The $100 laptop

[Josef Lowder]

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.

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