Intel on the outside are now on the inside of OLPC

No sooner has Lord Patel posted about the PC laptop / notebook power shift to the East and the way AMD have a prime position on the One Laptop per child Project (OLPC) than Intel make a volte face and have joined up on the MIT project. (Pic Negroponte at Davos with his OLPC)

In May this year, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of OLPC, said the silicon giant "should be ashamed of itself" for efforts to undermine his initiative - their Chairman called it a "$100 gadget"

Negroponte accused Intel of selling its own cut-price laptop - the Classmate PC - below cost to drive him out of markets in the developing world.

Will Swope of Intel told BBC Online

"What happened in the past has happened," "But going forward, this allows the
two organisations to go do a better job and have a better impact for what we are
both very eager to do, which is help kids around the world."

Negroponte said: "Intel joins the OLPC board as a world leader in technology, helping reach the world's children. Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children."

AMD were tight lipped and said ...""Intel's apparent change of heart is welcome, and we're sure they can make a positive contribution to this very worthy project for the benefit of children all over the world." More at NYT

We don't predict the future here. We just grasp at the straws in the wind.

The x factor

Rupert Crawshay-Williams 1908 -1977 was one of the clever people at Bletchley who helped solve the German Enigma code, a friend of Bertrand Russell, and Turing, and a founding member of the Classification Society (Now the British CS) . He wrote a fascinating and little read book, "The Methods and Criteria of Reasoning" in which he attempted to understand why people argue. Which briefly, he concluded was a lack of congruence on basic assumptions by the participants, which whilst it might fall into that calss entitled "Statements of the Bleedin' Obvious" is rarely obvious to the argueifiers arguists people involved in the argument. The book also includes the first discussion of Turings so called "dilemma", whereby he set the task of a von Neumann machine to be interrogated and for the operator to decide if they were interacting with machine or a man or a woman.

He would therefore have enjoyed the following which has been sent to Lord Patel as an example (perhaps apocryphall) of the more inventive approach to the solution of algebraic problems that examiners have tasked their (in this case), evidently reluctant audience.

There is a simplicity and brevity which has to be admired, tempered with a deep foreboding that the sender's female offspring is destined to the the author of similiar assaults on the intellect of examiners - redeemed to some extent by her skill at understanding non-Euclidian problems associated with dribbling a football (soccer ball. -US.var.) and bending it like Beckham, combined with an unerring and deadly accuracy with an imperfectly shaped snowball.