By Cyrus Farivar
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005, at 3:31 PM ET
At the World Summit on the Information Society two weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the laptop he believes will digitize the developing world. The cute green computer sports a WiFi card, a 500 MHz processor, a 1 gigabyte flash drive, and a novel power source—a 6-inch hand crank that juts out from the side. It will run free, open-source software, most likely some derivation of Linux. All of this for the low, low price of just $100.
Negroponte promises that bringing cheap laptops to countries like Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt will help “children to ‘learn learning’ through independent interaction and exploration.” That might be true, but this green machine won’t be the computer to do it, no matter how much Kofi Annan and the international press fawn over it. The $100 laptop is a huckster’s gambit—poorly thought out, overly ambitious, and too sexy to be true.
