From School Technology Leadership Blog: “A laptop for every child on Earth.”

A ’sound byte’ from Wired News interview with Nicholas Negroponte (chair of the One Laptop Per Child initiative):

WN: So you’re shipping this with development tools installed?

Negroponte: Yes. Absolutely.

WN: We’re talking about C compilers and Make and the whole programming environment?

Negroponte: Yup.

WN: Is the goal literally to make computers available to every child that wants one in the world?

Negroponte: It’s every child in the world whether they want one or not. They may not know they want one.

WN: You’re going to be unleashing a whole new generation of open-source programmers, who otherwise would never, possibly, have gotten their hands on a computer.

Negroponte: I hope so. I hope we unleash half a billion of them.

Ummm…. Wow. Talk about Power to the People! Brace yourself folks, the world seems to be spinning awfully fast right now.

• Have you switched your operating system today?
• Free and Open Source Software
• You know you’re a rock star… Now prove it!
• High Tech? More like highly nostalgic
• Schools lagging behind in tech.

Alfred Thompson
1/24/2006

So you know that a Windows XP system with the .NET Foundation update (a free download and installed on tens of millions of computers already) includes compilers for Visual Basic .NET, C/C++, C# and J# right? So the ability to write programs for Windows is already out there. Visual Basic .NET is a lot easier for new programmers to learn on their own than C in my opinion. Also the Visual Studio Express editions are very powerful, easy to use IDEs and, yes, free.

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