Re: The $100 laptop

Yeah, and when it starts, Billy Bob will go "oh, my
God' and suddenly a $50 WINDOWS machine will popup!!
You think he will go down that easy and NOT fight it??

--- Josef Lowder <joe@actionline.com> wrote:

>
> Abridged excerpts from an article today entitled:
> The $100 laptop
>
> Nicholas Negroponte is the director of MIT's Media
> Lab, and he
> has now attracted three big-time corporate sponsors:
> AMD, RedHat,
> and Google to sign on to his grand vision of
> providing a sub-$100
> Linux-based laptop to every child, worldwide.
>
> Negroponte's goal is to put laptops in the hands of
> each of the third
> world's hundreds of millions of children by
> producing a high-tech
> laptop that will run at such low power levels as to
> make hand-cranking
> it for power a viable option. Important if you live
> in the jungle and have
> no electricity. This project is made feasible
> because of Linux.
>
> A sub-$100 laptop is definitely possible. Today, any
> OEM can sell a
> $100 PC by using a free Linux operating system with
> a full complement
> of free "open-source" Linux-based software,
> including the complete
> OpenOffice Suite that is fully equivalent to MS
> Office.
>
> Mr. Negroponte's goal is to gear up to ship 150
> million of these units
> every year by 2007.
>
> To put this in perspective, it is doubtful that up
> to this point any OEM has
> ever shipped even 10 million of any single model of
> any PC. Shipping this
> many Linux laptops in a single year would totally
> swamp the market.
>
> The scale of Mr. Negroponte's vision is so huge that
> sponsors are
> signing up in the hope of tapping-in to even a tiny
> share of this huge
> volume.
>
> Many foreign governments have already signed on to
> participate.
> Including China with its 220 million school
> children. And, realistically,
> China surely will not stop with children.
> Undoubtedly China and other third
> world countries will want to make these low-cost
> computers available to
> everyone - the 'haves' as well as the 'have-nots'.
> When hundreds of
> millions of school children all over the world are
> brought up on Linux, the
> computer landscape of the world will change rapidly
> and dramatically.
>
> As of today, the technical challenges of producing a
> fully functional
> human-powered wireless laptop computer have already
> been met.
>
> So, Mr. Negroponte's vision very well may be the
> inevitable future.
>
>
-------------------------------------------------------
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list -
> PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail
> settings:
>
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
>


Cyclists should expect and demand safe
accommodation on our public roads,
just as does every other user.

Nothing more is expected.

Nothing less is acceptable!

Long live Knoppix!!


        
__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings:
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss