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Re: Laptops for the worldFrom: Andrew Folley (dean@thehuffpeople.net)Mon Oct 3 19:59:56 2005
.. How can it be so inexpensive? By not including a Windows operating system -- using Linux instead. Dean Huffman - - - - Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 15:50:34 -0500 Reply-To: ob-gyn-l@obgyn.net Originator: ob-gyn-l Sender: ob-gyn-l@obgyn.net From: evsono@pipeline.com (art fougner, md) Subject: Re: Laptops for the world And why not there and not here? The $100 Laptop, Why There and Not Here? mitlaptop.jpgMIT's Nicholas Negroponte has been working on an admirable goal - providing the developing world with inexpensive laptop computers that children could use at school and take home. It has been engineered to be very tough with a rubberized exterior. It can be powered by AC or by hand crank. One minute of cranking yields ten minutes of power. It has four USB ports and is wifi capable. How can this be offered for only $100? Among the key specs: A 500-megahertz processor (that was fast in the 1990s but slow by today's standards) by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and flash memory instead of a hard drive with moving parts. To save on software costs, the laptops would run the freely available Linux operating system instead of Windows. Plus, this is a nonprofit project. Negroponte and others are donating their time to aid the developing world. Obviously, they would not want others to profit from their charity or steal from the kids these machines are meant for. To keep the $100 laptops from being widely stolen or sold off in poor countries, he expects to make them so pervasive in schools and so distinctive in design that it would be "socially a stigma to be carrying one if you are not a student or a teacher." He compared it to filching a mail truck or taking something from a church: Everyone would know where it came from. As a result, he expects to keep no more than 2 percent of the machines from falling into a murky "gray market." This 2% grey market projection is naive. If there is a demand, the supply will flow to the demand. Certainly it would be shameful to take a school-bus-yellow laptop marked "For school use in developing nations only" to work. But these computers could be quickly absorbed into a home use grey market. This problem could be addressed by offering a commercial version of this cheap machine. If a $150 or $200 version of this machine was offered to the rest of the public at the time the $100 student versions come out, much of the grey market demand could be satisfied honorably. Additionally, any profits made from the commercial version could be used to engineer improvements to both versions or subsidize the student version. And why not offer this machine in the United States? We are a wealthy nation, but I believe there would be a market for super-cheap, rugged, rechargeble-by-hand laptops right here. If offered for $200 or less, I would buy two of these machines immediately - one for my 3rd grader, another for my 1st grader. No way am I giving these rowdy guys fragile $1000 laptops. But these would be perfect for them. http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000454.html Art
At Sat, 1 Oct 2005, Anna Meenan, MD wrote:
>
-- art fougner, md
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