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Rest In Peace, Ridiculous Dual-Screen OLPC XO-2
RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009

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Markarian
11/04/09

In reply to Rest In Peace, Ridiculous Dual-Screen OLPC XO-2
I'm really not surprised. The concept shown above is the kind of product a Chinese megafacturer could sell at $400 wholesale. There's no way it would have been half as economical as the XO. OLED and eInk, flexible displays, are about at the stage that LCD computer monitors were in early-to-mid 90s. You see it Popular Science and on the Discovery channel, but it'll be a good decade before it's really prevalent in your home.

And yes, my prognostication may be quite a bit off. But let's face it, they've been demoing this stuff for the last five years and we have only a dozen or so consumer products to show for it. And they sure aren't cheap enough for the average Ugandan 4th grader.
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fuchikoma promoted this comment Edited by Markarian at 11/04/09 5:23 AM Markarian was starred Markarian was unstarred

fuchikoma
11/05/09

@Markarian: Exactly. I have an XO-1 and it's great for what it is. I'd be totally up for a transflective waterproof tablet like they're talking about, but the dualscreen XO idea just baffled me - it's like they went from trying to make a laptop for under $100 to giving up on that and trying to compete with Apple for the next slickest gadget. #olpcxo2
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balls187
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
"Or produced/plagiarized many a fine middle school research papers, culling facts from its bounty" Nice to know I wasn't the only one.
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strider_mt2k
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
Nope.

Never used it.
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Sora57 is OK
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
I used it twice.
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Monty
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
Microsoft has a difficult time creating a clear business model, and the multimedia CD years are another great example. Whether it is the computer game division, multimedia CD's, Xbox, Zune, live, Hotmail, MSN, ... the list goes on and on. If they could just focus on their operating systems and development tools, they might be okay, but they are like kids with too much money in their pocket -- they just have to spend it on something, anything, even the ridiculous gambling "grab a toy" machine on the exit from the toy store. If I was their parent, I am afraid I would have to take away their allowance for a month.
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Kaiser-Machead
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
For school, neither this or Wikipedia are really accepted sources to site (unless you're in elementary school, or your High School teacher is lenient about such things), but for your own personal info-scrounging, it was great. I remember when I first started using Encarta. I already liked sifting through Encyclopedias, but it was fun looking at all of the multimedia functions and snippets for the heck of it. But then, the internet wasn't as much fun or as info rich as it is now, so Encarta is a bit of a dinosaur.
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tmed
03/31/09

@Kaiser-Machead: Encarta is(was), in fact, pretty widely accepted. Wikipedia isn't, and can't be. It can however point you to its references.

Encarta was a marvelous creation, from a time when Microsoft dominated by making better products rather than simply leveraging Market power.
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Kaiser-Machead
03/31/09

@tmed: I was able to use Encarta as a kid, but then I found that teachers who accepted this source were getting fewer and fewer. I suppose maybe some are just purists and won't accept anything "less" than a book, but that was what I found. It really depends on who you get, but none of my English professors would even look at any of these anymore.
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Serolf Divad
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
I bought Brittanica on CD-ROM. It thought it was the height of awesome. But that was before Wikipedia came along with articles on everything from the Riemann hypothesis to Ron Jeremy.
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Kaiser-Machead
03/31/09

@Serolf Divad: Libraries won't be going away unless suddenly Wikipedia is suddenly widely accepted as a source for research papers and the like. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
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General Halfshaftery
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
Remember back ten years ago when we worried that Microsoft would dominate everything it decided to stick its fingers into? But they slept through the Google revolution and have shown so many vulnerabilities since that few people still think of Microsoft as all-threatening.
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frigg
03/31/09

@General Halfshaftery: Microsoft employees (like Google employees) originally wanted to change the world. That was good for the company.

Then, as Microsoft got huge, employees wanted to become rich. That was also good for the company.

Then, as Microsoft became established, employees were motivated by job security. That's when the company began to stagnate.
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Twenty5
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
I still remember using it when i was a kid... very useful indeed...

Will certainly be sad about this...

Oh well... Thank you for those years encarta!

RIP.
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Dr. H. F. Danger
03/31/09

@Twenty5: Yes, very useful for looking up boobs.
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Nick
03/31/09

In reply to RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009
oh man i forgot all about this bad boy. it was a great product for its time. i can understand why it's dead now, though. RIP Encarta.
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RIP Microsoft Encarta, 1993-2009

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