Recently in OLPC Category

Now that Amazon has taken on the chore of processing orders for the One Laptop Per Child program, which aims to put forward-thinking, rugged and cheap computers in the hands of children throughout the developing world, now is the perfect time to either "give one" to a child in need ($199) or "give one, get one" ($399) and both provide one for a child while getting one for your own kid (or yourself, since the comments at Amazon make it clear that adults really dig this little laptop).

While there has been a lot of controversy over the OLPC, mainly due to Intel not being happy that the project chose an AMD processor and Microsoft not being happy that the Fedora GNU/Linux-derived Sugar operating system was ... not Windows.

Now that the OLPC is being modified to run Windows XP, supposedly because foreign governments have been demaning such, the OLPC project is slashing and burning any goodwill it had in the free, open-source software community for the moneyed arms of Microsoft.

At any rate, as it stands right at this very moment, the OLPC still runs Sugar and looks to be a great educational tool for kids all around the world ... so if you're rolling in it, why not roll a little their way?

Linus Torvalds, father of the open-source Linux operating system, says that in some ways Apple's OS X is "actually worse than Windows. He saved the phrase "utter crap" for OS X's filesystem. He says:

"An operating system should be completely invisible," he said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment ... to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

I'm no Linus, but that seems a bit harsh. Even so, there's a new OS X filesystem on the horizon, I've heard.

Back in the Linux realm, Torvalds says he admires the One Laptop Per Child initiative as well as the low-cost -power and -size ASUS eee-PC laptop.

The One Laptop Per Child project hasn't hit its target price of $100, but already one of its creators is talking about a $75 device.

There's been a lot of blog noise lately about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Asus EeePC, Everex Cloudbook and other laptops that sell for anywhere for $250 to $400 ... if you can get your hands on them at all.

But this is the first I've heard of a planned $75 laptop being spun off of the OLPC project. There's a new company called Pixel Qi that exhibited at CES and is run by Mary Lou Jepson, the founding chief technology officer of OLPC.

Here's their manifesto:

What computing can be, the XO laptop was just the first step.

Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras.

Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO, while leveraging a larger market for new technologies, beyond just OLPC: prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of the key technology advances. Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use.

More from Jepson:

I believe that looking at computers in a new, holistic, systemic way, with a clean-sheet approach to computer design - rather than incrementally increasing the horsepower of the CPU - is critical to bringing computing and Internet access to more than the 1 billion affluent who now are its beneficiaries. The key is a new generation of low-cost, low power, durable, networked computers, leveraging open-design principles.