14 DAY TRIAL // The founder of the Media Lab at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Nicholas Negroponte held a speech yesterday in which he talked about Bill Gates and his statements regarding the $100 laptop and the open-source OS behind the device.
The father of the laptop for third world children criticized the richest man in the world for his statements on the device.
"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, jeez, 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," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum.
Negroponte said that it's not about a weak computer, but a slim, thin and fast one and that Gates' statements only hinder the laptop's distribution program.
Another extremely interesting statement made by Nicholas Negroponte was that his organization was already working with Microsoft to make a version of the laptop that will run a stripped-down version of Windows.
Given the circumstances, the rhetorical question asked by Media Lab's founder is as logical as it gets.
"So jeez, why criticize me in public?"
Another problem was the dimension of the Linux code, which has to be reduced in order to match the requirements imposed by Media Lab's creation. Negroponte says that Linux has gotten fat lately and that it has to lose weight.
The laptop will incorporate a 500 MHz AMD processor, 128 MB of RAM, a 500MB Flash card which will act as a hard-disk, a 7 inch display, WiFi networking and the famous crank.
