Dritte

CNN reports on "Bill Gates mocks MIT's $100 laptop".

"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.

Ironically, Gates implies a Grameen bank's Grameen Telecom type of "shared use" model whereas MIT's $100 laptop has the theme "One laptop per child".

I am just wondering what reactions should we expect from Bill Gates when we at Dritte announce our low-cost computing platforms which expect to go BELOW $100 :-)

Also, see a related story "The Lessons of the $100 Laptop"; they changed the hand crank design after Bill's comments!!!

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 09:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the early good news for Dritte includes funding from MSR for one of the projects titled "Poor Man's Broadband: Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking" by Umar Saif. It is interesting to note that this is the first time ever in history that MSR has funded a project in Pakistan. Here are links to some of the related press releases:

• Microsoft Research Awards $1.7 Million in Academic Funding, February 2006
• Microsoft Research (MSR) Sponsors First Ever Project in Pakistan, March 2006

Next steps? I personally think that one of the first steps could be that we collaborate with the MSR Digital Inclusion RFP Winners to organize a workshop. ASPLOS XII has an open call for workshop proposals. The cross-fertilizing research in areas of hardware, architecture, compilers, operating systems, networking, and applications makes ASPLOS a good choice but the deadline of March 22nd might be too close for comfort. Other conferences which could be a good venue for such a workshop?

Posted by Muneeb Ali at 04:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)