Did anyone read the story in Wired about netbooks? They mention uses of cloud computing for high-end graphics so no heavy processing has to be done on your local machine:

“The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD’s vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: “Now imagine you’ve got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game.”

That’s from this pretty inspiring wired article on the “trickle-up” economics of the recent netbook market:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks?currentPage=all

I hadn’t heard of this - now THIS would be cool.

I’m paying close attention to the netbook market. For me, the best technology in education would be an appliance - imagine a laptop that just worked - um, similar to http://laptop.org/en/laptop/index.shtml this, but with more of everything.