Get your own $180 laptop -- if you donate a second one in the One Laptop Per Child project

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2007, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2007, The Post-Standard

The only thing Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project couldn't manage was the price. His plan to build millions of laptops for kids in poor nations is doing very well otherwise.
And even that one slip-up in financial planning can be forgiven. In 1995, when Negroponte announced his plan to build enough cheap laptops so that every needy kid in the world could own one, his target price seemed ridiculous -- $100 per laptop, only 5 percent of what a typical laptop cost back then.
Inflation and the cost of manufacturing pushed the price to almost double the original goal. But even at $180, the cute little XO computers are a bargain unlike anything I've seen before. They're so rugged they're rain- and dust-proof, drop-proof and child-proof. They have built-in networking, last a long time on batteries alone, have a non-Microsoft operating system, ensuring better reliability, and can run off literally any kind of power source.
They even have a solar recharger.
Before Negroponte started the One Laptop Per Child project, he ran the MIT Media Laboratory and was widely hailed as a visionary who would help guide the future of technology. But he gave technology a kick in the pants with the laptop project.
Negroponte knew that kids can't be trusted to take good care of laptops, so he decided to make a laptop that could take all kinds of abuse. There's more: By making the new laptop so cheap that it could be given away, he got rid of the argument against letting kids handle anything expensive in the first place.
Starting Monday, you'll be able to buy an XO laptop for yourself -- as long as you buy one for a poor child in a developing nation. This makes sure Americans can't snap up the supply and keep kids who really need these laptops from getting them.
To get one while giving one, go to www.xogiving.org and click the "Donate" button. You'll be charged $400 for the two laptops, plus shipping. If you really don't want an XO laptop for yourself, you can pay $200 to have one sent to a child. You can donate more, of course, with each $200 paying for a laptop. All donations are tax-deductible.
The project points out that the XO laptop was designed specifically with children in mind:
"The XO's screen can be viewed as clearly as a newspaper in broad daylight, and the wireless range of the XO is several times longer than your average laptop," the project says.
The laptop comes with a Web browser that's based on Firefox, a document viewer, the AbiWord word processor, an e-mail program, an instant-messaging program, a journal, multimedia authoring and playback software, a music composition suite, graphics software and games. The operating system is Linux.