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First Photos of MIT $100 Laptop

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

An anonymous reader noted that MITs $100 laptop was unveiled at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting. It runs a special version of the Fedora linux and it comes with native wireless lan support. You can see the photo album, and you can pledge to buy one at triple price... in order to donate 2 of them to children.

5 of 659 comments (clear)

  1. These look great! by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The final photo in the set shows three different colours - they all look fantastic - this photo shows the fedora desktop. Also looks great!

    It should be noted that the 'horns' are for directional wireless (and also cover USB ports when not in use) - remember that if you want to mock them!

    I say kudos to AMD, Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat for making this possible. It's a pity Gates & Jobs couldn't join in rather then attempting to downplay the fine efforts of this group.

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    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    1. Re:These look great! by cwgmpls · · Score: 5, Insightful
      1) You can't run OSX on a 400 MHz AMD processor with 128 Meg of RAM. (If you know how, please let me know!)

      2) Apple would never allow an OSX laptop to retail at $300 in the U.S., which is what OLPC is doing.

      3) One of the design goals of OLPC was to be totally open source, to allow third parties to tinker with it and improve the entire system at will. I don't see how OSX could be part of a purely open-source project.

  2. Re:Freedom where art thou? by benjjj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is it forced charity? Forced charity would be if we were paying taxes for third world orphans to get gov't-funded laptops.

    This is just like being nice and giving to public radio, and they give you a sweet tote bag in return. Here, you're paying $300 to charity, as a nice, charitable human being, and you're getting a laptop in return.

    Don't be so whiney.

  3. Re:Freedom where art thou? by Fhqwhgadss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oxfam does this. But if you actually gave a shit you'd know this already instead of blindly bashing the $100 laptop project. After all there's more than one way to try to help others and nobody is forcing you to do it their way.

    --
    How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
  4. It amazes me too by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 5, Insightful
    How people like you keep not getting it.

    This isn't for areas where people are starving. This is for areas where people have food but now need to advance to the next level. Education is the only tool to prevent people from collapsing to starvation again.

    Why PC's instead of books. Because 1 internet capable pc can contain all the books in the world in their most recent version with an infinite amount of paper and pencil.

    Books are expenive as hell, ask any student, and schools in poor countries often got to work with hopelessly outdated material and practice books that gotta be reused time and time again.

    Cheap PC's make sense, not in starvation areas but in those countries were the basic needs have been taken care off and now education is the most pressing concern.

    Because hopefully educated people will be more concerned with creating a better world and not with waging war on each other. Right?

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.