
Microsoft trials XP on XO laptop (Nooooooooo) - nickb
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7130637.stm
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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.

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tlrobinson
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>

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derefr
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.

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edw519
In other news, GM trials coal as fuel for its 2008 Cadillacs.

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

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sadiq
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).

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

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breily
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'.

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mynameishere
_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."

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andyn
I 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?

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

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damon
Time to bring back the hand crank!

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

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

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dhouston
embrace and extend. ouch. :)

