MIT is developing a Linux-powered, fully functional, WiFi capable laptop that costs only $100. The laptop, using a number of innovative features (including, possibly, wind-up power), would be bought (or donated) in bulk to education ministries in developing countries, who could hand them out to schoolchildren like textbooks. The people behind the program fully intend to distribute 100 million of these notebooks in 2006 or 2007. CNN is already covering the story.
With 500 MHz processing speed and a 1 megapixel display, these laptops aren’t too far off a number of computers still found at homes and workplaces today. Only the 1 Gb hard drive is on the small side.
You know what these guys should do? They should sell these laptops to North American consumers for $200, with $100 of that going into producing and sending one of those laptops across the ocean to a schoolchild somewhere. It would be a good way for average consumers to help bridge the digital divide.
Uh, oh. Project Inferno!
One of the best Doctor Who stories of the early 1970s is entitled Inferno, wherein the Doctor has growing qualms over a British Energy project to drill through the Earth’s crust and tap the power straight from the Earth’s mantle. Then he gets zapped to a Nazi parallel Earth where the same project is happening, but is further along. Thus he is able to witness the piercing of the Earth’s crust and the end of the world. Cool story.
…but maybe not a story any longer… Hat tip, Geek News Central.
What gets me even more is this line:
The latest drilling was done at the Atlantis Massif
They have to drill this project in a place called “Atlantis”? Talk about hubris.
:-)
A Summary of This Week’s Traffic
Below you shall find a graphic summarizing the amount of traffic I’ve had this week on Bow. James Bow.:
This is about average for me. I get around 360 hits per day, many through Google, but some from other bloggers. I’m proud of my traffic, but I’m not too big-headed about it. So when some Canadian bloggers talk about a major traffic spike as a result of people searching for Gomery revelations, I feel a small flash of jealousy. Nothing more.
However, this chart below puts the numbers above in the context of the numbers received by my “other” blog, Transit Toronto (which I share with Aaron Adel and run with the help of a number of dedicated volunteers).
As you can guess, the traffic spike wasn’t generated by the Gomery Commission, but by people searching for news on the impending (but now resolved — hopefully) transit strike in Toronto. I’ve been surprised and a little overwhelmed by the traffic, and so have spent a lot of time these past two weeks covering the latest news on the strike, even giving out information and advice to one or two journalists interested in the entrenched positions of the labour dispute. Thus far, I think it’s gone quite well, and I’m especially proud to have Transit Toronto provide a useful, current service after so many months being essentially dormant.
I hope you won’t begrudge me a brief moment of egotism when I wonder if the service I provided was a bit more useful in the short term than the latest rumours coming out of the Gomery commission.
(slaps self)
Okay, back now.
Maybe it’s just the relief that the labour dispute is over, for now, but I feel as though I’ve had a lot of fun logging the strike talks as they happened. Now, if only somebody could pay me to keep up on these things…
By the way, the two charts were courtesy of StatCounter, a new webcounter service that runs rings around Sitemeter. Sitemeter has its advantages (its ease of use and the fact that its averages are logged in the Blogging stats repository, the Truth Laid Bear), but StatCounter gives you more information, allows you to drill down further into that information, and allows you to use more than one counter per account. It’s free, and I recommend it for every blogger. Maybe the Truth Laid Bear could incorporate it among their new standards.