One Laptop Per Child - Give one Get one campaign

One Laptop Per Child project's XO-1 laptop is available again to the consumer market for anyone to buy. However you cannot just grab one for yourself but you have to buy one for a child in the developing world as well. This is not a bad thing if you ask me. As the campaign says so

Why give a laptop to a child in the emerging world? If you replace the word "laptop" with "education" the answer becomes clear.

The One Laptop Per Child foundation has partnered up with amazon. This is a wise choice since amazon is a very experienced partner when it comes shipping and handling orders and it is also accessible to even more people that want one. The price for the the give on get one deal is 399$. If you just want to donate one the price is 199$.

When XO-1 was announced there where no cheap ultra portables in the market. Since the arrival of the eeePC though everything changed. One can get one those gadgety laptops for the same price as the give one get one deal of XO-1. Why would he/she prefer the technically inferior XO-1 to the more trendy and powerful eeePC and the like.

The answer has probably something to do with the charity factor of the deal ,or because XO-1 is an excellent portable computer, or both. It is hard to crack, it has really long battery life, it has a very simple interface, it has an open architecture utilizing open source applications and it would make an excellent first computer for anyone's kid. At any rate, the One Laptop Per Child Idea gives children the opportunity for better education that otherwise would never have. If a west-world consumer can help to achieve that, he might just as well do. If he is to buy the eeePC as a fashion Item or simply as a useless gadget it is better to get an XO-1 for himself and buy one for an underprivileged kid in a developing country.

Who, actually, needs a netbook?

Netbooks is a fairly new term that describes sub-12” screen notebooks, with limited processing abilities. A little more than a year ago ASUS launched eeePC. A small factor 9” screen notebook that had one incredible characteristic. It was ridiculously cheaper than any other notebook on the market and especially compared to the ultra portables that cost more than 2000 $. Its success was beyond any analyst's expectation and it actually created a whole new market, the netbook market.

I myself find it to be a very nice gadget. But what is its market really? Who actually needs it? The road warriors need a powerhorse laptop to do their job. Using it to simply surf the net on the road, like in a cafe, is probably an overkill since not many people actually do that and, in addition, that need is covered by others means such as smart phones. Surfing the net on the couch is one thing, but who actually does that? Of course a netbook has many other abilities since it is a full blown computer able to play back music, videos, can edit documents and so on. These abilities are found everywhere else as well and people have other computers to do these jobs faster and more efficiently. So what is its purpose. It is certainly not to be a primary computer and maybe not even a second. It is more like a third computer type of product. Few people need a third computer though. So, I ask again: what is its market and its purpose as a product?

Netbooks are very-very cool gadgets and for what they are offering, they are very cheap and that is why they are very successful. Beyond having a very cool, do it all, 10” screen, underpowered, cheap laptop for no particular reason I cannot explain it. Struggling to think of some use for it the only think I can come up with is having it next to the bed for some bedtime net surfing in the comfort of my bed. But does this worth the 300 $ I have to spend for that. I guess not but, since, it is actually more of a gadget and less of an actual computer or work tool it does not matter. I am sure that many would have found very handy uses for it but they do not define a raging new market and I am talking millions of units sold here. So what everybody else are doing with it? I still cannot answer the question.

My shiny powerful new Macbook Pro

I got my new computer...a shiny powerful macbook pro. I have been (wet)dreaming about this for a long time. Here in Europe the mac cost as much as in the US as far the absolute price number is concerned. Lately though the dollar exchange rate has dropped very much to euro. Thus buying stuff from the US is very cheap. A cousin of mine studies in NY and when the semester was over and he was about to come home I sent him the money and bought it on my behalf. It cost me 1500 euros which is very cheap in comparison to the 2500 euros that it would cost me here. Hoorey!

The machine itself is awesome. Using a mac mini at home for years now I had been sick of seeing the spinning ball of death. The poor mini, as much as I love it, was showing its age. Back at work I have a powerhouse but at home I could not even watch an HD video on the mini. I had to use another machine for that or for heavy stuff like gaming. I can now run Azureus, Neoffice, iTunes Firefox and Safari each with 10 tabs open and the machine does not even stall for a moment. Revelation! Power, I need more power!

Since this was my first Intel Mac I have to say I am impressed. I even installed bootcamp to install windows on it to play some not available for mac games. Everything worked flawlessly. A soon as I got I installed everything I could not run on my mini just to get that out of my system.

I have some small complaints. Where is the damn delete button? And I do not mean the button the says delete and it is right in front of me as I type this line. On the keyboard I do not know how to delete a character from the left...no I do not mean a backspace delete..the other side. Oh well. Another small concern that does not have to with the macbook pro itself but with Mac OS X Leopard. I do not like how spaces work. In my Linux box at work I can assign a key combination (using either Gnome or KDE) to the next desktop on the left or on the right. With spaces I can only assign absolute desktop numbers to a key combination. Go figure. I suppose I cannot have it all. Anyways...this machine kicks serious ass.

As a game geek that I am, the first thing I did was to install openVPN in order to be able to play online with friends. We have set up a small game server back at the office that we use to play LAN games from our houses. In a few minutes I had openVPN, teamspeak and Warcraft 3 installed ready to play. The next thing I will do is to install eclipse, jboss and liferay on it to have it ready for battle. I want to see in how many minutes (or seconds) jboss will need to boot with the portal engine on it. I will see about that; In the meantime I will enjoy my new macbook pro. Awesome!