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Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop (Nooooooooo)
- mynameishere 19y agoYeah, that would seriously blow if MSFT could increase the USA's export market, as well as provide healthy salaries for programmers.
- ivankirigin 19y agoYeah, that would seriously blow if a security flaw in XP allowed the global mesh network of XO laptops to spread a worm, power the biggest botnet ever, and destroy the hardware of any XO receiving tech support.
- breily 19y agoBut the goal of the OLPC project isn't to make money/salaries/increase export share in any way. Its to give computers to third world countries where people have little to no access to them. Microsoft trying to sell XP with these laptops - which doesn't seem to make much sense, since they're supposed to be cheap - wouldn't help the project in any way. So basically, it seems like any market share/income they might make wouldn't be much and would come at the expense of the very people the project is trying to help, and so yes, it would 'seriously blow'.
- mynameishere 19y agoisn't to make money I have a feeling...I haven't looked into it...but I have a feeling that most of the associated vendors are making a profit on the thing. I can't imagine an assembly plant saying, "Sure, we'll sell at cost because your heart is (allegedly) in the right place."
- andyn 19y agoI suspect it's more about easing people into MS products in the first place. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions eventually, of people being exposed to their first computer and what does it have in it at the moment?
- jsmcgd 19y agoIts fine for the associated vendors to make a profit, there wouldn't be any conflict of interest there, but it would be bizarre / disappointing if the OLPC project was trying to make a profit from the XO (which I'm pretty sure it isn't). Why can't Microsoft just keep its greasy mits off!
- dhouston 19y agoembrace and extend. ouch. :)
- edw519 19y agoIn other news, GM trials coal as fuel for its 2008 Cadillacs.
- ivankirigin 19y agoCoal gasification is actually a reasonable way to get high energy content fuel from something other than petroleum.
- __ 19y agoWhat a cancer. On the plus side, this might put some pressure on developers to make the XO's OS really good. But, of course, OS choice is unlikely to be based on technological quality.
- damon 19y agoTime to bring back the hand crank!
- sadiq 19y agoIt worries me that when the XO will be able to run XP, we'll see the same stunts pulled with the XO as we saw with Classmate (see Mandrive and Nigeria).
- Elfan 19y agoCould we have a way to flag headlines with an un-needed editorial?
- tlrobinson 19y agoI'll be very surprised if Microsoft can get anything but a very very stripped down version of XP running on XOs 433MHz processor at any sort of reasonable speed. Maybe it will be based on MinWin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin
- derefr 19y agoThat's weird to hear. I ran XP on 433MHz (Celeron) computers in 2001; it was a little slow, but nothing too scary. My parents still have a 533 running XP at this moment, and as far as I can tell it's just as IO-bound as the laptop I'm typing this on.
- bdr 19y agoThis is a good thing! It will strengthen XO's perceived position relative to the several other light-laptop projects.
- asciilifeform 19y agoIf anyone doubted that going with the x86 architecture for the OLPC was a mistake, this should convince you.