Uruguay buys first ‘$100 laptops’

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Hooray! BBC NEWS report…

The first official order for the so-called “$100 laptop” has been placed by the government of Uruguay.

The South American country has bought 100,000 of the machines for schoolchildren aged six to 12.

A further 300,000 may be purchased to provide a machine for every child in the country by 2009.

The order will be a boost for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation behind the project which has admitted difficulties getting concrete orders.

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written,” Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the organisation, recently told the New York Times.

Facebook stats for the UK

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Hmmm… I wonder how reliable these are…

They’re billed as “extrapolations”, which is not encouraging. Still, for what they’re worth, here they are:

Sex
6,407,580 people in the UK
2,320,200 are male
2,789,540 are female

Age
3,241,800 men between 18 and 25
1,565,520 women between 18 and 25
907,620 men between 25 and 35
1,006,420 women between 25 and 35
227,220 men and women between 35 and 60

Professional vs student
5,160,740 who are not students
295,260 are in High School
447,820 are in college
503,760 Alumni

Damien Mulley’s done the same thing for Irish users of Facebook.

Thanks to Rory Cellan-Jones for the original link.

Welcome to dork talk

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Hooray! Stephen Fry is going to write a weekly technology column for the Guardian…

What do I think is the point of a digital device? Is it all about function? Or am I a “style over substance” kind of a guy? Well, that last question will get my hackles up every time. As if style and substance are at war! As if a device can function if it has no style. As if a device can be called stylish that does not function superbly. Don’t get me started …

Schools warned off Microsoft deal

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Wow! I never thought I would live to read this:

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.

The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.

It says talks with Microsoft have not resolved “fundamental concerns” about academic licensing and about Office 2007 and the Vista operating system…

Facebook and the Groucho problem

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This morning’s Observer column…

Pssst … have I got a deal for you! Send me a cheque for £10 and I will sell you a 0.000001 per cent interest in NetworkerColumns Ltd, a privately held company which produces copious quantities of mildly irritating prose. I will then release a press statement announcing that we are both partners in a £1bn company!

Daft, isn’t it? Well, it’s exactly the same logic that has led the mainstream media to hail Facebook as a $15bn company – that is to say, the fifth-most valuable internet company after Google, eBay, Yahoo and Amazon. What happened is that Microsoft, after months of secret negotiations, announced it was paying $240m for a 1.6 per cent stake in Facebook. Multiply 240 million by 100, divide by 1.6 and out pops the ‘valuation’…

The Googlebrain

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Mike Burrows, Google’s Principal Engineer, came to the Cambridge Computer Lab on Wednesday to give a talk on “The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems”, a large-scale distributed lock service used in several Google products. This is a gig he’s done before, but it was interesting to see him in action. As he was talking, the thought that came to mind was that Google has two main advantages over the competition: one is the PageRank algorithm; the other is its ability to manage the Googleplex — the enormous, distributed computing resource that the company owns and operates. Mike’s work is a key element in the latter.