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News On Laptops For Education
AdamWill notes a Mandriva press release with the news that the government of Nigeria has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running Mandriva Linux for educational use in a nationwide pilot. About 17,000 machines will be involved at first. We can only wonder at the maneuvering and negotiations that went on with the OLPC project. The latter had its first announced order for 100,000 XO machines, from Uruguay, with a potential for 400,000 over time. The bigger news out of OLPC is that Microsoft is porting XP to the platform, and chairman Nicholas Negroponte says that's fine with him: "It would be hard for OLPC to say it was 'open' and then be closed to Microsoft. Open means open."
From what I've read lately (I'm too lazy at the moment to look up the articles. I believe it was in a dead tree publication that I get), Microsoft is trying a new approach for the next OS. They're making it more module based, starting with a core set of functionality and then adding on the appropriate modules for the various editions.
It's a good idea that's been used by a number of operating systems in the past and it's about time that they got around to trying it. I hope it succeeds. It should cut out some of the bloat and possibly make backwards compatibility even easier.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.