Or we might just get 200 million new Myspace accounts. WHO KNOWS?

It's finally looking like the One Laptop Per Child project is getting into its production and distribution phase. For those of you who haven't heard of OLPC, it's aiming to provide sub-$100 laptops to children in the developing world in order to help in education - not only IT education, which is going to be increasingly important in the years to come, but also because this increases internet access for general education purposes. (Feel free to insert jokes about how they'll be highly educated in poor grammar, Youtube videos and porn here.)

I've thought for some time that OLPC was an excellent idea. Admittedly, $100 is a lot for a family, or even for a school, in countries where the average daily wage is under $5, and there are countries where providing food is rather more important than providing internet access. However, given the explosion of new technology in a lot of terly brilliant. I've recently been struggling with getting computers to talk to each other over a wireless network and share an internet connection, but it's remarkably difficult. The fact that only one laptop on the network needs to have this connection for all connected machines to have access - and the fact that this all apparently just works, with no fiddling around with settings - sounds like some kind of technological nirvana.

Then there's the power supply. The number of times I've had to plug my laptop in after its embarrassingly short battery life failed it yet again makes me want a wind-up computer so very, very much. It's not just wind-up, either - one way of powering the computer is to use a foot pedal. Any computer that can make you feel like you're using a vintage sewing machine gets my vote for sheer hilarity. Oh, and the laptop has minuscule power requirements in the first place, and has an ultra-low-power display mode that lets you see the screen in full sunlight. These aren't just excellent inventions for developing countries - I want one of these computers so much already.

There's one further innovation on these machines that I think is going to have a major impact, and it's not one that you might expect. On the keyboard (the waterproof green rubber keyboard, to be specific), there is a key that has been labelled the "geek key". Its effect? Well, if you're using Firefox at the moment, press Ctrl+U. (IE users, go to View -> Source.)

What you're now looking at, if you followed the instructions, is the source code behind The Beautiful Hypothesis, so you can see exactly what Blogger and I did to produce the webpage that you're currently looking at. When a student presses the XO's geek key, the source code for the program that they're using will automatically be displayed. And, because the laptop includes the tools to edit that code, and because kids learn by trying out new things more than anything else, they will rapidly produce new versions of the software they're using. Oh, and because all the software on the laptop is open source (see a couple of posts ago for excessive enthusiasm about open source software), this is not only legal, but encouraged.

The practical result of this is that many of the recipients of these computers will rapidly become extremely good at tweaking code and writing their own - in other words, these supposedly less-developed countries will produce a huge flurry of software developers, very possibly kickstarting their respective countries' IT sectors. If there's a faster way of bringing in profit and foreign investment (short of finding oil and being friendly with the USA), I don't know of it. This could be a very exciting time.