aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Friday, September 30, 2005
A computer for the whole world
A sub-$100 PC:
Professor [Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs] came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.
His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year.
A prototype of the machine should be ready in November at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia.
Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get the under-$100 (£57) computer, said Professor Negroponte at the Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.
Via Steve Gillard, who apparently doesn’t get it:
So, who writes the software?
It’s not like you can use Office, can you?
[...]
This isn’t a bad idea, but it seems to be less thought out than you would think.
It seems very thought out to me - hand cranked power, super bright screens, a shared “brain.”
How about the notion that they’ll write their own software? Maybe even open source; less bloated! And not bought into our Mac chic and Microsoft money.
A movement I can support:
Negroponte thinks that even $100 remains too expensive for some.
He said he is committed to the idea that children all over the world should be equipped with technology so that they can tap into the educational and communications benefits of the net.
