By the end of the decade, a billion people will be clicking away at computers, but generating a profit out of newly wired portions of the world is going to take a lot of work.

The number of PC users is expected to hit or exceed 1 billion by 2010, up from around 660 million to 670 million today, fueled primarily by new adopters in developing nations such as China, Russia and India, according to analysts.

PC and software makers are ready to make new sales but have their work cut out for them. Poverty, unreliable energy supplies, a multiplicity of languages, regional laws and education levels are all potentially major obstacles.


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One of the things which I would have thought was pertinent to the worldwide spread of computers and Linux as is sugested above is the availability and cost of energy. I read an interesting article in New Scientist not long ago about a self contained Nuclear Power Plant which the US was developing. The plant is on a barge and would prospectively be 'lent' to developing countries to help their economies grow. The waste was kept inside the unit so it could not be enriched for weapons use. I would suggest that it is not just developing countries which need this cheap source of energy but also some of the developed who are struggling to find green and cheap ways to generate and transmit energy.

fiscal strain is also good news for open source. People with less money to start out with are less likely to pay, what is it now, $200 for windows XP w/SP2 when they could endorse (as China and Germany already have) open source OS

on the concept of energy, I haven't seen any figures in linux vs windows in the area of power management.... anybody ?

hi there

do our hardware device behave differntly with different OS??
i think it depends much on the user

regards

There is an area where Linux is more power conservative:

I am running Linux on a 500 MHz machine with 128M of memory and 250W supply, and Win 2000 on a 2500 MHz machine with 512M of memory and a 420W supply. For many tasks the Linux machine is faster! Which uses less power? I haven't measured their power input but it probably reflects the supply ratings. Linux runs very well on older, slower machines, and XP is far slower than 2000!

How much ocean surface does that floating nuclear power plant occupy? And given that it requires a massive amount of flowing water for cooling, how do they get the power from that far out to the land? High tension lines are very dangerous unless they are very high up.

John