The $100 laptop

[ec]

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 at 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.
> 
>
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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!!


		
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