Last December, One Laptop per Child's XO-3 tablet was an impossible dream: semi-flexible plastic, multitouch, sci-fi thinness, all for $75. And while a partnership with Marvell helps breathe life into XO-3, it won't resemble winter's fantasy device.

Click to viewDo I even need to explain that a video entitled "One Laptop Per Third World Noob" might be a bit tasteless? Sure, I chuckled at the stick figures and the lewd child pornography references, but I'm also a terrible person.

It has always been an unspoken fear—or assumption, even—that the dual-touchscreen followup to the original OLPC, the XO-2, would never come to pass. But we let the dream live! Until today: the XO-2 is officially scrapped.

OLPC's Give One Get One initiative has delivered around 11,000 XO-1 laptops to Afghanistan schools alone. But power is a problem when you get off the grid, so the team there has had to think outside the box.

Kenny Irwin is an artist with a strange medium—microwaved plastic. His latest creation started out as an OLPC, but ended up looking like a slug made out of sushi. Did I mention that you could actually own this thing?

While it's probably not very practical for typical day-to-day laptop use, the Sugar Linux desktop environment, designed for the OLPC project, is a novel take on user interfaces. Now, Sugar Labs has released Sugar on a Stick, a version of the OS that is designed to boot, run and save data from and on a USB drive. [

In a bit of an about-face, India has placed a huge order for 250,000 OLPC XO laptops for their schools. This is a huge victory for the OLPC project.

Despite being an original sponsor of the OLPC project, AMD processors will not be used in the upcoming XO-2 touchscreen netbook. Instead, in an interesting move, ARM chips will take on the computing load.

The embattled OLPC program, already reeling from job cuts and salary decreases, is making one final attempt to stay afloat: Open source everything and hope enough companies copy the design to make it profitable.

Today, Ars Technica picked up a blip from Nicholas Negroponte, who informed readers of his intention to cut half the staff and reduce pay of the rest, and emphasizing the shift to hardware.