Triplesourced

The Thai government has joined India in deciding to drop out of the $100 laptop scheme . Given the fun and games happening in Thai politics these days, there is a good chance that this could all change next week – or whenever the next coup happens. But for now Education Minister Wijit Srisa-arn claims that the $100 laptop, or OLPC project as it is officially known, is an expensive distraction and intended to simply win political support. Not content with axing the OLPC scheme, the education minister has also axed plans to provide every primary and secondary school in the country with broadband.

The ideal sitting angle to avoid back pain is not 90 degrees after all but more like 135 according to researchers . A study at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen using magnetic resonance imaging showed that sitting up straight puts unnecessary strain on the spine and could cause chronic back pain because of trapped nerves or slipped discs. Sounds like the ideal excuse to ditch your PC, desk and chair for a laptop and beanbag/hammock. We always new that sitting at a desk all day was very, very wrong.

The first 1000 machines from the One Laptop per Child project have gone into production. The new batch of notebooks are going to face some vigorous testing according to OLPC to make sure the design is fit for being bounced about in Africa or whether they eventually end up.

You can find some photos of the interestingly green machine here

“Tests will include dropping the XOs from various heights, children pounding on the keyboards, and making sure the encasements are dirt and dust resistant. Software developers will also receive units to debug the software and applications that make up the operating system,” according to the OLPC.

Once this testing phase is over, the next units to be manufactured in early 2007 will go to school children in Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand. The machines will be used by the children in real-life conditions as the final phase of testing before mass production begins in the summer of 2007, according to OLPC

According to the BBC , the assailant in the UK’s (possibly even the world?) first web-rage incident has been sentenced to two year’s imprisonment. Paul Gibbons, 47, assaulted John Jones, 43, at his Essex home, after an argument in an online chatroom. Judge Richard Hawkins warned that “the dangers of giving personal information out in a chatroom environment must never be underestimated".

We have been tracking the Austrian capital of Vienna’s love of all things open source for a couple of years now – ever since the city announced its intention to migrate several hundred desktops to open source . This latest move, announced this week, sees Vienna swapping its former FreeBSD based servers for one’s running on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux . So far Vienna has migrated about 100 servers to RHEL. The fact that Vienna is such a pro-open source town is also interesting when you discover what Microsoft has codenamed the next incarnation of Windows following Vista – yep – you guessed it – Vienna.Maybe irony is alive and well in the US after all – well Redmond at least.