Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop

You've probably all heard about the $100 one-laptop-per-child scheme from MIT Media Labs. If you haven't, its a scheme to provide laptops to children in third-world countries. It's the brain child of Nicholas Negroponte, head and co-founder of the Media Labs.
















The debate has been raging about whether these laptops will actually be any practical help to the children, many of whom will be living on less than a dollar a day. To date, we had been hearing that they would not be commercially available, but I read an article in which Nicholas Negroponte said that they would allow a commercial version, to support research into ways to make production cheaper for the not-for-profit version. I think that's incredibly great news for the hardware market in developed companies, as the competition will force conventional hardware providers to reduce their own prices, which can only be good.