Thursday, January 15, 2009 Ng: Netbooks and the One Laptop Per Child By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
ONE of the most significant developments that happened in the techworld in 2008 was the rise of the netbook or the subnotebook.
Before 2008, a smaller notebook was usually sold at a premium—you have to pay more to get a small notebook. Then Asus introduced their
EeePC line and priced it around $300 to $400. On its first year, over five million EeePC units were used. It was such a hit that almost all PC manufacturers from HP to Dell to Lenovo to Acer followed suit.
The one that started the trend, I think, was actually OLPC. This was the One Laptop per Child non-profit organization by Nicholas.
Negroponte whose goal was to introduce a small notebook computer that is priced at $100 and would be donated—or sold—to developing countries. Although they could not hit the $100-mark, they were able to come up with a credible notebook for less than $200, which at that time was a huge price difference from notebook computers then.
The group came up with the OLPC, and on its first year also scored success by being able to donate over 500,000 of these units to the developing countries. What they did was to use the G1G1 promo— Get One, Give One. Somebody interested in the notebook would buy one for $400, and for that amount, he gets an OLPC, and another one unit would be donated out. I think that effort deserves great commendation, not only in helping bridge the digital divide, but in opening a new segment for a whole new affordable notebook line.
Another great development in 2008 was the further development of the Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is free and made up of contributions by people worldwide. Currently, it is available in 10 languages, with over 2.6 million articles in English, and over 500,000 articles each in German, French, Japanese, Polish, Dutch and Italian.
It has become such an authority that it is now the world’s fourth most visited website, with thousands of articles accessed and changed almost every hour. In fact, it is also so authoritative that when you do a search, the articles in Wikipedia normally also come out on top - meaning it is judged universally to be credible and almost entirely accurate.
Such is its credibility that in a fund raising to finance its continued operations, the Wikimedia Foundation raised over $6 million in donations with over 125,000 donors worldwide. Thus, its articles are available free of charge until June 30, 2009.
Microsoft’s Windows 7 is the most downloaded software online since the beta copy was made available for public download last week. Although Microsoft has not disclosed when it will be released, a lot of people are speculating that it is very likely within this year while others believe it will be around August.
The Windows 7 beta is reported to be feature complete, which means all Microsoft is doing is just to fix bugs without adding new features to the OS and ensure the code is stable.
However, no one has seen anything close to an Office 14 public beta yet, and Microsoft won’t publicly comment on the software or its release date. However, because of perceived issues with Microsoft Vista, everybody believes that Microsoft will find it to their interest to release the new Windows 7 as soon as possible rather than later.
The minimum system requirements Microsoft suggests for the new software include a 1GHz processor, 1GB of main memory, 16GB of available disk space, and support for DX9 graphics. The suggested setup is close to what is recommended for Vista.
