| Tech Trends |
| Intel CEO Scoffs at One Laptop Per Child |
| by Cat Rambo |
In a recent press conference in Sri Lanka, Craig Barrett, Intel CEO, said that the poor of the world are choosy about their computers. He was responding to recent news that in late 2006, Quanta Computer Inc. a Taiwanese design manufacturer will begin releasing $100 computers designed and funded by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organization. OLPC was created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty from the MIT Media Lab.
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Negroponte is author of Being Digital, twenty year overseer of the Media Lab, and brother to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.
The laptops will be sold to governments who can issue them to schools on a basis of one laptop per child. These rugged machines will be Linux-based, so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation.
It makes sense for Intel to be feeling a little threatened. The first working prototype of the laptop was shown at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on November 16, 2005. The machine is encased in vivid green thick rubber. It sports full-sized keys and a small screen. A white crank attached to one side produces ten minutes of power for every minute of cranking and gives it a Fisher-Price feel.
However, the little machine’s capabilities are not childish at all. Suitable for basic word-processing, Internet, and e-mail, it employs flash memory rather than a hard drive and a 500 megahertz processor – slow by high-tech American standards but sufficient. Each unit includes a Wi-Fi radio transmitter that allows it and its fellows to create a wireless mesh that shares an Internet connection.
The laptop can function as both conventional computer, electronic book, TV, or a handheld games console. The display, usually the most expensive part of a laptop, uses innovative technology developed by Mary Lou Jepsen, former Intel CTO and now the CTO of OLPC, which can be built for $35 or less.
While Barrett asserted that people wanted real computers rather than “gadgets”, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan greeted the prototype as an “expression of global solidarity” and hailed the innovation as a new front in peer to peer learning.
Brazil has agreed to commit $1 million, and Chile, Argentina and Thailand are interested. Massachusetts’ Governor Mitt Romney has requested half a million for the children of his state.
Negroponte emphasizes that education is the purpose of the program, noting that "Every single problem you can think of, poverty, peace, the environment, is solved with education or including education.”
The project’s developers believe that illiterate children can learn to use the computers with minimal teaching and then teach themselves to read before advancing onto more complex education. Pioneering developer Alan Kay and educational theorist Seymour Papert are collaborating to create software that monitors a student’s progress and makes suggestions based on that information.
Contributors to the $10 million project include Rupert Murdoch ($2 million), Advanced Micro Devices ($2 million) and Google ($2 million) as well as Brightstar, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat.
Corporate figures other than Barrett have also failed to greet the proposed program with enthusiasm. Bill Gates would prefer that the project employ proprietary Windows, rather than open source, software. It’s hard to see where any of them would feel justified in supporting it, but failing to seems the worse of two biteable bullets since it ends up putting companies like Microsoft and Intel in Scroogish public positions.
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