Negroponte aims for $50 laptop

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project hopes to lower the cost of its laptop for developing nations to $50 by 2010, reports VUNET.

OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte told the LinuxWorld conference in Boston that the first units are scheduled to ship in December this year or January next year at an estimated cost of $135 per unit, but technological advances are expected to bring down costs to $100 by 2008 and $50 by 2010.

OLPC, which is supported by the United Nations and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hopes to ship 5 million to 10 million units in 2007 to Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Nigeria and Thailand. However, according to PC Magazine, the hand crank is to be moved to the machine`s power supply unit.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled the thinnest mobile phone in the US market, aiming to take a wider slice out of sales of Motorola`s Slvr, reports Forbes.

The new Samsung t509, which is to be released to the US market in May, is 1.7mm thinner at 9.8mm than Motorola`s Slvr.

The t509 is part of Samsung`s new range of 12 new slim line phones to be introduced to the US market this year, which is seen as a direct response to the trend set by Motorola`s Razr line.

IBM is expected to release a near-ready version of its latest database server, code-named Viper, later today and News.com says the product is designed to grab market share from rival Oracle and fend off open source challengers.

According to the report, IBM plans to offer the DB2 Viper "test drive" as a free download to customers, with the full product scheduled for release only later this year.

IBM says the most significant feature to be added in the DB2 Viper version is the ability to store and index XML documents in a "native" format. DB2 Viper`s "hierarchical" storage format and XML-specific indexing will greatly improve performance for applications that use XML data, it says.

Phishing scams could be catching out 90% of those that see them, according to an academic study that looked at whether Web users could tell legitimate bank Web sites from fake ones used for phishing.

The BBC says that according to the study report, almost all participants mistook the most sophisticated phishing sites for the real thing.

The study found that users ignored most of the visual cues such as fake sites being hosted on domains that have nothing to do with their target and errors in spelling and grammar.