Airencracken
09-28-2005, 10:21 PM
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/09/29crank.html
Laptop with a hand crank and a $100 cost
MIT developing cheap computers for children in developing countries.
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(enlarge photo)
By Brian Bergsteine
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, September 29, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.
The AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power it when there's no electricity. They would be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs and carried like lunchboxes.
For outdoor reading, the display would shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.
The laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly because "they have to be absolutely indestructible," said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader on Wednesday.
Negroponte hatched the idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also take home.
Those computers had been donated by a foundation run by Negroponte and his wife. He decided that for kids everywhere to benefit from the educational and communications powers of the Internet, someone would have to make laptops inexpensive enough for officials in developing countries to purchase en masse.
Within a year, Negroponte expects his nonprofit One Laptop Per Child to get 5 million to 15 million of the machines in production, when children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa are due to begin getting them.
While a prototype isn't expected to be shown until November, Negroponte unveiled blueprints at Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.
Among the key specs: a 500-megahertz processor 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.
The computers would be able to connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks and be part of "mesh" networks in which each laptop would relay data to and from other devices, reducing the need for expensive base stations.
Perhaps the defining difference is the hand crank, though first-generation users would get no more than 10 minutes of juice from one minute of winding.
Other attempts to bridge the world's so-called digital divide with inexpensive versions of fancy machinery have had a mixed record.
Negroponte says his team is addressing ways this project could be undermined. For example, 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."
And unlike the classic model in which successive generations of devices get more gadgetry at the same price, Negroponte said his group expects to do the reverse. With such tweaks as "electronic ink" displays that will require virtually no power, the MIT team expects to constantly lower the cost. After all, in much of the world, Negroponte said, even $100 "is still too expensive."
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Nifty!
Laptop with a hand crank and a $100 cost
MIT developing cheap computers for children in developing countries.
Advertisement
(enlarge photo)
By Brian Bergsteine
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, September 29, 2005
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The $100 laptop computers that Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers want to get into the hands of the world's children would be durable, flexible and self-reliant.
The AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power it when there's no electricity. They would be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs and carried like lunchboxes.
For outdoor reading, the display would shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.
The laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly because "they have to be absolutely indestructible," said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader on Wednesday.
Negroponte hatched the idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also take home.
Those computers had been donated by a foundation run by Negroponte and his wife. He decided that for kids everywhere to benefit from the educational and communications powers of the Internet, someone would have to make laptops inexpensive enough for officials in developing countries to purchase en masse.
Within a year, Negroponte expects his nonprofit One Laptop Per Child to get 5 million to 15 million of the machines in production, when children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa are due to begin getting them.
While a prototype isn't expected to be shown until November, Negroponte unveiled blueprints at Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.
Among the key specs: a 500-megahertz processor 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.
The computers would be able to connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks and be part of "mesh" networks in which each laptop would relay data to and from other devices, reducing the need for expensive base stations.
Perhaps the defining difference is the hand crank, though first-generation users would get no more than 10 minutes of juice from one minute of winding.
Other attempts to bridge the world's so-called digital divide with inexpensive versions of fancy machinery have had a mixed record.
Negroponte says his team is addressing ways this project could be undermined. For example, 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."
And unlike the classic model in which successive generations of devices get more gadgetry at the same price, Negroponte said his group expects to do the reverse. With such tweaks as "electronic ink" displays that will require virtually no power, the MIT team expects to constantly lower the cost. After all, in much of the world, Negroponte said, even $100 "is still too expensive."
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Nifty!