...but India decides against purchasing the $100 OLPC laptops for its citizens
Quote:$100 laptop project receives first official order.
Nigeria has officially ordered and paid for one million of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) devices, according to the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper.
The deal is the first actual order for the project that aims to provide Linux-powered laptops to children in developing economies.
Production of the devices will start once five to 10 million have been ordered and paid for, according to the OLPC website. ...
full article:
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/news.aspx?CIaNID=35311
Quote:India has decided against getting involved in Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child scheme - which aims to provide kids in developing countries with a simple $100 machine.
The success of the project depends on support, and big orders, from governments. The loss of such a potentially huge, and relatively technically sophisticated market, will be a serious blow.
Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."...
full article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/26/...o_to_olpc/
My bet is that the govt of Nigeria will resell the laptops -- at a handsome profit -- to the new Nigerian scammers entering the marketplace, demanding a % take of THEIR profits, too!
India is doing a disservice to its youth by not ordering OLPCs.
The wind-up power generators reminded me of the
Freeplay Foundation's radios that were produced for Africa's children.
http://www.laptop.org/faq.en_US.html
Quote:What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode displayboth a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data
Update: cow powered laptops ;D
Quote:The One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC) is toying with a novel source of power for its low-cost XO laptops: cows.
"We plan to drive a dynamo (taken from an old Fiat) through a system of belts and pulleys using cows/cattle," wrote OLPC's Arjun Sarwal, in an e-mail dated October 21 and posted to one of the group's discussion lists.
Sarwal and others are now finalizing the design of the cow-powered generator...
full article:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.ph...;16;fpid;1
Did anyone bother to ask the cows if they liked the idea?