Folks as you know this initiative is probably the most ambitious and most daring initiative to bridge the digital divide. The laptops will be a property of the child. Every child will own such laptop. The product will not be sold, but will be distributed by the ministry of education through the same channels of school books.
You also have to be aware that the design of the project. The MIT, the hardware and the software all guarantee technological independence. What I mean is that there is no monopoly benefiting from such project. There are companies funding the development, but there are no strings attached. AFAIK.
As you know there have been governmental projects to bring more computers to more people. Namely the Computer for Every House project by Egyptian telecom. We all know that this project was a for big profit initiative. Although the monthly installments were low the computers ended up costing 1000 EGP more than the ones sold in computer shops.
I hope that this project would be successful in Egypt. I also hope that corruption would refrain from hurting this project. It would be a shame if the project succeeds in other developing countries and fails here.
I18n
This laptop will not be distributed with a latin only keyboard and an English interface. So a key software component here is Arabic language support.
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Comments
Don't bother
This thing won't take off.
For this thing to work, it requires a social environment where a family regards its primary objective as the furthering of the welfare of the child; otherwise, how do you think a govt. employee can justify spending 4 or 5 months' worth of salary on something like this?
Assuming this is the case (which it isn't), then the family provider (usu. father) will need a clear vision of how this machine will give his child a clear economic advantage or edge. The fact is that the logical link between computer skills and economic betterment is tenuous enough for it to be easily missed. Most fathers are going to say something like "What is my son going to do with a computer, play games? Why should he learn to program, he should learn how to make furniture or fix plumbing, those people make money."
Negroponte is right that reduced cost makes for improved access to computing facilities, but he's wrong that this automatically means the cost of a new computer. It's clear that he either hasn't lived in a developing environment for long or, if he has, he's failed to adapt his beliefs to the facts on the ground.
The only way to reduce costs of computing access is to prolong the employment lifecycle of hardware and induce rapid hardware turnover. In other words, letting "obsolete" hardware trickle down in cost and ownership.
If my theory is correct, which I'll bet the farm it is, then we'll have Moore and Gates and the Nvidia/ATI marketing departments to thank for bringing computers to the masses.
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I am sorry for bumping