Fearful Symmetry

I've noted before that Microsoft is in difficulty over the ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EEE PC; now it seems that the other half of the Wintel duopoly is also in trouble because of the new triple-P (price, performance and power) demands these systems make:

Two days before Intel CEO Paul Otellini would unveil the Classmate 2 or the Intel-powered XO at the CES, Intel announced that they are quitting the OLPC board.

Intel claims that they are quitting because of Nicholas Negroponte wanting them to stop the promotion of the Classmate/Eee to education in third world countries, but I think that the real reason is that Intel does not have a good enough processor for the OLPC project to use as an alternative to the AMD Geode LX-700.

Intel has not been able to develop a processor to match the price, power consumption and performance requirements of the OLPC project.

Bye-bye Wintel, hello Linmd?

At the Top of the Stack

The Inquirer has an interesting story about the quaintly-named "China Rural PC", which seems to be Intel's bid (a) to make some dosh out of the huge Chinese market and (b) to prove that a Lintel duopoly is just as nice as the Wintel one.

But what really caught my attention was the software line-up that this system - whether it ever gets made or not - will/would run at the top of the stack:

Mozilla
Evolution
Gaim
Gnomemeeting, aka Ekiga
OpenOffice.org

along with some interesting extras like Moodle (what a great name: now I wonder why I like it so much...?). The only things I'd change are to swap out Mozilla for Firefox and Evolution for Thunderbird, especially once the latter acquires the Lightning calendar extension.

What this list shows is the range and maturity of GNU/Linux apps on the desktop, and the fact that the technical obstacles to broader take-up are diminishing by the day.

That only leaves the users.