A new laptop computer for just £99 sounds like the kind of offer found in a spam e-mail or on a dodgy auction website. But the British company Elonex is launching the country’s first sub £100 computer later this month and hopes to be making 200,000 of them by the summer. It will be aimed at schoolchildren and teenagers, and looks set to throw the market for budget laptops wide open.

Celeste Lyn Paul is Senior Interaction Architect for User-Centered Design, Inc., organizes the KDE Usability Project, and works with open source projects such as KDE, Linux Foundation, OpenUsability, and Ubuntu.

4 links about OOXML, before next weeks' big vote at the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting, on how it now fails it's own criteria for importance, how restricted the BRM will be, about worries over Micrsoft's patent promise, and a pic of the printed spec.

"In the past few months in the Debian-EeePC team, a number of interesting things have been happening. [...] Thanks to the efforts of numerous users and developers who are being added to our ranks daily, we expect by the time Lenny releases we will be well on our way to providing a pure Debian solution for the Eee. Whether or not everything needed for the Eee is in Lenny at that time remains to be seen. We need to allow for how long it takes to get new drivers into the kernel. But if we miss the release, we will certainly provide backports and look forward to full support in the following release."

I recently came across some Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) information Microsoft has published on their website, showing how using Windows Server gives you a better Return On Investment (ROI) than Linux. Given the ubiquity of Microsoft Windows, you may think that what they have to say would hold a good deal of truth to it. I think the truth is a little closer to "Microsoft makes it as expensive as possible to break out of the lock-in their products create."

"Without «pushing the boat out», the gradual introduction of free software in Cuba becomes significant to go ahead in the process of incorporating informatics into society. [...] For Free software to be truly free, it has to have an open code, but not necessarily the other way around. To use open code technology does not mean we collaborate with the ideals of technological justice. Open code use can make people become more dependent. Microsoft, just to mention a name, presents the world two very clear licences that meet the requirements of the Open Source Initiative..."

"Recently, Students for Free Culture -- a non-profit organization dear to my heart -- elected its new board. Several months ago, the group voted to hold its elections using the same preferential election method system that Debian uses. To help make their election easier I agreed to support them with a new set of features in Selectricity aimed at more structured organizational decision-making. Currently Selectricity is more geared toward more informal QuickVotes. From a democratic and voting technology perspective, the election was a huge success..."