Martin Langhoff wrote: > Interesting. Though the challenge they have -- localising closed src > binaries... to non ASCII-using locales -- is rather hard.
The non ASCII is a complication, but changing binaries was very popular in Brazil in the 1980s (the copyright law here was only extended to software in 1987). A serious limitation of this project is that just because the machines are openly being sold in a market in India (here in Brazil too, but closer $100 than $12...) doesn't mean that there are no legal issues. Nintendo is simply ignoring them as few units are sold compared to normal PCs or modern videogame consoles. If this project is a success and sales increase significantly, this could quickly change. It is odd that the article talks about expired patents as the reason for lower prices. Most early machines weren't even patented: the original PC (1981) wasn't, the PC AT (1984) had seven patents in all and the PS/2 (1987) was the first one that IBM tried to seriously protect and it backfired on them. The main factor for the low costs is Moore's law: you can either get twice the transistors for the same price in 18 months or the same transistors for about half the cost. The PC industry has mostly followed the first option while the OLPC was explicitly created to take advantage of the decreasing costs curve instead. Building in 2007 what was essentially a mid range laptop from 1997 got you an entirely new price point. If we imagine the Famicom (the current $12 computer) in 1985 with about $30 of electronics and the Commodore Amiga with $300 in the same year, in 1997 eight cycles of Moore's law would have passed and we would have $0.12 and $1.17 of electronics in modern remakes of these machines. Except that packaging and testing would be about the same for both options and the costs of the case and keyboard would totally dominate the sales price. I guess the point of trying to make educational use of a $12 Famicom (NES in the USA) instead of a more reasonable $13 Amiga is that the first exists and is being sold right now. But like I said, the volumes are not impressive. If the numbers are to be expanded to cover whole poor countries then the investment that has to be made could certainly support a little development, right? It has been done before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV The reason why I said the Amiga was more "reasonable" is that the PlayPower plan is to allow people to connect to the Internet. Even the Commodore 64 has a new operating system (Contiki) that allows that in a very limited way, but the Famicom is just too weak. I would love to see a project like this be a massive success, but don't think the path they are taking is the best option. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
