The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've written before about the One Laptop per Child project. Coming out of MIT in the U.S. and headed up by Nicolas Negropante, this project aims at putting inexpensive laptops in the hands of millions of kids in developing nations. The concept is simple. These kids deserve the same opportunities, the same access to information and communication as kids in First World nations. Two significant things have happened in this project over the last several weeks. The first is that the project coordinators have always been adamant that any machines produced would be going to students overseas. They refused to see them be for sale in North America as they did not want any of their production to be diverted. But now, beginning November 12 and lasting for two weeks only, this will change. The website xogiving.org will open to allow people to "get one, give one." For $400 U.S. dollars (which is a lot more affordable now compared to several years ago), you can purchase one of these laptops for yourself and donate one to a child in a developing country. This is an excellent opportunity for so many reasons. First of all, it puts one of these awesome little, virtually indestructible machines into your hands. Second, it ensures that a child in a developing nation will get one as well, giving them the ability to make contact with kids around the world and access information that they would have no other way of getting. The second major thing that has happened is that David Pogue, the tech editor of the New York Times, laid his hands on one of these newly updated machines and has posted videos and articles online of his reviews. The videos show him dropping it from above four feet and the machine working fine afterwards. These things are built rugged, they are built for kids, and they work. There are drawbacks to these computers. For the production price of $188, some things needed to be sacrificed. The first was storage. They have no hard drive and can only hold 1 gb. of stuff on the built-in flash drive. These machines will accept both a SD card, like your digital camera probably has in it, and also have USB ports that will accept a jump drive. Both of these are available in amounts far larger than the 1 gb. the machine has. The other major drawback is that there is no floppy drive, CD or DVD on them; you cannot load standard types of software. This is obviously a larger issue, but first of all, the machine comes pre-loaded with word processing and spreadsheet software. Software that will edit images and software that runs the machine's built-in video camera and microphone. After that, you are on your own. I'm thinking of buying one of these machines just for that reason. They have a built-in wifi antenna and can get on the Internet like any other machine you may already own. So you can download all of the communication software you may need, like Skype or MSN. You can also get all of the production software like Open Office off of the Internet for free. As well, a lot of the software that I use these days is online anyway and doesn't need to be installed on the computer at all. I use Google documents for word processing, for spreadsheets and for presentations I give. I don't actually have much stuff on my machine anymore. There are also a lot of interesting things that have been built into these computers. As I mentioned, they come with a built-in camera that can shoot videos or stills. They have a mic to record and software to not only edit your recordings, but to produce music for them as well. They come with built-in simple games and also have a neat feature that lets you look at the code behind any of the software you have and make changes. Of course, with one touch of a button you can restore your machine back to its original state if you mess something up. While they are not for everyone, I believe these outstanding little machines show us a cheap, networked vision of computing that is fun and easy to use. On top of that, for your $400 you make a donation to a good cause. Get your Visa ready. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
