One Laptop Per Child pledge

Jeff Kinz jkinz at kinz.org
Tue May 30 09:18:01 EDT 2006


On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 10:01:52PM -0400, Fred wrote:
> Anyway, just to add my own $0.02, I don't see the $100 PC making much f a 
> difference -- unless it can connect to the Internet. Otherwise the "third 
> world" will be limited to whatever content and software their respective 
> governments will allow to be installed on those PCs.

The OLPC units have built in "wi-fi mesh" capability"  This only means
that the units can network with each-other on a local basis.  However
for longer distance internet connectivity this project:

http://www.green-wifi.org/

does exactly what you are looking for and is designed to work with the
OLPC units.  These routers come with their own Solar panel designed and
built for deployment to these "more rugged" environments


> 
> Oh, and unless these PCs can be run with a hand crank or solar cells, still 
> pretty useless in many parts of the world. And with the typical power 
> consumption of laptop CPUs, that's a lot of hand cranking. And I don't see 
> how you can keep the costs down to $100 if you have to include solar cells.

The original design called for a hand crank but it was determined that
it would stress the frame too much.  Current plans call for a foot
pedal to produce power.  None of the power plans require more than
periodic "power generation" effort. :-)

> 
> Methinks someone has a pipe dream. I can just see it now. All of these 
> villagers are given these PCs, which are dead after the first hour or two of 
> use. But hey, I'm sure they'll find novel uses for dead PCs.

Twenty years ago we had laptops that ran off double A batteries for
days, (and for some people, weeks) at a time.  I'm fairly certain we can
do better than "two hours".


Like the OLPC units those old laptops used low power display technology,
miserly CPU's and used software that was much smarter about what machine
resources it used and how it used them.  And one more interesting
parallel - neither those old laptops nor the current OLPC's used ANY
rotating storage.


-- 
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
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