kottke.org posts about One Laptop per Child
Lisa Strausfeld's team at Pentagram has designed the interface for the One Laptop Per Child computer. "Users can move outward from the Home view, where they can set preferences like color, to the Friends view, where they can chat with their friends, to the larger Neighborhood view, where they can locate other users and gather around an activity."
Update: The OLPC human interface guidelines document has a lot more on the interface. (thx, bob)
One Laptop Per Child project abandons hand crank in favor of a foot pedal attached to the AC adaptor. Negroponte also says Linux is too "fat" for the 500 MHz AMD processors they plan to use. -dj
One Laptop Per Child project and Red Hat release their Software Developer Kit. Includes a laptop simulator (since the hardware doesn't exist yet), and a rich set of compatibility tools. -dj
The $100 Laptop being designed by the MIT Media Lab was recently unveiled. It's a bright green, has a hand-crank for recharging the battery, flash memory, USB ports, networking, etc. The target audience is children in third-world countries.
Nicholas Negroponte spoke this morning about the MIT Media Lab's $100 laptop initiative. "One does not think of community pencils--kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful." More info at BBC News and Technology Review.