Although Bill Gates is generous when it comes to donating impressive sums of money to third world countries for research of anti-malaria vaccines and to prevent newborn deaths, he's not so nice when it comes to making technology available to everyone.

The chairman of the Redmond giant was unimpressed with the $100 laptop and made a series of nasty remarks towards the device developed by the MIT Media Lab, led by Nicholas Negroponte.

"The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk ... and with a tiny little screen. If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection, and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying to type," Reuters quoted Gates as saying at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum.

However, before mocking the $100 laptop, the 'generous' Gates showcased the UMPC, running Windows, not Linux, with an Intel processor, not an AMD one, and with a price ranging between $600 and $1000, not 100 dollars.

Negroponte's laptop will be sold to governments in countries like Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina and Egypt, who will distribute it to every needy child.

We can't refrain from asking what is Mr. Gates thinking when he says that the device should not have a crank, because in the regions where electrical current is not a common commodity, the fact that you can generate it yourself is more than welcome. For Mr. Gates, a price ranging between $600 and $1000 might not be much, but for a family who hardly makes that money in one year, the sum is humongous.

Intel was not too pleased with the MIT device either, Craig Barrett, president of the CPu company, calling it a gadget.

"It turns out what people are looking for is something that has the full functionality of a PC. Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown-up PC ... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for hand cranks for power," Barrett said

Both Gates and Barrett are not happy with the fact that Negroponte's laptop runs Linux and uses an AMD processor, which is unacceptable for the two presidents, but since this is a noble cause, it would have been wiser if they kept their opinions to themselves and stuck to their own achievements.