I am on record as considering the Media Lab effort as mainly
smoke-and-mirrors. They set a benchmark for next March which should
produce empirical evidence for their lack of progress. Signing
agreements to deliver the impossible, if not the inappropriate, is
not substitute for actual delivery of sustainable machines.

If the Media Lab are even close I will applaud them but even then
they are in the same boat as the Simputer. The Simputer and similar
Latin American efforts are well meant but they are only scaled down
versions of the traditional desktop or notebook computer.

I believe they about to be leap-frogged by the network computer idea
being worked on by NDIYO in Africa (see: http://www.ndiyo.org ), by
Novatium in India (see http://www.novatium.com ) and others. A
usable product is about to be rolled out in the form of the well
funded Novatium network computer in India. The server-based software
strategy is a huge plus several grounds.

Of course, the question remains: Where is the "win-win"? Who uses it
for what? The connected device is the start of the challenge, not the
end of the challenge.

Sam Lanfranco
Distributed Knowledge Project
York University
Nearby Mon Oct 3 17:34:02 2005