MIT: The $100 Laptop Making it's Debut?

[! !]

It was the DISPLAY that was the stumbling block :confused:

What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The $100 Laptop will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop, which initially is achieved either by rear projecting the image on a flat screen or by using electronic ink (developed at the MIT Media Lab). In addition, it will be rugged, use innovative power (including wind-up), be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel. The cost of materials for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $90, which includes the display, as well as the processor and memory, and allows for $10 for contingency or profit.
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/

[meksikatsi]

wow, what a deal!

[Catalana]

If I didn't have something I would try one

[mmiikkee12]

Where can I get one?

[jwenting]

Nowhere. It's not for marketing to individuals, only to be made available to foreign aid organisations and 3rd world government agencies (mostly educational and healthcare) in orders of 1000 units and more.

[Catweazle]

Certainly some interesting things come out of MIT.

One of the recent efforts was the generation of a computer program which writes randomly created research papers with 'context-free grammar', charts and diagrams.

"[They] submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida. To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.....

....."Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions.""

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/

Unsurprisingly, the conference organizers came up with a rather thin excuse in relation to the paper getting accepted for presentation :D