One Laptop Per Child with Windows XP

One Laptop Per Child with Windows XP

Microsoft has joined forces with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project in a bid to provide inexpensive portable PCs to schoolchildren in developing countries. The announcement means that the XO notebook will run Windows as well as the OLPC’s home grown Linux-based operating system. OLPC will be hoping that the partnership with Microsoft will help kick-start demand from education ministers for its XO laptop, which has thus far received orders for just 600,000 systems. The project has also struggled to drive down the price of its laptop to the highly publicised $100 mark; the current version is priced at $188.

OLPC and Microsoft said in a joint statement that trials of laptops loaded with Windows will begin in “four to five” countries from next month, with a broader release in August or September. “Transforming education is a fundamental goal of Microsoft Unlimited Potential, our ambitious effort to bring sustained social and economic opportunity to people who do not currently enjoy the benefits of technology,” said Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. “By supporting a wide variety of affordable computing solutions for education that includes OLPC’s XO laptop, we aim to make technology more relevant, accessible and affordable for students everywhere.”

Source: Vnunet

Adobe Launches New Version of Acrobat.com

Adobe launches New Version of Acrobat.com

Adobe Systems Inc. is launching a new version of its document sharing software Acrobat on Monday, and this time it can package videos. Acrobat allows users to package documents so they can be read across different hardware and operating systems. Acrobat 9 comes with Adobe’s video-enabling software Flash. Users can include Flash-based videos when they create and share documents with the portable document format, commonly known as PDF. With a professional version of Acrobat 9, for example, users could package a Power Point presentation not just with images, but also with an audio of the presenter’s voice.

“You can now send someone a presentation that speaks on its own all through a PDF,” said Adobe spokesman Kevin M. Lynch, who is not related to the company’s chief technology officer with the same name. Adobe also launched Acrobat.com, which will host Web-based software services to support document creation and sharing. The San Jose-based software maker hasn’t launched a new version of Acrobat since November 2006, almost a year after it purchased Macromedia Inc., the creator of Flash software. Users have expected to see Flash integrated into Acrobat since that purchase, Lynch said.

Source: AP