, etc. So you and I will probably never be able to buy one even if we wanted to.
 
Imagine the possibilities:
-Electronic textbooks
-Offline copy of wikipedia

And with the meshing a new electronic textbook could spread virally around the world in hours.

All open source software based too :D
 
hey make it available and it will drop the prices of all hardware and software slightly if people staryt buying it as a 1st pc perhaps. hrm i want one if they let me get one.
 
Heres what will happen: Governments will buy tons of these. Schools will buy them from governments. You possibly too, possibly only in bulk. Distributors like Sahara and Rectron may get in on it as well, if theres a reasonable profit margin in it for them.

They'll get stolen like anything. Governments will have to be clever about these devices available on the black market.

Government will have to be slapped around like a wet fish to get them to the kids fairly and easily enough - My guess is that it'll become a library tool that can be lent out and optionally bought. They'll probably try to get enough of these so Grade 10 and up pupils can each take one home at least 1 or 2 days a week.

Sponsors... well, we'll see how the legal aspects play out.. anyways.

Getting them online will be no problem since all that is required is one ADSL line to hook up 100 of these from one point. Put a proxy, cache and a content filter in place and you can prevent kids from watching porn with 99.9% efficiency and cache saves over 60% of the bandwidth. I've just seen the statistics at a large school lan. In 3 hours this morning, 90 different users viewed 80 MB of internet webpages, while only 20MB was pulled over the paid-per-megabyte internet link. Pretty Cool.
 
Or - governmint could buy the school a corsa lite or 2 for R850 a month, and each kid could learn to drive, then open their own taxi industry and give the kids a lift to school and then expand that into a fully fledged taxi service servicing the community, and then use the profits from that to launch a sattelite and then compete with DSTV and ...

/me hath lost me mind.
 
stoke said:
Or - governmint could buy the school a corsa lite or 2 for R850 a month, and each kid could learn to drive, then open their own taxi industry and give the kids a lift to school and then expand that into a fully fledged taxi service servicing the community, and then use the profits from that to launch a sattelite and then compete with DSTV and ...
Click to expand...
Oh but you see, we have the dilemma of Corsa Lites not running on H20 lite.

stoke said:
/me hath lost me mind.
Click to expand...
Here, I have a spare, let me just pull it out of my ass.
 
I believe that they are betting that it will cost a lot cheaper than printing textbooks in the long run.
 
damn, i just got excited and thought that the $100 laptop was ready to be used.....then I find this is an old thread.........
 
Lazarus

nic777 said:
damn, i just got excited and thought that the $100 laptop was ready to be used.....then I find this is an old thread.........
Click to expand...

How did this thread rise from the dead? Nothing new to see here. Move on people...
 
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