IN OUR OLPC Wiki page we have accumulated some required background information. It ought to shed light on Intel's attacks on OLPC, using a high volume of evidence. We won't be repeating old information, but sceptics who are not aware of what Intel did to OLPC will still have access to information from independent, respected journals that verified the facts.
“The lawsuits alleged that Microsoft not only engaged in collusion with Intel but that it also shipped a product which it knew was defective.”Microsoft was sued for colluding with Intel in order to sell "junk PCs" with Windows Vista [1, 2, 3]. It was a class action and there was more than one lawsuit.
The lawsuits alleged that Microsoft not only engaged in collusion with Intel but that it also shipped a product which it knew was defective. For Intel, the aspiration was to make money from spare hardware which it saw as obsolete. It's the equivalent of a butcher selling an animal's head as though it was chops or a shopkeeper selling bad carrots with a lot of condiments on them, in order to hide the fact that they are rotten.
We have just found videos that are only days old. We were particularly interested in Walter Bender's wonderful talk (keynote). He is the benevolent master behind Sugar and his principles have earned him both fame and notoriety (among Microsoft apologists for the most part). Mr. Bender makes reference to the "Free software" community, which he admires (he doesn't say "open source") and in the following first video we found something particularly interesting that suggests Intel was pulling the "junk PCs" trick about 2 years ago, maybe in order to harm OLPC. Older evidence does seem to suggest that this was Intel's intention. OLPC used AMD chips at the time, but it is moving to ARM now.
Skip to somewhere around the fourth minute (starting 4:15) and listen to what the man says. To quote:
They figured out, "OK, this might be a little bit too slow for our needs, and that Intel still had a couple of Celeron N CPUs on stock that they needed to get rid of, so ASUS stepped in and made the first EEE PC, which became a huge success after they announced it..."
Since when was this country's educational system run by Bill Gates and his foundation? When exactly did he and those he's hired become the top educational experts in the country?
As far as I can tell this (like much else) has to do with who has enough money to boss other people around. There are supposed to be other values in a democracy.
And the irony of the man who was sued by the federal government for a monopoly now endorsing competition in public education hasn't escaped me, either.
We are all well aware of the no-man’s land of cultural difference between farmers and non-farmers. Visualize on the one hand a high rise apartment dweller in Manhattan burning more carbon than any human ever did before in history just to maintain his luxurious lifestyle while fretting about the evils of global warming. Hold that picture while, on the other hand, visualizing the farmer out in his barn on a frigid December morning shivering and quivering while losing money on every pint of milk he produces and wishing that global warming would hurry up and get here.
But there is another cultural divide coming to the fore in our society, this one between farmer and farmer. The best current example of this phenomenon is the flare up of opposition to Michael Pollan’s books criticizing industrial grain farms and animal factories. Agribusiness has suddenly realized it can no longer just ignore the opposition. A large scale corn and soybean farmer, Blake Hurst, went online with something he called the “Omnivore’s Delusion” to blast Pollan’s “Ominivore’s Dillema.” The crap really hit the fan. Industrial farm supporters and pastoral farm supporters went at each other on the Internet like a couple of tomcats, the former labeled sneeringly as factory food producers and the latter called, even more sneeringly, “agri-intellectuals.” Fast farming vs. fake farming.