Once again, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is offering two of its XO machines for $399. One goes to you, one goes to a third-world child. Technologizer editor Harry McCracken, the pathologically honest former head of PC World, bought into the program last year. This year, he says, he'll do it again, but he's not…
Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab director turned non-CEO of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, is working with Amazon.com to start shipping out the green-and-white laptops that no one really wants to Europeans. It's been a year since they were first offered for sale in the United States via a…
Programmer Richard Stallman's 25-year crusade to banish proprietary software from planet Earth hasn't had many victories. Most recently, One Laptop Per Child stabbed RMS in the face by replacing its Stallman-approved freeware with a Windows operating system. OLPC head Nicholas Negroponte, who originally backed a…
In a deal worth more than $3 billion, Venezuela has agreed to purchase 1 million mini-laptops from Portugal. The Intel-designed Classmate laptops were licensed to Portugal for manufacturing and are similar to Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project that Intel once backed. The Venezuela contract is bigger…
In the race to develop the first mass-producible laptop that costs less than $100 has apparently been won by Chinese company HiVision, which currently offers an adorable, pink, 7" MiniNote for $120 but plans to introduce a model in October that will retail for only $98. Like the Lemote laptop that radical open source…
The Mengloong from Chinese manufacturer Lemote is a fairly exotic machine — designed to be widely affordable like the One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1, its Loongson-2 processor couldn't run Microsoft Windows if you wanted it to. So it's the machine of choice for Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman
Arrrrrrrrr! Readers who watched computer-display innovator Mary Lou Jepsen yesterday had only one question: WTF with the eye patch. I guessed at Jepsen's email address and asked her. It turns out we'll be seeing much more of Jepsen, but not the patch. The engineer, trained at MIT's Media Lab, left Nicholas…
MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte had a vision: Millions of third-world children lacked laptops and therefore the means to learn of his greatness. He founded the One Laptop Per Child Project with a singular vision: He, Nicholas Negroponte, would bring laptops to these children, so that they could know that…
Nicholas Negroponte, the nutty MIT professor who has championed the idea of cheap laptops for Third World children, is feuding with his own programmers. Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child is best known for its distinctive hardware — the candy-colored, devil-horn-antennaed XO notebook computer. But he's turned his…
Nicholas Negroponte has come to his senses and realized that he is not a businessman and has no place running the One Laptop Per Child project. "I am not a CEO. Management, administration, and details are my weaknesses. I'm much better at the vision, big-picture side of the house." Yeah, leave the minutae like …
PC World's Harry McCracken ordered an XO laptop from the One Laptop For Child charity on November 12. He gave a $400 "donation" — half to buy himself a laptop and half to buy a laptop for a "deserving child" in a developing country. After many emails back and forth and 35 minutes on hold, McCracken still hasn't…
We stopped by the Blogger Lounge within the Microsoft booth on the Macworld Expo floor. Inside, it was rather comfortable, considerably more so than the press areas at CES — except the internet didn't work. While we were there though, we found M&M's graced with the Microsoft Office, Word and Excel logos, comfy…
Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project may be better named "No Laptop Per Child," at the rate it's going. Back in November, the Wall Street Journal essentially labeled the project a failure. Now, the group is being sued for $20 million by a Nigerian company for patent infringement. Let's hope OLPC…
"Think of how cool it would be! Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist…
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal devoted nearly 3,000 words to the saga of Nicholas Negroponte's plan: "Design a $100 laptop and, within four years, get it into the hands of up to 150 million of the world's poorest schoolchildren." What went wrong? "Mr. Negroponte's ambitious plan has been derailed, in…
If you weren't so ahead of the curve that you don't read newspapers, you'd know that Dell is underpricing Negroponte today, with a $700 laptop knocked down nearly in half. I'll leave it to the fanboys to comment whether or not it'll boot Leopard or Ubuntu.
Gilberto Gil, Brazil's Minister of Culture, is retiring. Medical tests revealed a polyp on his vocal cords which could threaten his musical career. Gil needs to quit giving speeches while the polyp is being treated. Which is unfortunate, because he has quite a bit to say. Gil is the man who turned down Nicholas…
Chinese manufacturing firm Quanta has started to mass produce a $100 $188 notebook computer for the One Laptop Per Child project. Nicholas Negroponte, the head of OLPC, claims 250,000 machines will be built this year, with 1 million a month being built in 2008. And if you believe that, Negroponte's got a $100 laptop…
A few weeks ago, Forbes editor Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, wrote a devastating analysis of the One Laptop Per Child project. On Tuesday, Wayan Vota, a blogger who follows the OLPC project, responded in essence, that while he agreed with Fake Steve, he still agreed with the project's aims. That would have…
CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — The chasm between Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project's lofty goal — putting computers in the hands of children across the developing world — and its actual achievements is staggeringly wide. Instead of millions of computers, it's struggling to put in an order for a hundred thousand…
