Sunday, October 28th 2007
Microsoft Getting Closer to OLPC Operating System
Software giant Microsoft is making progress in creating a modified version of its Windows operating system designed to run on the XO laptop built by the One Laptop Per Child project. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Will Poole said:
Source:
Reuters
We're spending a nontrivial amount of money on it. We remain hopeful with our progress to date, we still have significant work ahead to finalize our analysis and testing processes. At the end of the day, there's no guarantees.The OLPC project intends to start producing its laptop next month, which is designed for elementary school children in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The laptops were originally designed to run Linux, however Microsoft hopes to develop a cut-down version of Windows in order to install it on the XO, with the biggest issues being reducing the power consumption and the space required by the operating system in order for it to run efficiently.
13 Comments on Microsoft Getting Closer to OLPC Operating System
MS will probably pay them to use it. Having millions of kids running open source[ maybe even programming:cry:] is there worse dream come true.
To me it seems stupid stuff like health care,food,clean water and not getting shot/chopped to death in a civil/ethnic war would be of more importance then learning to surf the web:wtf:
Here is a link to an article dated November 12, 2006: AMD pulls plug on Personal Internet Communicator arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061112-8201.html
No matter how much you strip down the Windows CE, it's still bloated and it requires more hardware power (aka more cost) than some alternatives.
I mean, I understand why Microsoft wants a piece of the action, but they are deluding themselves if they think some type of stripped down Windows XP Embedded or CE will do the job. That's what happens when you spend most of your R&D budget on "prettying things up" and shiny GUIs.