Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project’s focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.Krstic wrote his essay in response to the news that the OLPC might become Windows-only, with the Sugar interface ported to it. In the essay, he gives several points of criticism that seem to reflect what many others (including Eugenia and myself) have been saying for a long time now.
Firstly, he doubts the usefulness of constructionism as a learning theory. The constructionist part of the OLPC project is more or less the open source part: users can fix, improve, and translate the software themselves, which will aid massively in the learning process. While Krstic appreciates the “bright-eyed idealism”, there simply appears to be no facts backing it all up. “No, we don’t know that laptop recipients will benefit from fixing software on their laptops. Indeed, I bet they’d largely prefer the damn software works and doesn’t need fixing.”
As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory. […] There sure as hell doesn’t exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.
Later on in the essay, Krstic dives a little deeper into the philosophical issue of whether or not the entire software stack must be open source. He writes:
At the end of the day, it just doesn’t matter to the educational mission what kernel is running Sugar. If Sugar itself remains open and free – which, thus far, has never been in question – all of the relevant functionality such as the ‘view source’ key remains operational, on Windows or not. OLPC should never take steps to willingly limit the audience for its learning software. Windows is the most widely used operating system in existence. A Windows-compatible Sugar would bring its rich learning vision to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of children all over the world whose parents already own a Windows computer, be it laptop or desktop. To suggest this is a bad course of action because it’s philosophically impure is downright evil.
Krstic also quotes Richard Stallman. Stallman equated teaching children to use proprietary software to introducing children to addictive drugs. This got Krstic riled up pretty badly. “If proprietary software is half as good as free software at aiding children’s learning, you’re damn right it makes the world a better place to get the software out to children,” he fumes, “Stallman doesn’t appear to actually give an acrobatic shit about learning, and sees OLPC as a vehicle for furthering his political agenda. It’s shameful, the lot of it.”
He does want to make clear that he opposes the idea of making Windows the sole operating system of the Sugar UI – but he is enthusiastic about porting it to as many operating systems as possible. In an internal memo Krstic wrote that the OLPC project should port the core Sugar technologies to other operating systems, and then leverage the developers on those operating systems in order to develop the actual user interfaces. “The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning – that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open – with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable.”
Another big issue is the one of deployment, or distribution as I called it in my short piece. For a project aiming to bring laptops to third world countries, you’d think they would put a lot of emphasis on developing an infrastructure for getting laptops to places where there aren’t even McDonald’s restaurants, let alone Starbucks, and, well, roads. Well, you thought wrong.
Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay’s and Peru’s combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. I was parachuted in as the sole OLPC person to deal with Uruguay, and sent to Peru at the last minute. And I’m really good at thinking on my feet, but what the shit do I know about deployment? Right around that time, Walter was demoted and theoretically made the “director of deployment,” a position where he directed his expansive team of – himself. Then he left, and get this: now the company has half a million laptops in the wild, with no one even pretending to be officially in charge of deployment. “I quit,” Walter told me on the phone after leaving, “because I can’t continue to work on a lie.”
Krstic then posts a part of an internal memo he wrote, in which he explains that not having a deployment strategy is going to be the biggest problem for OLPC – so the project very well knew this problem was coming, but didn’t seem adamant to fix it. “That OLPC was never serious about solving deployment, and that it seems to no longer be interested in even trying, is criminal,” Krstic explains, “Left uncorrected, it will turn the project into a historical fuckup unparalleled in scale.”
Krstic doesn’t just criticise the past, he also proposes how to go forward. He presents a paragraph from an email he sent to Negroponte, in which he explains what OLPC should become.
I continue to think it’s a crying shame you’re not taking advantage of how OLPC is positioned. Now that it’s goaded the industry into working on low-cost laptops, OLPC could become a focus point for advocating constructionism, making educational content available, providing learning software, and keeping track of worldwide [one-to-one] deployments and the lessons arising from them. When a country chooses to do [a one-to-one computer program], OLPC could be the one-stop shop that actually works with them to make it happen, regardless of which laptop manufacturer is chosen, banking on the deployment plans it’s cultivated from experience and the readily available base of software and content it keeps. In other words, OLPC could be the IBM Global Services of one-to-one laptop programs. This, I maintain, is the right way to go forward.
Keeping people learning one single platform, why don’t take OS X for instance? Is much clean and not desktop lock in…
The reason of OLPC was failing was Intel Class Mate pc, bad design decisions, the mesh and eventually the price.
For me, Sugar is great as much they learn to use the computer in an agnostic way, means to not learn XP interface and at the end to be blown away by the Vista’s or Windows 7 interface. Is a share that person to get in any way desktop locked in by only one monopoly, even is MS or Apple. The future is education, not the companies!
wake up man! OS X is locked to the Apple hardware and the company would see absolutely no reason to let OLPC use it at any price level. Apple sells products where as MS sells software and much like the good ol’ neighborhood drug dealer it is giving free samples. There is no free lunch and the fact that the OLPC management is so blind as to not see the MS agenda is just another proof how a good idea alone is not enough to make it big in the business world.
Oh, and the reason why the OLPC never made any progress is because they are treating this like some 2 bit OSS project instead of a real business/job which it is and has always been. 2 years ago the hardware was pretty good. On paper it was the best things since fast food but then came the delays and then the ridiculous idea of selling it to developed nations for 2x the price. Come on, you are not really going to give away a free laptop for every one that I buy. You don’t even have a deployment strategy let alone one for giving away free stuff. Plus this very much looks like discrimination based on place of birth/residence … Anyway the bottom line is that OLPC, while having a huge industry backing and a considerable financial one, has already turned into a fiasco. I did have a lot of respect for the project, today I would be ashamed to say that I work for them.
Apple actually offered to port Mac OS X to the OLPC early in the beginnings of the project. For free, even, iirc.
Yer. It’s just a pity that there is no educational software to run on the Mac.
“Keeping people learning one single platform, why don’t take OS X for instance? Is much clean and not desktop lock in…”
Except that it _is_ a desktop lock in, just as Windows. Thinking about that, you could also call Gnome a desktop lock in.
Sugar has the advantage that it doesn’t teach any desktop. It’s a dedicated platform as a learning environment.
“Stallman doesn’t appear to actually give an acrobatic shit about learning, and sees OLPC as a vehicle for furthering his political agenda. It’s shameful, the lot of it.”
Learning can be viewed differently by different people.
Learning your times tables, geography etc. are all well and good but really learning is about learning to be able to learn for yourself, to learn to be interested in how things and other people work.
Using Free software means that the kids are more likely to be able to learn about software and how their computer works. The philosophy behind Free software also fosters a sense of community, learning about community is extremely important for young people, this is something that is sadly largely lacking in modern education.
To some degree programming is something that every computer user should know a little about. I’ve seen so many users waste so much time because they think that pointing and dragging a thousand times is the only way to get the job done.
Don’t forget that only a fraction of children is interested in learning how their computer works. If you want to be a doctor or architect, it is likely that you are not interested in how your webcam software works.
While I do agree that it is a bonus for free software (besides a low price point), the primary goal should be education. In terms of education, having good (electronic?) text books available is much more important, besides that a computer is just an educational tool, and it should be good at that.
An operating system or platform for such devices should be easy to use, use little power, and not add much to the costs. If a modified OS X (what Apple appears to have offered) fulfills those requirements, it seems to be a viable option as well. And I am not sure why they would’ve let that option pass.
In this case I think it is important to forget our own agendas, and think about the primary goal: education.
Edited 2008-05-14 11:12 UTC
Bingo.
The goal of educating children is far more important than the goal of spreading Free software or fighting t3h ev1l Microsoft. Those children will define the future of the world – our software will not.
Sorry, let me just highlight the last sentence of yours:
“In this case I think it is important to forget our own agendas, and think about the primary goal: education.”
All the other companies involved in creating OLPC competition this have shown only a commitment to their own agendas and had a very negative impact on OLPC as a result, often through lobbying, a tactic the OLPC team obviously can’t do as they can’t pay off corrupt government officials as it appears classmate sales staff can do.
Stallman maybe wants to further Free Software but this is because he believes it is the best tool and not because it makes him money or massages his ego.
Regardless of his beliefs, the fact of the matter is that there is no indication that anyone these laptops are meant for has asked RMS to step in and save them from Microsoft.
OTOH, the whole project is very poorly managed as far as I can tell – the few I have seen (or have first hand knowledge of) have died quickly due do faulty screens, bad power supplies, bad batteries, and one even died from a firmware upgrade. It’s apparently a major PITA or impossible to RMA them w/o luck or help.
I believe you got this the wrong way around. The end users of the laptops are not the ones who needed to be saved from Microsoft … it was the OLPC project itself that needed saving from inteference and hinderance and straight out obstruction by Microsoft and Intel.
In the end the OLPC project could not hold out against that.
As the saying goes, “it’s the content, stupid!”
How about we start with a collaborative project to develop a free educational curriculum with textbooks, exercises, lesson plans, etc. under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license. If there were a comprehensive education available for consumption or derivation by anyone with a computer, then there would be a strong case for deploying computers in the developing world.
The Web is a great educational resource for the reasonably educated, but a child cannot learn by exploring Wikipedia. Children need a step-by-step program, and to my knowledge, this kind of resource doesn’t exist on the Web in a libre/gratis form. I propose a UN-sponsored organization headed by professional educators from around the world to coordinate the distributed development of free and open primary and secondary curricula.
“The Web is a great educational resource for the reasonably educated, but a child cannot learn by exploring Wikipedia. Children need a step-by-step program, and to my knowledge, this kind of resource doesn’t exist on the Web in a libre/gratis form.”
Actually there *is* lots of material out there. Do a search for home school curriculum. There are some sites that charge, yes. There are also plenty of sites that do not, and provide the material gratis to the parents that are teaching. So what you propose does already exist, though it could stand to be unified better.
I learnt what I hated about UI’s from using some of the worst ones. That taught me more than having a perfect UI to begin with. GUI designers are all so vain they fail to see a bigger picture when it comes to practicality.
I think krstic was a bit unfair to Stallman and other FOSS advocates in this post. Besides, the free (let’s assume) advertisement to Apple at the expense of GNU/Linux was unfortunate, and the free advertisement to Microsoft doesn’t make it any better. But maybe he was only voicing his frustration and disagreement with unrealistic expectations, that you can throw half-working software to children and expect them to become happy kernel programmers all by themselves just because it’s FOSS, without any kind of teaching plan. At the end of the post, he clarifies his position:
” Now, pay close attention: while I’m unequivocally enthusiastic about Sugar being ported to every OS out there, I’m absolutely opposed to Windows as the single OS that OLPC offers for the XO. […]
OLPC should be philosophically pure about its own machines. Being a non-profit that leverages goodwill from a tremendous number of community volunteers for its success and whose core mission is one of social betterment, it has a great deal of social responsibility. It should not become a vehicle for creating economic incentives for a particular vendor. It should not believe the nonsense about Windows being a requirement for business after the children grow up. Windows is a requirement because enough people grew up with it, not the other way around. If OLPC made a billion people grow up with Linux, Linux would be just dandy for business. And OLPC shouldn’t make its sole OS one that cripples the very hardware that supposedly set the project’s laptops apart: released versions of Windows can neither make good use of the XO power management, nor its full mesh or advanced display capabilities.
Most importantly, the OS that OLPC ships should be one that embodies the culture of learning that OLPC adheres to. The culture of open inquiry, diverse cooperative work, of freely doing and debugging — this is important. OLPC has a responsibility to spread the culture of freedom and ideas that support its educational mission; that cannot be done by only offering a proprietary operating system for the laptops.
Put differently, OLPC can’t claim to be preoccupied with learning and not with training children to be office computer drones, while at the same time being coerced by hollow office drone rhetoric to deploy the computers with office drone software. Nicholas used to say the thought of the XOs being used to teach 6-year olds Word and Excel made him cringe. Apparently, no longer so. Which is it? The vacillation needs to stop. As they say in the motherland: shit or get off the pot.”
I could’n have said it better.
Edited 2008-05-14 15:40 UTC
I don’t think so. I think he was dead-on about Stallman et al. Stallman is wholly preoccupied with spreading the politics of free software, not with educating kids.
Negroponte is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Intel is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Microsoft is preoccupied with making money off the kids. Steve Jobs was, apparently, also interested in lining Apple’s pockets off the kids.
Although I am, as you know, an advocate of Linux, I’ve also established myself as a critic of Stallman and his peculiar monomania.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone, by this time, that giving any one entity control by using their proprietary software would be a mistake. This is one situation where I have to agree with Richard.
Edited 2008-05-15 01:21 UTC
I don’t think so. I think that Negroponte is struggling with the reality that he can’t run a project without commercial support — and he doesn’t want the project to be solely commercially-driven. It’s a difficult line to walk.
Of course. For-profit companies are motivated by profit. But, I think, if you are fair, you will agree that these companies have hugely downscaled their prices in order to make this project possible. It isn’t solely about profit for them. It’s about building long-term mindshare which, frankly, is more important than short-term profit.
I disagree. The fact of the matter is that kids don’t have to use open source operating systems in order to dabble in open source software. Plenty of open source software is written to run on top of Windows and OS X. Further, there is no reason why a Linux distro couldn’t be installed on one of these OLPCs, if a given user needs to use an open source OS. What we have here is a case of Stallman wanting to prevent these kids from even having a laptop in order to protect their “freedom”. Quite frankly, the casual observer would probably agree that that is ridiculous and wrong-headed. The overwhelming majority of these kids will not care about or have any interest in the particulars of the OS that they’re running. And those that do care have other avenues to pursue (eg. install Linux). So, I would rather err on the side of putting computers in the hands of kids, not protecting some moron’s political agenda.
Edited 2008-05-15 20:53 UTC
Yours is a reasonable position. But giving any of the commercial, proprietary vendors control by using their OS on the machine, in my opinion, seriously compromises the value of the project. I can well understand why yours and my opinions might differ on that count, despite the fact that we probably are both concerned about the kids. Then again, neither of us are in control of the outcome. Care to join me for a thumb-twiddling session? 😉
Let’s be honest here: The essential “value” of the project is putting laptops in the hands of kids. It isn’t about putting “Linux” in the hands of kids.
Tomcat,
I’m not sure about that. Like beauty, the “essential value” is in the eye of the beholder. The commercial entities want to get their claws into these kids. The kids need books, virtual or otherwise. This thing is potentially quite big, but needs to be done right. I’m not sure that stretching the tendrils of our US based megacorps so far and wide as this is in the best interest of anyone.
Edited 2008-05-15 21:11 UTC
Given that you’re not going to be able to put a laptop in these kids’ hands without the involvement of commercial interests, something has to give. There has to be a compromise somewhere and, given that, I think it’s a small price to pay to ship the machines with a commercial OS. It’s not as if these commercial interests have the ability to force the consumer into buying another commercial OS down the road. Linux is getting quite good, and there are other options. But that’s just my opinion.
Tomcat,
I suspect that is about as close as we are likely to get. I think that one of the commercial OSes may just be able to come up with a way to force them to purchase future copies. I can’t prove it; my crystal ball is on the blink and won’t allow me to take screen shots.
Let us hope that the Universe really does unfold as it should.
Edited 2008-05-15 23:55 UTC
The worst that can be said of Stallman is that he values children’s freedom more than their education. So do I.
Yes, the last thing that they need is to have a new overlord. Bill, Steve, Nicholas, Paul… hard to decide. You can bet that Larry and Jonathan also are hard at work coming up with plausible reasons that this effort requires powerful Sun servers running Oracle. (Of course, Jonathan is secretly planning to switch it to PostgreSQL after the deal is signed, and Larry is secretly planning to switch it to Linux.)
Edited 2008-05-15 01:58 UTC
That’s BS and you know it. The reason children have rules as they grow up which are relaxed once they become older is that education must come before freedom. Human beings cannot be free in society before they learn to control themselves and integrate well. Similarly, it’s far more useful to teach these children skills that are applicable to their situation such as medicine, information about the natural world, writing and communication, than it is to get them into computer programming or Free Software. Free Software is great and if that’s the cheapest and most effiicent way to get the job done, then by all means go with Free Software. But if a proprietary company is donating their work and their software will allow the product to be produced cheaper and more effectively, then Free Software should take a back seat because it is far less important to the vast majority of the kids than the aforementioned skills.
Well, I don’t think much of educational systems where children are not treated as free individuals from the beginning. It’s not that I’m against rules, free adults follow rules as well. But this is a digression. Children are supposed to follow stricter rules “for their own good”. Do you really think there’s a valid analogy between the rules that parents set for their children and the EULAs that corporations write for their users? hint: for whose good are they designed?
Freedom is a very general and loaded concept, but in this case I mean the children’s freedom to own their tools. It doesn’t matter what they will do in life, if computers are useful at all for their profession then computers and the software in them are some of their tools. I think it’s arguably better to have lower-quality tools, or having to wait a little more for high quality tools, than growing used to tools you don’t own. Many adults decide otherwise, often for pragmatic reasons, but children should not be exposed to such traps.
well if you want to talk about freedom…well these countries that the OLPC is marketed to aren’t very free at all. Fix that problem and we wouldn’t need this OLPC campaign as parents will be able to afford to buy their own computers without any help.
Are you actually equating freedom with purchasing power? What definition of freedom are you applying here?
The problem with Stallman is that he seems to lack any sense of perspective. He would rather put a bullet in the head of this project rather than have it use commercial software. So, tell me, would these kids be more free because they lack access to computers and technology? Or would the ability to use open source software running on top of a commercial OS be a reasonable compromise? I think it is.
You seem to confuse “proprietary OS” with “commercial OS”. Linux, the OS now being tweaked for the XO, is a perfectly commercial OS. Dozens of corporations make loads of money producing it, developing software for it, using it and supporting it. It’s also perfectly free/open source software.
It’s one thing to say Stallman lacks a sense of perspective, which is a reasonable criticism (and I’m not saying I agree), and another thing to say, as Krstic did, that he doesn’t “give an acrobatic shit about learning, and sees OLPC as a vehicle for furthering his political agenda.”, which I consider an unfair characterization. You can bet RMS cares about the children’s education much more than Microsoft and Apple executives do.
Regarding your question, I think it may well be the case that they are better off in the long run waiting a little longer for free tools than having proprietary tools right now. OTOH, if Windows were treated as a kind of “driver” with which they never interact directly, and so they only get used to the FOSS tools built on top of it, so that a future migration to a GNU/Linux platform is trivial, then it might (might!) be an acceptable compromise, but then they would loose the ability to investigate the software stack down to the metal, so it would only make no difference to those who are not very interested in computers in the first place.
But from what I’ve read, it seems that Windows will take a prominent place. Besides, as a “driver” it’s technically much worse than GNU/Linux for the OLPC. That only leaves the reason that Microsoft may donate lots of money, effectively buying its way to the new generations. Frankly I prefer the FSF’s “political agenda” than any corporation’s agenda any day.
Lastly, and excuse the rant, while I concede that in some circumstances (which I don’t think are happening) distributing a free software platform on top of a proprietary operating system might be an acceptable compromise, that’s the kind of thing a project must clarify from the beginning. It’s not OK to present a vision of a fully free computing and learning environment and then, after so many people contribute with time, effort and money, turn your back on one of the biggest pillars of the vision, embrace proprietary software corporations and call it just a strategic move, while insulting those very contributors. Hiding behind the “it’s about the children!” argument is just lame. Free software advocates don’t have to prove they want the best for the children, just like any decent person. It’s wrong to lie to people, period.
As noble was the project, but reality bit it and soon it start behaving like schizophronic personality. Dont have any direction and ivory tower professors(even from MIT) dont realize reailty of real world.
Think from eyes of a third world children who have Never seen a computer in their life. they never have read even fancy colorful books. All they need is a simple, computer which they can read and write books and alphabets and maths. Any old days 386 will perform better. I dont mean TW kids dont deserve latest technology, just they dont need it at this moment.
Imagine you have never driven a car and someone is ready to give you a most utility Jeep right away but promise fancy Ferrari after 3 years.which would you take. Give these kids what they need to start their interaction with technology. A windows mobile powered cellphone(or symbion) worth $100 will do better job than much promised OLPC.
I challenge Mr Negroponte to implement OLPC project with US kids(which are way backwards in reading, maths and science..37th). And prove that it improves their skills before looting TW govts with empty promises.
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you are not a native English speaker and that you have no idea what you are talking about.
Cheers
I have to say it’s a very interesting article. It sheds some negative light on Negroponte and I must admit, I’m disappointed in the way OLPC seems to be screwed up by some of its leaders.
However, I don’t think it’s a good thing to digress fulminating against free software/open source. It might be that some people, out of irritation with some of Linux’s quirks on their crappy hardware, go out and buy Macs, and it might be that Mac OS X could have been an interesting platform for something like the XO.
But this doesn’t mean that free software would be somehow discredited all of a sudden. It’s not just about kids wanting to or not wanting to hack their own software together or get to the inner workings of their OS and programs. It’s also about an educational infrastructure that is not tied to any specific vendor. If not all of the kids turn hackers, and of course they won’t, at least an educational institution’s software infrastructure should, one might argue, be open and independent of any software firm.
In a ‘winner takes all’ market this is not something to think light of. Even politicians these days (in some places at least) have discovered that it is preferable for public institutions to use open source software by default. It has nothing to do with any religious conviction, it’s an extension of the democratic freedom of the public to not be dependent of any one corporation.
The XO, by the way, is still potentially far cooler than any of the ‘Classmate’ variants out there today. The latter are just nice cheap little crappy laptops, the former actually is something innovative and interesting. And it’s about design quality too, in a world where most laptops out there are designed to fall apart after only a few years.
Yes, I did try them out both.
Sure, this was about education. So instead of the XO now, are we going to send those poor kids our crap Pentium 3 white boxes again?
I don’t understand why is there such an opposition to sugar. And I don’t understand why so many people perceive the project as a failure, especially in a technical site like this.
I’m not a kid, so I won’t speak from theory, just from the adult end user experience (not the intended target, but I doubt anyone here has credentials on techno and education either).
Sugar seems to me the perfect UI for the type of physical device it was designed for. Very easy to point, very clean usability concepts. The last joyride builds are simply awesome. Performance lags, and the Journal needs a lot of love, but the concept and even present day usability is great. And the cute programming interface actually reminds me a lot of how I got fascinated with computers when I was a kid.
While I understand the strategic mistake of taking on so many fronts at the same time, I doubt that the goals of the project can be successful without a major rethinking of the interface. The project could benefit from collaboration with Ubuntu Mobile or something like that, but something along those lines would have been needed anyway. A regular desktop OS is not a good fit for this computer, you can install it (pretty easily, I’ve done that in a few minutes) but the window metaphor has a limit in this type of machine and needs more than just tweaking. The Sugar UI in all its imperfections is still my preferred interface.
And from a kid’s perspective it’s really easy to install whatever flavor of linux you want in it. In short, let’s not forget how great these little machines are, and the technical prowess (both in hardware and software) they achieved, even creating the market for low-cost, tiny laptops. I thought that this is what people in this site would have been more interested about rather than discussing the pitfalls of management a project of this magnitude, and self congratulating for old pretentious prophecies cast with little real knowledge on the subject.
Typing this from my 2.0lb, 7.1 inch screened Eee PC running Ubuntu… I’ve never quite understood why a “from scratch” interface was needed in the first place.
Have you run a live cd with the sugar interface, or maybe even tried the XO machine yourself? It actually is interesting. It’s intuitive in a different way, but some of the concepts are well thought out. Such as the graphical way of being in single user mode, in a group, or with everyone on the network.
Obviously, you and me are way too old and conservative to get used to this alternative interface. Hell, I still use Gnome without Compiz.
I agree with what you’re saying abot Negroponte’s leadership failures and general concern on the project. I too have followed it, and (the typos betray it) I’m actually typing this from my own xo.
My point is that this failure does not demonstrate, though, that the hardware/software developmnt model was flawed. The projct had/has a lot of potential but it is primarily due to management issues that it is now in the state it is. The UI and hw and design decisins were not flawed at all I believe.
In this I disagree with posters and especially with the read more comment.
It’s very cool you can actually use one at home. I’ve only used one for half an hour at CeBIT, Hannover. I had a good opportunity to compare it to the Eee, and frankly, the XO pwns the Eee in almost every respect. Coolness being obviously one of them.
Not in the least.
The one area where all the XO/OLPC’s competitors miserably fail is quality. Design, build, materials, repairability, recyclability, a human-powerable battery, the mesh network, versatility of the screen, waterproof keyboard (ok. the keyboard might be a bad example
) if the bugs are ironed out, the XO is superior in all these respects.
1. You where educated in a system that invested minimum 50k in your education per year. With books that are worth 500$ per book per class that where loaned per individual.
2. They have to learn to use computer first , because that’s the only tool they will use and have to learn primary level of education. There secondary level teachers need to learn it too.
3. Because the fact is there is no multi nationnal , multi language , education tool , that can be used for gratis. Sure there exist more performing educationnal tool in the proprietary world , that cost 10k more per unit , but hey are not gratis and copying them could run into lawsuit and stopping class in the future.
4. Red Hat is the solution provider , not Ubuntu.
5. Because GNU/Linux is used at secondary level elsewhere and test and research whas done and that’s the solution the research came with for easier learning.
6. Sugar can be/is made to run on Windows , BSD , OS X , etc.
7. The fact that Mac OS X and Windows don’t run , and aren’t used on the OLPC as mroe to do with Apple and Microsoft failure to provide the base then anything else. The hardware used for base is to far below the basic requirement of both OS , there developer are unable to come up with a working solution. They also ar enot interested in offering a Free Software or Open Source offering.
Let’s take this one point at a time. Tulsa, OK, USA invested “at least” $600,000 in my public education and paid $500 per book I touched?
A city of population 1 million would have to spend well over $8 billion per year on public education alone to maintain those numbers.
Really, you are either very confused or very full of it, Moulinneuf.
Edited 2008-05-14 19:48 UTC
“Tulsa, OK, USA invested $650,000 in my public education and paid $500 per book I touched?”
They paid more then that because you did not just get an high school education , did you ?
People pay taxes at three level , city , states , federal. They all contribute to the education system.
– In order for you to have an education your teachers had to learn and be educated first. They had to have had books and teachers theself , schools had to be built and transport system had to be put in place to help them get to school , plus the cafetaria system. ETC …
– Before that/at the same time your parent used that system too.
Then you happened and when you grew up there was the computer revolution , so they had to buy computers to teach you and others the basics , so they had to replace all the obsolete books with newer one , had to refurnish and rebuild schools to cope with the increase in number of students and the need for IT infrastructures.
But that’s not all they had to retrain the teacher’s too , and they had to hire teacher to teache the teacher’s about computers , they had to buy books to help teach them. They had to retrain them in new curriculum too , the curriculum had to be paid to be built first too, because somethings are proven as true and other’s as false. History changes , event that shape the world happens. Geographic map do not stay stale neither do Geopolitical States. Country change government , Mathematic discovery and economic changes happens. ETC …
30 billion divided over 20 years = 1.5 billion per year. 1.5 divided by 3 = 500 million
http://www.muninetguide.com/schools/OK/Tulsa/Primary-Schools/
500 million divided by 69 school = 7.5 million per school.
“you are either very confused or very full of it”
Option C , Again , I know a lot more on the subject then you do and have read real report from experts who work in the fields. I also add properly.
Sure thing are amortized over time , but you forget that they need to be bought first , that they need maintenance , repair , evolution and to be replaced when they are broken. Also thing always cost more overtime.
Nice of you to notice.
*Sigh*
All of this was figured in. Back when I was studying mechanical engineering, we talked quite a lot about “steady state” systems. Word problem for you Moulinneuf:
If the average person in the US, population 300 million, has $50 thousand spent on him for 13 years of his life, that is $650,000. If he then lives an average of 72 years, how much is that per person per year?
It works out, on average, to $9027 per year per person. Do the arithmetic. Does the US, or any other country on the Earth, spend nearly 3 trillion dollars per year on education?
Obviously Canada does not, if you are any indication.
But I am reasonably certain that you are not representative.
We are not talking about a truly steady state system. So you have a certain amount of wiggle-room here. But you are never going to pull the orders of magnitude out of that that you need.
You were talking out of your ass Mouly. Just admit it.
Edited 2008-05-14 21:09 UTC
You missed the point … If you stopped at 13 years that make you an high school student , If you did more your numbers are wrong.
Nope. Just the *interests* on loans are never factored in by students …
Wrong again , because the US taxes payer is not only the US population … Corporatiion and business and some Foundation , etc , do pay taxes to …
We have more then 50 thousand spent on us per year …
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
1182 billion only at the US federal level , per year.
How much per state ?
How much per City ?
How much Corporation and services pay per individual ?
Sure it does , In mechanical engineering , where as in reality you have to account for everything. Let me guess in your fake and wrong numbers you need 1 teacher to teach sudent one class ? right ?
In reality it take 4. Because people get sick and people get other jobs/get fired/sued/go into retirement.
You know it’s funny that you compare the US vs CANADA
Explain to me how since I am so stupid and my country so inferior why CANADA is always at the top of the lists and you guys at the bottom ?
We beat your 300 million at everything and we are only 32 million.
Your right , most people don’t pass collegial level , don’t speak more then one language and also they tend to be working for someone else and make less then 30k per year.
“You were talking out of your ass Mouly”
It’s Moulinneuf and sadly no , unlike you I was not.
Edited 2008-05-14 22:49 UTC
Most companies in the US get away without paying any taxes due to all the loop holes, tax breaks, etc. that are in the system. It’s typically the small business owners (the mom & pop shops) that pay taxes – or companies with really bad accountants.
FYI – each school in the US gets approximately $8k per student per year from taxes to spend on everything that student needs. So I’d say the parent is a lot closer to right than you.
Now, if you were to factor in cost of teaching the teachers, then you have an impossible calculation to make as it would be an extremely deeply recursive function – and you’d then end up at billions of dollars per student per year more likely than not.
And note, of course, that my post treats the system as a black box. Mouly’s reference to the cost of teachers and his assertion that it takes four of them per student due to illness and retirement was a smoke and mirrors ploy on his part.
Your post is completely wrong. That’s what it is.
That’s my real life name and it’s still Moulinneuf. Not Mouly , there is no Y in my name …
[/q]reference to the cost of teachers and his assertion that it takes four of them per student due to illness and retirement was a smoke and mirrors ploy on his part. [/q]
No , that’s your point I said :
“Let me guess in your fake and wrong numbers you need 1 teacher to teach sudent one class ? right ?
In reality it take 4. Because people get sick and people get other jobs/get fired/sued/go into retirement.”
I never said you need 4 teacher per student anywhere , I said you need 4 teacher per class/course , I never said at the same time since your obviously being a moron on this , I obviously need to specify it.
Really Moul,
How does all that hand-waiving address my initial objection to your claim that the US spends $50k per year per person on education?
13 years * $50,000 per year per person = $650000 per person.
If a person lives, on average, 72 years, then that works out to $9028 per person through the system. That would work out to about a 3 trillion dollar per year education budget.
Loan interest, building maintenance, janitorial service, and whatever they paid for that foul and stinky cafeteria food are all quite irrelevant.
Your numbers are nonsensical, Moul. Just admit it. 😉
Edited 2008-05-15 04:58 UTC
It’s not hand waiving.
I don’t make claim , your just deciding to forget the other associated cost and deny they exist. It’s per student not per person too.
No , but that’s what make you irrelevant if your only interested in making up numbers to substantiate your own nonsense and discard reality.
But then again you make up random number and multiply them as you wish and discard what you don’t like that show you as wrong.
School are not only made of student or only student expenses.
It’s you who need to admit that you prefer to believe that you pay less , because your not interested in knowing the real price needed to educate one student per year.
But Moul, you said just a few posts ago:
“””
You where educated in a system that invested minimum 50k in your education per year. With books that are worth 500$ per book per class that where loaned per individual.
“””
Still say you “don’t make claim”? You made claim. I showed that your claim was absurd. And you are now dancing around said claim which you cannot support.
Edited 2008-05-15 06:53 UTC
The two post don’t contradict themself … and are not claim. They are two different reply and point to two different comment you made.
You where educated , this imply as a student , in the US system , to the cost of 50k per year minimum.
You don’t agree because you only account for student spending and discard the other cost that are associated with schools. Fine by me , but , that make you wrong.
The problem is your multiplication and numbers and erronous data based on your failed education.
I strongly object to your taking the us population as a multiplier , why ? Because not every citizen was educated in the us and a natural citizen of the US.
That’s what your person in :
“13 years * $50,000 per year per person = $650000 per person.”
implies … Instead of students.
I stronlgy object to your 13 year multiplier because most people go above high school level.
I strongly object to your 72 year random number , because if a person died at age 5 , they are a person and never went to school.
“That would work out to about a 3 trillion dollar per year education budget.”
Sure , if by some magical device you could do 13 year of living and crunch them at the end by using the device to make it be a spending of one year sure that would equals 3 trillion per year …
In reality 650 000 after 13 year at 50k , that mean 50k per year. So if the basis for your trillion per year is 650k , that means your wrong …
But then at 68.6 billion per year + for education at the federal level only per year in the US if you multiply it by 13 years. your 3 trillion is also wrong …
http://www.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html
“That said, it is important to point out that education in America is primarily a State and local responsibility, and ED’s budget is only a small part of both total national education spending and the overall Federal budget”
Yes and no , I cant deny that there is a lot of legal tax evasion , it’s the same in Canada and almost every where too , but it’s really the fault of the system for allowing it in the first place , also corporation do pay some taxes and there income level make them pay more taxes too , on the amount not the percentage , the smb and mom and pop shop are generally taxed differently and do pay more taxes on percentage , but they usally make less income too and pay less taxes on the amounts.
That’s because they account for the teachers teaching , school ground , lab equipments , furnishing , transport , sanitazion , etc in other category.
There’s not just the cost of training the teachers to account for , school repairs , school improvements , new labs , new techniques/class that need new training tools , systems , teachers equipment , study equipment. ETC …
Those are the components of most schools ( taken from wikipedia ) :
cafeteria (Commons), dining hall or canteen where students eat lunch. athletic field, playground, gym, and/or track place where students participating in sports or physical education practice , auditorium or hall where student theatrical or musical productions can be staged and where all-school events such as assemblies are held, office where the administrative work of the school is done , library where students consult and check out books , Specialized classrooms including laboratories for science education ,
A Computer lab where computer-based work is done
Those are manned but not accounted in the student budgets either.
No , but you know I can examplify it for you , real simple example is your car expanses :
Gas , oil , maintenance , insurance , driver license , Vehicle registration plates , incident/unforseen events. All those by themself are meaningless if you don’t have a car. Who pay for the car ? the Car vendor , the governement or you ? When your kids or your S.O. use the car is the oil comapny paying for the oil or you are ?
So sure you have the student and there expanses. But someone pay for the school , the people who man it and the people and equipment who help the kids get to school. Sure there are amortized over the years , but when you discard those cost your just being stupid. Because they too have a cost and they need to be watched and paid for at the right amount for the job.
The OLPC replace the Library , the books , the assistant teacher and the school labs. If they where to buy them then they would not be able to do it for every student.
“FYI – each school in the US gets approximately $8k per student per year from taxes to spend on everything that student needs. So I’d say the parent is a lot closer to right than you.”
Please show where these numbers came from? Being in the US myself, I find it very hard to believe since our schools can not buy needed supplies, and at 8K per student per year as you claim, there would be more than enough money to pay teachers salaries and get supplies. There sure would not be a lack of computers as there is now for sure, let alone being able to update the textbooks every few years.
Apple and microsoft both offered to provide the base. Pragmaticism made the OLPC project choose otherwise.
Yes , but none of them delivered any real working product or real working solution , had Apple or Microsoft delivered a working solution on the hardware specs , OLPC could offer other OS solution now.
They also wanted to sale there proprietary solutions at a discount per/unit. Charge the development fee to the project too.
Also the base is just the start.
They offered and they were turned down…why would they go ahead and do it anyway?
Because they did and failed … Because they wanted to replace GNU/Linux as they see it as a global threat.
Because a good portion of Apple revenue for it’s computer and OS sale is the education system likewise for Microsoft windows.
Please provide proof that Apple tried and failed to provide a version of OS X. Until then you’re trolling
http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/
General requirements
Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor
512MB of memory
DVD drive for installation
9GB of available disk space
Some features require a compatible Internet service provider; fees may apply.
Some features require Apple’s .Mac service; fees apply.
and look what they provided for the iphone. You don’t need a general purpose OS for something like the OLPC.
Show me real proof.
“and look what they provided for the iphone”
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/…
the 8GB model is 399$ …
http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_on_MacOS_X
If you are running Leopard, don’t waste your time (as of Dec 12, 2007) I just spent 2 days using macports and some custom builds to try to satisfy the sugar-jhbuild dependencies, and as much as I hate to admit it – it is currently undoable. There are some real problems in leopard with some of the GNU libs – for one thing any package that includes -export-symbols-regex will compile and install, but fail with “dlopen…symbol not found: xxx” errors when you try to use in python (eg. import gtk) – this problem has been logged on both macports and gnome. You can remove the flag, and some will work, but some, like vte, will not regardless.
In addition, there are numerous other gaps – such as no gst-python port for OSX (the source does not compile out-of-the-box), and the ALSA requirement is likely to be trouble even if you can get past the dep check of sugar-jhbuild. Overall sugar-jhbuild was clearly not designed with x-plat in mind. It would be nice to be able to develop sugar activities on OSX without having to live in a VM environment – but right now that is the only realistic way to do it – at least in leopard.
Why are you still on about general Mac OSX leopard? They could do many different things to pair down the OS to make it something that will fit the goals of OLPC and the hardware…
Try again. I want real proof that they tried and failed. Otherwise stop wasting my time and yours.
I gave you real proof , Your too dumb to realize that a 1000$ iBook + 150$ for the OS + 4000k on the software is not going to meet the requirement of a 100$-200$ total projects.
Even when the Tecnology is transfered in a 400$ device ( iPhone ) your still 300$ too high …
Your time is of novalue to me , Correcting your nonsense is of immense value for me.
And yet you’re still using software built for a general purpose computer. Not a specialized operating system built for a very special piece of hardware.
The reason mac os x’s hardware requirements are so high is mostly because the graphical interface. If you’re looking to put sugar on it instead of Aqua, you suddenly cut the requirements down immensely.
Seeing as you’re getting into personal attacks. Don’t call me dumb till you learn how to spell and utilize correct grammar. You’re too stupid to provide adequate proof that Apple has failed at providing a specialized build of their operating system that meets the requirements of the OLPC project.
Try again?
No , yet , that’s what the OLPC is , a general purpose computer that is , with a lower cpu of 433MHZ. That the other OS can’t run on , even using there lite versions ( iPhone ). Not on a 100$ hardware budget , otherwise they would have version available for the OLPC now.
Both company used to build OS for Hardware system with far less hardware specs. Except there newer OS need more Hardware requirement to run properly.
Because Leopard as only Aqua that as higher Hardware requirement …. No , but nice try.
Nothing personnal at all in replying to your nonsense , sorry.
I am , but then that means your really dumb since you have no excuse to explain your nonsenses.
I did , the fact that you don’t accept what I offered as adequate only show you as dumb.
Why ? your suddenly gonna grow inteligence beyond your current level ? Accept reality that there is no Mac OS X for the OLPC ?
Very doubtfull.
Edited 2008-05-15 00:27 UTC
It may still be the initiall reaction. A lot of us (if I dare call myself a regular here), supported the OLPC and where very vocal about it. I’ve personally corrected many people on missconceptions about the program by pointing out that the hardware is designed well for harsh environments and that the ultimate goal was education not pissing contests over hardware specs.
For me, this clarifies a great deal of confusion. The media reports have considtantly been getting less optimistic. OLPC has been dropping staff like ice off the tail of a commit. Even so, getting open details on what kind of clusterfk has been going on behind closed doors is a rather sharp slap in the face for those who have supported to publicised goals and innovations.
I think that’s really what many are responding too. We become attracted to a project. We supported and vocally volunteered in our limited ways. Ultimately, the project management turned that around and tossed off in everyone’s face. We seek now to discuss and understand the reasons why this very vocally supported project is flying into the side of a mountain. It’s failing for BS business reasons rather than any technical limitation that was unexpected and couldn’t be addressed.
The originally publicized goals of the program and innovation that has been done should not be lost. I think they are still very valuable. It’s still not the magic cure to educational cancer but it could be a very important tool where applicable.
I was watching OLPC closely as a first machine for my little one provided it was still the best choice when the time came. Currently, it’s the eeePC but if that price point raises above what I can get the same form and resources for then it may just end up being my old CF27 again since that will take a good kicking as a child’s first machine.
As mentioned in the article; all they had to do was not lie too the open source community they invited so much help from. We’ll see how it all turns out being that we’re all limited observers. Hopefully some children benefit and that shnazzy screen makes it’s way into regular product use.
In simpler language, some of us are wondering if Negrogponte isn’t just a lying, deceitful c*nt. Please understand that I am going for concision and clarity in this post rather than for adherence to the tenets of social etiquette. 😉
Edited 2008-05-14 18:37 UTC
Whatever tenets you adhere to, I share your fears.
Without trying to answer that rather burning question … follow what Walter and Ivan and Mary and the devs do … and if Prof Negroponte manages to put the organization under, then *shrug* it will be a damned shame but not the end of anything.
Quite quite frustrating, I’ll agree.
There’s a build tree separate from Joyride called “faster” if you want to participate in the performance enhancing experiments. Guaranteed to be unstable.
Oh and the new UI stuff has been coming into recent Joyrides.
Oh and Tomeu kicked out a first prototype of a new DS and much disscusion of the forwards and backwards (and sideways) compatibility and uses has ensued.
To first step in accomplishing a complex goal is to determine what you want to accomplish. This is the executive role in companies/organizations. The goals of OLPC have changed.
The initial OLPC goals include:
“We are non-profit: constructionism is our goal; XO is our means of getting there. It is a very cool, even revolutionary machine, and we are very proud of it. But we would also be delighted if someone built something better, and at a lower price.” (http://www.olpcnews.com/olpc_mission/olpc_mission.htm). This indicates they wish to provide tools that will allow people to learn to fix and extend their systems on their own. For this mission FLOSS is really the optimal choice.
The new OLPC goals include:
“OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.”
(http://laptop.org/en/vision/mission/index.shtml). This goal indicates that they wish to connect people to current world.
The two goals are NOT the same. To me goal the old goal represents a fairly basic change from how things are done today since it encourages localizing solutions, learning to fix your own problems and sharing information. Most solutions today rely on the global economy for many things and knowledge must be purchased (IP). The new goal seems to simply represent getting people on the internet in the same way we do today. I believe this is why many people have conflicting views of the changes at OLPC. If the old goals were significantly more important than the new ones changing to the new one will likely be seen as a betrayal (especially if you supported it through work or money). If you feel the new goal is more important than the old goals then you likely will not see it as a betrayal merely changing to “real world requirements”.
For me this explains most of the changes that are going on at OLPC.
Personally, I have a hard time trusting a non-profit that changes its goals so significantly without publicly soliciting the advice of its current supporters.
It will take a lot of additional planning to address the new environment presented by the new goals and I have not seen any indication they are addressing them. One example is OS support, will MS / Apple provide free or low cost support for these PCs if they ship with their OS? Will they provide means to do offline updates (since many of these will have only sporadic internet connection)? If not, how will these people deal with the problem of updates and support? Windows XP is not a commercial product anymore (XP has reached EOL), will new hardware be supported?
Without better long term planning I can see several roll-outs that will be “successful” but decay over a year or two. Unfortunately, from what I’ve read long term planning does not seem to be a strong suit of the current OLPC upper management.
It’s just another rant from a former employee. To be polite because the reality is he is incompetent and did not know what he was doing yet choose to try and do the job and instead of working at fixing the problem he decided to quit …
None of is point have anything to do directly with the OLPC , it’s sound more like the wrong opinion of people we hear here all the time.
The fact are this : GNU/Linux is offering a solution , Windows and Mac OS X make claim but there OS don’t run on the hardware even after it was modified to help them get on it, and hiking the price of the hardware in the process .
OLPC asked for the impossible , and they got a partial solution from GNU/Linux and no one else.
Sure if the budget had been 10k per child then we would have seen Apple and Microsoft all over it with real solution both hardware and software and teacher program , ready for deployment.
As it is there is no budget , for anything , only small programs and small donations. For the size of the task.
In a perfect world the Proprietary OS and proprietary software would contribute there old version so that the program to client that will never be able to afford there solution for now can be educated and one day there country reach a level where they can afford to buy any solution for education.
As it is only Free Software and GNU/Linux are doing the job , The OLPC is plagued by inside treachery and inside competitors and Management who change there mind and the targets by the months , with incompetent employee.
The task is an impossible one and the only one that show up and do the job are being satirized and devilized by people who are unable to provide any solution for the exisiting hardware and who’s current offer are worth 20k per individual. Who never tried to do the job a slong as they existed.
There is always money to protect the rich and there interest , when it’s a fact they don’t pay taxe or avoid paying there share , there is millions and billions for obsolete weapons and weapons programs.
Yet there is never any money to spend to educate the poor and provide them tools to make there lives better.
At the end of the day , we can listen to critics who don’t do the job , the quiter who never finished there jobs , Multinationnal worth billions who don’t even participate.
Or we listen to those who try and do the job and ignore the rants.
True.
Sadly, many of the people that live in the country of the XO/OLPC’s origin live in ‘Third World” circumstances already.
Wow, I stopped reading after you said he was incompetent in the guise of being polite.
Are you an expert in any of the fields Ivan works in?
Published in any of them? Know anything about the work he did at OLPC and for the XO? Did you work there?
No? Then kindly keep your ignorant opinions and bald personal attacks to yourself.
I get the impression that Moulinneuf has something of value to say… but he gets so caught up in being offensive that any initial value that it might have had is lost in the end. 🙁
Oh is that what happened in the subthread about inflationary pressure on US currency in Tulsa, OK’s education budget?
Indeed…
Take off… for the Great White North. It’s a beauty way to go.
Last time I checked, they were still using currency in Tulsa, and we still have an education budget (barely) so I guess those are points in his favor. 😉
Hey, as long as the Kansas BoE isn’t involved …
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/responses
.. you gotta be doing okay, eh?
You should have continued reading it , might have learned something …. No wait , reading others who know more then you is impossible your perfect and a god …
Must be why you hide your name and point to someone ugly text based site …
“Are you an expert in any of the fields Ivan works in?”
No , I am the teacher to the expert …
“Published in any of them?”
Yes.
“Know anything about the work he did at OLPC ”
Yes.
“and for the XO?”
Yes.
“Did you work there?”
No. As more to do me not wanting to work with them and them not being able to afford me.
“No?”
Was mostly yes and one no.
“Then kindly keep your ignorant opinions”
I did not make an opinion. I actually say IMPO or In my personnal opinion when I make one. I made an observation on a usual situation when you have someone incompetent , usually a vocal developer , who quit before being fired , who is making tons of excuses to explain everything else but why he could not achieve the job and what was is own failure and what was needed.
But then YOU did not read my post and YOU concluded I was ignorant , a two year old with a half functionning braincell know you don’t send an architecture security expert in the field for deployment. The real expert refuse to do jobs they know they are not perfect for.
“bald personal attacks”
There is nothing *personnal* about is work at the OLPC , is opinion and pedantic *Notebook* article on past news events and is recorded incompetence there. As the saying goes don’t dish out dirt and show your incompetence in public , you might have it returned ten fold and someone pointing out you did not do the job.
In case it need pointing out to you , divergent opinion and opposing obsevation are welcome on forum.
Definition of a forum :
a public meeting or assembly for open discussion
a public facility to meet for open discussion
The thing is your not interested in reading and hearing what other’s have to say even if they diverge in views ,observation , opinion , it’s you who should shut up and go to a place where people always agree 100% of the time with your views.
I am only replying to you because you spent so many words not refuting my suggestions that it’s amusing.
If you would like to criticise the arguments presented in the linked post, please do so. Attacking the person in lieu of the argument is called an ‘ad hominem’ attack and is a common fallacy taught in rhetoric and philosophy classes.
You might have had something if you’d stopped with “rant from an ex-employee”, but you did not, and so any sane arguments that you might chose to make (…) are coloured by the light of your opening attack.
Thanks for the criticism of my personal website design. That was classy and helps to prove my point even more.
See how I can point out problems with your presented arguments without criticizing you personally?
Cheers
Reading Ivan’s post, the only thing I had any serious qualms is that i think he misunderstood soem of the recent commentary on the Sugar/Windows threads (And there threads plural on dev, believe me..)
My read is that the current Sugar devs are squeezed for time to try and fit some fixes and features into the planned august release and don’t have any time themselves to work on porting Sugar to Linux or Windows, not when they are overhauling the UI and the datastore and who knows what else this summer … and without the Bitfrost architect.
The plans I’ve read about are in fact to open up things more to porting wider, and this is well considered for the architectural changes going into the next rev. It’s a good, if noisy, discussion if you have the time to look it over.
All the BS aside this was announced yesterday.
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-fi-laptop16-2008may16,0,17…
So yes windows on OLPC is a reality and Negroponte is officially just another linux nutjob. Noone wants a dual boot ridiculously underpowered computer for educational purposes. This is not going to be used as college lab computers and a dual boot is just about the best way to scare children away from using computers. Oh and Negroponte is officially on of those corporate assholes who lie though their teeth every chance they get. I wounder what the commission from that deal with MS was and why would you agree to it when essentially the OS which really cheap is not free and requires modifications to the hardware? Are you going after ASUS now? Because I can assure you that the $600 price point of the windows Eee is not really fit for developing countries and actually most Americans wouldn’t pay that much either when they can get a much faster budget laptop with a larger screen and hard drive that runs Vista for about the same price. But that’s another topic.
Anyway OLPS officially dies and was buried yesterday.
Why do I bother? *sigh*
If you aren’t just trolling, here are a couple links to the dev’s discussion of the new firmware features:
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-May/014249.html by John Gilmore
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-May/014297.html by Richard Smith
And the wiki page for the announcement you seem to have misunderstood is here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/AnnounceFAQ Feel free to read up, discuss, et cetera.
Cheers