$100 Laptops
The AP has a story about an undertaking by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, his wife and some MIT colleagues to create laptop computers at a cost of just $100 each and put them into the hands of millions of children in the third world.
Your first thought is probably the same as mine was: at that cheap, the finished product is likely to be so stripped-down as to be little more than a toy. But Negroponte is quoted as saying he wants the $100 laptops to "be so close to the current laptops as to be nearly indistinguishable."
The laptops will be multimedia capable and wi-fi equipped, and have USB ports for hooking up peripheral devices. They will also have batteries that can be recharged with a hand crank. On the downside, they will have relatively slow processors, "modest" storage capacity and a barebones software suite (Linux, which is freely distributed, will be used as the operating system).
Tags: laptops computers MIT third world development Linux Negroponte Massachusetts software MIT Media Lab
Your first thought is probably the same as mine was: at that cheap, the finished product is likely to be so stripped-down as to be little more than a toy. But Negroponte is quoted as saying he wants the $100 laptops to "be so close to the current laptops as to be nearly indistinguishable."
The laptops will be multimedia capable and wi-fi equipped, and have USB ports for hooking up peripheral devices. They will also have batteries that can be recharged with a hand crank. On the downside, they will have relatively slow processors, "modest" storage capacity and a barebones software suite (Linux, which is freely distributed, will be used as the operating system).
Tags: laptops computers MIT third world development Linux Negroponte Massachusetts software MIT Media Lab
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