Geeks unite to do good
The Christmas season is almost upon us, and the holiday spirit is slowly creeping up on us. Its the season to be good and merry. I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I see computer geeks uniting to help others. Today, I want to talk about two such projects. They are highly popular in the geek world, so its very likely you have heard of them.
The first is the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. It an incredible intiative by the good people from the MIT Media Lab to develop laptop that would cost under a 100$ to produce. These laptops could potential change the face of education in all countries, especialy in developing countries, since it would be easy to distribute one of these laptop to each child. This project has backing from an important collection of heavyweights such as AMD, Google, Nortel and Redhat. The laptop is very cute and has an interesting design. The LCD will feature two modes, a color mode and a B&W mode that will consume less energy and work outside. The laptop will be powered by a lightweight battery, will feature an AC adaptor and a hand crank to manualy charge the battery in countries were electricity is not widespread. You kind find out more about this laptop here. Although it’s not the first time we see this kind of project, I sincerly hope this one works out. Did I mention the laptop looks cute ;-)
The second project I wanted to discuss is the Child’s Play Charity. Created by the author’s of the famous Penny Arcade, the no nonsense (or administrative fee) has collected in the last year over 1 million dollar of toys for sick children. This is gamers giving back to gamers. They are also planning a charity auction in the Seattle area in December. Too bad they don’t sponsor a hospital in Montreal. At least they sponsor a few hospital in Canada. I’m seriously considering giving something this year, and I highly encourage you to do the same, especialy if you’re a gamer ;-)
