On 13 December last year, the One Laptop per Child project announced a plan to make its $100 notebook for third-world kiddies available in Q4 2006, but of course the inevitable overruns have since set in. It won't ship on time and, allegedly, won't cost $100. Perhaps the slow progress is due to the 1,825 reboots that project founder Nicholas Negroponte has apparently had to endure in the last 12 months. While bigging up the OLPC and simultaneously talking down conventional PCs, Double-N complained, “My computer crashes five times a day.” Given that Sneak hibernates a perfectly ordinary Windows XP ThinkPad at the end of every day and suffers an unscheduled reboot only when the moon has turned blue, Sneak is forced to assume that either Negroponte is using a very old, very unstable PC, or is turning his laptop upside-down and shaking it, Etch-a-Sketch-style, whenever he wants to clear the screen.

12 Dec 2006