By silicon.com, 26 January 2006 12:00
The $100 laptop is a good idea. Computers and the internet might be luxury items now but increasingly the spread of these technologies will be important not just for the development of individual children but whole economies.
Some might wonder about priorities here. After all, which is more important - a wind-up laptop or helping people find jobs, food and self-sustainability? But it makes sense to at least try and do this.
Computers are now a key to knowledge, so it's important to get the developing world online as this will undoubtedly help accelerate their learning process and help them to build their own economies.
Even in the UK some sort of low-cost computing would help. Without computers, those who know nothing about them feel more alienated as technology progresses. They are left out of the IT loop and access to knowledge suffers.
And the companies creating computer equipment and even software do very little to simplify computing.
If you buy a washing machine, you switch it on and it works. If you buy a computer, not only is it a big investment, it takes 10 minutes to start, asks you questions you don't understand and breaks down when you need it the most.
That's not to say washing machines don't break down but it would seem that computers are still in their infancy from a usability perspective.
It's no wonder the poor and more disadvantaged people steer clear of them. They've got enough to worry about without having to think about getting the computer fixed by someone.
Once the problem of stability and support in computers has been mastered, we will be in an even better place to give laptops to kids around the world.
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1. Keith Armstrong
While the washing machine has only been around for a few decades it was a natural development of the engineering that went before it. IT is not a great leap from tubs with paddles of the Victorian era to motorized tubs with paddles of the 1950s and the devlopments lead on from there.
Technology in the form of computers and the like is very very young. The languages may have been around for a few decades themselves but the machines on which they run have not.
Environmental disaster strikes through the abuse of science. Lack of information is vital to a nations development but software companies look to perpetuate their existence through increasingly complex programming. Who can see the power of the machines they run? Bigger in this instance doesn't mean better at all levels of the product. It is to be hoped the next 10 years will see this change.