Summary
The One Laptop Per Child initiative, announced by
Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab at the World Economic Forum in January
2005, aims to one day deliver inexpensive laptop computers to the world's
children. The significant technical challenges to building the laptops, the
coordination involved to deliver them, and the education of the many children
who use them may help the entire world benefit.
Nicholas Negroponte is best known as a founder and
professor of the MIT Media Lab, but his new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
initiative may one day mark his place in history on a much grander
scale. Negroponte is spearheading the OLPC program, whose mission is to
develop a $100 laptop for distribution to the world's children. The
self-stated goal of OLPC is "to provide children around the world with new
opportunities to explore, experiment, and present themselves" [1]. The
initiative is based on the premise that education is a solution to many problems
in the world, including poverty.
The laptop will use a 500MHz AMD processor, 128MB
of RAM, 512MB of flash memory for storage, and a dual-mode display that can
switch between color and black-and-white to improve readability in sunlight
[2]. One component in traditional laptops that is missing in the $100
laptop is a hard drive. A hard drive is typically used to locally store the
operating system, applications, files, and data, but is presumably being left
out of the $100 for several reasons. The laptop is being designed for
lightweight internet use, and has no need for a multimedia repository like most
computers on the market today. In addition, a hard drive will increase the
likelihood of mechanical failure, add significant power consumption, and add
unwanted cost to the laptop.
For a power source, the laptop was originally
designed to have a hand crank on the side that physically needed to be wound to
generate power. Recently, Negroponte announced that that idea was thrown
out due to the fear that the torque generated from the crank could damage the
laptop. An alternative power supply has not been named, but Negroponte
envisions a foot pedal. Negroponte envisions that the laptop will be using
about 2 watts when in operation, with 1 watt of power used for the
display. To put that in perspective, your home PC operates on about 300
watts of power. A lightweight version of Linux must be developed for the
laptops to operate at such power efficiency, which Negroponte cites as one of
the biggest technical challenges for the project.
The core enabling technology behind the laptop,
however, is mesh networking. Each laptop is designed to serve as a relay
node in a giant network mesh, sharing its internet connection with any other
laptops nearby. Feasibly, this could help deliver an internet connection to
laptop users in remote parts of developing countries, enabling them to do
research for their homework online, send email, and do other internet related
tasks. A mesh network could also be local, consisting of a teacher and his
or her students, who could chat online with each other or collaborate on school
tasks.
Taiwan's Quanta computer recently won the contract
for developing these machines. Quanta, the world's biggest producer of
laptops, is renowned for its production volume and its razor thin profit
margins, estimated at 3%. Quanta's CEO estimates that the OLPC laptop deal
could add between $3 billion to $5 billion to its yearly revenue, and believes
they can produce the laptops at similar margins to their current business
[4]. The laptop is set to pilot in China, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt,
Thailand, Nigeria, and India in the first quarter of 2007, distributing 5
million to 10 million laptops to children in those countries. As of April
2006, OLPC has marked Iran as being interested in the initiative at the Ministry
of Education level or higher [1]. OLPC aims to sell the laptops for $135
when they release in 2007, then cut the price to $100 in 2008 and $50 in 2010
[2]. Laptops would be bought in bulk from governments of the associated
countries for distribution to the children.
The OLPC initiative has its critics, including the
chairmen of Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation. Microsoft's Bill
Gates was recently quoted as saying: "If you are going to go have people share
the computer, get a broadband connection, and have somebody there who can help
support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the
text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to
type." Intel's Craig Barrett was also skeptical of the idea, saying "I
think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget.' It turns out what
people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC... not
dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not
dependent on hand cranks for power" [3].
The $100 laptop, if successful, would not only help
to educate the world's children in developing countries, but would solve some of
the most difficult problems in technology today. These include mesh
networking, ultra-low cost production, low-cost digital displays, and
ultra-lightweight operating systems. From a philanthropic and technical
perspective, the laptop may one day help the world in more ways than imagined.
References:
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