What do you guys think of this idea?
I've been doing a wee bit of reading about this project in the last couple of weeks and from what I can see, it should be a really good idea, as long as the scheme doesn't become abused with the distribution of the laptops themselves.

Here is a link to the actual laptop itself, the XO-1.

The last I heard this was going to end up being more like a $150 laptop by the time they actually get them in the field but this thing is hardened so it will work just about anywhere rain or shine and it is as tough as a Nextel "brick", RF connected and low power enough to run off a hand crank supply.
I would buy one myself if they would sell me one but Andy Grove and Bill Gates is being sure these stay out of the US marketplace.
Maybe they could start a program where they sell us one and we buy one for a 3d world kid. Even $300 is cheap for a laptop. Particularly for a laptop that can suffer living on the road.

Such a program is already in place:

http://www.laptopgiving.org/

, but the price is $199 per unit, making your unit a $400 laptop.

Crikey,
That sounds a tad anti-competitive.

These machines don't come with windoze. That makes them evil to Gates. Windoze IS a virus

Bzzt, there's one difference .
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article09-115



Ian A.

Is this the MIT project?
I know some grad students have developed one for $88.. Then anounced the cost would be more like $200.

I've heard rumors that Uncle Sam has already put in a "big" order. (hear say so far, still digging for dirt)

A little update on this project:

From Wikipedia

I can't say I like the colour of these laptops, but hey, if they do some good, I'm all for them.

They are made primarily for school children so that color suits them, I suppose.

The color's probably so that you can find the stolen ones more easily.

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.