The $100 laptop

[Joseph Sinclair]

The point is that nobody's going to be running anything remotely resembling Quake III on this box.  It's not targeted at the US market, but at communities where the average income is below 1 US dollar per day.  People in that environment won't have friends and neighbors running an upgraded version, the most probable scenario is similar to how cellphones are used in those communities, one person will obtain the laptop through a micro-loan program and they'll rent time on the device to the rest of the village at rates appropriate to the area (probably something like $0.10/hour).  Just about the only software likely to be run is a web browser and OpenOffice.org.

There's no reason to make a $100 laptop fixed hardware.  Any market where performance, comparison, etc... are likely to occur will also have the economic support to purchase mainstream systems at around the $300 price point.

Bad programming and bad programs have been around since ENIAC, and they'll be around for as long as we write software.  That doesn't mean anyone should make suboptimal choices in hardware, only that consumers should have the ability to choose software that's done right, and should exercise that choice.

==Joseph++

FoulDragon at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 10/9/2005 5:40:13 PM US Mountain Standard Time, 
> plug-discuss at stcaz.net writes:
> 
> 
>>With a modern O/S, like Linux, these are no longer concerns for the 
> 
> application developer.  >Consider that we now see a vast array of applications written 
> for Linux that run just fine on >systems ranging from an old 486, to a 64-bit 
> AMD, to a hyper-threading, multi-core, multi->processor, NUMA system, and you 
> realize just how irrelevant the level-platform concept >has become.
> 
> Well, they may *run* technically, but I think that most of us will agree, 
> Quake III plays better on that Athlon 64 than it does on a 486.
> 
> You can hide the hardware from the programmer, but you can't hide its 
> performance from the user.
> 
> If a later generation of the $100 laptop comes into circulation, you'll see a 
> lot of annoyed people when their friends get one of the new ones and it runs 
> the tasks which strain theirs more easily.  And even more annoyed people when 
> people start coding assuming that level of performance is available.
> 
> Yes, hard-coded delay loops and other similar thinking is bad.  But it 
> doesn't prevent it from happening.  It will always be tempting to do it that way 
> too, if you have fixed hardware.  It's easier.
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