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My bet is that solid state drives do much better. Moving parts consume a lot of power.
http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/12556/samsung_announces_64_gb_solid_state_drive
"...consumes just half a Watt when operating (one tenth of a Watt when idle)"

vs. from the article:

"Through a 40-percent power reduction, Hitachi GST has delivered unmatched idle power utilization of 3.6 watts on the 250GB capacity model and 4.8 watts on models with capacities of 320GB or greater. Similarly, the P7K500 has reduced its active power requirements to 6.4 watts and 8.2 watts for its one- and two-disk models, respectively. By utilizing roughly half the 7 watts of idle power typically allocated for hard drives..."

According to the Entertainment Software Association, mod chips cause the industry to lose billions worldwide in lost sales. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce speculates that they cost the U.S. economy between $200 billion and $250 billion every year, at a loss of 750,000 jobs. ICE agents were seeking the manufacturers and distributors or such devices in Wednesday's raid.

750,000 jobs?? For comparaison: the WHOLE I.B.M. employs only 322,000 people, Microsoft employs 71,000 people, and E.A.(a good-size game development house) employs only 3,600 people. Do they dare claim that Modchips cost the industry losses of the number of jobs equivalent to more then 200 good-size game-development companies?

Now on to profits. 200 billion per year to the "economy"? Assuming this is at 15% sales tax rate, this means that value of games sold altogether is about 1.33 TRILLION dollars. (I assume the sales tax goes "to economy" the rest goes to the game company). Even at $100/game, this is about 13.3 BILLION game sales losses per year, or about 36,529,680 game sales losses PER DAY. To put this in context: if EVERY USA resident has a game console, this means that EVERY day one in eight pirates a game...

I would like to have a chat with the math teacher of whoever came up with those numbers...

Apparently Sony referenced this patent in their application:

"Oddly enough, Sony's own patent, filed in 2001 and issued in 2007, actually lists the 1991 patent as a citation. In other words, Sony's own patent lawyers have already seen the old patent and deemed it not to be a threat, and the U.S. Patent Office apparently agreed when it issued Sony the patent in June."

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/13725/ps3 s_cell_processor_faces_patent_challenge

There may be very little ammo in this suit. /understatement

I think desktops capable of parallel processing - which can be 1000 times faster than currents PCs - hold a lot more promise for the near term.

http://news.digitaltrends.com/news/story/13371/des ktop_parallel_processor_developed

As for OLPC, I doubt they want to slow the project -- they want to make the pie bigger and OLPC will help them do that.

Now see, there's your mistake: You're thinking about this reasonably.

Microsoft absolutely do want to slow the OLPC project. Bill Gates has as much as said that he thinks it's crap and that people should instead consider his masterful plan to provide an over-powered mobile phone that plugs into a TV, instead. The fact that the phone costs USD 600-1000, requires mains power, an external keyboard, mouse and television doesn't seem to be a problem for him.

Microsoft is not the only company attempting to pour water on the OLPC project, by the way. Even more shameful behaviour is being shown by HP and its proxies. Check out the 'concern' website OLPC News. It's written in true Fox News style, with false objectivity and vocabulary weighted to cast aspersions without regard to the factual content of the article. And last I checked, the author of all this concern did not once admit that he was involved in the management of HP's Classmate PC project, designed explicitly as a response to OLPC.

Make no mistake - the business world does not like OLPC, and they will do what it takes to stop it. And for me, that's as good a reason to support it as any. 8^)

The article at the TFA's website about a 1TB removable disk looks even more interesting:

http://news.digitaltrends.com/article12559.html

http://www.mempile.com/

As of the end of 2006, only 695,000 consumers owned either a Blu-ray or HD DVD player. 270,000 of those were HD DVD players; the other 425,000 were Blu-ray. The overwhelming majority of Blu-ray players are PS3s--only 25,000 standalone Blu-ray players had been sold at year-end. Just over half of the HD DVD players sold were Xbox 360 add-ons.

Well
it
might
be
because
iTunes
sucks

I tried it so I could listen to some of the iTunes shares my housemates have but it kept crashing periodically and in the end I still prefer winamp's look and feel.

Relevant link source from 2 secs of Googling:

http://news.digitaltrends.com/article9178.html

It's completely telling that the first comment on that page, is a comment by a guy who's worried IE7 is going to trash his computer.

If that's the first reaction people have, firefox has a pretty good chance.

Here is a full review: http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review3647.html

This is a sweet little system!

link
Some Core 2 Duo C processors will apparently sport an E designation, indicating consumption between 55 and 75 watts.

75W is comparable to an Athlon 64 FX, for a processor that was designed to be miserly that's a pretty terrible direction to be heading in.