:: Bersa Talk ::

This could be a real kick in the $BODYPART for the laptop industry - many people have said that once thing cross the $99 barrier and become blister-packed on a peg in the store, that the way people approach them will be changed. If HiVision can churn these out in quantity (and I have no reason to believe they cannot), you might even see them in vending machines in airports - leave your laptop at home, get one once through all the TSA BS.

There is simply NO WAY that a Windows machine could hit this price point without subsidies from Microsoft - you couldn't use a cheap non-x86 CPU, you would need more memory and storage, and the performance would still be unacceptably low.

Semi-OT: At work, I've been playing with the Beagleboard - a $150 developer board for the TI OMAP3 processor. 600MHz ARM core with a 500MHz DSP, 256M Flash, 128M RAM, simultaneous and independent S-Video and DVI outputs (DVI up to 2Kx2K), OpenGL acceleration (though, unfortunately, only through a non-Free driver), MPEG acceleration (again, only via a non-Free driver), and other goodness, at 2 watts power consumption. Already well supported by GNU and Linux, so that I won't have to waste my time screwing around just getting the thing to boot, and can spend my time doing the things that Aeroflex needs done.

These sorts of cheap and powerful systems are really changing both the face of consumer computing AND the face of embedded, and I'd like to thank all the people involved with Free Software (starting with RMS and working downward) for their contributions to the greater good of the world