THE founder of the ambitious $US100 ($121) laptop project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, has revealed the machine now costs $US175. It will also be able to run Windows in addition to its home-grown, open-source interface.
Nicholas Negroponte, the former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who now heads the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, updated analysts and journalists on where the effort stands, saying "we are perhaps at the most critical stage of OLPC"s life". At least seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white XO computers: Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya. But it remains unclear which ones will be first to pay up