100$ Laptops on flickr

I had blogged about the MIT initiative a few months back. The pictures of the laptop can now be seen on flickr (thanks to Pete!).

The nature of the laptop to be expected (from the Project Website)

The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

Quails, the American Passion

I have nothing particular in mind writing this except for a strange coincidence of listening to Tom Wolfe reading about his book 'A Man in Full' and the Dick Cheney's quail shooting incident.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/ra/wolfe.ram The reading session was in the November of 1998.

In the audio file, if you listen to the first 5 minutes, Tom remarks...

He starts talking about private jets and then starts to say: "There seems to be the new Expensive American Passion. In Georgia 10 thousand, 20 thousand sometimes 50 thousand acres of land dedicated to shooting quails. ... You can have only two shooters at a time, as the birds don't fly over, but burst out of the tall grass in every possible direction. If you had 3 or more, you could have hunters shooting each other than the quails..."

Have fun!