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.
India had previously done a test pilot of the OLPC and decided they could make a better, or at least cheaper, laptop themselves, but after their $10 laptop turned out to produce a product that was not a laptop and could not be made for $10, they appear to have come back to the fold. The quarter-million OLPC XOs will go out to about 1,500 schools, though we're not sure if they'll be getting the newer versions with the upgraded processor, memory, and storage. Congrats to OLPC; they've had a rough go of it but we're always in favor of weirdly adorable computers for the less fortunate. [Ars Technica]