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September 29, 2005
You Know, For Kids
Posted by Dana Blankenhorn
Nicholas Negroponte of MIT Media Lab fame, still trying to remain relevant, has announced a program called One Laptop Per Child, which wants to mass produce fully-loaded Linux laptops for schoolchildren in the dveloping world.
Given what happened here in Atlanta when Apple tried to sell Macs for all the local schoolchildren (the plan was rejected and the superintendent pushed out) it will be interesting to see where this goes.
Negroponte's plan is to build low-powered units, 1 GHz chips with cheap LCD screens used in DVD players , and minimal storage (use the Internet instead) but the underlying problem, even if he can get things rolling, will remain.
That is:
How do you keep the design stable?
Moore's Law means that the parts for today's $100 laptpo will be quickly replaced by new, better parts. Keeping the design backward-compatible is essential, for at least three years, so that the kids aren't crushed by repair costs, and so the kids with this year's laptops are stuck with mionimal envy next year.
AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, and Red Hat have all agreed to help, and the hope is to have a prototype ready in a year, with 100 million units produced the following year.
Comments (2)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Consumer Electronics | Digital Divide | Futurism | Linux | Moore's Lore | Semiconductors
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Brad Hutchings on September 30, 2005 02:17 AM writes...
Perhaps this is something where they could learn from Apple. The first GUI app that I wrote for a Mac way back in the fall of 1988 still runs on my 17" PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4. I followed the rules with that app (a Rubik's cube simulation) and Apple has kept up its side of the bargain. The binaryt still runs. Isn't that amazing? Can the Windows or open source worlds say the same?
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on September 30, 2005 05:17 PM writes...
The only solution I can think of to the problems you list Dana is to make the "laptops" nothing more than dumb terminals. That way the hardware specs for the device could be locked for at least 5 years and no one would care. Indeed, they would get cheaper and cheaper to build and appear to improve in performance as upgrades were made to the servers to which they connected. Of course, to make this work we would need a robust and ubiquitous wireless network. In the developing world it is very easy to build such networks, so this is certainly not a deal-breaker.
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