$100 laptop expected in late 2006

[mandy]

A hand-cranked laptop that will cost roughly $100 is expected to be in the hands of schoolchildren in poorer countries by late 2006.

MIT Media Lab Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said at a United Nations Internet summit here that his nonprofit organization was negotiating with manufacturers and would have an initial order placed by February or March. Thailand and Brazil are among the six governments that have showed the strongest interest,

full article: http://news.com.com/100+laptop+expected+...g=nefd.top

[mandy]

...but India decides against purchasing the $100 OLPC laptops for its citizens

$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

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/

[stardust]

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! 

[rose]

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

What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both 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

[mandy]

Thailand signs on:

According to reports, Thailand has jumped on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) bandwagon and government officials have even announced that it would give away the OLPCs free of charge if the test project is deemed successful. Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told reporters that he plans to have the OLPCs in distribution by October of this year...

Shinawatra also mentioned that Thailand may replace traditional school books with OLPCs because books can be found on the Internet -- although this may present a copywrite situation. "Each elementary school child will receive a computer that the government will buy for them, free of charge, instead of books, because books will be found and can be read on computers," said Shinawatra...

full article: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3769

[rose]

Photo of the OLAP: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Green_an...achine.jpg

[mandy]

Update: cow powered laptops  ;D

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

[regic]

Did anyone bother to ask the cows if they liked the idea?