The $100 laptop closer to reality

[jkinz at kinz.org (Jeff Kinz)]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 12:47:19PM -0400, Brendan wrote:
> On Thursday 29 September 2005 12:37 pm, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> > The design of the $100 dollar laptops seems to defeat this
> > automatically.  They have no local storage. (No hard drive, they boot
> > off of a "Rom'med" Linux.
> >
> > These are, to some degree, "thin clients" :-)
> 
> True, but you know that won't last long. How would upgrades happen, I wonder, 
> long term?

heh,heh,  upgrades mean trouble.  "No upgrade for you!"  (IT Nazi)

seriously- this is such a major undertaking.  I don't think it would
make sense to allow any modification to the systems, with the possible
exception of a new image for the ROM.

of course.... they will get hacked. inevitable.


> > Interesting. At my school(s) the professors would even xerox
> > pre-publication drafts and use those for texts if the book they desired
> > wasn't published in time.  Invariably the individual professors seemed
> > highly involved in making the choices.  If more than one was teaching
> > the same course (multiple sections) they would try to agree on one text.
> 
> Sounds great. Where was this? My father is in upstate New York.
> At a local college here in Bo-town, there was a "copyright control" officer, 
> who made sure the licenses were up to snuff and copied things were on the up 
> and up, etc. It was amazing, you had to run things by this person to hand out 
> copies to students. No, I can't tell you the name of the school. I still work 
> for them sometimes.

I am relating experiences that happened a "few" years ago.  Things may
well have changed.  

Problem: Textbooks cost way too much.

How about all the textbooks on any given subject could be replaced by a
choice of five (maybe as many as 10) really well done books on the
given subject.  Distribute all of them as e-books (or paper if the
student wants to shell $ out.)

Each book written by a team of five experts in the fields who are locked
in a room for five months to a year. If they survive, they derive
royalties for the rest of the books life. Percentages diminish slowly
over time if new authors are added to the later editions of the book.

Being selected to be one of 25-50 text authors in any academic field
will be a significant honor in terms of the recognition it  signifies.
(and money too!)

After 15-17 years the book is thrown away and we start over again.
(Allow/encourage new schools of thought to be exposed in each body of
knowledge)

Each .edu will license the book from the non-profit org that manages
and selects (and pays) the authors. 

relative price of an e-copy of the book drops to a few bucks per copy,
authors scoop up major bucks, old-tech publishing companies scramble to
find or support new business model.

Jus' rambling' out loud.

-- 
speech recognition software was used in the composition of this e-mail
Jeff Kinz, Emergent Research, Hudson, MA.
??Ya no mas!