MIT Media Lab: $100 Laptop
"The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created."
Click around their site for more images and FAQ. You may have seen this in recent months, but now they have working prototypes. For some reason this gets me all hot and bothered. I know they won't sell them directly, but even if companies started producing knockoffs for double or triple that cost (which you know they will), it would be an awesome thing and comparatively cheap. It has a fucking turncrank so you don't have to plug in! It's designed for ebooks and video, with open source operating system! And their whole intent was to make them as educational tools. They need to do like some of those companies selling turncrank radios, where middle class chuckleheads like us can buy them for a certain price, and it includes the cost of another appliance being given away to an orphan somewhere. It would be like Sally Struthers rewarding your charity with an awesome tech-geek "premium".
...oops. Then I read some of the FAQ. "The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing 100 million of anything. This is not just a supply-chain problem, but also a design problem. The scale is daunting, but I find myself amazed at what some companies are proposing to us. It feels as though at least half the problems are being solved by mere resolve." I hope they prove me wrong, but that sounds like a preface to VAPORWARE.
"The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. To achieve this goal, a new, non-profit association, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), has been created."
Click around their site for more images and FAQ. You may have seen this in recent months, but now they have working prototypes. For some reason this gets me all hot and bothered. I know they won't sell them directly, but even if companies started producing knockoffs for double or triple that cost (which you know they will), it would be an awesome thing and comparatively cheap. It has a fucking turncrank so you don't have to plug in! It's designed for ebooks and video, with open source operating system! And their whole intent was to make them as educational tools. They need to do like some of those companies selling turncrank radios, where middle class chuckleheads like us can buy them for a certain price, and it includes the cost of another appliance being given away to an orphan somewhere. It would be like Sally Struthers rewarding your charity with an awesome tech-geek "premium".
...oops. Then I read some of the FAQ. "The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing 100 million of anything. This is not just a supply-chain problem, but also a design problem. The scale is daunting, but I find myself amazed at what some companies are proposing to us. It feels as though at least half the problems are being solved by mere resolve." I hope they prove me wrong, but that sounds like a preface to VAPORWARE.
posted by Robert T. Northrup @ 11/18/2005 07:52:00 PM
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