Microsoft has unveiled
a plan under which a somewhat crippled version of XP will be made available
to the makers of low-cost PCs like the Eee PC and XO laptop. I'm not sure how I
feel about this; at $25 it's practically free, but the arbitrary hardware
limitations Microsoft is imposing are, I think, kind of despicable: "the PC
vendors that make ULPCs must limit screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives
to 80G bytes, and they cannot offer touch-screen PCs…the systems can have no
more than 1G byte of RAM and a single-core processor running at no more than
1GHz."
Wow. No touchscreens. No dual core. No big displays. Are they really concerned
that the $25 XP will cannibalize sales of the much more expensive Vista?
)