$100 Laptop to Be Sold in Europe
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Amazon to Sell $100 OLPC Laptop
Update: As it turns out, OLPC says that a dual-boot XP and Sugar OS XO will be shipping in the "next month of so." Happy pappie?
Computers, Celebrities, Google
Dvorak Says We Should Send Rice, Not Laptops, To Children
In case you haven't been following along with our occasional coverage of John C. Dvorak, we think he could lighten up a bit. This angry man has made a career out of bemoaning everything from Web 2.0 to the iPhone, and now the OLPC XO, the laptop designed for children in developing countries. Dvorak thinks that the OLPC XO is a slap in the face of the developing world. A modern day "let them eat cake," to steal his analogy.
Allow us to boil down Dvorak's arguments for you:
- Money would be better spent donating $200 worth of rice
- Millions of people are starving to death
- Kids will be spammed and see ads
- There are bomb-making instructions online
- There are lots of illiterate people
We also want to take issue with a particular piece of information that Dvorak takes from a "world hunger website:"
"Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion -- a majority of humanity -- live on less than $1 per day."
Wait, what? "one in four" is 25 percent, "1.3 billion" is less than half the population of China, and some how that's a majority? The most recent estimates actually put the population of the Earth at around 6,634,570,959 which would mean one in four would be closer to 1.7 billion. None of those three figures align.
As for his concern that these poor children have to deal withj spam, all we can say is, "oh well." Life is too short to worry about Viagra ads in a child's inbox. Then there are his worries about the type of information available on the internet, such as bomb making instructions. If Dvorak is worried that these children don't even have water, what is the likelihood that they'd have bomb making materials?
And, finally, Dvorak suggests that the OLPC laptop would be useless since there are large populations of illiterate children in Africa. I don't know if he's been paying attention, but the whole purpose of this thing is to get educational materials to children through the laptop so that they won't be illiterate.
Referenced story from PC Magazine
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The $100 Laptop for Kids - Where it Went Wrong
Since unveiling it in January of 2005, Negroponte has been known as the master of the OLPC initiative. The goal was to create a $100 laptop for educational purposes and get it into the hands of up to 150 million children across the developing world within 4 years. Three years later, it turns out that Negroponte's goals are unattainable, at least according to a recent story at the 'Wall Street Journal'. He has learned the hard way that getting pledges and promises is not the same as an order on paper and cash in hand.
A proper examination of the successes and failures of the OLPC Program could fill a book, but that won't stop us from trying to condense the information into an easy-to-digest blog post:
Where it went right:
To be sure, the OLPC XO is a marvel of engineering. It is extremely efficient, able to derive energy from optional solar panels, foot pedals, and draw strings when outlets are unavailable. The batteries used are even special. The XO uses an extremely inexpensive ($10) nickel-metal hydride or LiFePO4 battery that is less volatile than traditional lithium-ion batteries found in laptops. It will also survive four times as many recharges before capacity takes a nose dive.
Then there is the screen. It uses a beautiful dual-mode, high-resolution, sunlight-readable, ultra low power LCD that has tech mavens marveling.
OLPC has also inspired others to join the effort, producing their own low cost laptops aimed at the developing world and driving companies and philanthropists to donate to OLPC and other similar programs.
Where it went wrong:
A $100 laptop was an ambitious goal -- perhaps too ambitious. Even before it became obvious that the economies of scale would not bail out the project, the price had climbed to $150. And when deals collapsed, that number shot up to its current resting place of $188.
A price like that puts it with in spitting distance of the $230 Windows-equipped Intel Classmate PC, Intel's machine that was inspired by Negroponte's organization. Competition from these other initiatives has hurt the OLPC's bottom line, driving up costs by reducing orders of the XO.
This brings us to the single biggest failure of the organization: marketing. OLPC may be a non-profit, but businesses such as Intel and Microsoft, who were left out of the OLPC party, have a vested interest in spreading their wares around the globe and preventing Linux and AMD from entrenching themselves in developing markets. Good intentions alone can not keep the foundation alive. The marketing muscle and high profit margins of the big technology companies give them a leg up on Negroponte's little non-profit. Microsoft has started offering a $3 software bundle that includes Windows, Office and educational programs, and Intel has the aforementioned Classmate all taking a bite out of the XO's market share.
The tale is not over for the XO. Intel joined the board of the foundation in July, and a new Intel-powered OLPC model is in the works. The OLPC foundation also has plenty of funding to survive at least another year or two before things begin to get shaky. The effect of the OLPC foundation has been a net positive for the world, but whether or not it can survive the trials and tribulations of its own quest for technological penetration remains to be seen.
From the Wall Street Journal
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Best Buy's $200 Black Friday PC and Other Cheap Computers
If you decide to brave the battlefield at Best Buy this year, you'll be rewarded with an opportunity to grab an eMachines PC with a 17 inch LCD monitor for the super low price of $200. Don't expect the world though. The PC is rumored to be powered by an Intel Celeron running at 2.66 Ghz (meaning no efficient and powerful 'Core' for you), comes with 512 megabytes of RAM (which is the bare minimum for doing just about anything on a computer these days), has a measly 80 Gigabyte hard drive, and it has no DVD burner.
Don't get us wrong -- $200 is still a heck of a price, but you could get so much more, or at least more interesting for a tad more cash. For instance, Wal-Mart is selling their own $200 PC without monitor. The gPC, as it's called, runs Linux instead of the resource-hungry Vista and uses an ultra low-power (and carbon-neutral) processor from Via. Or, how about the diminutive and cheap Eee from Asus which is also powered by Linux (noticing a trend here?). Priced from $200 to $400, these little laptops let you get all your basic computing tasks done by focusing on web applications.
Or, if you're in the market for something truly different, head on over to Laptop.org and you can get yourself one of the OLPC XOs (also Linux powered). These tiny, innovative convertible laptops are meant for kids in developing nations, but for a limited time you can order one for yourself as long as you're willing to pay for two. The second one gets sent to a child in the third world on your dime. In that case, $400 gets you a technological marvel, a piece of history, and a warm, fuzzy feeling.
From Engadget
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First '$100 Laptops' Sold to Uruguay
The tiny green and white, $100 XO notebook has been in development by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation for years, but the device, intended to bring computing to children around the world, has only now received its first official order. The government of Uruguay has purchased 100,000 devices for children 6-8-years-old. If things go well, the South American country's government has indicated another 300,000 may be purchased as well.
The OLPC XO laptop was made famous as a supposed '$100 laptop,' intended to be sold for just a Benjamin apiece. The idea was that children in developing nations everywhere would be using the things. Additionally, its rugged, simple, and completely integrated design made it a perfect computer for nations lacking solid infrastructure (it can even be powered via solar electricity, a foot crank, or even a pull-string generator). Additionally, the devices can communicate wirelessly and can daisy-chain and share central connections, meaning laptops on the edge of town may be able to connect to Internet access points that would otherwise be out of range.
While we earlier mentioned that Mexico's Carlos Slim was offering to purchase a million laptops for his country's children, the government of Uruguay is the first to actually step up with the cash to buy the things. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the OLPC foundation, recently said: "I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written."
Perhaps this is why there aren't more tech-savvy politicians?
From BBC News
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The $100 Laptop Goes Into Production
In case you haven't been paying attention, the XO or OLPC (or $100 Laptop as it's called) is a first-of-its-kind project loaded with new technologies and innovative features. A unique display runs in both a high resolution and sunlight-readable black and white mode along with a normal color mode for indoor viewing. The laptop also has a special ultra-wide touch pad that can be used with either a finger or a stylus as a drawing pad, while a special ultra low-power mesh Wi-Fi network allows for sharing an Internet connection between several PCs. It even extends the range of a typical Wi-Fi antenna by using the laptops as repeaters.
The laptops have finally met their threshold for mass production of 3 million orders. Though the laptops have climbed in price from the original goal of $100 to roughly $175, interest is still strong. Quanta, the largest laptop manufacturer in the world (they build laptops for Dell and Apple amongst others), will begin assembling the machines in bulk shortly. Now if only the rumored commercial version would be announced soon, some of us geeks would love to get our hands on one of these.
From The BBC
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