Bill Gates mocks $100 laptop
Following in the footsteps of Intel's Craig Barrett, who called the $100 laptop a gadget last year, Bill Gates has openly mocked the device. The $100 laptop is an MIT project sponsored in part by Google, and it runs a variant of Red Hat Linux on an AMD Geode GX500 processor. Gates stigmatized the device's small screen and lack of hard disk-based storage:
"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," Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.While Gates raises some interesting points, it's worth mentioning that the $100 Laptop project is also known as One Laptop per Child—it wasn't designed to be shared. The hand crank is also designed as a backup for environments without electricity, and the device features 802.11b Wi-Fi connectivity for Internet access."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," Gates said.
