MIT Media labs and a 5 partners (including Google) have designed a laptop which will be ultra cheap. The mission is to take the information and knowledge revolution to the third world. They call it an "education" project rather than a "laptop" project. This super-cheap laptop will cost US$100 and will be made available to students in developing nations (Not directly sold, but only through various NGO's). Ars Technica has a review on this laptop here. Some pictures are also available here. MIT has emphasized that these laptops will NOT be available to the general public.

Simputer is an Indian company based in Bangalore with a similar mission. They are doing well, taking the revolution to the villages in India with their low-cost portables.

Does any one use the built in CD Burning wizard in Windows XP? If you add 600 MB of data to the CD, there is one cached image made in some folder on C drive. Ok fine, when you start the wizard to start writing to the CD, XP makes another copy - for some weird reason. This would have already taken around 20 minutes of your time and 1.2 GB of your system drive. When everything is on the hard disk, why cant they burn directly from the hard disk. One cached image of the CD is still fine for performance and to prevent buffer underrun, but i don't understand two copies!

So I found this. Wonderful. An interface similar to Ahead Nero Burning ROM and with all features. Burns DVD's, writes ISO files, create boot disks. Oh and did I mention - its written in .NET and is absolutely FREE.