Rs 500 laptop display on Feb 3

NEW DELHI: A $10 laptop (Rs 500) prototype, with 2 GB RAM capacity, would be on display in Tirupati on February 3 when the National Mission on
Education through Information and Communication Techology is launched.

The $10 laptop project, first reported in TOI three years ago, has come as an answer to the $100 laptop of MIT's Nicholas Negroponte that he was trying to hardsell to India. The $10 laptop has come out of the drawing board stage due to work put in by students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras and involvement of PSUs like Semiconductor Complex. “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down,” R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.

Apart from questioning the technology of $100 laptops, the main reason for HRD ministry's resistance to Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was the high and the hidden cost that worked out to be $200.

The mission launch would also see demonstration of e-classroom, virtual laboratory and a better 'Sakshat' portal that was launched more than two years ago. Sources also said that the ministry has entered into an agreement with four publishers — Macmillan, Tata McGraw Hill, Prentice-Hall and Vikas Publishing — to upload their textbooks on 'Sakshat'. Five per cent of these books can be accessed free.

The mission, with an 11th plan outlay of Rs 4,612 crore, is aimed at making a serious intervention in enhancing the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education. The mission has two major components. One, content generation through its portal 'Sakshat', and two, building connectivity along with providing access devices for institutions and learners.

In this context, government would give Rs 2.5 lakh per institution for 10 Kbps connection and subsidise 25% of costs for private and state government colleges.

The mission would seek to extend computer infrastructure and connectivity to over 18,000 colleges in the country, including each department of nearly 400 universities and institutions of national importance. The mission would focus on appropriate e-learning procedures, providing facility of performing experiments through virtual laboratories, online testing and certification, online availability of teachers to guide and mentor learners, and utilization of EduSat and DTH.

Microsoft to Sponsor Open Source Initiative

Microsoft has signed a deal with Open Source Census, a project aimed at finding out what open source programs are most frequently used by companies as well as how many companies are using them, to sponsor the initiative. Open Source Census’s goal is to use the information resulted from the study to find better ways of convincing more and more companies to use open source programs in their daily activity.

So the question seems to be why would Microsoft, a company that makes money out of selling software, want to support a project that seems to be aimed against its interests. What is obvious is that there must be something that Microsoft hopes to benefit of, since it’s well known that the Redmond-based company knows how to make money from every situation.

There are two scenarios that could both be true, and that Microsoft can take advantage of. First of all, it might be a PR stunt that the software giant uses to gain the public’s perception of it actively supporting the open source community. The company could latter use this episode to claim that it is involved in open source efforts, without contributing with what it is essential for this source of initiative: code.

The other idea could be that Microsoft would use the information discovered by the study to gain a better understanding about where it should make changes to its products to make them better than the competition, and what products it can stop focusing on, knowing that the companies prefer similar open source ones.

Which of the two, if any, is the right answer remains to be seen. What is probably true is that Microsoft would not sponsor anything just out of good will.

Mozilla shows off Firefox Mobile interface concept - Video

Want to know what the upcoming Firefox Mobile web browser will look like? So do we. And the video above may or may not give us an idea. Aza Raskin, the head of user experience for Mozilla describes the concept interface shown in the video as a "conceptual mockup" of an "experimental UI." In other words, there's no gaurantee that the final version of Firefox Mobile will bear any resemblance to the concept. But then again, it might look exactly like this.

In a nutshell, the concept UI shares some features with Firefox 3, including tabbed browsing and the "awesome bar," which shows you results from your browsing history when you enter a URL. But there are a few aspects that have been designed with mobile devices in mind:

• You can navigate a page by clicking and dragging it. There are no scrollbars, which means more screen real estate.
• There are also no back, forward, refresh, or other buttons on the main screen. The web page takes up the whole screen.
• You can find navigation buttons by dragging the screen to the right, which brings up a series of buttons on the left side of the screen, including back, forward, bookmark, and page info.
• You minimize a window by dragging it to the left or right and clicking the zoom button. You can then navigate between open tabs or open a new one.
• When you reach the bottom of a web page, there will be buttons for performing specific functions like submitting a page to Digg or del.icio.us or mapping an address found on a web page

Want to try the user interface yourself? There's a web-based demo available. And the code is open source if you want to check it out or contribute to the project.
[via Mozilla Labs]