Around the world, Intel and others are touting a new tablet designed for education. It’s specs include a new Atom processor, 7 inch screen and education-specific software. The OS is listed as “7″/Android Honeycomb.
With a bit of searching I found an Indian site that listed more details:
“Intel Studybook runs under Windows 7 or Android, and users will have to choose one or the other as this is not a dual-boot system.
…
Intel StudyBook Tablet Price In USA : $200
Intel StudyBook Tablet Price In UK : € 152
Intel StudyBook Tablet Price IN India : Rs 10000″
That’s interesting. Are they going to sell the tablet for the same price for either OS? Will we see identical hardware offered showing the price difference? There are a lot of competitive tablets in this size. Wintel bundling is coming undone. M$ was terrified when PCs started to fall under $1K. They must be hiding under their desks now.
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Netbooks proved that Microsoft is still able to restrain competition in the US. They can’t stand two identical things that clearly demonstrate the cost of Windows.
hiding under their desks now
That is a chuckle from the past, Mr. Pogson!
When you think about it, you can see the vast change that has come over at least the North American world in the past 50 years. Back then we were threatened with atomic attack and widespread incineration from H-bombs that could come out of a blue sky. We contented ourselves with the idea that we could hide in a shallow ditch for a brief time and so weather the storm.
Now we queue up at the airport with our shoes and belts off while legions of security folk pat us down or go through scanners to look through our clothing on the notion that we are thus protected from a handful of fanatics hiding in caves in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We spend a hundred billion in the process of obtaining this sense of well-being on top of it all.
And you only grump about Microsoft!
Clarence Moon wrote, “we queue up at the airport with our shoes and belts off”.
Some of us don’t. One of the advantages of flying into remote northern communities is that transportation, while more vital, is more casual. Sinc 9/11, I have not flown anywhere in USA. Travel is a bad enough inconvenience without intrusive security.
Those same changes have affected IT using that other OS, anti-malware software and endless re-re-reboots. One of the huge advantages of using GNU/Linux is that security being job one for the OS is much less intrusive. I don’t have to worry much about clicking on links or running my own applications. No pop-ups bother me. I laugh when my browser warns me that PDFs can be dangerous… They are passive image files to me. I have used XP with anti-malware so intrusive it would ask users if they really, really wanted to run that executable and sniffed every file accessed on the hard drive. Can you imagine the hit to performance?
The over-reaction to 9/11 has caused the world to spend hundreds of times more money and lives than the actual cost of damage in the event. The over-reaction is a force-multiplier for terrorists who will forever be encouraged to keep trying. Like Internet-trolls sometimes it is better to ignore them.