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Geekworld: The $100 solution
When it comes to coming up with practical ideas, and getting them implemented as well, nobody does it better than Nicholas Negroponte. The man has been at a single quest since eons: to bridge the ever-widening digital divide and ensure that IT reaches the masses.
To this end, Negroponte has made headlines more often than not. He repeated this feat recently in Tunisia. The North African country was recently home to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), where IT heads and gurus assembled to draw up a vision for the future.
It was in the middle of such heady developments that Negroponte — chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Laboratory — presented his vision for the future: a computer for every child. Across the globe, every child must have a computer, or to be more precise, a laptop. What is more, the machine would cost no more than $100, he said.
This is decidedly better than the $1,000 or so the well-known brands charge. Negroponte’s laptop is green in colour and weighs no more than a kilo. It will be powered by a Linux-based operating system and RedHat is said to have won the contract.
Apple had attempted to acquire the rights to provide the laptop’s operating system, but the offer was politely declined. The reason was that it is not open source.
The machine will have a swiveling, full-colour 7.5inch screen and will be able to do almost everything except store huge amounts of data. An interesting feature is that the laptop can be folded up like a computer tablet and its screen can be rotated for others to see it.
According to http://tech.monstersandcritics.com, the laptop’s alternating-current power cord doubles as a carrying strap and the versatile hinged design of the screen allows the computer to be used as a writing tablet or electronic book. The display allows the screens to be manufactured for under $35 each. What’s more, the screen shifts from full colour to glare-resistant black-and-white for outdoor use.
There is storage space for just 1GB of material. This ‘rugged’ laptop will be WiFi-enabled, designed to knit machines into a wireless ‘mesh’, so that they may share a Net connection. They will come with a USB port. An AMD 500MHz processor will drive the system.
Other terrific features include a pliable rubber casing, which makes the units virtually indestructible, and a flash-based drive. The latter has a huge advantage over the regular hard drive which is not only more costly, but the moving parts are more susceptible to damage.
However, the real jaw dropper is the laptop’s power source. Negroponte caught the imagination of the audience when he revealed that the laptop will be hand-cranked. This basically means that the machine will not rely on the unreliable local power grids for electricity, but will generate its own with the help of a wind-up lever.
A 10-minute wind-up will produce electricity for running the machine for half an hour. Power cords are also there if you want to plug it into the local grid.
There is little doubt that the machine will help eradicate poverty. It is, after all, a ‘stripped down’ computer, one that is devoid of the unnecessary gadgetry that has come to define today’s computing machines. Given the practicality of the model, the claim does not seem far-fetched.
So how will these machines reach every child? Negroponte is currently the chairman of the non-profit organization, One Laptop Per Child, a project he helped initiate. OLPC will sell the machines directly to governments in the developing world, where the digital divide is most obvious. The governments in return will distribute the computers to children in remote rural communities. The laptop would then belong to the child.
Already, the MIT is planning to produce five to 10 million of these low-cost laptops by next year. It plans to distribute them on a non-profit basis to primary school pupils through governments in seven developing countries, namely China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria and Thailand.
One of the main reasons why systems are being sold on low rates is that there has been no marketing and commercial distribution of the laptop. This automatically translated into a 50 per cent reduction in cost.
However, as is the case with most inventions, there are many doubters of the plan. African delegates to the conference in particular did not mince words with their criticism. They felt that a more pressing issue was the need to bring real schools and clean drinking water to poor children.
Mohammed Diop — a sceptic from West Africa — said the West, obsessed with cyber crime, junk mail, and viruses, is also sold on the idea of bringing computers to the really poor. “They’ve finally found a way of selling to a huge number of poor people,” he added sarcastically.
The systems will need some kind of connectivity, which in turn will require buying satellite dishes or some other means to allow the computers to connect to the internet. And even if they do, where are they going to find a WiFi hotspot in an impoverished neighbourhood of a Third World country?
Also, there is always a shadow over the effectiveness of a new scheme. Where is the guarantee that the child will keep the laptop with him and not sell it off so that his hungry family may have a proper meal or two?
To counter these reservations, MIT claims that the laptops will be connected to a network. If they are not logged in for a specified number of days, they will remotely be disabled.
What about the durability of the laptop? Well, when the UN secretary-general tried to crank a laptop into action, the lever broke. So much for reliability, say the detractors.
Yet another concern pertains to the production of the machines. Who will produce such a large number of laptops?
This year 48 million laptops are projected to be built, which means that the manufacturers are working at an optimum capacity. That, however, has not stopped four Taiwanese and a South Korean firm from bidding for the manufacturing rights of the machine. Taiwan is expected to be the winner, since it is known to produce 80 per cent of the world’s laptops.
Many nations also argue that it would be easier and more economical to distribute refurbished desktop machines to the children. MIT’s argument is that if they had 100 million used desktops, where each one required only an hour of human attention to refurbish and reload, the resulting workload would spread out over 45,000 years. Thus, while we definitely encourage the recycling of used computers, it is not the solution for One Laptop Per Child.
MIT adds that while desktops are cheaper, mobility is more important, especially with regard to taking the computer home at night. This system also has an advantage in a place where electricity is scarce. In a village, where there is no electricity, the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.
The $100 laptop could do wonders in Pakistan. IT budgets have swollen steadily over the years and with the central government pushing for more digitization country-wide, this is surely one of the must have machines. Refurbished machines have been a hit in the local computer market, mostly because of the cost.
Therefore, there seems no reason why the $100 machine cannot be a success here. However, in a country where we have not been able to provide millions of children with the basic tools of learning, like notebook or pencil, getting a computer for them seems too hard to believe. But such scepticism is not discouraging Negrop- onte and a posse of do-gooders from taking the initiative. In fact, there are already plans to provide a commercial version of the computer, a non-profit model but a slightly and little higher priced one. Nothing is stopping Negroponte now.
The writer atifiz@hotmail.com is a freelance contributor
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