$100 laptop for the third world.

[Plane]

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/The100DollarLaptop.aspx



This idea might be only failing temporarily , the cost of components still is going down and the cost per gigabyte of memory is still diving .

Perhaps after a while we can see the children of rural Cambodia playing everquest and the bushmen of the Kalihari discussing stock prices online.

[kimba1]

could they use all the tech applied in that laptop to help these folks?
hand generator,long lasting batteries
durable products.

[Plane]

I think that the hope was to make education availible very widely .

That is the part of the idea I like too.


A more educated human race may be better for all concerned.

[kimba1]

wouldn`t cheap paperback books do a better job?

the laptop by itself would not be very useful
it needs software and other stuff
if I recall it doesn`t even have a hard drive so it has no built-in data
those radioshack play laptop seem more useful in learning than this thing
and cheaper,but battery operated

[Amianthus]

it needs software and other stuff
if I recall it doesn`t even have a hard drive so it has no built-in data

I seem to recall that the laptops had free software installed (courtesy of the Open Source movement) and had flash drives (like 4GB ones).

The issue would seem to be Internet access.

[kimba1]

than it would only work in places than can support a wifi network.

most towns in the U.S. don`t have that.

dosn`t this mean only school in towns with some degree of tech should have them?

[Amianthus]

dosn`t this mean only school in towns with some degree of tech should have them?

Hey, I wasn't one of the ones championing the program. It's a cool idea, but requires government infrastructure - which is sorely lacking in many of the areas targetted.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I think that cheap laptops, or even cheap desktops, run by batteries charged by solar/crank energy, with access to the Internet are an extremely desireable tool for the education of humans everywhere.

Using satellites, it should be possible to provide Web access to most of the planet, especially to the areas where a majority of the people live. For example, access to Wi-Fi in Reno, Las Vegas, along the Humboldt and around Lake Tahoe would cover a majority of the people in Nevada. In Alaska, Fairbanks, Seward Peninsula, Juneau and Sitka would do this. The same is true of places such as  Mongolia, Botswana and Rajastan.

[kimba1]

well
getting them on wiki daily does sound like a good idea.
I`m on it everyday.
I`m a serious wiki addict

[Plane]

One of the hottest leaks this year is a Compaq Presario Notebook (512 MB, 60G harddrive) from Circuit City for $299 -- Just $99 with a year's subscription of Vonage.

 

http://money.aol.com/news/articles/_a/black-friday-survival-guide/20061120101909990001