What a cancer. On the plus side, this might put some pressure on developers to make the XO's OS really good. But, of course, OS choice is unlikely to be based on technological quality.

I'll be very surprised if Microsoft can get anything but a very very stripped down version of XP running on XOs 433MHz processor at any sort of reasonable speed.

Maybe it will be based on MinWin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin

That's weird to hear. I ran XP on 433MHz (Celeron) computers in 2001; it was a little slow, but nothing too scary. My parents still have a 533 running XP at this moment, and as far as I can tell it's just as IO-bound as the laptop I'm typing this on.

In other news, GM trials coal as fuel for its 2008 Cadillacs.

Coal gasification is actually a reasonable way to get high energy content fuel from something other than petroleum.

It worries me that when the XO will be able to run XP, we'll see the same stunts pulled with the XO as we saw with Classmate (see Mandrive and Nigeria).

Yeah, that would seriously blow if MSFT could increase the USA's export market, as well as provide healthy salaries for programmers.

But the goal of the OLPC project isn't to make money/salaries/increase export share in any way. Its to give computers to third world countries where people have little to no access to them. Microsoft trying to sell XP with these laptops - which doesn't seem to make much sense, since they're supposed to be cheap - wouldn't help the project in any way. So basically, it seems like any market share/income they might make wouldn't be much and would come at the expense of the very people the project is trying to help, and so yes, it would 'seriously blow'.

I suspect it's more about easing people into MS products in the first place.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions eventually, of people being exposed to their first computer and what does it have in it at the moment?

Its fine for the associated vendors to make a profit, there wouldn't be any conflict of interest there, but it would be bizarre / disappointing if the OLPC project was trying to make a profit from the XO (which I'm pretty sure it isn't).

Why can't Microsoft just keep its greasy mits off!

Yeah, that would seriously blow if a security flaw in XP allowed the global mesh network of XO laptops to spread a worm, power the biggest botnet ever, and destroy the hardware of any XO receiving tech support.

This is a good thing! It will strengthen XO's perceived position relative to the several other light-laptop projects.

Time to bring back the hand crank!

If anyone doubted that going with the x86 architecture for the OLPC was a mistake, this should convince you.

Could we have a way to flag headlines with an un-needed editorial?

embrace and extend. ouch. :)