I had a Comp Sci professor in college who, after rambling on a completely unrelated topic to what we were supposed to be learning for 30 mins or so, would wrap it up by saying it was good dinner conversation material. Most of his little rambling spells were about his predictions on the future of the internet and considering he was the only professor in the department at the time who was aware that the internet existed, his stories were usually pretty good stuff. That's all to say that this post kind of fits into that category. It also has a Christmas spirit, save-the-world vibe to it, and I just thought it was cool. Some of you may already heard about this...
There's a program under way to provide $100 laptop computers for every child in the world. The whole thing was started by Nicholas Negroponte who is the founder and chair of MIT's Media Lab and co-founder of Wired magazine. (When he does interviews with journalists who don't know any better he also takes credit for inventing electricity, the light bulb, and the internet.) His latest project is a design for a laptop that can be cheaply produced and usable everywhere, and I really mean everywhere. It was a *hand crank* to power it. Check out the pics:
It uses a 500 MHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and is supposed to do everything a normal laptop can do except store a large amount of data since it uses flash memory instead of a hard drive (which has "too many moving parts"). It has 4 USB ports to connect to external devices though. The keyboard folds under the screen so that it can used as an e-Book reader. The screen has a color mode and a black-and-white mode. In B+W mode it's supposed to be bright enough to be readable in the sunlight and can display for 40 minutes with 1 minute of cranking. Negroponte thinks he can get an optional plug-in DVD player produced for under $10. The laptops all form a wireless mesh network, so that in remote villages if you can connect one node to the internet via satellite or carrier pigeon then everybody is on the internet. It's not in full production, but they've put the prototypes into some remote villages and Negroponte claims that the very first English word spoken by some children now is "Google". (You know Microsoft is happy about that one!)
China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand have all signed on for 1 million machines each to be produced next year if everything goes according to plan. Negroponte's goal is to produce 100 million units a year in order to meet the $100/each cost goal. That goal is more that double the current yearly production of ALL laptops world-wide. Individual countries put up the money to buy the laptops with the value proposition being that the countries don't have to buy student textbooks anymore. Students also get access to all the free books out there like on Project Gutenberg and other sites.
The boot-strap and prototype stage of the project was funded by AMD, Brightstar, Gooles, News Corporation (aka Rupert Murdoch), Nortel, and Red Hat. (Yes, they run Linux; Win XP would require too much cranking apparently.) Quanta Computer in Taiwan is producing them. They currently make 1/3 of all laptops produced including all the iMacs and IBM clones for Dell and HP. Quanta also gets the option to produce a more upscale, commercialized version of the laptop which will supposedly sell for $200.
Anyway, I just found out about it and thought it had that Christmassy feeling to it, so I thought I'd pass it along. You can read more about it here:
