Meet the cheapest laptop in the world

• Matthew Elliott
• 27 comments

From credit card debt and school loans to rising gas prices and adjustable mortgages, there are plenty of reasons why consumers in the developed world can’t afford a laptop. Not to mention the fact that underfunded schools and underprivileged kids also exist in the developed parts of the world. Enter the Medison Celebrity laptop. It’s a $150 laptop from Swedish company Medison that’s available through the Columbus, Ohio-based online reseller 2Checkout.com.

(Credit: Medison Europe Limited)

With Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC hovering around $175, and Intel’s Classmate PC expected to cost more than $200, the Medison Celebrity laptop can lay claim to being the cheapest laptop in the world. And it boasts an impressive feature set for the money. For starters, it features a large, wide-screen 14-inch WXGA display and weighs a reasonable 4.8 pounds. Powering the Medison Celebrity is a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron M 370 processor and 256MB of memory. You may scoff at such a meager memory allotment considering all the reviews out there that complain whenever a PC serves up less than 1GB these days, but the Medison Celebrity doesn’t have to power Vista or any other flavor of Windows. Instead, it uses Fedora Linux, which requires less muscle to run than a Windows OS and no Microsoft licensing fee. Rounding out the specs are a 40GB hard drive, an integrated Via PN800 graphics chip, and 802.11g Wi-Fi. You also get stereo speakers, three USB 2.0 ports, and a PC Card slot. Medison backs the laptop with a one-year warranty but offers little detail about the terms.

IBM tells employees to behave in Second Life

Big Blue guidelines say don’t discriminate, harass or use inappropriate avatars

By Jon Brodkin, Network World, 07/27/07

 

The Nature of Lisp

 

Taken from http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html#note-blaise

chicken brains

Wary diners ask: Is fish from China?

After the FDA voices safety concerns about certain Chinese exports, some Americans are beginning to look more closely at restaurant selections.

By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 25, 2007 edition

language and tought

Many psychological experiments concern the means by which the brain processes, stores, and recalls information. Some studies^{[citation needed]} concerning the storage of linguistic utterances (e.g. when listening to someone speak, or when reading a book) suggest that in most cases the brain stores the actual words recorded by the senses for only a very short period of time and that for people with the capability to hear spoken language, this representation is phonetic, even for written language. (This is related to, for example, the relatively high frequency of spelling mistakes involving homophones like “there” and “their”.) Unless special effort is made at rote memorization, longer term storage of utterances involves distillation into a simpler semantic representation. Thus when people are asked to recall an utterance, they are generally able to easily replicate the meaning – they capture the “gist” of what was said or written – but are unable to reproduce the exact wording (though in many cases they do not realize they are using slightly different words than the original speaker [see Telephone game]). The existence of a semantic representation distinct from phonetic representation raises questions about how closely tied the two layers are, or need to be.

google talk

Peter Seibel

ABSTRACT In the late 1920’s linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf hypothesized that … all » the thoughts we can think are largely determined by the language we speak. In his essay “Beating the Averages” Paul Graham echoed this notion and invented a hypothetical language, Blub, to explain why it is so hard for programmers to appreciate programming language features that aren’t present in their own favorite language. Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis hold for computer languages? Can you be a great software architect if you only speak Blub? Doesn’t Turing equivalence imply that language choice is just another implementation detail? Yes, no, and no says Peter Seibel, language lawyer (admitted, at various times, to the Perl, Java, and Common Lisp bars) and author of the award-winning book _Practical Common Lisp_. In his talk, Peter will discuss how our choices of programming language influences and shapes our pattern languages and the architectures we can, or are likely to, invent. He will also discuss whether it’s sufficient to merely broaden your horizons by learning different programming languages or whether you must actually use them.

classmethod python

classmethod(function)

Returns a class method for function.

A class method receives the class as implicit first argument, just like an instance method receives the instance. To declare a class method, use this idiom:

class C:
    @classmethod
    def f(cls, arg1, arg2, ...): ...

The @classmethod form is a function decorator — see def for details.

It can be called either on the class (such as C.f()) or on an instance (such as C().f()). The instance is ignored except for its class. If a class method is called for a derived class, the derived class object is passed as the implied first argument.

My personal experience is that I almost *never* want a staticmethod.
The things that I would have written as a staticmethod in Java I simply
write as a module-level function in Python.

I do occasionally used classmethods though to build alternate
constructors. I recently had a class with a constructor that looked like:

class C(object):
def __init__(self, *args):
…

I already had code working with this constructor, but I needed to add an
optional ‘index’ parameter. I found the clearest way to do this was
something like:

class C(object):
def __init__(self, *args):
…
@classmethod
def indexed(cls, index, *args):
…
obj = cls(*args)
obj.index = index
…
return obj

Then the classes that needed the ‘index’ parameter simply use
C.indexed() as the constructor instead of C().

STeVe

Python Generator Tricks

By Pramode C.E.

The Python programming language’s support for generators is described in PEP 255. This article demonstrates a few simple programs which make use of this feature to do some fun stuff like filtering out prime numbers, representing an `infinite’ series expansion in a finite way, applying the Euler `accelerator’ to make a series converge faster etc. Many of the programs which I describe here have been taken from `test_generators.py’ which is available with the Python source distribution. A few ideas have been stolen from the Computer Science classic, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Finding the found

Spotting Bias In The News From The Bush Administration. A Really Really Serious Skill…

Seldom do you come across a story with such blatant bias that even a mainstream news reporter can spot it. Such is the case with a story in the Globe today headlined “Study says 95% of Guantanamo detainees had posed a threat”. The story was nicely written by William Glaberson of the New York Times News Service.

IEEE News

1. Amended Standards Policy Prevents Patent Stranglehold
In a restatement of its policy, the IEEE Standards Association now
requires that members of IEEE standards development projects reveal
any knowledge they have of patents they or their employer hold on
intellectual property being considered for inclusion in the standards.
To learn more, visit http://bmsmail3.ieee.org:80/u/6719/04235081

2. New Search Engine Zeros In on Documents From Scholarly Societies
Need to dig up the latest documents in your field but hate to deal with the
clutter of the Internet? A new search engine eliminates that clutter by not
searching the Internet aimlessly. Scitopia.org can scour more than
3 million documents stored in the digital libraries of the IEEE and 14 other
leading science and technology societies. Read on at
http://bmsmail3.ieee.org:80/u/6720/04235081

3. Hacking With Heart
Winner of IEEE Spectrum/Make magazine’s Do-It-Yourself contest, Alan
Nishioka, solved adult engineering problems when he was a child and
improves children’s toys as an adult. Read about the IEEE member’s
winning project, a computerized Etch-A-Sketch that can easily draw
curved lines, at http://bmsmail3.ieee.org:80/u/6721/04235081