ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet $100 Laptop project

The cheap laptop is not suitable to what it is for, nor for children, any need for speed would kill it, nor for professional use (programming, where the development environment takes 1.88GB only), but can be good for playing online chess, but you can do the same with a 10yrs old p2, with an ADSL and Win98.

What? There is also a server? Blah! You buy 500 laptops for USD100 and buy a big enough server to store data for 50000 USD

Gloria, these are aimed at kids and if they have any decent programmers it is plenty fast enough. These kids are not editing videos live, they are learning to read and write.
IBM Eduquest had some excellent education packages with flashy graphics that ran fine on a 25mz 386SX. When they were network connected the server was a 386 DX, Bill Gates may have convinced the world you can't balance a checkbook without a 3gz machine and a 400 gig operating system but it is just not true. In the 70s people ran large corporations with 1mz machines that only had 64kb of memory and a few dozen megabytes of disk space.

Dear Greg, I have learned to read and write with 0GB, actually with no PC at all. :~D

This is only one more thing that blocks communication between human and human. (teacher and child).
These guys born in the 80's are lonely enough. I know there is life on the net, but there is a saying, that people, who doesn't got touched or talked to for a while, will easily misunderstand any kind of input.

I personally don't recommend pc for kids other than data mining (eg. wikipedia). Actually boys at my age spend all their time after work with the PC (not going out at all, nor chatting, nor doing anything together). That's embarrassing in a relationship.

Look at this: you go home, your wife's chatting on a chatsite, your kid's playing something, none realizes that you arrived, and it can turn to a habit in your family. They don't even realize if you don't go home.

ASUS has just come out with a 400 dollar laptop with a solid state memory at 4gb and one on the way at 8 gb. External monitors and keyboards as well as external (USB) drives are supposed to usable. 7" screen and uses Linux OS.