The CFA of Redhat came to my school to speak the other day and he was stressing these new laptops among other things.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4445060.stm

anyway, these things are going to be sporting wireless and linux O/S's.

11/17/2005 12:25:57 PM

old news - but i don't think i've seen a post on here since the news was released that they were going to make these

11/17/2005 12:30:43 PM

a hand crank

11/17/2005 12:30:58 PM

wow, other than the handcrank, that's actually not a bad idea.

11/17/2005 12:31:24 PM

Steve Jobs offered free OS X licenses for all of them but they declined b/c it wasn't open source

11/17/2005 12:40:16 PM

^ Yep, here is the link:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113193305149696140-442o71jo_IlBrLpyUeeOdsqDs7E_20061113.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

11/17/2005 12:53:23 PM

a handcrank?? come on...

11/17/2005 12:54:21 PM

^ Well if you have no electricity ...

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 12:55 PM. Reason : e]

11/17/2005 12:55:06 PM

someone please explain why the fuck a hand crank is a bad idea

11/17/2005 1:20:31 PM

It is an excellent idea for impoverished areas without a good electrical subsystem. Not everywhere is just like the United States.

11/17/2005 1:23:32 PM

^because to people who don't know what they're talking about it seems silly.

11/17/2005 1:23:54 PM

I used to wish my laptop had a hand crank during long meetings, but then I got this new Thinkpad X31. Now I just wish the X31 was $100.

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 1:59 PM. Reason : s]

11/17/2005 1:58:58 PM

I want a fucking hand crank. Someone ought to make a usb peripheral for you to recharge your laptop via a hand crank, or make something to recharge all your gadgets (cell phone, laptop, pda) with a universal adapter.

11/17/2005 3:18:01 PM

Hence why I do 90% of my writing and notetaking on a 5 year-old PDA. I'm picking up a new Palm with built-in wi-fi to just check email and bounce documents to my gmail account, but this old visor does most of what I need a laptop for. 3 weeks on a set of AA's.

I'll be all over this laptop when it comes out. If you don't need the power, who gives a shit what the speed rating is.

11/17/2005 5:12:47 PM

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 5:28 PM. Reason : Think my memory is shot]

11/17/2005 5:20:03 PM

Quote :

""I hope there would be community pressure so it does not appear in the secondary market. The technology is in it so that the machine is disabled if not connected to the network after a few days," he added. "

wtf mate? So if johnny in brazil doesnt use it more than once or twice a week, it's a paper-weight?



I don't see the logic behind this. I mean there's got to be a better way to stop people from reselling them.

11/17/2005 5:21:25 PM

Quote :

"But by using mesh networking, the vision is for children to interact while doing homework, and even share homework tips on a local community scale"

why do people even say things like this

if by tips you mean

cheat

11/17/2005 5:23:43 PM

lol


or better yet:


How does a country of people that can't read learn how to operate a laptop for educational use?

11/17/2005 5:39:57 PM

Quote :

"Hence why I do 90% of my writing and notetaking on a 5 year-old PDA. I'm picking up a new Palm with built-in wi-fi to just check email and bounce documents to my gmail account, but this old visor does most of what I need a laptop for. 3 weeks on a set of AA's. I'll be all over this laptop when it comes out. If you don't need the power, who gives a shit what the speed rating is. "

I think you're missing the point. These laptops are not for people who already have PDAs and internet access.

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 6:01 PM. Reason : ]

11/17/2005 6:01:11 PM

why not?

Why not let ANYONE buy them.

There is no way to stop a reseller market. If you sell them to anyone and everyone
there is no reseller market. If you ONLY give them away, everyone will buy them cheap off of ebay, load a newer linux version on the flash drive that eleminates the shut down mess, and hook up an external hardrive.

11/17/2005 6:31:45 PM

I do agree that making them unavailable to the public will only fuel the reseller market.

11/17/2005 6:45:12 PM

i believe there was discussions of a similar version that was more expensive but publicly available.

11/17/2005 6:51:10 PM

the point of not making them have a resale value is so that people wont steal them from kids
thats also one of the reasons for the green color

if you can afford a $100 external drive, why the hell do you want an underpowered word processor that can surf the internet?

my 8 year old iPaq can do that, you can find them on ebay for, what, ~50 now (if that)
and it probably has a better screen and almost as much processing power as thoes laptops

DELL offers like $400 laptops now, if you want a cheap, small, portable laptop there you go.. just no handcrank

11/17/2005 7:04:28 PM

a laptop that has NO moving parts, a flash hardrive, led based screen light, can be used on mroe or less any ac power source, or via a handcrank. Hmmm......

Why would people who want CHEAP LOW POWER USAGE devices want one?

Add a usb adaptor and a cell phone, and a usb cellphone charger.
You now have a portable internet device cap[able of doing anything you want to do on the net, anywhere with cell coverage, that never needs batteries.

You have a device you can toss in a box of emergency supplies, and when you loose power, or laptop dies, ect, you can jump online, do hw, whatever.

At 100 or less for parts and assembly, anyone with a sapre 100 should have 1. No, its nto a gmaing box. It has a full keyboard, wireless , and did i mention it is durable, small, portabl;e, and never needs batteries??

11/17/2005 7:50:58 PM

This may be the best thing the world has ever seen since toothpaste.



what will really be funny is the first first virus that comes out and starts bricking the damn things.

[Edited on November 17, 2005 at 7:59 PM. Reason : lol]

11/17/2005 7:58:15 PM

's the nice thing about them runnin' redhat linux

there are basically no viruses out for it
there were some created, couple made some impact, but there has never been any major ones

then again, if there are hundreds of thousands of them, more people will likely test their defences


^^ and it will need new batteries eventually
what do you think the handcrank recharges?

the screen is rather crappy by today's standards, they switch to monochrome for typing mode

if you want low power usage, get a damn mac
I think the ibook gets like 6 hours of battery life

11/17/2005 8:10:11 PM

Quote :

"I want a fucking hand crank"

I want one hooked up to a bicycle in every office. I promise it will decrease American obesity by a huge percentage.

The 4 USB ports impresses me ... anybody spot the amount of RAM these things will have?

11/17/2005 8:13:21 PM

Quote :

"Why not let ANYONE buy them."

The CFA stressed the fact that these laptops will be built in HUGE orders. At least million unit order or more is required to make profit. 3rd World countries are requesting an actual prototype before they sign over their orders. You'll see them being sold 2nd hand before you see them being sold brand new off the store shelf.

11/18/2005 9:32:29 AM

First thing that came to mind:

11/18/2005 10:04:24 AM

I can't see poor people in third world countries taking naturally to Red Hat or any other Linux variant, especially if they have little to no prior computer experience. It's obvious that this MIT professor is a die-hard Linux fan-boy, but I think it's a little short-sighted to flatly reject Apple's offer. OS X is the best OS out there. Why do impoverished people need the capability to "tinker" with the OS? Sounds like a sure fire way for them to mess things up.

11/18/2005 10:05:36 AM

^ i agree that it was a big missed opportunity, and he never even really considered anything but Linux from the start.
Given that these people probably have no computer experience anyway, so no pre-existing knowledge or biases, i doubt picking up linux will be too much more difficult OS X or windows, but oh well.

btw - they look better than I thought they would

11/18/2005 10:45:16 AM

^ I would think (okay, hope) that whatever OS they choose would be highly modified to make the basic tasks much more intuitive.

11/18/2005 10:46:48 AM

that is an awesome hand crank.

11/18/2005 11:22:50 AM

cramer had something about this monday on Mad Money on CNBC

as a matter of fact, AMD won out for the processer over intel

im looking at buying some AMD stock with a little play money i have put back

11/18/2005 11:26:52 AM

comes with four USB ports as well

11/18/2005 1:12:16 PM

i still think the handcrank is stupid as hell.

how are they going to do all this networking on a community level as they talk about without AC? how are you going to browse the internet? and if they have the AC to do all that with, they don't need the handcrank.

[Edited on November 18, 2005 at 2:30 PM. Reason : *]

11/18/2005 2:29:37 PM

I think the idea is they could sync up adhoc instead of surfing the web.

11/18/2005 2:33:13 PM

yes, this is an awesome idea that has far ranging uses outside of third world countries

11/18/2005 2:45:04 PM

The handcrank is AWESOME.

I *love* my handcrank radio.

11/18/2005 4:55:36 PM

I'd buy that in a heartbeat. I field tested an Alphasmart Dana this summer while we were paddling the Mississippi River and loved the damn thing for basic wordprocessing. Hell it's a palm OS.

Throw a few gig of flash memory in it, give it a wifi card, and sell it stateside for $300. I'd buy the first one for mobile use and do the heavy lifting back home.

11/18/2005 4:56:59 PM

Quote :

"It's obvious that this MIT professor is a die-hard Linux fan-boy, but I think it's a little short-sighted to flatly reject Apple's offer. OS X is the best OS out there. Why do impoverished people need the capability to "tinker" with the OS? Sounds like a sure fire way for them to mess things up."

What's obvious is that you are an Apple fanboy.

OSX can't even run well on a 400mhz PPC, with a half gig of memory and high speed hard drives. It takes up nearly 3 fucking gigs for it's base install.

So basically it takes up more space than the entire device has, it uses 2-4 times the memory, and it needs a retardedly fast processor. Even then it doesn't run quickly, just adequately.

Red hat on the other hand can be paired down and customized to run on a fuckin 486 with 4mb of ram. Exactly why they went with linux. People who never used a computer before have no idea what is good or bad so the learning curve is going to be a bitch no matter what.

11/18/2005 7:01:42 PM