Home
D&D
Music
Banner Archive

Marvel Comics Timeline
Godzilla Timeline


RSS

   

« Get yourself in even more trouble with the government | Main | Boo Boo the Chicken is dead. »

The $100 laptop

Powered by a hand-crank. Pretty cool:

The world's first true $100 laptop has just been unveiled, and it looks to be a spectacular innovation.

Delaware nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, initiated by CAD pioneer Nicholas Negroponte and run by MIT's Media Lab faculty, designed the laptops to be sufficiently inexpensive to be given to every child in the world. They are poised for distribution as digital textbooks in China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Thailand and elsewhere.

Each laptop contains a 500MHz processor, 128MB of dynamic RAM, and 500 MB of Flash memory in place of a hard disk, with four USB ports and wireless broadband that allows it to "talk to" its nearest neighbor, in an ad hoc local area "mesh" network.

Costs are significantly cut by using the open source Linux operating system and the same LCD displays found in inexpensive DVD players, which support full color or sunlight-readable high-resolution black and white.

According to Negroponte, the OLPC laptop can do everything a $1000 laptop can at one tenth the cost. The only difference is its permanent data storage capacity is limited to that of a high-end PC from the early 1980s. But what makes these digital textbooks an incredibly powerful global education resource is that they require no outside electricity; they're run by hand cranks.

By fnord12 | May 26, 2006, 1:12 PM | Science


Comments

it cannot do everything a $1000 laptop can. but i would like one for my collection.

maybe two or three at that price.

Wei, maybe you could get a more powerful one and power it with slaves riding exercise bikes.

not slaves. prisons chained to ones basement. its quite a simple solution for own energy needs.