I'm sure by now everyone has heard about the One Laptop per Child program. I'm sure many of us have seen these dinky green things and said "Gee, I wouldn't mind getting one of those for $100."

Well the more I learn about it, the more it seems like maybe kids in developing countries could use $100 (or $180, the current price) better than buying a laptop.

Until I saw this picture:

My friends, that's not just a laptop. That's a game machine! And I want one.

As it turns out, for a short while you'll be able to buy one as part of this new "Give 1 Get 1" program, where for $400 you buy a laptop for a kid in a developing country and then get a second one "for your child."

I'm sure that many of us can think of much better uses of that laptop than learning. Such as using a Nintendo emulator to play Super Mario Bros one.

I have to admit, I'm tempted. If I just earned 50% more than I do right now I'd have already busted out the credit card.

According to the XO-1's creators, one of the goals was to stigmitize the laptop by making it look so childish that kid's wouldn't just sell them on the black market because no adult would want to be seen with one. This plan failed the moment they gave it a d-pad equipped gaming configuration. Although the d-pad might be kind of small for my tastes...

hi eveyrone well tim told me today was talk like a pirate day and asked if I would write for the site.

first off when pirating large sums of media i recommend using dvdrs. if you can't afford a dvd writer then quit being a cheap ass and get one, they ar super cheap and you will save moeny after some time.

second off if your'e going to need to get some kidn of player to view these tvs shows adn yes you can go get a dVD player or something but i recomend you use whatever cheap comptuer parts you have laying around. this way you can install Myth TV or the Linux that can play any format you find on bittoerrent like Divxor mpeg. you may think you need a computer monitor but there are tv adapters for many vidoe cards so if you get one you can watch it on the big screen in full glory just like at the movies.

finaly go to pirate bay or somethign and you can find all the videos you want. really this is a lot better than getting your money stolen by hollywood or M$. don't think you aren't supporting the actors because you are... I read this slashdot article that says the Nine Inch Nails guys said to steal music non-stop because their record company screwed them and if you aren't giving money to artists why should you give money to the people who support the live style they signed contracts to live? there's no reason and only idots pay for music. besides its stupid to pay for movies anyway because artists you just feel good about creatign things and not do it for the money, like see this post here, i am doing it just so i can because i am creative (and so tim will stop bugging me LOL) and i don't need any moeny although if you'd like to support me you can go to my site which has free downloads of many motion pictures and MP3s yoiu can stream to your iPhones and there is a paypal donation link. you will need to google that site because tim is a prude and won't link to it from border-town, because he's afraid the FBI will find him or soemthing. anyway please google my site becaus eI can only keep updating the internet if i get money and don't have to worry as mnuch about my real life because i have a life too people this site is not my life.

step two is to buy an X-box. you can usually buy one from ebay with a bunch of roms and shit on it but if you can't thats no problem becuase you can get it modded easy. just open it up and install a phat new hard drive like mine and you can download games from bittorrent and have any game you want. then you just get some more emus and roms and stuff and you don't even have tyo buy new stuff. if you can't afford it get a job cheapo!

It was so ill I literally got sick from it.

What started as an annoying trickle in the back of my throat is now a non stop symphony of flim creeping up the back of my mouth like a pack reverse lemmings.

I was feeling a little bit better and thought I'd go to work tomorrow, so I could just close my office door and hack and cough and wheeze all day long in privacy, and you know what happens? My damn nose starts bleeding as I'm washing my face and getting ready for bed. Too much warm water next to the nostrils I guess (that and I was shoving a fork up there).

Yep, my body is pretty retarded. First off, it's sending an endless parade of snot out the same already over-tasked orifice I used to breathe, to eat, and to speak from. Now that alone is pretty stupid if you ask me. I mean what's the point? Does my immune system really think there's something down there it can eventually retrieve if it keeps the conveyor belt going? Does anyone ever get ill like this, hack some disgusting piece of hell up and then go "Oh wow, I'm fine now. That was it, thank you body." Hell no.

Second off, all this hacking and flim producing does nothing less than constrict the oxygen super highway the rest of my body needs at full speed throughput 24/7 to keep me from dying. So when I start making some sound that would be more at place in a retirement community it's not like I really have a choice on the matter. I have to do it to clear whatever wreck is on the road and restricting oxygen to one lane.

Now this hacking and stuff, I don't think the body was ever even designed to do it as it involves, as my wife (who I made sick as well) tells me, contorting every muscle in my body to force enough air out to hack that crap up. This pressure is more than the highway was designed for and normally it ends up badly damaging it. As a result I walk around feeling like my throat is on fire or I can't breathe, and have to usually make a trade off - do I want air to feel like I'm not dying or do I want some relief for my vocal chords?

Next I'm going to talk about my nostrils (kudos if you're still reading!). Basically, they're 100% useless. Every couple of days I might faintly smell something but mostly they just hang out at the front of my face and contribute to the ruining of my facial profile. The nostrils are sort of like that volunteer who says he wants to help but leaves the first time he's asked to do anything besides sit around and bullshit with his friends. Point is when my nostrils figure out illness is coming they close shop for awhile and redirect all oxygen / mucus traffic back down to the throat, which was really pretty dick of them because those guys have enough problems to worry about.

Well the right nostril has always been a bigger douche than the left one. Basically, if shit goes down you know the right one is going to do everything in its power to avoid breathing or hurt or do something so I can't use it anymore, which sucks because that means I can't use the left one either (I don't possessive that kind of coordination). Eventually I got to the point that if I get sick like this, I just say to hell with it and tell the nostrils not to worry about anything.

Well, apparently even this isn't good enough for that son-of-a-bitch right nostril because today it started bleeding again when I was simply washing my face. Two days ago it bled when I lay down and tapped my face too hard against a pillow. Apparently barometric pressure and other factors play a big role in determining whether or not the right nostril works, doesn't work, or releases blood from a nearby artery. At this point I'm starting to suspect the right nostril is just doing this for attention.

Anyway, I was hoping I could get to work but with my nostrils pulling this kind of bullshit on me just before I go to sleep I guess that's only a fantasy.

You may remember around E3 I unexpectedly became a pretty big fan of the PSP thanks to Sony's addition of video output. Finally, I thought, there is a successor to the Gameboy Player.

Well, based on what cnet says the video out sounds like SHIT!

Video output:

The new PSP features an AV output jack (which doubles as a standard headphone connector). With the purchase of a special breakout cable (composite and component versions are available for about US$20 apiece), you can display the PSP's audio and video on virtually any TV. But there are a few notable caveats--most notably, the maximum video resolution varies according to the content displayed. Video content from UMD discs (prerecorded movies) and Memory Stick (home-ripped videos) can be displayed at DVD-level 720x480 resolutions--though quality will vary depending upon how the compression of the video in question--

but games are locked into the PSP's native 480x272 display. So, if your TV doesn't have a robust zoom function, you're stuck with a window-boxed experience for games. Another potentially bigger problem with games is that they don't seem to even work on TVs that can't handle progressive-scan (480p) output. So while nearly any HDTV should be fine (with the component cable), older televisions will be limited to displaying non-gaming video output.

What the hell? Even the Gameboy Player had better TV out than this with a resolution of 240 x 160!

Let's see what the friendly guys over at idiot-blog Joystiq have to say:

As you can see, the game has a significant border around it.... you're gonna get borders off the top, bottom, left, and right. Also, because its running at 720 x 480, you know that the aspect ratio will be a little bit wrong....

The games look remarkably good even on a television because of the borders. If they didn't border the image the pixelation might've been too severe.

Wrong, moron. The Gameboy Player outputs a 240 x 160 image so that the image takes up most of the width of the TV and manages to not ruin the aspect ratio in the process. It does this using a miraculously nice filter that keeps you from remembering you're playing something with a 240 x 160 resolution while also enjoying an image that fits the TV you bought the Gameboy Player to utilize.

The PSP has a resolution of 480 x 272. This is higher than the standard SNES resolution of 256x224, which I recall could fit an entire TV back in the day. It is also higher than the Sega Genesis's resolution of 320 x 240 or most of the resolutions employed by the Playstation One.

Anyone right now who's saying "oh this is ok" or "if they didn't border the image the pixelation might've been too severe" is a damned liar who's sitting in bed with Satan. Yes, Sony could have made the output work. It just would have required some internal hardware to scale the image.

Of course they didn't do that, because they're Sony. They didn't even include the ability to output to a normal TV either. That's right! If you don't own a fancy new HDTV, you can go straight to hell because the games won't output to a standard definition TV at all. I'm sure that's a bullet-point on the back of the packaging.

For all the rhetoric about how the game "press" tries to be like consumer reports, I've never once heard how worthless the PSP 2000's TV-output was until now. I can't imagine how crest-fallen I'd have been if I'd spent $200 on a PSP only to be totally unable to play games on my 32 inch standard television.

I'd probably be just like this poor gentleman named pakkman781:

I just found out, to my great dismay, that my single main reason for buying the PSP slim, the TV-Output, has been crippled so that I won't be able to play games over a composite connection. Everything else will work, but not games. So here is my plea to all the good people out there: Please find a way to enable Game video output over composite cables!

The discussion at Max Console indicates that Sony went with the cheapest solution they could to implement TV output almost as an after-thought and is now billing it as one of the main reasons to get the new PSP. This almost worked on me, too, as I had somehow forgotten that everything Sony says or writes is a complete and utter lie.