Comment Re:Thanks Intel/Microsoft (Score 1) 379
No. Laptops that work well in full sunlight and are rugged and low power are not being built by anyone, and won't be.
Sure they will, but only if it's economical to do so. Those are all desirable qualities in any laptop computer - why would anyone not want them? But buyers choose price over features most of the time.
The problem is this - any manufacturing process that could create an OLPC for $100 could just as easily create a bare-bones Linux laptop without the OLPC's bells and whistles for $50 or less. If you're a Third World consumer, what are you going to choose - an OLPC, or a netbook for half the price that is "good enough"? And the netbooks are going to get much better, much faster than the OLPC ever could.
No netbook costs half what the OLPC XO does, and if you can design one for $50, I can get you a job, or venture capital funding if you prefer. The XO would have cost about $100 if
a) W hadn't sold off the dollar to the Chinese, and
b) OLPC and some of the governments interested in it hadn't decided to double memory and storage, and use a slightly faster processor.
By the time Asus et al. get anywhere near $100, the XO-2 (most likely from Pixel Qi, not OLPC) is projected to be $75. Mid-2010 is the latest estimate.
There are also projects to create $12 8-bit computers for education, such as PlayPower. Unfortunately, that's without a display. If somebody can figure out how the students can use them, there is excellent free 8-bit education software that we can port over.
I have some pre-Linux math software for the Apple II and C64 that I have offered to GPL if somebody else will do the necessary work to get it into Sugar or onto the PlayPower system. (Sorry, I'm writing textbooks to go out under GPL full-time now.)
