Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop (Nooooooooo)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130637.stm

by nickb • 19 years ago

10 17 19 years ago

news.bbc.co.uk

Yeah, that would seriously blow if MSFT could increase the USA's export market, as well as provide healthy salaries for programmers.

ivankirigin2• 19 years ago

Yeah, 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• 19 years ago

But 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'.

mynameishere2• 19 years ago

isn'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."

dhouston• 19 years ago

embrace and extend. ouch. :)

edw519• 19 years ago

In other news, GM trials coal as fuel for its 2008 Cadillacs.

ivankirigin2• 19 years ago

Coal gasification is actually a reasonable way to get high energy content fuel from something other than petroleum.

__• 19 years ago

What 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• 19 years ago

Time to bring back the hand crank!

sadiq• 19 years ago

It 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• 19 years ago

Could we have a way to flag headlines with an un-needed editorial?

tlrobinson• 19 years ago

I'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

derefr• 19 years ago

That'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• 19 years ago

This is a good thing! It will strengthen XO's perceived position relative to the several other light-laptop projects.

asciilifeform• 19 years ago

If anyone doubted that going with the x86 architecture for the OLPC was a mistake, this should convince you.

Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop (Nooooooooo)

Related Stories