The $100 Tablet Of Doom

This $100 Laptop certainly seems to have plenty of critics.   Worldchanging and TriplePundit are worried about the industrial waste, and WC have questioned feasibility, configuration, etc in the past (whilst being generally supportive).  The most stinging critique however comes from Kerry Howley at Reason :
Gifting, we discover every Holiday Season, is an incredibly inefficient mode of exchange. The first week of January is a customer-service-line filled nightmare, our collective attempt to correct judgments people who love us make about what we really want: sweaters two sizes too big, gadgets we have no use for, toys too uncool to engage in public. The developing world, too, has a closetful of gifts it never asked for and couldn't use: Free food diverted to feed the militias responsible for hunger in the first place, anti-malarial bed nets turned into wedding dresses, newly dug wells abandoned because no one knew how repair them.

Any development guru has internalized this, and few projects get funded without at least a pretense of community feedback. [...] News accounts are filled with a story Negroponte tells about distributing the machines in Cambodia, where, he says, parents wouldn't let their children use them at first for fear they would break. But upon discovering that the laptops, when opened, were the "brightest light source in the house," they came to love them.

Consider for a moment, how bizarre and condescending a story this is: Do poor parents really think of computers as souped-up nightlights? And if they valued them too much to let their kids use them before they discovered the light-producing wonders, why do they value them less when they discovered this added capability?

The (later) suggestion money would be better spent on fat network pipes does ignore the rather nifty wireless mesh network capability of these boxen; it's just a fancy LAN without someone giving away access to the net though.

But ouch: the leapfrog tech networked engine for the next generation of second superpowerettes as an exercise in command-and-control paternalism.  After this I'm less concerned about e-waste than the entire Internet collapsing into a giant toxic seizure of vitriol after the first of these come online.  In fact, I now suspect giving away free computers to poor kiddies is probably a crucial portent of the End of Days.
avocadia: The Reason article makes me laugh:

The computer has no hard drive; it\'s sluggish;

No hard drive. 500 Mhz. Um. I don\'t even want to think about how much better it is than the computer I had when I was doing my IT degree. Something measured in orders of magnitude. Sluggish? What a dick.
adam: True: Dunno what you\'d need more than 500 Mhz for really unless you\'re compiling things or calculating pi ...
cam: Heh: SSR runs on a mini-itx box that is 800Mhz and has 256 Mb RAM.

cam
avocadia: Perspective:

My primary home computer until three months ago was a 533 Mhz with 256 Mb of memory. The thing that pisses me off the most about that article is the use of the word \'sluggish\'. The guy has zero perspective; the other highlight of his lack of perspective is the description of the cranking it as \"arm straining\". Makes you wonder if the guy has ever had to do a day of manual labour in the last twenty years.

Everything else he says after that is either dopey digs at the colour scheme, a pointless dig at Negroponte\'s enthusiasm, and some patronising rubbish where he cherry-picks instances of foreign aid gone wrong. For every insecticde treated wedding dress there\'s probably a thousand nets.

The critques based on the materials used are the better points, but even then it is just nit-picking.
adam: Sluggish: Well, I think going for 512 Mb of flash memory instead of a hard drive might be a pinch.  Especially since flash memory gets flaky after a year or two.  (Though the fungibility of flash memory is great - when we were in China the local photo shop guy used a stack of 128 Mb flash cards as external memory before printing.)  The handcrank is cool but it breaking off is a bit of a worry.  Being powered by typing is really cool, do you know if that every made the final version?

I think the attack the top-down reliance on Ministries of Education in places where the governance can be lousy is a serious critique.
avocadia: Memory and Materials and Ministries:

I too thought that the 512 Mb might have been a bit tight, but then I remembered my computer throughout my university course had 40 Mb. But the thing has 4 USB ports, and keys would be something these same people could distribute.

Do we know what the handcrank is made from? I think the entire crank mechanism should be made from something more sturdy than plastic, aluminium perhaps; would that bit a cost hit?

They\'re not exactly running this as a commercial enterprise, but they are selling them for a price greater than the mean wage of a Pakistani brickmaker. The one hundred dollar price tag is driven by the production numbers they plan to deal in, 1,000,000 as a miniumum; after that the price per unit goes up on them. That\'s US$100,000,000 as a minimum order. It\'s hard to see them dealing with failed states any time soon. They\'ll be going places that can whack a hundred million on the table.
cam: I think I built the SSR \'server\': for around $150 USD. The case was $45, the CPU/board was $89. I scavenged the RAM, hdd and wireless card. I think I had to buy a $30 elbow card so the wireless PCMCIA card went out the back and not out the case\'s side. The wireless card i sunnecessary on the VIA boards as they come with inbuilt NIC (and everything else).

Maybe another way of getting technology cheaply to less advantaged countries is through gifting of old computers/parts to a company or NGO who then builds cheap, if ad-hoc, machines. It might be better run as an indiginous business.

cam
adam: Oh My: Its not my area but I\'d be surprised if making the crank aluminium bumped the price up that much.  It would make it heavier though.  I couldn\'t find anything on the crank material, the closets was this guy making his own from recycled bits and pieces, there\'s a picture of his fairly flimsy crank on that page.

I thought the million dollar production run was total orders before the run went; ie it\'s like Boeing commissioning a new model of aircraft.  1 million from a single customer is not required.

So if, say, Laos  allocated 1% of its received aid budget for 5 years, it could put in an order for 100,000 laptops for Luange Prabang schoolchildren (because it\'s a tourist centre and hence high profile) ...  I imagine Negroponte is depending on exactly these sorts of aggregated numbers.
adam: Some of this is happening already: Eg UK computer recyclers some of which give to the developing world.  A quick Google doesn\'t turn up any Oz links though.
avocadia: Production runs: > I thought the million dollar production run was total orders before the run went

You\'re probably right.
adam: Storage: If you\'re talking about CS, Law, languages, anything very text driven, I guess you\'re right, 512Mb is heaps.

If you\'re talking about areas where it\'s good to use a lot of diagrams or photographs - weather photos, anatomical photographs, etc - I think 512 will be a squeeze.  But the two USB ports is a good point.
cam: Isnt the internet just a fancy storage medium?: Get them on the net and flickr becomes storage, as does photobucket, and any other online service that accepts the upload of data.

\"Crank harder honey, my CVS check in is only 22% done\"

cam
adam: Smooth though! Don\'t pull a Kofi on it!: You mean like these holiday snaps ?

How hard do you think it\'ll be to keep these machines online with any frequency though?  Who\'ll stump up for the bandwidth?  Or will that become the petty theft of choice for a new generation?

\"Come back here you grubby but rosy cheeked scamp!\" yelled the ISP owner after young Muhammed.  \"You\'ll pay for those stolen megabits!\"  But Muhammed and the gang had already disappeared into the crowd.

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