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Please review the technical assessment of porting Sugar to Windows which offers a number of reasons why porting the XO software to Windows is difficult, in excruciating details. Yes, I wrote that assessment, and yes, I work at OLPC. I know what I'm talking about. You don't.

Sugar is made with python/gtk, there is no technical reason it can't run on many different platforms, in fact it already does for development.

The reasons the user version does not are, according to the author, political and philosophical.

I see the whole "Windows on the XO" situation as a deal with the devil, and it's not an easy deal to make. From what I've been able to tell from reports since I started following OLPC shortly before G1G1, Negroponte had trouble getting the buy-in from education ministers in various countries based on the fact that the XO runs Fedora/Sugar. If you don't get large-scale buy-in from countries to buy your product, the per-unit cost goes up and threatens to sink the whole project because the magical $100 ($188 for G1G1) laptop now costs $450 to produce.

OLPC's official statement about the XP-on-XO rumours for a time was that OLPC has not devoted any resources to Microsoft for the effort to get XP onto the XO, and it was a pet project by some people at Microsoft, but, at the same time, XP could be/have been a compromise to get more countries to buy the OLPC. So... was it really a "we'll let them mess with the beta units JUST BECAUSE WE'RE NICE" thing? Or did one part of OLPC push for XP compatibility for wider adoption of the XO-1? OLPC's security guy (I can't remember his name nor find the cited source at the moment, sorry) is on record as saying that he will refuse to sign off on XP on the laptop unless Microsoft uses the XO's onboard Bitfrost security structure and abides by it. (For people unfamiliar with the XO's security design, among other elements, the machine is designed to be secure without saddling the child-user with a mandatory password--by default, the machine boots straight to the GUI without any user interaction beyond power-on.)

I own an XO and love it, but I'm cautiously looking into getting xfce on instead of Sugar because I'm learned enough to handle direct access to the file system without a CLI to prevent me from deleting files unless I know what I'm doing. Sugar is, also, in its current state, fairly cumbersome and occasionally cranky, but it's basically still a beta.

I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.

Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.

For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."

Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.

Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.

There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.

While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.

Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.

However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.

I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.

I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.

Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.

For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."

Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.

Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.

There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.

While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.

Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.

However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.

I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.

You're mixing up "closed source" with "interpreted". There's no reason why the OLPC software could not have been written in C++ or hell, even D for all I care, and still allowed children so inclined to explore it.

I'm not mixing up anything. While it's technically possible to interact with compiled code, reading it, tweaking it and seeing the changes right away, it's requires either an environment capable of compiling and splicing changed code in on the fly (I've used such and they're large; not suitable for the XO-1), or else it imposes barriers. Learning about compilation, linking, etc.

It's no accident that the highly-respected tools for teaching programming to children are all interpreted (Python Livewires, Logo, and the old classic, BASIC).

This would have been a much more sane approach because it would have meant that the 99% of users who aren't going to learn programming to get a more responsive and capable system that can do more with less

Bah. You're talking about UI code that spends all of its time waiting on input. Go do a little profiling and then come back and tell me that even a 1000% performance increase is going to be at all noticeable.

Anyway, the whole idea that kids are going to learn programming by reading the Sugar codebase is laughable. Have you actually read it? Here, try it for yourself. That's some of the code that manages the pop-out frame around the edges.

What about it? Looks like pretty standard GUI widget construction code to me. It's quite readable. It's not very interesting, because there's no behavior there. I have to say it's rather disingenous of you to try to denigrate the accessibility of Sugar by pointing to a piece of framework code -- framework code is always obtuse, and not very interesting to change anyway.

If you look at the "activities" provided by Sugar, you'll see there's a very nice progression of tools for learning programming. First there's Turtle Art, a Logo-like language for getting started. Getting a little deeper there's Etoys a Squeak-based mini-environment that provides all sorts of little programmatic structures to play with, and allows the play to be in collaboration with remote machines. Once kids have grokked the basic concepts with those, there's an interactive Python development environment, AND the whole Sugar UI and activities to play with. A child who's progressed to this level might, for example, hit the "View Source" key while in the chat application, and tweak it to automatically expand abbreviations, or change the notification behavior when a message arrives or whatever.

And, for those kids that get interested in how to create their own applications that draw custom frames, they might well want to read and copy bits of frames.py. The ones who decide to try to improve Sugar itself may well be editing frames.py.

Observe that there are no comments

Bah. Comments are overrated. I've been writing code for 30 years and over that time my commenting started at nothing, increased to book-like proportions and then gradually declined to nearly nothing again. Well-written code (like frames.py) is clear enough on its own that few, if any, comments are required, particularly for bits like frames.py which isn't appropriate for novices.

BTW, I say this as somebody who did learn programming as a child (around 6 or 7). I remember the process pretty well. It would not have been possible without my father who was not only a skilled programmer, but also amazingly patient.

But why do you suppose that all kids are as limited as you are?

I don't think I'm any kind of great genius, but I taught myself programming in BASIC on a friend's TRS

You're mixing up "closed source" with "interpreted". There's no reason why the OLPC software could not have been written in C++ or hell, even D for all I care, and still allowed children so inclined to explore it.

I'm not mixing up anything. While it's technically possible to interact with compiled code, reading it, tweaking it and seeing the changes right away, it's requires either an environment capable of compiling and splicing changed code in on the fly (I've used such and they're large; not suitable for the XO-1), or else it imposes barriers. Learning about compilation, linking, etc.

It's no accident that the highly-respected tools for teaching programming to children are all interpreted (Python Livewires, Logo, and the old classic, BASIC).

This would have been a much more sane approach because it would have meant that the 99% of users who aren't going to learn programming to get a more responsive and capable system that can do more with less

Bah. You're talking about UI code that spends all of its time waiting on input. Go do a little profiling and then come back and tell me that even a 1000% performance increase is going to be at all noticeable.

Anyway, the whole idea that kids are going to learn programming by reading the Sugar codebase is laughable. Have you actually read it? Here, try it for yourself. That's some of the code that manages the pop-out frame around the edges.

What about it? Looks like pretty standard GUI widget construction code to me. It's quite readable. It's not very interesting, because there's no behavior there. I have to say it's rather disingenous of you to try to denigrate the accessibility of Sugar by pointing to a piece of framework code -- framework code is always obtuse, and not very interesting to change anyway.

If you look at the "activities" provided by Sugar, you'll see there's a very nice progression of tools for learning programming. First there's Turtle Art, a Logo-like language for getting started. Getting a little deeper there's Etoys a Squeak-based mini-environment that provides all sorts of little programmatic structures to play with, and allows the play to be in collaboration with remote machines. Once kids have grokked the basic concepts with those, there's an interactive Python development environment, AND the whole Sugar UI and activities to play with. A child who's progressed to this level might, for example, hit the "View Source" key while in the chat application, and tweak it to automatically expand abbreviations, or change the notification behavior when a message arrives or whatever.

And, for those kids that get interested in how to create their own applications that draw custom frames, they might well want to read and copy bits of frames.py. The ones who decide to try to improve Sugar itself may well be editing frames.py.

Observe that there are no comments

Bah. Comments are overrated. I've been writing code for 30 years and over that time my commenting started at nothing, increased to book-like proportions and then gradually declined to nearly nothing again. Well-written code (like frames.py) is clear enough on its own that few, if any, comments are required, particularly for bits like frames.py which isn't appropriate for novices.

BTW, I say this as somebody who did learn programming as a child (around 6 or 7). I remember the process pretty well. It would not have been possible without my father who was not only a skilled programmer, but also amazingly patient.

But why do you suppose that all kids are as limited as you are?

I don't think I'm any kind of great genius, but I taught myself programming in BASIC on a friend's TRS

You're mixing up "closed source" with "interpreted". There's no reason why the OLPC software could not have been written in C++ or hell, even D for all I care, and still allowed children so inclined to explore it.

I'm not mixing up anything. While it's technically possible to interact with compiled code, reading it, tweaking it and seeing the changes right away, it's requires either an environment capable of compiling and splicing changed code in on the fly (I've used such and they're large; not suitable for the XO-1), or else it imposes barriers. Learning about compilation, linking, etc.

It's no accident that the highly-respected tools for teaching programming to children are all interpreted (Python Livewires, Logo, and the old classic, BASIC).

This would have been a much more sane approach because it would have meant that the 99% of users who aren't going to learn programming to get a more responsive and capable system that can do more with less

Bah. You're talking about UI code that spends all of its time waiting on input. Go do a little profiling and then come back and tell me that even a 1000% performance increase is going to be at all noticeable.

Anyway, the whole idea that kids are going to learn programming by reading the Sugar codebase is laughable. Have you actually read it? Here, try it for yourself. That's some of the code that manages the pop-out frame around the edges.

What about it? Looks like pretty standard GUI widget construction code to me. It's quite readable. It's not very interesting, because there's no behavior there. I have to say it's rather disingenous of you to try to denigrate the accessibility of Sugar by pointing to a piece of framework code -- framework code is always obtuse, and not very interesting to change anyway.

If you look at the "activities" provided by Sugar, you'll see there's a very nice progression of tools for learning programming. First there's Turtle Art, a Logo-like language for getting started. Getting a little deeper there's Etoys a Squeak-based mini-environment that provides all sorts of little programmatic structures to play with, and allows the play to be in collaboration with remote machines. Once kids have grokked the basic concepts with those, there's an interactive Python development environment, AND the whole Sugar UI and activities to play with. A child who's progressed to this level might, for example, hit the "View Source" key while in the chat application, and tweak it to automatically expand abbreviations, or change the notification behavior when a message arrives or whatever.

And, for those kids that get interested in how to create their own applications that draw custom frames, they might well want to read and copy bits of frames.py. The ones who decide to try to improve Sugar itself may well be editing frames.py.

Observe that there are no comments

Bah. Comments are overrated. I've been writing code for 30 years and over that time my commenting started at nothing, increased to book-like proportions and then gradually declined to nearly nothing again. Well-written code (like frames.py) is clear enough on its own that few, if any, comments are required, particularly for bits like frames.py which isn't appropriate for novices.

BTW, I say this as somebody who did learn programming as a child (around 6 or 7). I remember the process pretty well. It would not have been possible without my father who was not only a skilled programmer, but also amazingly patient.

But why do you suppose that all kids are as limited as you are?

I don't think I'm any kind of great genius, but I taught myself programming in BASIC on a friend's TRS

Abandoning open source means abandoning constructionism to some extent as well, since whatever closed-source binaries you use are opaque and unavailable for exploration.

You're mixing up "closed source" with "interpreted". There's no reason why the OLPC software could not have been written in C++ or hell, even D for all I care, and still allowed children so inclined to explore it. This would have been a much more sane approach because it would have meant that the 99% of users who aren't going to learn programming to get a more responsive and capable system that can do more with less, whilst the 1% who cared could grab an SDK from the school server and see the source code there. Done properly it doesn't need to be much harder to change the code.

Anyway, the whole idea that kids are going to learn programming by reading the Sugar codebase is laughable. Have you actually read it? Here, try it for yourself. That's some of the code that manages the pop-out frame around the edges. Observe that there are no comments, except for the occasional cryptic fixme like. Hippo? I haven't been out of the Linux scene for that long, but even so I'm thinking "what's Hippo"? Trying to learn programming by reading Sugar is like trying to learn industrial engineering by looking at a bridge. It isn't going to happen.

BTW, I say this as somebody who did learn programming as a child (around 6 or 7). I remember the process pretty well. It would not have been possible without my father who was not only a skilled programmer, but also amazingly patient.

I thought OLPC was about using technology to help kids to learn technology so that they can do any number of things that technology can potentially offer them. I though that that was why Free software seemed to make so much sense.

The way I read it, the project was about giving educational tools to kids -- electronic textbooks, collaboration software, communication tools --, and that the technology was not the goal in itself.

There's no doubt that switching to Windows makes this goal much more difficult to achieve; see this posting by Scott Ananian.

I couldn't agree more. After all this effort put into the OLPC project, it's really dissapointing to see them marching towards closedness.

I find it weird, though, that the OLPC website still seems to agree with the original vision. I can't understand that... They still say it right there on their website!

Yes, there are struggles, but no, they are not all hidden away. A lot of this is happening on mailing lists at http:lists.laptop.org/.

You _can_ just send Negroponte an e-mail, but I have no idea how he determines whom to reply to and whom to ignore. He has replied to me privately about a public post I made, much to my surprise. We are discussing setting up a meeting.

See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Controversies for pointers to the discussions and a brief summary of the various points of contention.

Bruce and I have discussed some of this face to face. We will discuss further in private and let you know if we come up with something useful.

And for the rest of you: Yes, you are welcome to join the public discussion. Just remember,

"Please check your facts before posting nonsense to Usenet."--Beable van Polasm, alt.religion.kibology

I have to disagree with you that it's "well under way." There's this wiki. If you look at the books listed there, there is almost nothing at all at the K-12 level. Virtually the entire list consists of college textbooks, and quite a few of them are not even freshman college texts, they're at the upper-division level.

Maybe we're talking about different time scales. I've been cataloguing free books at theassayer.org since 2000. During that time, the good news has been that hundreds of high-quality free books have appeared. The bad news is that essentially none of those are K-12 books. If the deficit of free K-12 is going to start changing, I'd expect that the time scale for that to happen would have to be at least a decade. And a decade would, IMO, be an optimistic figure that would occur only if something fundamental changed that would get people started on writing those K-12 books. In fact, I don't see that kind of fundamental change happening. I think there are probably two reasons why free K-12 books have never gotten off the ground. (1) People writing free books are generally affluent people in the U.S., who can afford to do it as a hobby. Some are computer programmers writing documentation for software, and others are university professors. None of them are K-12 teachers, probably because K-12 teachers have all they can handle just managing a classroom full of 35 kids. (2) In most places in the U.S., textbook buying decisions are heavily bureacratized. Book publishers spend vast amounts of money on marketing and lobbying. My own free physics books are college-level books, but sometimes high schools do use them; I think it's telling that nearly all the high schools using them are private schools.

If "well under way" means "likely to get going within our lifetimes," then I'd say maybe. But I certainly don't see any sign that it's going to happen during the lifetime of OLPC.

That's about the size of it. The real OLPC news site does not mention any of this BS.

As well as Scratch, there's a lot of other interesting educational stuff built on top on Squeak, eg eToys, Plopp, Dr Geo II etc. The fact that it's on the OLPC XO is driving a lot of development work for new activities as well.

There's an article at news.squeak.org that mentions an interesting series of posts by one of the developers of Dr Geo II who is building up an introduction to Squeak features for educators.

As well as Scratch, there's a lot of other interesting educational stuff built on top on Squeak, eg eToys, Plopp, Dr Geo II etc. The fact that it's on the OLPC XO is driving a lot of development work for new activities as well.

There's an article at news.squeak.org that mentions an interesting series of posts by one of the developers of Dr Geo II who is building up an introduction to Squeak features for educators.

I saw a very nice graphical LOGO implementation on the OLPC Live CD. It's called Turtle Art, and rather than writing lines of code, you work in a very visual style, by snapping together puzzle-piece type blocks. Here is a screenshot of a very basic script that draws a square. It was fun for me, an adult, to play and tinker with the code blocks, and I'm sure a lot of smart kids would love it, too. This is a great way to learn about programming.

I saw a very nice graphical LOGO implementation on the OLPC Live CD. It's called Turtle Art, and rather than writing lines of code, you work in a very visual style, by snapping together puzzle-piece type blocks. Here is a screenshot of a very basic script that draws a square. It was fun for me, an adult, to play and tinker with the code blocks, and I'm sure a lot of smart kids would love it, too. This is a great way to learn about programming.

Umm what? The Geode is an x86 processor. It runs x86 binaries, including Flash.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Adobe_Flash

Actually it's interesting to compare the power consumption with Atom. Wiki says the OLPC "originally used the GX series Geode processor in the OLPC XO; but has since moved to the Geode LX". The LX uses has a TDP of 3.1W at 433Mhz. An Atom has a TDP of 0.65W at 800Mhz and a much lower average power. Even the 1866 MHz Atom has a lower TDP than a 433 Mhz LX!

I think it would do better if you compare average power rather than the worst case TDP value since the Atom is a much more recent design - it supports things like the C6 state where the the caches are powered down and processor state is saved in an SRAM kept alive but a low voltage supply.

So Atom looks like it will have more computing power per watt. The Atom is an in order design of course, but so is the Geode. Then again for an OLPC like machine you'd probably want an Atom with an embedded graphics controller and chipset, which is probably still some way off.

Flash runs fine on my XO. It's easy to install it and use it instead of Gnash.

Screenshots, please. Although, you appear to be correct.

Flash Player: OLPC FAQ:

Quote: "Adobe makes the official Flash plugin, but OLPC cannot ship it on the XOs because it is legally restricted and doesn't meet the OLPC's standards for open software. Instead, the XO ships with Gnash, an open source Flash plugin that can play some (but not all) Flash content. As shipped on the XO, it cannot play YouTube videos. Skilled users can rebuild it to include that functionality."

The Sugar distribution's exclusion of Flash, and only shipping a crippled version of Gnash, is all about open source politics, not technical performance limitations.

According to Walter: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-April/013067.html First of all, just to make this clear. "Flash does run on the laptop: there is a choice of both the Adobe Flash player and the FOSS Flash player, Gnash. We opted to install the Gnash player by default. We don't load proprietary codecs onto the machine by default, but they are available for download and some of our deployments in fact do opt to load some proprietary codecs--after of course obtaining the proper licenses. I see this approach as a reasonable compromise given the goals of the project. Apparently others see this as fundamentalism?

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Apple invented it but Microsoft INNOVATED it!

Please see my response here: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/community-support/2008-April/001922.html

Direct Link to Resignation letter

I was going to submit this story after finding it on Digg or Reddit; the headline was focusing on Negreponte(sp?) allegedly wishing to partner with MS to put XP on XO in order to sell more units. After reading the letter and there being no mention of it I decided against submission.

Seriously some of the debaters in this discussion are so ignorant. Picking on a charity organisation... shame on you Even kids can fix these keyboards: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:007_Arahuay.JPG

The keyboard is designed to be replaceable at home (as is the touchpad, the LCD, just the LCD lightbar, and even the bumpers...). Sophie & Philip demonstrate separating the display an motherboard (similar disassembly of the bottom half allows for replacing the keyboard and touchpad).

At the moment, the bottleneck for people in the US is getting replacement parts -- in the meantime, you can install an ASK-3100 keyboard instead (for +clickiness and -waterproofing).

I was the first one to report the bug here:

http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/5658

Although the cause is still unknown, I do believe that the way I was holding mine could have accelerated the issue in my case:

I held it in my left hand with the lower left corner of the base in my palm - My fingers being under the base and my thumb being over the base in the left corner. I would then type and scroll with my right hand, so the entire weight of the laptop was being held at the point where my thumb was pressing on the lower corner - The laptop would essentially flex down and to the right.

The problem presented within 4 days of receiving the laptop.

Since I have received my replacement, I have not held the laptop in same fashion - not even once - and will not.

And luckily, so far so good - I've not experienced any problems with it.

  -- start rant ---
I was also the first person to send mine back based on the bug, *BUT* I wasn't the first to be mailed a replacement.

If you read the threads on the bug you'll one of the tech guys next-day-aired some other dude a laptop after his was returned for testing - I was a little bummed!

All of the official messaging from OLPC says that a replacement cant take as long as 30 days. I waited for 30 days and then called support.

They informed me that it would be several more weeks before they shipped my replacement.

Actually, I received it less than 48 hours after getting off the phone with them.

By the way, the support staff are incredibly nice!

-- end rant --

It is.
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_Giving/Europe

The OLPC is not a consumer product. They don't have the infrastructure to sell it as such. If you buy millions, they can sell support, including hardware, and warranties.

They are not iXO's. Their goal is not to sell laptops for everybody. They are making this for kids who might use them to learn. Both objectives don't have to be acheived together, and don't even need to be compatible.

Have you seen Sugar http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar for the XO laptop? The 'typical desktop interface' was thrown out in favor of something more useful, like what you're talking about, but since it's new and unfamiliar people were scared of it. Sugar has a primitive graphical package manager, a streamlined version of Firefox (and if that's not good enough a streamlined version of Opera), Abiword, etc. etc. The software's been designed specifically to be easy to use and consume less power. The journal system that everyone hates? It's TAGS. Just like gmail uses, only while everyone touted gmail as innovate and the best thing since ponies, Sugar was ridiculed for the same feature. Tags are great. The XO has almost entirely replaced all my other computers as concerns grad school. I agree that the typical desktop OS is too bloated, and the typical laptop is too bloated. There's at least one alternative, and it's getting better all the time.

This will never stop with the current security model. Attacks like this work just as well on the other major operating systems. Let's move away from reactive security and fix the root cause.

BitFrost (see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost [laptop.org]) is the set of security mechanisms present in the OLPC.

Though I certainly wouldn't care to summarize the entire thing, here's what it comes down to.

User programs don't automatically get the running user's full rights. A calculator has no reason to delete your documents, so why should it be able to? And without your knowledge to boot. On the OLPCs, documents are kept in a special storage area. It isn't a matter of owner read access. In general, for a program to get a user's file poofed in to its chroot sandbox, it has to ask the document service (which presents a consistent dialog). Further, a text editor doesn't need to access the network. The user can access the network, but his or her programs can only do so if explicitly allowed to (various such rights are set at install time, configurable later). Certain combinations of program rights are disallowed at install time (such as both network access and webcam access) but can be enabled later. Plus a lot more.

Sudo/UAC sound nice and all until you realize that programs and users are separate entities.

Yes, there's a lot to learn from the OLPC project. It's designed to be used (safely) by computer-illiterate children who can't (or can scarcely) read. If you think that sounds like a good description of computer users in general, then you're absolutely right. Security as seen in *nix and Windows makes perfect sense for protecting users from each other. That was the goal back in the day. The people with access to a server were supposed to have a general idea of what they were doing (entirely on them if they didn't), and in that case *nix security works well. But computers have gotten more personal, and that assumption is now blatantly false. Anyone thinkng that Windows security problems stop at buffer overflows, or that Linux on the desktop will change anything, is a fool.

It is also worth checking out the OLPC wiki entry on Arahuay, Peru, where the first pilot project was set up. Very interesting account of the successes and obstacles the project has gone through there.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-update It uses rsync, but you can do it other ways. With OLPC, everyone has had the same set of problems, so they are all very well documented on the wiki. Read up before complaining.

this law is is an attempt to criminalize a culture of sharing

Would this have implications for young kids who got an OLPC for Christmas through the BuyOneGiveOne campaign.

When you switch it on, the OLPC tries to build a mesh network out of any wireless access points it can find.

this law is is an attempt to criminalize a culture of sharing

Would this have implications for young kids who got an OLPC for Christmas through the BuyOneGiveOne campaign.

When you switch it on, the OLPC tries to build a mesh network out of any wireless access points it can find.

My right to whine is threatened MOST by bad legislation and lack of campaign finance reform.
It is NOT threatened by some whacked out dictator of some micro-country on the other side of the ocean.

My right to privacy and to travel and move about freely is threatened most by politicians who traffic in the fear and protection racket.
It is NOT threatened by Cuba or Iran (etc.), who could both be dealt with quite nicely over time by dropping enough of these and these and these on them.
No guns needed. What is needed is to remove the frightened old warlord types from BOTH sides of the equation.
Proper education is the best weapon there. Old warlord types die off. How do new ones keep coming into power?

he'll still put his life on the line to protect your right to continue to whine.

This tired old non-sequiter is NOT a free pass to escape criticism. I would prefer to never hear it again.
Look at where the US military is deployed around the world. Look at China's favored nation status.
The US military is at least as much in place to protect US global economic interests as it is in place to
protect my rights.

Whether they're napalming villages, torturing brown people, or simply camping out in the wrong place,
the US military is the international equivalent of Al Capone's muscle men. If you think that's a trollish
exaggeration just imagine yourself a very small country getting a "favor" from the US.

To all of you who thanked the general for obeying orders (e.g. doing the interview), your manners are commendable but you're just priming the PR machine for more calculated fluffery.

Yes I'm quite cynical. When we, as a nation, start acting as a global citizen and stop acting like the baddest thug on the playground, then we can start respecting our military again.

You can find out more about the repeaters here. Problem is, mesh networking protocols aren't well suited for covering an entire city. The protocol used by OLPC is based on AODV, which uses flooding for route discovery. That's efficient if the mesh is sparse and there are a few long-lived connections, but inefficient if the mesh is dense or there's a lot of traffic. You could almost say that if mesh networking is a solution in search of a problem, the problem it's been searching for is two kids under a tree in the middle of the desert. ;-)

You can find out more about the repeaters here. Problem is, mesh networking protocols aren't well suited for covering an entire city. The protocol used by OLPC is based on AODV, which uses flooding for route discovery. That's efficient if the mesh is sparse and there are a few long-lived connections, but inefficient if the mesh is dense or there's a lot of traffic. You could almost say that if mesh networking is a solution in search of a problem, the problem it's been searching for is two kids under a tree in the middle of the desert. ;-)

The OLPC wiki is very extensive and growing, and is a great starting-point for making contact with the core OLPC team (including senior management at OLPC, who are surprisingly accessible). If there isn't an article specifically addressing a person's questions, the wiki at least provides a place where questions can be posted with a reasonable expectation of getting an answer. In addition, there are instructions on how to join OLPC mailing lists and IRC, where you can communicate directly with the team.

Nevertheless, I will say that much of what is on the wiki is oriented to software or organization building, and that info on OLPC hardware seems to get the short-shrift. There is a *short* article discussing the wireless repeater here, which links to the manufacturer's page here. I'm sure that contributions to the wiki in this area would be appreciated.

The OLPC wiki is very extensive and growing, and is a great starting-point for making contact with the core OLPC team (including senior management at OLPC, who are surprisingly accessible). If there isn't an article specifically addressing a person's questions, the wiki at least provides a place where questions can be posted with a reasonable expectation of getting an answer. In addition, there are instructions on how to join OLPC mailing lists and IRC, where you can communicate directly with the team.

Nevertheless, I will say that much of what is on the wiki is oriented to software or organization building, and that info on OLPC hardware seems to get the short-shrift. There is a *short* article discussing the wireless repeater here, which links to the manufacturer's page here. I'm sure that contributions to the wiki in this area would be appreciated.

The XO touchpad seems to need recalibration from time to time. There's a magic key sequence to do that:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Recalibrating_Touchpad

I find this helps a lot when I'm having touchpad issues. Supposedly, the next revision of the hardware will fix this.