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Story: Two ways to bring PCs to emerging nations
Intel Classmate is just like SCO: to delay the inevitable.
When SCO made outrageous statements in 2003, I knew that it did not have any factual reason to do it, so it should be something else. Now we know that SCO wanted to straighten out its financials by being purchased by IBM. Then Microsoft saw a chance to delay progress of GNU/Linux by keeping SCO alive, and allow time for the release of Windows Vista. SCO is going to take some beating today in court. But it was a good thing for the entire open-source community, because now GNU/Linux has projected a strong image and a few GNU/Linux distributions have acquired a larger user share.
But Intel did not learn the lesson. By promoting an expensive, badly engineered competition with the OLPC, Intel is giving notoriety to Negroponte's team, so my feeling is that the Classmate is a loss leader that backfired. Its battery charge lasts up to 4 hours, while the OLPC's lasts 4 to 8 hours, depending on usage. The Classmate is not even good as a loss leader.
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