Evaluating and diving into the bits about the OLPC project, it's obvious the discrepancy between the configuration of modern computers and the laptop proposed. The superiority of modern computers in terms of hardware is evident. On the other hand, the OLPC's laptop aims at the students that in their day-to-day will cope with tasks not so sophisticated. This way, the OLPC’s characteristics will satisfy with praise a lot of children around the world.

The key point of the OLPC project is to permit children to interact with each other through the mesh network that is available in the hardware and at the same time to enable the access to the fantastic computer network called internet.

The hardware configuration isn’t so attractive, but to those that never thought in the possibility of having a computer, it’s a valid option.

It’s important to mention that great part of the world's population is formed by people bellow the poverty line since 1.1 billion people, about a 1/6 of humanity lives with less than 1 dollar per day.

The initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is fantastic. Since it's coming from a country that has a dictatorial economy that provides the rules to other markets nowadays and from an institute renowned internationally and financed by great technology companies, we can expect good fruits of the progress of this project.

It’s the underdeveloped governments’ responsibility to implement the policies and enforce the proper acting for the technology area, which is related directly with the future of such nations. The poverty and the barrier imposed on the knowledge access will only be suppressed when all or at least the major part of population have access to the better of this world. Unfortunately this isn’t the real thing and any project that tries to diminish the gap of the digital exclusion is welcome.

Concluding this brief evaluation I consider the OLPC an outstanding initiative of low cost given that the necessity for knowledge and access to new technologies is increasing at a high pace in the underdeveloped nations.

I've just bought an iPod nano 3rd generation (4 GB) model. It arrived from Germany from a trip a cousin took there for his new job at Thyssenkrupp.

I decided to ask him to buy an iPod there because the price here in Brazil is an absurd. While in the USA it costs $ 149.00 and in Germany € 149.00, here in Brazil it costs an average of R$ 600.00.

I put my hands on the iPod on Saturday 12/22 in the afternoon although it were on my computer desk since the morning.

Firstly I tried to connect it in one of the USB ports I have on my computer. It didn't work. The computer refused to install the iPod and didn't recognize it at all. I kept trying any possible configuration but even after formatting the hard disk I couldn't get it functioning.

I googled for the causes of this problem and I found a lot of advices and possible solutions. For what I could see there are a lot of people with the same problem.

I spent more than 24 hours of constant research to get to a solution. It wasn't that obvious.

My motherboard is an ASUS A7S8X-MX and it has 4 USB 2.0 ports on the back. The USB controllers are from SiS, more specifically model SiS 7001 PCI to USB Open Host Controller (look at the expanded node in the image bellow).

When I tried to connect the iPod to the computer I got an error message that stated that the device had malfunctioned. Sometimes the operating system tried to install the drivers but failed during the process and stated that the device could not work properly. In truth it didn’t work. I couldn't see the iPod neither in Windows Explorer nor in iTunes. So what was the solution? I got the motherboard manual and searched for USB. There is a jumper that controls how the USB ports are charged. It is described in the section “USB device wake-up” in the manual. What I did was just change the jumper position from +5V to +5VSB. After that the iPod was recognized by Windows XP SP2.

From what I could observe the iPod didn't have sufficient current so that every time it started to charge its battery the OS automatically ejected the device. This way I didn't have access to the iPod. Every time it connected and ejected automatically.

Now everything is working flawlessly and I've already synced some music. I'm listening to it.