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HP Thailand Sells $450 Linux Laptop
greyrax writes "The revolution has begun! Seems that the Thailand branch of HP is selling Linux-based laptops for $450. The government of Thailand is now talking to Dell Thailand about a similar arrangement."
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Cnet.com has the specifications on the laptop.
800MHz Intel Celeron processor
128MB of RAM
20GB hard disk
Right you are, according to this CNet article:
The government is subsidizing the cost of the hardware...
Sorry folks, I don't think the Thai government is going to pony up for the rest of us.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Let's see, racist = funny and anti-Linux = troll.
.smell my feet.
You have to realize that in Thailand $450 is 18,550 Baht - which by Thai standards is about 2 months rent for a pretty small apartment in the city.
You could get all the bells and Whistles with a laptop such as DVD, Wifi, etc... but chances are you will never use any of it if you are a Thai native (no AP's anywhere, they watch VCD's, etc...)
Which is why Internet Cafe's are all the rage in Thailand - cost is 1 Bhat per minute (0.02 cents USD).
Thailand is still a developing country, espically in the technology field. A good portion of the country (despite how beautiful it is) is still 3rd world like.
Some more info Here
"Fishy" is right. This story is a lot less about computers than it is about Thai politics, which is why so many posts are expressing puzzlement, confusion, and comments that are off target.
/. --So I go on and on offtopic -- sorry, but my point was that this giveaway is the government buying the computers and selling them at a loss, using tax revenues to buy votes while incidentally undercutting and damaging legitimate businesses. Huey Long would be impressed.
The current prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra (pronounced more or less Toxin Sheen-ah-waht, and yes, we got the joke a long time ago) is a populist who got his start in politics by somehow talking someone in the military junta that was running the country at the time into giving him a monopoly on mobile phones. Thais all gotta have the dratted things, it shows status and confers prestige. The result: millions and zillions for Thaksin, and outrageously high phone rates here, even now, years later. He's the richest man in the nation, and the stories about how he works his taxes would curl your hair.
Well, according to his critics, he's basically buying the whole country, and the Thais love him for it (yes, we got that joke, too). Relatives of his go to high posts in the police and military, though unqualified; the English-language papers here are howling that some news media are lapdogs (very true of the radio, slightly less so of the TV, not so true of the newspapers, but they are running scared, as I see it), and the voters have been seduced by a plan that provides medical care for 30 Thai baht (less than a US buck) per visit. Never mind that the care is slapdash and provided by exhausted, harried doctors. Thaksin is, in short, to Thailand what Juan Peron was to Argentina. So far the economy is holding up under the strain, but it can't last.
Nor can the population: over 2,000 people were just shot to death in a wild anti-drugs campaign, and nobody knows how many were simply executed by the cops, and how many were hit by rival drug gangs -- no one is investigating, either, because they know where their best interests lie. The corruption that is a fact of every part of Thai life is becoming even more blatant. The latest little gift for the Thai nation: a tax on telecoms that benefits -- oh, you guessed! And the tax was imposed unconstitutionally, but the courts have been corrupted, too.
The "cheap computers" thing has little to do with HP or Linux. It's a Thai deal, just another aspect of the Southeast Asian version of bread and circuses. In fact, I question whether this item even belongs on
BTW, "farang" (my user name) is the Thai word for "Westerner." It comes from the Thai pronunciation of the French word for "French."