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Friday, April 6, 2007

100-Dollar Laptop

This is a project to make available to children in developing countries laptop computers priced at US $ 100.00. The details are @ http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/4985.

I think it was a mistake to have its OS based on Linux - a WIN32 API based OS could have enabled the availability of a much larger selection of software.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't a Win based OS defeat the purpose of a $100 system?

Babak Makkinejad said...

If the purpose is to wage a war against Microsoft then you are correct.

If the aim is to empower and make available inexpensive computing platform to the disadvantaged children of the world, then this is clearly not the way to go.

Windows, to my knowledge, is the only platform that supports almost all extant scripts. It enables computing in the native language for millions of people in the world.

Why try to re-invent the wheel?

Furthermore, there are thousands of educational titles written for Windows - it would be impossible to redo all of that for this new platform since the cost cannot be depreciated over millions of licenses.

Wintel PC has enabled personal computing around the globe, why not build on that?

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