According to Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett, the new $100 laptop, designed to be used by children and adults alike in the developing world.

To quote from the article and Mr Barrett:

"Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop -- I think a more realistic title should be 'the $100 gadget'," Barrett, chairman of the world's largest chipmaker, told a press conference in Sri Lanka. "The problem is that gadgets have not been successful."

Sadly I think he's right - the article goes on to explain that people want to be able to run PC applications - and again I think this is right. People want compatibility with the other millions of computers out there, not cut-down computers that have limited compatibility with other machines (except, maybe, for browsing the Internet and sending email) and the software they run.

This Shark Tank compilation made me chuckle when I saw the comment on international email prices, because I've experienced this very question more than once.

The people who ask generally fall into one of two camps:

• Users who are not technical or business minded, and are just worried about the increased costs.
• Users who are technical/business mind and have trouble understanding why there isn't an increased cost.

But let's face it, it's not exactly an unreasonable train of thought - the email is going further, why shouldn't it cost more?

A few months ago I wrote this piece about distributions and standardization. Among the main points of the post was the theory that Sun's opening of the Solaris OS would lead to a number of Solaris based distributions, in the same way that the release of the Linux kernel had given rise to a number of Linux distributions. It is, interestingly, becoming apparent to other people that OpenSolaris distributions could well be a reality and as common as Linux - as highlight in the first part of this article points out.

Back in the bad old days there were really only a few ways in which you could reach someone. Anything non-urgent was post. If it it was something that needed to be read, we used fax, anything that required an immediate response would be a phone call.

Today, we use email in place of nearly all of these in many situations, but it seems we haven't adapted our use of email along with how we used the old systems. Many of us are guilty of this, myself included.

For example, when you email somebody, do you expect an immediate response?

Sometimes I do, and occasionally I'll get myself into a terrible state worrying about why a client hasn't emailed me back on some important issue. Sometimes it might take them a couple of days to get back to me, maybe because they've been out of the office.

The big news today is that Microsoft is releasing Office formats as a standard. The headline doesn't necessarily match the reality however.

Microsoft are planning on releasing the standard for Office 12 documents, which will be based on XML technology, as a standard approved by the ISO. But are the ISO really a better alternative for releasing this information, than simply publishing the information themselves, online, for everybody to look at?

Why does a document standard need ISO approval?

Because doing so would make it much more likely to appeal to governments are large corporations which like to use standards to ensure interoperability.

The UK is one of the worlds better known free societies, but in the name of technology we are beginning to lose our freedoms.

The recent 90-day debate for terrorists was partially justified through the need to investigate hard drives for offending material.

Now we have the possibility (or more likely probability) that we will have a national camera network designed to monitor number plates. The aim is to ensure everybody has insurance, has taxed their vehicle and ultimately, it would seem, that everybody keeps within the speed limits.

Two years ago, if you asked about virtualization most people would respond with some comment about VMware, possibly Microsoft Virtual Server (which was in beta at the time) and if you were really lucky may have mentioned one or two other packages.

Today, virtualization is a byword for gaining greater efficiency and effectiveness from your hardware and there are many technologies vying for our attention.

Originally virtualization was a software technology, usually an application built on top of an existing operating system that could then be used to run other, multiple, operating systems. For example, you might run VMware on Linux and run Linux, Windows and Solaris virtual machines.

I'm going to continue a look at the news that Sun made an announcement yesterday about some new features for Solaris and OpenSolaris.

I've just commented on the PostgreSQL component - now it's time to look at what else was in the announcement; this time with the OpenSolaris specifics.

The biggest component in the new OpenSolaris release is the inclusion of ZFS support. ZFS is a file system, but unlike other file systems it combines a number of advanced features into a single component to produce a very comprehensive and efficient file system driver.

Sun made an announcement yesterday about some new features for Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Most people are picking up on the inclusion of the PostgreSQL as an included and supported component of the Solaris operating system. Many see PostgreSQL as an interesting choice because it isn't MySQL, the most common and popular of the two choices.

I think PostgreSQL fits into Solaris for the same reason that OpenSolaris fits into the rest of the OS model - it's the less hyped, but exceedingly mature and capable alternative. Incorporating, and more importantly, supporting PostgreSQL on Solaris gives the OS another strong, open source, component that helps to make Solaris a sensible choice for web serving and as a general database platform.

There's a short but important discussion here about the ethical and moral implications of using email in the realm of healthcare.

The story is about medical research, but it spreads to any environment where you want some guarantees about senders and recipients. For example, I welcome the idea of being able to talk to my GP or even just my surgery by email, but irrespective of the level of the discussion, I'm not sure I'd want the content to be read by anybody, casually or otherwise.

There are lots of issues here that go beyond the realms of the current technology. For example, it's all very well for me to encrypt the email I send from my computer so that only my doctor can read it, but how do you ensure that it's me sending the mail, and my doctor receiving it?