The $100 Laptop

If a Red Herring is a bad thing, what would be the good equivalent? Some tartar sauce?

Whatever it is, today's unquestionably goes to the MIT coalition that has pioneered and built the $100 laptop. Much more than even a revolutionary marketing/pricing idea, this hi-def windup gizmo is meant to deliver First World know-how to Third World brains.

"OLPC" stands for One Laptop Per Child, which is like No Child Left Behind, except that it's about laptops, and it's not a wheelbarrow of horse dung. My roommate has actually toyed around with one of these things, so they're out there, if only in prototype form. It's the kind of idea that's so revolutionary, it should be absconded and polluted by corporate interests in no time.

Seriously, this is the kind of thing that could upend the entire retail industry -- even though it's intended for non-commercial distribution and use. (Remember the four kilobytes of storage space you used to get in your hotmail account? No matter whether you've switched to Gmail or not -- and you should, clearly -- Google's done you the favor of way ramping up industry standards for space.)

Check back on this one. Hopefully it's the one idea in the haystack... that really catches fire.

-Zed

QWTOFDY
"You can't imagine how wonderful it feels to have written this score and not have to search all over the globe for that drunken little fag."
-Richard Rogers, on writing for No Strings without Oscar Hammerstein