Orange. Vivid, ripe-for-the-picking orange. That’s the latest color to enlist in Nicholas Negroponte’s campaign to bring low-cost computing to schoolchildren and their families in developing nations. The secondary color joins lime green, powder blue and rain-slicker yellow (unveiled last month; click here for more images) in the palette of options for prototypes being touted by Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child organization.
A working prototype of the $100 PC design gets a tryout on Tuesday at a One Laptop Per Child meeting that brought together task forces from the seven countries where the laptops will be launched.\r\n
\r\nThe Linux-based design forgoes a hard drive, but will have four USB ports. Wireless broadband is expected to let several neighboring laptops form an ad hoc local network. The preliminary schedule calls for shipment-ready units by the end of 2006 or early 2007.
Bill Detwiler is the Editor for Technical Content and Ecosystem at Celonis. He is the former Editor in Chief of TechRepublic and previous host of TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer podcast and Cracking Open, CNET and TechRepublic's popular online show. Previously, Bill was an IT manager in the social research and energy industries. He has bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Louisville, where he has also lectured on computer crime and crime prevention.
