Intel made some major screwups with the XScale also. Remember the XPA255 running at 400MHz which ran slower than the XPA250 at 200MHz? Intel knew about this flaw yet still shipped it and alot of vendors got burned. Regardless of whether Intel could make the XScale scale, there is a concept exposed in the book, "The Innovators Delema" which as I see it also played a role in Intel sticking with x86 top-to-bottom. Did Microsoft think the PalmOS and Dragonball were really going to supplant Windows, no, but they knew that as customers got comfortable with another companies products, there was a loss of control of that customer. They didn't justify over $15 billion in losses just to win a couple billion dollar market, they did it to protect the money maker.
But regarding Intel's plan, it's not working so well for them. the Atom is built on the same 45nm process as their high end CPUs and that almost gets them an advantage over ARM, Geode and other SoC chip vendors who are all running on 65nm. The added chip count and extra power drain of the 45nm Atom setup only wins with Intel fan boyz and if they are stuck on Windows since it is only x86.
So it isn't so much a threat of replacing x86, it is a threat of allowing the industry to get used to something which is not x86. They still don't have anything in the lower end to compete with ARM, PowerPC, or even MIPS and ARM is moving upstream further than Intel had probably hoped. A 600Mhz TI Cortex a8 does a pretty good job running Linux and doing things the MID and netbook sectors are looking to do. Will you find ARM in servers or full-up desktops? No, but that is not the sector that's hot these days.
IMO, Intel would have been better off staying in the game if they had the skills to do so. The XScale screw-ups showed they were right to question their technical abilities so maybe jumping was their only choice. Maybe another anti-trust case will expose what really went on.
good question. Maybe they were required under antitrust law to sell what they got from Dec/Compaq a few years ago. Maybe, there were too many assets to just toss them in the dump instead of getting something from them for their investors. Remember, the ARM design is licensed. There could be other reasons but regardless, I do not think they don't or didn't see it as a threat once that market matured.
that $6K TCO must have been calculated with the Windows OS installed. Sounds about right for any Windows device.;-)
As far as the ClassmatePC goes, the only good that was is that it would also generate alot of sales of diesel generators to power the classrooms using the ClassmatePC. FYI, Intel had to ship a generator to be installed outside the room of one of their ClassmatePC pilots because the kids batteries were failing before the day was done.
XScale was likely chopped because it was growing up to threaten the desktop market. XScale was based on ARM and if you haven't noticed, ARM chips are showing up in all kinds of things these days and the netbook sector is set to explode with ARM based devices this year. Dell has even put an ARM chip/system in some of their laptops to fast boot into Linux so the user can get on the web quick, get email quick, and even to run a DVD player. All with something like a 7 day battery life.
XScale was is a threat to Intel's profits and marketshare so it had to go. It had nothing to do with low performance. IMO
I noticed in the first system info image that the processor and memory fields said "Not Available" but in the 2nd image labeled "system information closeup" it then shows data populating those fields.
Maybe I've been trained to look for tricks in marketing campaigns run by Microsoft but these kinds of details should not be overlooked or else it gives a sense of being falsified.
I hear a call for a death match. Tie FlightSim to the Xbox network let there be war.;-) I can see it now, a Piper Cub with a lazer weapon strapped to its wing.
from what I read, they are not terminating the product, just the development. It is a very mature product and probably quite stable by now and they figure they can continue selling it without requiring much of any software dev work to keep it going.
they cut Pen for Windows too but that was after they pretty much killed the one company at the time who was really building momentum, Go Inc. As far as Mac based apps go, Microsoft has very little strength or leverage on that platform. There is only Apple distributing and they have their own stores. Is Flight Sim really in a market which has or had the ability to threaten Microsoft's market position?
There is one app, Microsoft Money, which was threatened by Intuit's Quicken. Microsoft tried to tie MS Money to other products to beat Quicken but for some reason that failed. But then again, Quicken has not done anything to threaten Windows, they pretty much only support Windows and have a half effort still doing a Mac app. If they came out with a Linux version, MS would pull MS Money out or back one of the others and spend a couple of billion trying to knock Quicken down.
So while the iPod market still gets into many many Windows users hands, brings in Apple iTunes, and puts that pretty Apple logo in their mind for the next time they want a new PC. Well I just don't see them dropping the Zune. The iPod market is too big of a market threat to Windows to just leave it all alone. I don't think they'd ever drop the Xbox or MSN and their search. I'd me very surprised if they did drop it while the iPod still dominated the market.
It would be a first for them to cut failing business which was created to keep a competitor in check. Microsoft has many money losing businesses, ones which lose billions annually but their purpose is not necessarily all about being profitable, it's about limiting the growth of the market leader. Windows CE was created to slow or stop Palm's growth beyond the PDA and Microsoft has lost over $15 billion on that. The Xbox was created to slow or stop Sony from growing the PlayStation market beyond the console and Microsoft has lost many billions on that. The Zune was created to slow the Apple iPod market and they've lost a billion or two on that.
So with Steve Balmer still in charge and the Windows OS making up over 80% of Microsoft's profits and with huge profit margins, there is no history to show a willingness at Microsoft to cut any of these market protection based projects. Cutting the Zune would probably be the first one to be cut and not succeeded at its goal. IMO.
in all fairness, he also said that the distro he uses, Redhat, didn't integrate KDE4 very well when he did the update. And from what I hear, some other big GNU guy had problems with Redhat packaging and dumped it for Debian/Ubuntu.
So I thought the article really didn't say much about KDE4 which would change my mind but I did appreciate that Linus said he'd keep checking on KDE4 and Redhat's implementation every 6 months or so. It would have been better if he didn't rely on Redhat but this is the way it is.
ok, a pre-emptive multi-tasking os OS like the early 90s OS/2 had 16 bit drivers. so it is not considered a "real OS" and should be categorized in the same list as Windows 95? right.
and I liked the part in that link where Intel didn't allow the people putting up the article to do their own testing. I was there, I ran it, it ran OS/2 apps much faster, it ran windows apps much slower and Intel had to come out with a new design because Windows 95 was not optimized for 32bit and that was all Microsoft had.
Like I said, I was there and it was yet another example of Microsoft's marketing driving yet another poor OS experience for anyone who ran other OS's and new what an OS was supposed to be. What and OS should be.
look up the performance of Windows 95( the 32bit OS as MS claimed ) on the then new PentiumPro( the 32bit optimized CPU Intel claimed ). hint, an old 150MHz Pentium outperformed a 150MHz PentiumPro when running Windows 95. Real 32bit OSs like *nix, OS/2, and Windows NT showed vast performance increases running on the 32bit PentiumPro. It then took Intel almost 2 years to bring back 16bit optimizations into their latest CPU hardware.
I don't think this is about Microsoft being buddies with the hardware people. I think it has more to do with Microsoft designing poor software and throwing alot of it at the distribution such that just to get the OS off the metal, it's really resource intensive and their core OS guys are tasked with getting as much out of the available hardware as they are capable of.
Remember, tests had already shown that Windows XP outperformed Vista by 100% on the same hardware. Microsofts marketing is doing a better job now and we are constantly seeing performance tests showing Vista faster than XP and even Windows 7(beta) being faster than XP. And we are seeing alot of these performance test so once again, chalk it up to Microsoft's marketing because do you really think their OS people did in less than a year what they couldn't do in over 5 years?
I'd figured that they'd get him a device which acted like the Blackberry but had the server under control by the White House and used a VPN between the device and the server. If BlackBerry was not willing to allow one of their servers placed under White House control then there are other options.
I would bet that he ends up using the Windows based device very little. Just the hassle of switching between two devices is going to be a pain but then the size of that Sectera and the fact that it runs an OS which is so poor that Microsoft has had to pay companies to use for over 10 years. Too bad the Palm Pre wasn't available yet. They could put SE Linux on there and lock it down big time.
Microsoft is a marketing company and therefore would lend nothing but FUD and deception to mix. And if you think that it is not possible to be brilliant and yet suck at business, you are mistaken. I'm not trying to watch McNealy's back or anything, I just get the impression this poster does not have it together much. Drop Microsoft of that list and add a couple of universities and there would be some meaningful data.
Microsoft, would screw up any and all data because they have too much mindshare over those naive to the history of US technology markets. And their lobby power and history of using this power along with financial power would skew and screw up any meaningful data.
And FYI, where Sun screwed up with Java was when they thought their lawyers were smarter than Microsoft's lawyers and signed a license with Microsoft to have Microsoft do Java on Windows. That was 1996 and I was screaming "you idiots" over and over then. Anything which is cross platform is a threat worthy of billions in expenditures by Microsoft to have it destroyed. It is their history.
to tell the new administration why open source is so bad and it is probably going to center around how important Microsoft is to the US economy. They'll say stuff like how many Windows based jobs there are and how they would be lost. It'll all be lies but the fact is that McNealy should have kept his mouth shut until after he'd written the paper and submitted it.
But wait, Scott McNealy is much smarter than Microsoft's PR people and lawyers. Hmmm, what happened the last time he thought that?
What people should care about is that Canonical is getting successful and they are doing so not because they are paying people to take the products, but because people want the products.
So this is great news regardless of what Microsoft thinks. They, Microsoft, have never thought about anything but destroying what others have created so they may maintain their monopoly. Go Ubuntu! Go Canonical!
that's what I was looking for too since it is stated as an open source project. Yes, there it is, "Open Source Tablet" but there is no hardware list other than general mention of part names and features.
Maybe just hype considering they've got some former CTO backing the project and it was stated that _if_ it were to get into production, the team would be built around that former CTO dude. This is probably a closed source hardware project and partially open source software. Interesting but not worth that title of "Open Source Tablet".
did you even read my response? I mentioned that people have to pay an extra $150 or so to get XP installed instead of Vista and that I've already seen many business and home users who do not take this option. I notice that the HP page you mentioned liked to an HP page which says you have until Jan 31 2009 to do the XP downgrade.
But the fact remains that people have to push hard and even pay extra if they even have an option of getting a new computer with Windows XP.
But 'not working like shit' is what we already HAVE, with XP.
but you can't get it so that is off the table and my guess is that Microsoft's marketing is doing everything they can to make sure Windows 7 gets compared to Windows Vista as much as they can control this. I'm still seeing businesses accept Vista on computers instead of having to pay an extra $150 to up-grade to XP. And I'm seeing every new computer in the home and SMB market coming with Vista because they say they can't get XP. So there is little financial hit taken for Vista and in some ways, it's making them more with those who pay the extra $150 to upgrade it. Their brand is taking a beating and that is the reason for Windows 7.
What really blows me away is that the public keeps falling for this _new_ OS crap from Microsoft. They should have caught on that it was bull shit back when they shipped Windows 98 which should have been a service pack to Windows 95 and add USB support. There are just so many marketing games being played on the public by Microsoft yet the sheeple keep falling for it.
And talk about hype, I keep hearing that Windows 7 will replace Windows XP on sub-notebooks but I've not see any tests showing it can scale _down_ to that hardware level. So I'm wondering if the Microsoft marketing people are working overtime to keep Windows 7 from being compared to XP and that is why we hear it'll run on MIDs but don't see any tests.
IMO, Windows has sucked since NT was released and Microsoft has never released an OS worth the money they charge since those days in the early 1990s. They get better but WTF, they're still crap compared to the reliability, security, and scalability of *nix based systems.
ya, Microsoft purchased Google. But really, wouldn't this make more sense if those two guys were MSiBs? That CEO was already quite friendly with Steve Ballmer so it was quite a surprise they'd announce an Android phone in the first place.
Windows.;-) Didn't I read that this telecom was already in bed with Microsoft and even had the CEO or some other big-wig dissing on Google and Android?
Money talks so don't put it out of your head that there wasn't some kickbacks from Microsoft to keep them tied to Microsoft. We know Microsoft has bank accounts and/or budgets setup just for funding these kinds of things.
This really sounds like one of those "Joe the Plumber" stories where it could very well be motivated by some other process. After all, it's impressive that she found a system which had Ubuntu on it by default. She sounds really naive about computers, as does the article author, but yet she found her way to a $1,100 Dell laptop which came preloaded with Ubuntu and not Microsoft's Windows Vista.
What she did was really tough to do while being so naive. And let's not even get into how she claimed she needed it to have Microsoft Word but she could not have ordered that computer with Microsoft Office. I don't think Dell ships Ubuntu preloaded with WINE or even CrossOver Office. Could she really be so dumb as to decide she "needs" a computer to register for classes, not see what that registration system or the school requires and find her way through Dell's site and doesn't get a low cost laptop but a $1,100 model which has Ubuntu on it? This just sounds too convenient as in the "Joe the Plumber" situation.
She's one heck of a confused computer user or a mediocre publicity stunt by Waggener Edstrom or Microsft's current PR firm. And has her high school not taught her anything about computers? Maybe someone should research her high school to see if one child was left behind.
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Intel made some major screwups with the XScale also. Remember the XPA255 running at 400MHz which ran slower than the XPA250 at 200MHz? Intel knew about this flaw yet still shipped it and alot of vendors got burned. Regardless of whether Intel could make the XScale scale, there is a concept exposed in the book, "The Innovators Delema" which as I see it also played a role in Intel sticking with x86 top-to-bottom. Did Microsoft think the PalmOS and Dragonball were really going to supplant Windows, no, but they knew that as customers got comfortable with another companies products, there was a loss of control of that customer. They didn't justify over $15 billion in losses just to win a couple billion dollar market, they did it to protect the money maker.
But regarding Intel's plan, it's not working so well for them. the Atom is built on the same 45nm process as their high end CPUs and that almost gets them an advantage over ARM, Geode and other SoC chip vendors who are all running on 65nm. The added chip count and extra power drain of the 45nm Atom setup only wins with Intel fan boyz and if they are stuck on Windows since it is only x86.
So it isn't so much a threat of replacing x86, it is a threat of allowing the industry to get used to something which is not x86. They still don't have anything in the lower end to compete with ARM, PowerPC, or even MIPS and ARM is moving upstream further than Intel had probably hoped. A 600Mhz TI Cortex a8 does a pretty good job running Linux and doing things the MID and netbook sectors are looking to do. Will you find ARM in servers or full-up desktops? No, but that is not the sector that's hot these days.
IMO, Intel would have been better off staying in the game if they had the skills to do so. The XScale screw-ups showed they were right to question their technical abilities so maybe jumping was their only choice. Maybe another anti-trust case will expose what really went on.
LoB
good question. Maybe they were required under antitrust law to sell what they got from Dec/Compaq a few years ago. Maybe, there were too many assets to just toss them in the dump instead of getting something from them for their investors. Remember, the ARM design is licensed. There could be other reasons but regardless, I do not think they don't or didn't see it as a threat once that market matured.
LoB
that $6K TCO must have been calculated with the Windows OS installed. Sounds about right for any Windows device. ;-)
As far as the ClassmatePC goes, the only good that was is that it would also generate alot of sales of diesel generators to power the classrooms using the ClassmatePC. FYI, Intel had to ship a generator to be installed outside the room of one of their ClassmatePC pilots because the kids batteries were failing before the day was done.
LoB
XScale was likely chopped because it was growing up to threaten the desktop market. XScale was based on ARM and if you haven't noticed, ARM chips are showing up in all kinds of things these days and the netbook sector is set to explode with ARM based devices this year. Dell has even put an ARM chip/system in some of their laptops to fast boot into Linux so the user can get on the web quick, get email quick, and even to run a DVD player. All with something like a 7 day battery life.
XScale was is a threat to Intel's profits and marketshare so it had to go. It had nothing to do with low performance. IMO
LoB
I noticed in the first system info image that the processor and memory fields said "Not Available" but in the 2nd image labeled "system information closeup" it then shows data populating those fields.
Maybe I've been trained to look for tricks in marketing campaigns run by Microsoft but these kinds of details should not be overlooked or else it gives a sense of being falsified.
LoB
I used to fly on the old Falcon F16 over modem and one of they guys build peddles to lay down bombs better. it was fun.
LoB
I hear a call for a death match. Tie FlightSim to the Xbox network let there be war. ;-) I can see it now, a Piper Cub with a lazer weapon strapped to its wing.
LoB
or maybe they have something showing up on their console... yup, who knows.
LoB
from what I read, they are not terminating the product, just the development. It is a very mature product and probably quite stable by now and they figure they can continue selling it without requiring much of any software dev work to keep it going.
LoB
they cut Pen for Windows too but that was after they pretty much killed the one company at the time who was really building momentum, Go Inc. As far as Mac based apps go, Microsoft has very little strength or leverage on that platform. There is only Apple distributing and they have their own stores. Is Flight Sim really in a market which has or had the ability to threaten Microsoft's market position?
There is one app, Microsoft Money, which was threatened by Intuit's Quicken. Microsoft tried to tie MS Money to other products to beat Quicken but for some reason that failed. But then again, Quicken has not done anything to threaten Windows, they pretty much only support Windows and have a half effort still doing a Mac app. If they came out with a Linux version, MS would pull MS Money out or back one of the others and spend a couple of billion trying to knock Quicken down.
So while the iPod market still gets into many many Windows users hands, brings in Apple iTunes, and puts that pretty Apple logo in their mind for the next time they want a new PC. Well I just don't see them dropping the Zune. The iPod market is too big of a market threat to Windows to just leave it all alone. I don't think they'd ever drop the Xbox or MSN and their search. I'd me very surprised if they did drop it while the iPod still dominated the market.
LoB
It would be a first for them to cut failing business which was created to keep a competitor in check. Microsoft has many money losing businesses, ones which lose billions annually but their purpose is not necessarily all about being profitable, it's about limiting the growth of the market leader. Windows CE was created to slow or stop Palm's growth beyond the PDA and Microsoft has lost over $15 billion on that. The Xbox was created to slow or stop Sony from growing the PlayStation market beyond the console and Microsoft has lost many billions on that. The Zune was created to slow the Apple iPod market and they've lost a billion or two on that.
So with Steve Balmer still in charge and the Windows OS making up over 80% of Microsoft's profits and with huge profit margins, there is no history to show a willingness at Microsoft to cut any of these market protection based projects. Cutting the Zune would probably be the first one to be cut and not succeeded at its goal. IMO.
LoB
in all fairness, he also said that the distro he uses, Redhat, didn't integrate KDE4 very well when he did the update. And from what I hear, some other big GNU guy had problems with Redhat packaging and dumped it for Debian/Ubuntu.
So I thought the article really didn't say much about KDE4 which would change my mind but I did appreciate that Linus said he'd keep checking on KDE4 and Redhat's implementation every 6 months or so. It would have been better if he didn't rely on Redhat but this is the way it is.
LoB
performance challenged. "special" is not PC
LoB
ok, a pre-emptive multi-tasking os OS like the early 90s OS/2 had 16 bit drivers. so it is not considered a "real OS" and should be categorized in the same list as Windows 95? right.
and I liked the part in that link where Intel didn't allow the people putting up the article to do their own testing. I was there, I ran it, it ran OS/2 apps much faster, it ran windows apps much slower and Intel had to come out with a new design because Windows 95 was not optimized for 32bit and that was all Microsoft had.
Like I said, I was there and it was yet another example of Microsoft's marketing driving yet another poor OS experience for anyone who ran other OS's and new what an OS was supposed to be. What and OS should be.
LoB
look up the performance of Windows 95( the 32bit OS as MS claimed ) on the then new PentiumPro( the 32bit optimized CPU Intel claimed ). hint, an old 150MHz Pentium outperformed a 150MHz PentiumPro when running Windows 95. Real 32bit OSs like *nix, OS/2, and Windows NT showed vast performance increases running on the 32bit PentiumPro. It then took Intel almost 2 years to bring back 16bit optimizations into their latest CPU hardware.
I don't think this is about Microsoft being buddies with the hardware people. I think it has more to do with Microsoft designing poor software and throwing alot of it at the distribution such that just to get the OS off the metal, it's really resource intensive and their core OS guys are tasked with getting as much out of the available hardware as they are capable of.
Remember, tests had already shown that Windows XP outperformed Vista by 100% on the same hardware. Microsofts marketing is doing a better job now and we are constantly seeing performance tests showing Vista faster than XP and even Windows 7(beta) being faster than XP. And we are seeing alot of these performance test so once again, chalk it up to Microsoft's marketing because do you really think their OS people did in less than a year what they couldn't do in over 5 years?
LoB
I'd figured that they'd get him a device which acted like the Blackberry but had the server under control by the White House and used a VPN between the device and the server. If BlackBerry was not willing to allow one of their servers placed under White House control then there are other options.
I would bet that he ends up using the Windows based device very little. Just the hassle of switching between two devices is going to be a pain but then the size of that Sectera and the fact that it runs an OS which is so poor that Microsoft has had to pay companies to use for over 10 years. Too bad the Palm Pre wasn't available yet. They could put SE Linux on there and lock it down big time.
LoB
Microsoft is a marketing company and therefore would lend nothing but FUD and deception to mix. And if you think that it is not possible to be brilliant and yet suck at business, you are mistaken. I'm not trying to watch McNealy's back or anything, I just get the impression this poster does not have it together much. Drop Microsoft of that list and add a couple of universities and there would be some meaningful data.
Microsoft, would screw up any and all data because they have too much mindshare over those naive to the history of US technology markets. And their lobby power and history of using this power along with financial power would skew and screw up any meaningful data.
And FYI, where Sun screwed up with Java was when they thought their lawyers were smarter than Microsoft's lawyers and signed a license with Microsoft to have Microsoft do Java on Windows. That was 1996 and I was screaming "you idiots" over and over then. Anything which is cross platform is a threat worthy of billions in expenditures by Microsoft to have it destroyed. It is their history.
LoB
to tell the new administration why open source is so bad and it is probably going to center around how important Microsoft is to the US economy. They'll say stuff like how many Windows based jobs there are and how they would be lost. It'll all be lies but the fact is that McNealy should have kept his mouth shut until after he'd written the paper and submitted it.
But wait, Scott McNealy is much smarter than Microsoft's PR people and lawyers. Hmmm, what happened the last time he thought that?
LoB
What people should care about is that Canonical is getting successful and they are doing so not because they are paying people to take the products, but because people want the products.
So this is great news regardless of what Microsoft thinks. They, Microsoft, have never thought about anything but destroying what others have created so they may maintain their monopoly. Go Ubuntu! Go Canonical!
LoB
that's what I was looking for too since it is stated as an open source project. Yes, there it is, "Open Source Tablet" but there is no hardware list other than general mention of part names and features.
Maybe just hype considering they've got some former CTO backing the project and it was stated that _if_ it were to get into production, the team would be built around that former CTO dude. This is probably a closed source hardware project and partially open source software. Interesting but not worth that title of "Open Source Tablet".
LoB
did you even read my response? I mentioned that people have to pay an extra $150 or so to get XP installed instead of Vista and that I've already seen many business and home users who do not take this option. I notice that the HP page you mentioned liked to an HP page which says you have until Jan 31 2009 to do the XP downgrade.
But the fact remains that people have to push hard and even pay extra if they even have an option of getting a new computer with Windows XP.
LoB
But 'not working like shit' is what we already HAVE, with XP.
but you can't get it so that is off the table and my guess is that Microsoft's marketing is doing everything they can to make sure Windows 7 gets compared to Windows Vista as much as they can control this. I'm still seeing businesses accept Vista on computers instead of having to pay an extra $150 to up-grade to XP. And I'm seeing every new computer in the home and SMB market coming with Vista because they say they can't get XP. So there is little financial hit taken for Vista and in some ways, it's making them more with those who pay the extra $150 to upgrade it. Their brand is taking a beating and that is the reason for Windows 7.
What really blows me away is that the public keeps falling for this _new_ OS crap from Microsoft. They should have caught on that it was bull shit back when they shipped Windows 98 which should have been a service pack to Windows 95 and add USB support. There are just so many marketing games being played on the public by Microsoft yet the sheeple keep falling for it.
And talk about hype, I keep hearing that Windows 7 will replace Windows XP on sub-notebooks but I've not see any tests showing it can scale _down_ to that hardware level. So I'm wondering if the Microsoft marketing people are working overtime to keep Windows 7 from being compared to XP and that is why we hear it'll run on MIDs but don't see any tests.
IMO, Windows has sucked since NT was released and Microsoft has never released an OS worth the money they charge since those days in the early 1990s. They get better but WTF, they're still crap compared to the reliability, security, and scalability of *nix based systems.
LoB
ya, Microsoft purchased Google. But really, wouldn't this make more sense if those two guys were MSiBs? That CEO was already quite friendly with Steve Ballmer so it was quite a surprise they'd announce an Android phone in the first place.
LoB
Windows. ;-) Didn't I read that this telecom was already in bed with Microsoft and even had the CEO or some other big-wig dissing on Google and Android?
Money talks so don't put it out of your head that there wasn't some kickbacks from Microsoft to keep them tied to Microsoft. We know Microsoft has bank accounts and/or budgets setup just for funding these kinds of things.
LoB
This really sounds like one of those "Joe the Plumber" stories where it could very well be motivated by some other process. After all, it's impressive that she found a system which had Ubuntu on it by default. She sounds really naive about computers, as does the article author, but yet she found her way to a $1,100 Dell laptop which came preloaded with Ubuntu and not Microsoft's Windows Vista.
What she did was really tough to do while being so naive. And let's not even get into how she claimed she needed it to have Microsoft Word but she could not have ordered that computer with Microsoft Office. I don't think Dell ships Ubuntu preloaded with WINE or even CrossOver Office. Could she really be so dumb as to decide she "needs" a computer to register for classes, not see what that registration system or the school requires and find her way through Dell's site and doesn't get a low cost laptop but a $1,100 model which has Ubuntu on it? This just sounds too convenient as in the "Joe the Plumber" situation.
She's one heck of a confused computer user or a mediocre publicity stunt by Waggener Edstrom or Microsft's current PR firm. And has her high school not taught her anything about computers? Maybe someone should research her high school to see if one child was left behind.
LoB