It looks like the Simputer is facing some American competition in the ultra-low-cost computing market.
One man in Boston has a plan that he hopes will bridge the world's gaping digital divide - and quickly. The visionary is Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his idea consists of a new kind of laptop computer that will cost just $100 (£57) to buy. ...In fact, he expects to churn out about 15 million of them within one year, shipping most of them at first to children in Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa.
Describing the unusual design of his sub-laptop yesterday, Mr Negroponte insisted that it would "have to be absolutely indestructible". The mission is to create a tool that children almost anywhere can use and can easily carry between their classrooms and their homes. For that reason, for instance, the AC adaptor cable will double as a shoulder strap.
Few things will improve the quality of life around the world more than cheap computing.
This past summer we upgraded our slowest computers in the school district (Pentium II - 233MHz) to Celeron D 2.4GHz computers with XP-Pro. and Office licensing for a little under $300 per machine. Compared to $700-800 for a new computer, we got quite an upgrade for our money.
Performance-wise, they're indistinguishable from last year's Pentium 4's.
As 2nd-in-command of I.T., I couldn't be more proud of what we did.
Mark: What was involved in your upgrades? What components did you keep from the old systems?
MW: We kept the case, CD-ROM drive, floppy drive, monitor, keyboard, and mouse... everything else was replaced: motherboard, power supply, CPU, hard drive (old ones were too small), memory.
There were a few instances where the floppy and/or CD-ROM drive was shot... in which case we replaced them with spares we had leftover from the Pentium 200's we salvaged a couple years ago.
Sounds pretty labor-intensive. Did you save money after accounting for the labor cost of your own time?
We always work in the summer anyway. Everyone in the department is salary (myself included)... so the hours we work are irrelevant.
We do hire one student as summer help, but he didn't work any more or less hours than in other years.
FYI... this is the first year we've done this upgrading thing.
And we accomplished everything we regularly do every summer... as well as a few specific projects too. I came in on weekends to do some things as well.
This computer upgrade plan isn't the only thing we've done to save the District money. When I started with the District, I got us using a VERY cheap and VERY good email program, Merak Mail Server... that provided us a complete mail package (unlimited users, Web-based access, anti-spam, anti-virus, etc.) for a TON less per year than MS Exchange or Novell Groupwise.
Also, our technical support system is free.. and runs from our webserver.
We don't outsource anything except our wireless WAN links, otherwise everything else is taken care of by the 4 of us that make up the I.T. staff... in a District with 900 computers.
There's the Director of IT, who does little in the way of PC/network service/support... me, who does most of the network service/support as well as PC service/support and website work, another guy who does the phone system, PC service/support, and service of our A/V equipment, and our part-time secretary.
Mark: Even if you're salaried, your time is valuable because you could be doing other things. If you're coming in on the weekend, then you're volunteering and basically donating to your work.
Which is all fine, I just wonder if you ended up actually saving money.
MW: And I'm telling you that we did save money. Everything we regularly do in the summer got done in the same amount of time... and me coming in on weekends is merely a function of both convenience and necessity. This is the first summer in which I live close to work (instead of 30 minutes away)... and a few of my duties, such as major backups and server replacement, are easier to do on weekends. While we do not have teachers and students to contend with during the summer, there's still administrators and secretaries.
Getting back to the money-saving... upgrading these computers was not an all-consuming task. We were done with the project before half of the summer break was over. Did we work on other things while the upgrade project was going on? Certainly. Did any of us put in longer hours? No. While I came in on weekends once in a while, I also took off early once in a while on Friday. The bottom line, though, is that since we're all salary employees... and we get paid the same no matter what work we devote our time to... the District saved quite a bit of money with this upgrade plan. I picked a motherboard for the upgrade that had identical chipsets to the motherboards in last-year's P4's... so that we could use the same image.