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Saturday, October 08, 2005

$100 Laptop For School Children

I know what you're thinking...the same thing I was. Cool! Are they coming out before Christmas? Mommie can come out good all the way around this year. Well, come to find out, this non-profit association called One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is the one who is going to be giving them out. They are going to be distributed like textbooks to children in schools directly through the government in China, Thailand, Egypt and Brazil with the appropriate financing at a million minimum per order.

In January of this year, the Lab chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that they were going to try to put a computer in the hands of every child in developing countries. He's also the co-founder of a Foundation called 2B1. I couldn't find a lot of information on them because their link is down, but from what I gathered, their belief is that every child has their own pencils that they use to communicate, learn and think, and they shouldn't have to share computer, they should have their own.

They said the computers link up when they come out of the box. At a minimum order of a million, once these kids pop the laptops out of the box, they're all going to link up. Mr. Negroponte also sits on the board for Motorola. I wonder if these computers will be like a big version of a cell phone, but with everything a computer has.

The one thing these laptops don't have is storage space. They each a 1GB of storage. So with a peer-to-peer system, that's like having a 1,000,000GB disc space on your computer, if I understand correctly how that's going to work.

Unlike a cell phone they don't need a tower or a server. Which is good since these laptops are for kids that are in developing countries and some don't even have electricity. There going to work by inovative power technology, such as wind-up. How come we don't have that kind of technology here yet?

They art of handwriting is long gone with the creation of email. Is the art of speaking going to be far behind? I guess they've thought of that for when we finally get one of these laptops.

All the messenger programs just put out updates for chat with voice. I got the update, but didn't give a second thought to actually using the "voice" part. Come to find out my mom had already got her update and even bought the chat headset and is just waiting on someone else that she knows to do the same thing so she can try it out.

Hmmm...I can see it now. We're all gonna have computers in our hands and have headsets on our heads all the time. We won't need telephones because all we'll have to do is click and scroll down to find your name on the list, double click, click and you'll see a message flashing that I'm calling you. On the other line? Not anymore, I'm sure with the ability to pause live TV, you'll be able to pause me talking while you click back over to the other conversation, tell them to hold on one sec, click back to me and oh man...I get enough instant messages all at the same time, I don't know about talking to each one of them.

I guess telemarketers learned how to type when they ruled that they had to keep up with a do not call list. After that kind of rejection, they now bug you with a recording that pisses you off even more because there's no one there to hear you saying "DON'T CALL ME!!!"

When are we going to get anything done? We won't be able to pull ourselves away from the computer and our fingers might fall off. Hmmm...it might be time to buy stock in some arthritus medicine.

I listened to a mini seminar on the internet the other night about what age group you should be marketing to. Of course everybody knows that marketing to the baby boomers is a big thing. If you want to make money you need to stay ahead of the ball and market to people that are in the higher end of that age bracket.

Actually, you start marketing to the lower end of that bracket, you can buy stock in pharmaceuticals now and sell them $100 laptops, because not only are you going to make sure they have arthritus, with all the commercials you see for drugs and the symptoms being so vague (if you have pain in your legs sometimes then you might have blah blah blah), they're all going to be hypochondriacs and on so many drugs that the value packages will come in value combos, and we'll all be asked, do u want that "super-sized"? They already figured out a way to make McDonald's quit saying that so they could use it.

Back to this MIT Media, I asked my husband where he thought they might be from. His guess was Europe. Of course I was shocked when I found out where they're from. Here, right here in the good ole USA.
MIT Media LabBuilding E15-21820 Ames StreetCambridge, MA 02139 USA

Is there a reason why the don't want our kids to have one first? I wonder if it's because the children in developing countries will be more grateful for them than ours. You give a millions of children a laptop each that don't even have electricity, think of the following you'll have.

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