For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs a Big Debate

[Simon]

I won't consider the current computing market anything but a
monoculture significant fraction of people have the option of getting
their "main" box something other than an x86 arch cpu.  This could be
a low end performance sort of thing, like ARM, or MIPS ( slightly
higher performance range compared to ARM? Someone correct me if I'm
wrong please ), or in the high end, like Cell powered workstations
becoming somewhat prevalent as desktop systems.  Until then, we're
still on an x86 monoculture.  I'd have more to say about this if I
wasn't so clueless about the merits of various CPU architectures.  As
it is now, I just have assumed x86 is still popular mostly because of
widespread usage of closed-source software that scares hardware
vendors out of offering consumer products that run on different
hardware.  Then again, Apple's move to x86 sheds some doubt on this
assumption.

On 12/1/06, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org <phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> >
> > Thanks for bringing the thread back on track, Colin.
> >
> One of the exciting things about the OLPC project is that it is creating a
> completely new, widely used hardware platform for computing.  PC hardware
> has been a monoculture for many years and this has limited the kinds of
> hardware explorations that might otherwise take place.
>
> Whether it's widely adopted or not, the MIT team deserve full marks for
> thinking 'out of the box' in this design. Open-source software gets some
> credit for this - it's one of the things that has made it possible to
> branch out in this fashion.
>
> We might even return to the days of the Commodore 64 and Atari ST, when
> there was a real diversity of machines to choose from -- with the added
> advantage of data compatability, so that users are not 'locked in'.
>
> --
> Peter Hiscocks
> Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
> http://www.syscompdesign.com
> USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
> 647-839-0325
>
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists
>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists