Laptop Program to Intel: Good Riddance
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Walter Bender of the One Laptop per Child initiative says that reports of the program's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
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Not everyone is ready to do a complete switch over to the new Intel LGA 775 platform quite yet and perhaps for good reason. Should you decided you would like to say take a peek at it without having to &quot;Sell
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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The One Laptop Per Child Project would welcome Intel back if the chip maker returned to the group, the head of OLPC said Tuesday.The statement came just days after&#160;Intel quit the group&#39;s board of directors&#160;over what it said was OLPC&#39;s insistence that it abandon a rival low-cost laptop developed by Intel, the Classmate PC. OLPC has said it asked no such thing of Intel, and that it welcomes the Classmate PC because the more low-cost laptops there are available, the more likely they&#39;ll get into the hands of children in the developing world.&quot;It was very unfortunate what happened with Intel and I hope there&#39;s a way of rebuilding it in the future because there&#39;s&#160;no interest in OLPC pushing Intel out. It just is not in our interest. Our goal is to get this to as many children as possible,&quot; said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC, in an interview.He called it unfortunate that Intel made statements that OLPC asked the chip maker to stop working on the Classmate PC. &quot;The picture that painted was one of OLPC being anti-competition, which is ridiculous. We&#39;d like to see as many laptops out there as possible and kids have the widest choice possible,&quot; he said.Intel would be willing to talk with OLPC, said Agnes Kwan, an Intel manager. But she added that the organizational break-up came about because of differences that the groups have been so far unable to resolve.The OLPC Project started as an attempt to build a $100 laptop aimed at kids in poor nations, but the laptop from the group, the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount, initially. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope heavy volume sales of the laptops will drive down costs.The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how the software, Internet and communications benefits of computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further and further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers, a conundrum commonly referred to as the digital divide.&#160;
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Is your microcode reliable as it could be? Intel has released a BIOS patch for Windows machines running Core 2 and Xeon 3000/5000 chips that addresses potential unpredictable system behavior.â¦
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Cancels release of desktop chip in shift away from megahertz towards cache tweaks to improve processor performance.
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Intel withdraws from a project that aimed to put cheap laptops in the hands of children in developing nations.
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Intel and Asustek are working on a $199 laptop designed for emerging markets and for use in education.
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Now that all PCs are media PCs Intel appears to be de-emphasising its much-scorned Viiv brand, reducing the label from a tag designed to represent all-singing, all-dancing multimedia PCs, to a sub-brand of its Core 2 processor label.â¦
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A report from Reuters early this morning states that a Toshiba spokesperson stated it will end its exclusivity with Intel, with a deal that would deploy AMD processors in 20% of the company's laptop computers. From what we know at the moment, these will be Turion processors targeted at mid-range US and European markets.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel Corp.'s decision to begin shipping versions of x86 processors that are capable of 64-bit computing has slowed down the adoption of the company's high-end Itanium processors, a senior executive acknowledged Tuesday during a question and answer session at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco.
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SableVM is a robust, extremely portable, efficient, and specifications-compliant Java Virtual Machine that aims to be easy to maintain and to extend. It features a state-of-the-art and efficient interpreter engine. Its source code is very accessible and easy to understand. It also has many robustness features that have been the object of careful design.     SableVM is a clean-room implementation of the publicly available specifications.    In this version, we added an experimental generational garbage collector, we imported a new GNU Classpath snapshot, we added handling of Jar/Zip files on boot classpath, we added user-friendly failure messages for bootstrap problems, we added added a profiling switch, we made sablevm-classpath install its files in standard locations, we made jikes and gcc be less verbose by default, and we made several important bugfixes and improvements.  You can download the SableVM from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5523&release_id=281502
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Desktop changes too Intel has confirmed yesterday's processor price cuts, which saw up to 40 per cent knocked off what the chip giant charges for some of its CPUs. A batch of new ones were released too, including the first single-core Core 2 processors.â¦
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IDF Fall '04 As Intel prepares to detail its own multi-core chips
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Intel  said on Thursday it  will drop out of the One Laptop Per Child project and resign  from the board after the project's board demanded the chipmaker  stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets.
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Short-lived love-in ends The controversial One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to provide children in the developing world with access to $100 laptops, has fallen out with Intel.â¦
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Intel resigned from the&#160;One Laptop Per Child Project&#39;s board of directors&#160;after refusing a request to abandon its Classmate PC program, according to a source familiar with the situation.Intel&#39;s departure from OLPC&#39;s board means that an effort to build a version of the project&#39;s XO laptop based on an Intel processor is over, the source said.Intel&#39;s Classmate PC is a low-cost laptop designed for students in developing countries and competes against OLPC&#39;s XO laptop, which is based on a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Intel and OLPC agreed in July to work together on the development of technology for low-cost laptops and to stop disparaging each other&#39;s laptop offerings.As part of that agreement, Intel got a seat on OLPC&#39;s board of directors and the two sides began to discuss building a version of the XO based on an Intel processor. At the same time, OLPC also explored the possibility of using an Arm processor from Marvell in yet another version of the XO.But during discussions in the months following the July deal, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte insisted that Intel abandon the Classmate PC effort in favor of throwing its support behind OLPC&#39;s XO device, the source said. But the Classmate PC is undergoing tests in several countries and Intel was not prepared to walk away from those efforts, according to the source.Intel spokesman Nick Jacobs confirmed that the company and OLPC had parted ways, but declined to comment further on the matter. Negroponte and other OLPC executives could not immediately be reached for comment.OLPC has struggled to win orders for the XO laptop. A rising price tag -- now close to US$200, instead of $100 as originally planned -- hasn&#39;t helped the group make inroads with cash-strapped governments in developing countries.