Earth to Nicholas Negroponte, come in please


His stupid hundred-dollar PC is the ugliest piece of crap I’ve ever seen. There, I said it. Look at him with those stupid glasses propped halfway down his nose. This guy really thinks he’s the shizzle, doesn’t he? Mr. Big Brain from the MIT Media Lab. A real intellectual. Pop quiz: Name one thing this guy has ever predicted correctly. Question Two: Name one worthwhile product he has ever built. Question Three: Name one useful idea that has ever come out of the MIT Media Lab in its entire history. The one time I visited those guys they were friggin around with this like “robot” contraption that emulated a cockroach or something. “Yeah, and it can kind of like, uh, learn and navigate around its environment, so it’s kind of like artificial intelligence or whatever.” Great, you’ve spent fourteen million bucks in DARPA grant money to make a friggin Roomba. Except yours lacks the useful vacuum cleaner feature. Nice. Now these whiz-kids have dreamed up a half-baked PC that you have to crank up to get running. If I were some kid in the Third World and I got up on Christmas morning and found this frog-green pile of crap waiting for me under the tree, I’d fly to Cambridge and shove my hundred-dollar PC up Nicholas Negroponte’s butt. The best part is they aren’t even going to give these kids any training. They’re just gonna drop the PC in their lap and say, “Here you go, Pradeep, it’s your very own cheapo plastic Linux PC with no hard disk and no manual. Just start typing away on the keyboard and figure it out for yourself. Why, soon you’ll be cranking out J2EE apps. Then you can move to Bangalore and work for IBM.”