By Stewart Meagher
12 May 2008, 1:30 PM

VOLISH PLANS ARE AFOOT to make sure that, even the poorest people on the planet will also have to bow in supplication to the Mighty Bill and his Microsoft Megacorp. Obviously alarmed by the fact that someone came up with an altruistic way to get computers into the hands of the world's downtrodden and needy, and that those computers would not be running any Microsoft products at all, the Redmond Massive has thrown a spanner into the works by offering a chopped up version of Windows XP at 26 bucks a pop.

No doubt on the basis that making one or two dollars of profit from billions of poorly educated, subsistence-level peasants is better than some Open Source upstart giving them stuff for free. The very thought of it. Freeloading Linux hippies. The cheaper versions of the ancient, though much loved, operating system, will only run on the new breed of ULCPCs, and caveats come in the form of an upper screen size limit of 10.2 inches, a core speed cap of 1gigglehurts, no more than 1GB of RAM and hard drives no bigger than 80GB, according to IDG.