I Want This, Too

Ah, the Internet. Excellent tool for making me aware of what I want but don't have. Exibit #3 (today) - the $100 laptop.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--A low-cost computer for the masses moved one step closer to reality on Wednesday.

Nicholas Negroponte, the co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed specifications for a $100 windup-powered laptop targeted at children in developing nations.

Negroponte, who laid out his original proposal at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, said MIT and his nonprofit group, called One Laptop Per Child, is in discussions with five countries--Brazil, China, Thailand, Egypt and South Africa--to distribute up to 15 million test systems to children....

While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. "Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids' laptops. We're still working on that," he said.

That's a pretty sweet deal - $200 for a cheap laptop that also works as an e-book reader. Considering what people are shelling out for palm computers, this might be a really big thing. Given that it's shipping with wi-fi, this should take off nicely among university campuses. Considering that in some of my classes, half of the students already have laptops, this might be an excellent way of reaching the remaining market. I also like the idea of paying a premium to help get the computers to the truly needy - if people pay a premium for fair trade coffee at Starbucks, God knows they can pay a 15-30% premium to help poor kids get access to the world.

Ah, but is getting some poor Malawian child access to porn that important? Well, for that we turn to Yahoo and the Internet Archive, which today announce that:

An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.

The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

First off, Go U of T!!! Woot!

Secondly (ahem) this shows the real power of the Internet and these computers - making the sum of human knowledge available to everyone. Or at least, as much as copyright law allows. So good luck to Nick Negroponte, who is doing more for the good of the species in the last year alone than his brother has done in his entire life.

(In case you missed it, his brother is the despicable Bush appointee John Negroponte.)