OLPC Gets Much Love From Peruvian Children
From cnn.com:
 ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) — Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.
These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can’t get enough of their “XO” laptops.
At breakfast, they’re already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits.
At night, they’re dozing off in front of them — if they’ve managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines.
“It’s really the kind of conditions that we designed for,” Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.
Peru made the single biggest order to date — more than 272,000 machines — in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.
Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through “Give One, Get One,” a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.
One Laptop Per Child project is spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte and aims to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves with a help of XO Laptop.
Linux Is Not Y2k38 Compliant(?)
Y2k38.info writes:
On January 19, 2038, UNIX-based programs and UNIX-like operating systems will run out of time. To be more precise, at 3:14:07 GMT, UNIX will be exactly 1 billion seconds old. Many see this as a milestone, but from a technical point of view, this can mean disaster for computer programs and systems around the world.
UNIX keeps track of time in a 4-byte integer that represents the number of seconds after January 1, 1970 12:00:00. For example, a time of 60 represents the date January 1, 1970 12:01:00. A 4-byte integer has a maximum value of 2,146,483,547. This time (known as maximum time) corresponds exactly to January 19, 2038 3:14:07.
This explains why UNIX programs in large, were pretty much unaffected by the Y2K bug – since it kept track of time in units of seconds. However, its own version of Y2K will occur a second past the maximum time.
At exactly January 19, 2038 3:14:08 (one second past the maximum UNIX time), one of two things can happen to programs that keep track of time with this format. It will either crash and stop functioning altogether, or it will rollback time to the beginning of UNIX time: the first minute of 1970.
Tried this on my workstation, it worked. Didn’t see ant malfunctioning programs whatsoever. Or should I wait for year 2038? Am I even still be alive then? 
GNOME Gets Favored Over KDE In Ubuntu’s Next Version
The battle for the best Linux desktop still continues as Ubuntu’s sponsor Canonical announced that KDE will not be included in its Long Term Support (LTS) for the next release. Since the upcoming version of KDE, KDE 4.0, still has a long way to go, Kubuntu Desktop lead Scott James Remnant explains that KDE is not mature enough to be included in the LTS. Ubuntu is to release version 8.0, Hardy Heron, in April 2008.
news.com writes:
GNOME, the default user interface for Ubuntu, will receive the support, but KDE won’t. The reason, according to Canonical, which sponsors Ubuntu and is trying to make a business of selling the support contracts, is simply that KDE is at an awkward transitional period between two versions, the old-line 3.5 and the imminent and significantly different 4.0.
Though Ubuntu-KDE users are relatively small compard to Ubuntu-GNOME users, KDE still deserves the same attention that GNOME gets. But with its upcoming release of version 4.0 set close to the release of Hardy Heron, it is a case of bad timing.
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