$100 laptop may cost more for Nigeria
‘$100 laptop’ runs into more murky waters in Nigeria
CHIDIEBERE NWANKWO
businessdayonline.com
After suffering a major setback in the Nigerian market through the termination of purchase agreement between Nigeria and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, facilitators of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, the project has received another major set back.
This time, OLPC has been sued for an alleged patent infringement by Lagos Analysis Corp (Lancor). According to a report, Lancor alleges that OLPC used without permission, the company’s design for a multilingual keyboard design.
Ade Oyegbola, chief executive officer and founder was quoted as saying that Lancor brought the suit in Nigeria because that is where the design is patented, but notes that Lancor also expects to sue in the United States .
Oyegbola says his company worked for several years to develop the Konyin Nigeria Multilingual Keyboard. Some observers say the suit is nothing more than a ploy designed to drag royalty fees from Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child Foundation.
Recently, government officials opted for Intel’s Classmate PC over the OLPC laptop, also known as XO.
The laptop initially tagged $100 laptop because of its proposed cost of $100 (about N12,800) has now had its cost moved up to $188 (about N24,064). The project has received growing condemnation from some stakeholders who noted that the quality is not up to standard. (more…)
The BBC recently did a slideshow on their site showing kids with their laptops. Click here.
February 10th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I just got my OLPC-XO a few days ago and am still in the process of fooling around with it. It seems better constructed than I expected. The screen is better than I expected so I guess I didn’t really believe what was being said. It found my D-Link access point right away, I just had to enter the pass code. Further experimenting indicates I have to enter it every time I turn on the machine and sometimes it takes multiple tries.
I have BYTE magazines going back to the late 70’s. In the January ‘83 BYTE there is a benchmark called the Sieve of Eratosthenes and listings of the performance of dozens of computers in multiple languages. I wrote an enhanced version of it in GNU-C.
The fastest machine in that 1983 test was an IBM 3033 mainframe running assembly language. It took 0.0078 seconds but the machine cost $3,000,000. The OLPC-XO took 0.0122 seconds and I bought two of them for $400. The IBM took 0.036 seconds running PL/I. So this funny looking little laptop beat a $3,000,000 mainframe running a high level language that governments and corporations bought in the 80’s. That mainframe was first delivered with 8 MB and could be upgraded to a max of 32 MB. The OLPC comes with 256 MB.
I haven’t tested the range yet but I have read that these XO’s can communicate over a distance of more than 1 kilometer. My condo is on the 4th floor and I took the XO down to the 1st floor and it still made contact with my network. This same test failed on a DELL that cost more than $1000. Having little antenna that can stick up may not be stylish but it REALLY WORKS. Style is DUMB!
It doesn’t include a good book reader though.
How this technology ends up changing all societies on the planet depends on what people decide to do with it and whether we let the corporations tell us what to do with it.
umbra