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Jobs Offers Free Mac OS X For $100 Laptops
bonch writes "Steve Jobs offered Mac OS X free of charge to the $100 laptop effort by the One Laptop Per Child project. However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips."
If Steve offers OS X to you for free, you take it. Red Hat sucks
Gee if I was an OS writer Id do it too - its free publicity!
:D
I feel so glad for the red hat crew right now, because theyre going to get lots and lots of promotion from this
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I thought it was offered free? So where's the problem?
Does this seem like a little bit of zealotry? I mean, why not use a nice, EASY*TO*USE OS instead of something the under-priviledged people using this machine will have to struggle to learn?
Cemil.
However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips.
Sometimes it's tough to stick to your principles. However, in the long run it is always better not to compromise on your beliefs.
Idiots.
Give them a laptop the kinds can more easily use to accomplish their task.
I am an avid Linux user.. But i sure hte hell wouldn't expect most kids to figure out how to configure or install some applications at this point in Linux's development.
Strong product keys like Windows 9X/2000 had, no activation.
Open videocard? no
open chipset? no
open OS? of course! We have principles.
Is that even possible? Hmm...
Red Hat? It looks like they've been helping, but wouldn't using something like Debian Embedded be better, as it could be less bloated?
Surely, Jobs knew that the makers of the $100 laptop were looking for an open-source software solution. So, he made an offer knowing fully well that it would not be accepted...but he is getting tons of publicity and goodwill because of this.
What I wonder is, would he have offered free tech support with the free OS X for the laptops? Obivously I haven't RTFA.
Less corporate market exposure paid for by the government.
More critical thinking skills for the kids that get to fix their linux installs instead of clicking on pretty icons.
signatures are for fools with hands
To really get publicity, he shouldoffer it for free to the general public! Now that would get media attention.
While fast for what it does, OSX does quite a bit. Will you really get a 3d accelerated GUI environment to run on a $100 machine? That seems like asking a lot from the hardware which costs so little. While OSX is nice, I've heard that it can be somewhat slow on even a 700mhz iBook. Do we really want to use it on a $100 laptop?
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I don't see any reason why they couldn't take a nice bare-essentials distro, and build to it from the ground up. I've set up Slack boxes to work rather pain-free for computer illiterate users. No worrying about having to use bundled crap.
Oh well, I'm biased. Grain of salt ;)
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
so AMD is opening up their chips to scrutiny? woohoo! oh wait... I guess it isn't REALLY open source now is it? (and i'll bet they aren't getting those processors for free either)
Free installs doesn't mean all upgrades and software will be free and the choices might not be as high when you don't want to spend any $ for the software that you'll need to go along with the OS.
By choosing Red Hat not only do they have a free OS and practically guaranteed free upgrades, they'll also have a huge selection of free software to get maximum use out of the laptops.
As much as I love my Mac, I must admit that the last thing a developing country needs is to be helplessly tied to a major corporation. If Microsoft offered them Windows and was accepted, we'd all be up in arms.
Morton's Steakhouse offered to give all of the kids a free steak dinner, but the project declined, saying they needed to stick to their previous decision of powdered eggs for everyone...
Pelease from MIT... The $100 iPod project will let every child in every developing country download Sheryl Crow's new single to their own U2-branded iPod.
Getting this type of publicity is probably a lot nicer than getting publicity about stiffing your girlfriend for child support. Anyone remember that?
Free is free you know.
Now these laptops definitely aren't going to be using Mac Hardware so what version of OSX would it be? Did the offer mean that they would have to include hardware to allow the x86 version of OSX to run or would it simply run as is.
Price being one of the main issues it seems like additional hardware would be an obvious no-no. So does this mean that it was going to be OSX running on native x86?
I haven't been following the whole Mac to Intel thing too closely but I was under the impression that most likely not any old PC would be able run OSX.
If off the shelf hardware wasn't going to run the version of OSX offered it seems like not being full OSS isn't the only issue it was turned down. Did Jobs know this prior to the offer for a little extra boost of the public's image of Mac or is that just my "don't trust the man"-sense tingling a little prematurely.
OS X runs extremly laggy on my Min-Mac which costs well over $100, and has upgraded ram to 1 gig.
I find it hard to believe that OSX will run smoothly on a computer that costs $100.
You left out the part about you being a loveless and pale faggot who lives in your grandparent's basement (becuase your parents killed themselves after seeing what failures they were in raising you to be a normal person).
Now, I use Redhat and I think it is a strong Linux offering. However, it does not run on cheap anything. memory must be at least 256mb if you don't want constant lag, and 512 is only reasonable if you want speed.
I cannot help but find that choosing Redhat immediately raises the minimum bar the hardware can be set at. I can only marvel even more if they succeed in making this $100 (earlier than the time where the concept is no longer impressive. the point is to change things, right? to best what others are making available?).
The learning curve is still to steep, especially for children in developing countries who are unedcated, and honestly challenged form the start to learn the basics of elementary education. Linux is generally something that is picked up in college, as an alternative OS that students learn in Computer Science or Information Science cirricula. Trying to introduce this to a child is not only simply stupid, it is setting those children up for failure as well.
Yes I have a Red Hat account, I love my RHEL AS4 box, but I like the standardization of a *nix OS like OS X better. Mac has the smallest learning curve than any OS on the market. There is a reason Mac dominates the early education market, kids need to learn how to use applications that help them learn. Kids dont need to learn how to use the operating system to help them learn how to use an application that helps them learn (if that makes any sense).
What applications are out for Linux that would even help a child learn in the first place?
Open source is good, but simply to granular for a child to be learning when there are basic grammar, language, and arithmatic that needs to be learned first.
Well their reason for not selecting it might be zealotry, but I have to beleive that they can create a Redhat based distribution that will work with their hardware all the time. That is part of the Apple secret. If your hardware is a small handpicked set, then having an OS that just works is that much easier.
Think Deeply.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
More critical thinking skills for the kids that get to fix their linux installs instead of clicking on pretty icons.
It's that attitude that's keeping the bimbos out of the computer dating sites you know!
You can't take the sky from me...
Be afraid, be very afraid..
And Mr. Negroponte, after meeting with Mr. Gates, now says, "The machine will run anything, including Windows."
MS might be planing a way to ursurp all those laptops after they've been distributed. Hope Jobs does the same.
It is said that the Linux window managers are imitating Windows. Could it be said that it was really Windows imitating X/Motif/Open look? Didn't windowing systems happen on Unix workstations before they happened on PCs, and wasn't Windows trying to be more like the workstations than like the Mac?
For starters, the Mac hangs on to the application program menu as this shared resource where the app that gets the focus also gets control over the single on-screen menu. That may have been fine back in the day of small screens and limited pixels, but in these days of monster displays and ever more pixels, for crying out loud, give each app its own menu as is done by the Linux window managers and by Windows. The Mac system of you have to think which app has control over the menu is too much a distraction. Interestingly, Java apps running under OS-X have their own menus along with a bare-bones Mac main menu.
This type of thing needs to be ENCOURAGED, not discouraged. Even if it was Microsoft.
Besides, the OS is becoming less and less conspicuous. Get the laptop, load OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird.
What's the big deal? Do they think these kids are going to be compiling their own kernels on these $100 laptops?
Red Hat used to be a quality distribution. But we have to go back to the Red Hat 5.x and 6.x days to notice that.
As time has gone on, there have been many improvements that they have failed to adopt. Dropping support for RPM in favour of APT is one such improvement that they didn't make. The whole GCC 2.96 debacle sure didn't help their reputation amongst developers.
Either way, you are correct, Red Hat is not the way to go. Mac OS X, especially free, would have been the best possible choice. Not considering that, Kubuntu would have been the second best option. It'd offer a solid, coherent KDE system, built upon the power of Debian.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This computer is far closer to a PDA than an actual computer. Mac OS X is a desktop computer OS. If Apple made some kind of PDA-like device and acceptable OS UI to go with such a device, then that would have been fine.
But as it sits, it would have been fsck-all impossible to shoehorn Mac OS X 10.4.3 "just work" into a Negroponte laptop. They wouldn't get to adjust the UI themselves - the part of Mac OS X that is totally closed. With Linux - you can change whatever you want to fit your device. Its perfect.
Now, an Apple engineered open source OS for PDA sized devices - aw hells yeah. That would rock like Mac OS X and the iPod OS because they would design it to "Just Work".
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Red Hat?
I think they should have used ubuntu
google.slashdot
one of the primary reasons will be a sucky desktop OS. This laptop is supposed to be an enabler. OSX vs Redhat? Which is easier to use?
The people running this project have let their prejudices towards FOSS get in the way of doing what is right for the end users. They wanted something more "hackable"? OSX isn't hackable enough? What, are they planning to change the kernel?
Sheesh!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Way to get kids off on the wrong foot with Linux -- banish them all to RPM dependency hell!
"There are people in developing countries who have never seen computers so it's not like, 'How is this better than Windows?"'
Well, with that argument, why not just hand them a pile of dogshit?
That's the most useless justification for staying with Red Hat Linux as I've ever heard.
Further, it's not as if Red Hat-proper is "free". You can bet your bottom dollar that Red Hat is seeing dollar signs out of this deal. Big dollar signs.
Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well - I'm not going to pretend to know what he's thinking - but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source, and what's not open source is a very polished, easy to use, major-vendor-supported OS with amazing language and multilingual support, revolutionary accessibility support, including the first commercial OS to include a free full-fledged spoken interface, and so on, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source is a little bit short-signted and foolish, when one steps back and looks at the big picture.
I literally can't believe MIT rejected this offer.
(And no, there wouldn't be concerns with system requirements. Apple would have engineered a targeted version of Mac OS X specifically for this program.)
Last time I checked you could install more than one OS on a computer..
This "one laptop per child" thing seems like another "more computers
for schools"-type feel-good nonsense.
For one thing - Laptops, particularly _today's_ laptops are super-
fragile. I've used 3 laptops in the past 30 months or so (on the
company's nickel) and they were ridiculously unreliable. Constant
breakage.
The screens looked great when they issed it to me, but after 3 months,
it was noticeably dimmer and had numerous dead pixels. I doubt there
was a cdrom/dvd-rom drive that worked for a month before crapping out.
Battery lifetime (not per charge, but total # of charges) is much lower
than the old NiMH batteries laptops back in the mid-90s had. Another
consumable...
I can see cheap desktops for every child - but they must have one
heck of a service plan if they want to give easily-broken laptops to
the little monkeys.
And before anyone says anything about the alleged-quality of Apple
laptops - if they're giving them away at those prices, they surely are
NOT Apples.
You had a fantastic little platform in the Newton. The profile of the educational version was perfect. If you would simply provide such a platform again, at a reasonable price, and provide development tools such as HyperCard, you wouldn't need the hundred dollar laptop effort. YOu could create your own!
Making it easier for us to contact your company with such proposals would be nice also.
Did Steve Jobs offer to have OS X running on AMD chips? I presume that Apple already knew what processor the $100 laptop would have. I do not know the ins and outs of Apple's agreement with Intel, but I wonder how they feel about this. Still, since Apple is not actually manufacturing the laptop, I guess they can run their OS on whatever they want. Still, it is interesting to note that Apple would considering running OS X on AMD products.
Should've gone with Debian/Ubuntu.
Red Hat has contributed money to the project.
-everphilski-
Unbelievable the reactions.
Apple offers it's OS-X free and everybody in this sections says take it.
Imagine Microsoft would offer Windows for free for this device? Everybody cries out loud.
(You can already see some reactions like that around this reaction)
I think it's very wise not to tie yourself to any vendor.
With commercial OS makers, you will have to hope they keep the terms the same in a couple of years and as Seymour Papert said: you can't tinker.
It's also a bit weird that Mr Jobs refuses 3rd party hardware makers to use OSX and now he suddenly 'donates' OS-X...
Who knows what the future holds ? Why would you want to paint yourself into a corner by relying on an OS where the power is held by Apple ? At least with Linux you aren't under the thumb of oppressive private interests.
The overwhelming tone is that they should take up Steve Jobs on his offer - for whatever reason. If Microsoft had made the same offer, dollars to donuts the same people here on slashdot would be saying "f*ck you and the horse you rode in on."
-everphilski-
Apple, for offering up their hard work for free for a great idea. Apple wants people to be able to have a good, modern system for people to work with that is easy to learn and use.
Thank you, Apple.
I also admire the laptop project for turning them down. The point of a computer is not just to "do things" - it's to learn that things can be done. It wasn't pocket calculators that changed the world, it was readily-available, general-purpose, programmable computers.
Having a tool you can study and modify in great depth is a wonderful thing. It's not just a tinker-toy set, it's a tinker-toy set and ready-made large-scale projects *in that set* for you to study and alter/improve upon.
This is the same thing that brought about "hacker boom" of the TRS 80, of the Apple ][, and, yes, even early DOS - except this is larger scale, more sophisticated, and more flexible.
The $100 laptop is not about writing school reports, it's not about web logs, and it's not about accounting software. It's "here's what you can do, here's the tools to do it, and here's how it can be done - come join us."
That is the ultimate goal of Free software, and it can not be accomplished using Mac OS X, no matter how excellent a system OS X is.
I think sir, you will find that kids are FAR more adept at grasping unknown concepts than you and me. We have our ways and are set in them. To learn something new, we need to get away from what we are used to. Kids don't have that disadvantage. Believe me, I know from experience. They grasp Linux as fast as they grasp Windows. From what i've seen (I setup a linux computer lab for an orphanage in India and helped them decide the computer syllabus for the school), Linux helps more because the brighter kids start poring through the man pages and start mucking around with shell commands and scripting after some time (all we told them was that if they needed to know about something, use "info " or "man " - nothing else). They actually learn from it and sometimes they ask you about options that you didn't know existed :) With Windows, the help from both Windows and the command shell isn't too great and the chance to experiment isn't really there. They also appreciate choice. Give them an option to choose their window manager at the login screen and they will go through every single one! Why? Because they can and because they're curious.
:) Sure, there will be those who dont want to learn. That is something that won't change regardless of WHAT you're trying to teach them. But for those that DO want to learn, anything will do.
Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that just works. Sure its a real steal at no cost. But for kids, the cost of the OS doesnt matter. The fact that it just works is good. But what they really want to do is get into the internals and rip it apart to see what makes it tick. What better candidate than something that's open source? They dont have deadlines to meet. They are not bothered by customers who inist on their documents being in the MS Office format. For kids, it's about the concepts. If it doesn't work, they'll try for some time to see why. They will ask you why it doesn't work. They will try to fix it. If they can't they will ask you. They will listen while you tell them what's wrong. If you can fix it, they will watch you doing it very carefully, trying to understand what you are doing and asking 100 questions in the process. If you can't fix it, they forget about it and move to something else.
Do not underestimate the kids' thirst for knowledge and their ability to acquire it
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I'm a big subscriber to You Get What You Pay For economics (in this case, an OS that's free for you because someone wants to boost marketshare (and is therefore inferior)); however, this seems to be one instance I'd call an exception. Though I have never and never would use a Mac, judging by the disproportionately small volume of bugs and malware problems I have to fix as a digitician, I gotta give Apple a high five and call this a Good Thing[alt+0153] in addition to calling it a good marketing strategy.
i wonder if jobs would have mandated that the laptops have TPM in order to install the free OSX (do any AMD chipsets have TPM?). this would raise the price of the laptops. if he would have created a version that ran on the laptop without TPM, it would be on bittorrent in no time, and installed on my dell soon thereafter.
I may have read it wrong, but the page at MIT says that this is for "developing nations". Its not bad enough we lose a lot of tech jobs to offshore companies, now we have to provide free laptops to "developing nations". I am not saying it isn't a cool initiative, and yes a lot of families here can afford to buy their kids laptops, but where's the push to get them into the hands of underprivileged American kids? And then to get schools to actually USE the technology in a meaningful way... My son attends a "progressive" middle school with a "technology" program...so far he has played Sim City and built a 4 foot tower out of paper cups.
This is reminiscent of what Apple has done for a long time. They alwasy have pushed Apples and Macs into schools, through heavy discounts and "Apples for the students" schemes (50?K worth of dockets from a certain supermarket would get the school a mac clasic, if I rememeber correctly) aimed to get every student trained in using their machines. It was a good idea that worked reasonably well all round.
So, it's not suprising that they tried to do the same thing here. But I agree that they should have rejected it. Getting the source code into the hands of a few million inquisitive youngsters is a Good Thing, (with out collective mindset, of source: there will be some that will shudder at what they might do with it!!), and Apple would demand DRM to prevent those copies ending up being black-marketed around the world.
Still, nice try!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
that all the Mac zealots came out to bash Linux and how OS X is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Right tool for the right job, is the mantra. In this case, these $100 machines aren't exactly robust. An operating system as robust as OS X may work well on pricey, narrow-field hardware that's engineered specifically for the OS. But in this case, these are your run of the mill, low-spec machines, so a customizable OS would work much better.
And the point above all points: It's NOT free. The kernel may be free, the underlying system may be free, but the OS isn't.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
when I tested some Java apps on a Mac.
There's your problem.
Try to actually use one. Use the iApps. Use Safari. Use Terminal. Tinker. Play. Break stuff and fix it. The system is so much cleaner, more logical than Windows (and with a few exceptions, Linux)... and of course far easier on the eyes than anything else out there.
(You are absolutely right about Java, though. It's pretty poorly integrated.)
Regarding the application menu being at the top: look up Fitt's Law. It's far easier to shoot the cursor to the top of the screen or the corner than it is to aim the mouse at a 24-px-tall bar. That's the main reason for the menu being the way it is.
They specifically want something that the users can tinker with. Is Apple going to supply the complete source code under a free source license?
I think not.
Infuriate left and right
Does this seem like a little bit of zealotry?
Not to me. But then again I'm pissed off that the project is exporting the confusing term 'open source' instead of the clarifying 'free software'.
an ill wind that blows no good
Well thank God they rejected it. Otherwise, poor starving children will be running a better OS than me and such travesty cannot stand!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I couldn't agree more --
/. double standard is constantly in effect -- you people should be ashamed, and if you aren't, you should get a clue and THEN be ashamed.
and here's an idea.... Hard drive space costs pennies now, even for mobile devices. What about say, 10-20 gigs dedicated to 'restore' images, you could get at least 5 FULLY installed clone images of various free OSS distros, give them a few different flavors of unix / linux to tinker with (with some sort of common partition only for storing whatever personal files they may need, which won't be touched by the image writer), that way, when they 'tinker' enough to fubar the entire install, they're a reboot, 10ish keystrokes, and 10 minutes away from a complete reinstall of whatever distro they choose.
once again though, I cannot possibly agree more with the parent, the
Just because Steve Jobs is offering OS X for free now, doesn't mean that these people will get OS X for freeif they one day decide to buy a new computer or upgrade. If people in these countries become dependant on an OS that costs money and particularly hardware that they can't manufacture themselves (Apple hardware), they will be at the mercy of multinational corporations and US export taxes etc.
Well, here's the problem. The Mac desktop, and in fact the entire Apple experience, is intuitive for a certain kind of person. Artists, fashion mavens, leftists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a menu bar spanning the width of the screen and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic. It's a rare instinct, this appreciation for beauty and truth; accountants and other such pencil-pushers haven't a prayer.
In summary, unattractive squares like you should stick to Linux and Windows. Fitts' Law is for different thinkers.
Apple may have used intuition or good taste when they put a single menu bar at the top of the screen initially, but later on they did research which backed it up.
The edges of the screen are prime real estate and are easy targets to hit because the mouse pointer is constrained by the screen; effectively the menu bar is infinite in height. In order to hit a menu bar at the top of a window, you need to decelerate and hit a target that is fairly small. You need to do precision control in two dimensions instead of only one.
I think one of the reason Windows users are always complaining that using the mouse is slower than the keyboard is because putting the menu at the top of the window makes the mouse slower to use than if it were at the top of the screen.
Bruce Tognazinni devotes an entire chapter--27--of "Tog on Interface," (1992, Addison-Wesley) to this very topic. He cites four or five pieces of research.
But, never mind. It's only research. Tognazinni wrote--in 1990!--"People for years have been explaining to me that in this era of giant screen monitors, we just have to do something about those menu bars way up there at the top of the screen; that menu bars should be attached to windows, or pop up beneath the cursor or something. Anything, just so they aren't up at the top of the screen any more." And I am sure people will be doing it fifteen years from now, too.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
And how, exactly, does the fact that they're donating money indicate that they're not in it for the publicity? Corporations donate money all the time to events for the publicity.
(I don't think that Coors really has much of an opinion on that free Cher concert, and yet they donated money to it... and oddly enough they had a big banner over the stage... who would have thought!)
--
RumorsDaily
Make OSX open source!
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
However, in the long run it is always better not to compromise on your beliefs.
What if those beliefs are asinine, as in this case?
Which beliefs are you talking about? The one about compromising beliefs, or the ones about this case?
Local language text books? Generic history? Farming references? As usual, the hardware will be easy - what will the software be.
How about an online connection? It seems like all the cool kids are online, now, right? Isn't that the point of these things? Getting modern?
My cynical side thinks that this might be a nice gesture, but not much more than that, if having a cheap computer is not relevant in the lives of the recipients.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You're absolutely right.
We don't need any more people who actually know what the F*** the computer does.
We need more widget-clickers, Damn it!!
(BTW, "underpriviledged" doesn't mean stupid)
Or anybody using KDE...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I can see it now...the lid of the laptops will be plastered in huge advertisements. It's actually good to see major companies subsidizing this because everyone wins. The laptops stay cheap, and the companies get lots of advertising.
And how, exactly, does the fact that they're donating money indicate that they're not in it for the publicity?
He didn't say it wasn't publicity. He said it wasn't FREE publicity.
Red Hat is not getting free publicity. They are buying publicity for two million dollars. That's pretty fucking far from free.
Then again, Red Hat has been stretching the definition of "free" in a lot of ways over the last couple years, heh.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Doesn't it seem like pro-proprietary software zealotry to think that refusing an opportunity to lose one's software freedom is pitched as "zealotry"? No, framing this issue as zealotry won't help you understand what is really going on.
Ease of use is not freedom. Ease of use is a subjective assessment (everything is probably roughly equally hard to learn when you have no experience with computers) that doesn't address educational goals to the degree software freedom does. Any software can be made easier to use and people don't need to rely on proprietors to do it for us. We can and should do it for ourselves and share the results with people (particularly those who will share their improvements with us). This is part of the spirit that got us the free software OSes we enjoy today.
What Apple is offering here is a gratis opportunity to put on some handcuffs and choose between a set of masters. Some of MacOS X is free software but not all of it. Why subject the kids to a computer they can't control completely? Why help them grow an addiction to proprietary software that will be hard to break? I realize that /. readers tend to think this way only of Microsoft, but Apple is offering a comparable deal here: no software freedom, more like "the first bite is free".
For more on this, I recommend reading Why schools should use exclusively free software.
Digital Citizen
Sure, standard laptops can be fragile, but you seem to have completely missed the fact that these are special custom laptops.
In particular - the laptops will have a crank so you can power them without a constant power supply.
Also, referring to the kids as little monkeys? Come on.
From the FAQ:
"[It] will use innovative power (including wind-up)"
"Kids in the developing world need the newest technology, especially really rugged hardware"
"Desktops are cheaper, but mobility is important, especially with regard to taking the computer home at night."
What I love about open source is that it's about choice and options. That is something Apple isn't. While I think OS X is nice, Apple is a mini-Microsoft wannabe. They are as lock-in (customer) and lock-out (competition) as anything Microsoft has ever done. I like their products, I hate their philosophy. I'll take OSS, thanks anyway.
References:
See, iPod, Aqua, OS X on Intel requires Apple's hardware, and even the unfair business practices their own resellers filed against them, etc...
Maybe you should read the subject again. I don't think he was objecting to the OP's use of the word "publicity".
I think it's obvious that they are getting publicity. I think the point that strider44 was trying to make was that it's not *free*
It appears to me there are many valid reasons to pick RedHat:
1) RedHat IS paying $2 million for this project, and is one of the 5 companies spear heading this.
2) You can't afford to call up apple / microsoft and say 'hey remember that OS you gave me free? can you please spend time getting this to work for me?'
3) I'm sure the Develops WILL recompile the kernel, and make it just for the laptop in particular. Probably configure everything, and then take an image of the hard disk
4) IIRC, applications like apt, synaptic, yum, yumex can be easily ported to whatever verson of RH they are running, and RedHat still runs the repositories
5) Mac OS / Windows tend to be rather resource hogging compared to Linux (esp with recompiled kernel). Remember, this hardware won't be top of the line
6) Using a GPLed product like Linux ensures that the OS STAYS free, and you will never have to pay / activate the OS / Do any work at all.
With literally thousands of people in developing nations dying every day due to lack of clean water, vitamins, food, and other essentials, isn't this project rather silly?
i dont think so. the hypocrisy of volunteerism rears its ugly head.
they give things for free not because they care about the children, but because they have an agenda to push and they can only push it on the vulnerable and poor who have little choice but to say 'yes'
I've set up Slack boxes to work rather pain-free for computer illiterate users. No worrying about having to use bundled crap.
While that is a very admirable accomplishment, I have to wonder why everyone seems to think these computers are an exercise in a "* for Dummies" effort.
I believe the recipients would be better served learning about the art of computing rather than a "How to use 'Productivity Tool X'" waste of time.
Why not Darwin? It includes most of the things that set OS X above Linux (no slurs intended), like the better BSD security, the bundling of applications into self-contained directory structures, etc.
It's also open source, which meets the specified requirement. If Steve really wanted Apple to be a part of this, he would have pushed Darwin.
Full-blown OS X has way too much overhead to be practical on the proposed hardware, in any event. This was just a PR thing, no real intentions -- other than putting the product name (OS X) into the news.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along now.
I'm a little more forgiving to Apple (as compared to Microsoft) as Apple has an Open Source foundation (Darwin). Also, just look at the numerous open source foundation items found embedded in the OS. http://www.apple.com/opensource/ Granted, some of this is just marketing BS... but comparing OS X to XP simply isn't fair to the good work Apple has done working with the Open Source community. Sounds like the $100 laptop project threw the baby out with the bath water.
Henchman: Steve, this $100 project wants an open-source OS to run its laptops
Steve: Okay, let's offer them a closed-source OS and let them decline it
Henchman: Exactly! We'll look philantropic and lose no money!
MacOS (and RedHat) is nice and all, but if you want your kids to be able to compete against my kids for a technical job, you should forget about making their toys easy to use. Kids can learn this stuff faster than you think.
I'd also consider installing OpenSolaris if the drivers supported it. Too bad accelerated graphics support isn't there yet.
they will have to use it for several years before they will ever be able to learn how to install and play games, and etc, osx would have been easier for children to use, i dont know why they would have turned it down??
He also says money normally spent on textbooks would be used to pay for the laptops for Brazilian schoolchildren. "I'm very optimistic," he says, giving the project a "70 to 80%" chance of being launched in the country.
I'm sorry but does anyone else see a problem here? I know lots of us here would like to have every single person wired and staring into a monitor to do just about everything but I find this a bit uncomfortable. As a graduating computer engineer, I find that having a book is still much better than reading it off a monitor. Maybe it's just me, but I certainly hope this doesn't backfire on them..
An oddly relevant quote from the preface to the UNIX-HATERS Handbook:
"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."
Ken Pier, Xerox PARC
It was copywrited and then patented by MS. As a result, the innovative "+5 Conspiracy" technology has a license which is not only non-redistributable but is also incompatible with GPL based Software such as Slashdot's Slashcode.
They would be making a $100 laptop themselfs, and give tons of them away to schools. It worked in the Apple 2 days, it could work again.
Wait, that's not really so much of a surprise. Open source projects have always been more interested in being right than being good.
What if Bill Gates had offered a free license of Windows for this project? I read some people in the comments miffed that the project didn't take up Jobs' offer. But seriously, think about it. If you replaced OSX and Jobs with Windows and Gates in this scenario, those same people commenting would have been shouting to high heaven if the project took Gates up on the offer. In terms of the goals of the project, though, it's the same thing if Gates or Jobs offers Windows or OSX to use as the operating system.
I say kudos to the project for sticking to their guns and their principles. Keeping your integrity can mean tough choices sometimes, but it's always better in the long run.
Pardon me for not thinking about the little children but I didn't have a laptop growing up. I'm sure people who are having trouble getting food and water for the day are happy to hear about people getting cheap laptops. Oh wait no, they probably don't care because they can't read.
life in low-res
By your same line of reasoning, they will be too stupid to need a webserver. The only reason it is so difficult for you to configure linux is because you have been monkey trained to just put a disk in and Go! /my/ teeth on.
Instant gratification. Maybe they don't know about instant gratification yet? Their first impression of a computer will be of what you can tell a pc to do, not what it can tell you to do.
We ought to send them commodore 64's. That's what I cut
Biotch.
Parent has been wrongfully modded flamebait - PLEASE MOD UP.
imagine a cluster of those...
open source will only grow in popularity with projects like this one... jobs obviously saw the potential in having osx become the standard os of many emerging countries...
Get your torrents...
Duuuuuhhhh...
Besides, it would void the spirit of the project, giving kids a chance to do development and stuff... Newton (or prettymuch any PDA interface, barring Zarus or WinCE) is too light for dev work
-everphilski-
Not everyone who lives in their grandparent's basement is a loveless, pale faggot. My girlfriend left me for one of them :/
But really, providing an environment which promotes learning can't be such a bad thing can it? Systems like OS X and Windows seem to encourage even the mildy curious to wave their hands and go "Voodoo magic" much earlier than something like Slackware. Maybe I'm just distracted by shiny things though...
Apple knew they would be declined; its not a concern what chipset it is running on. It's all a publicity stunt. If they hadn't done it now, Microsoft would have done it later.
-everphilski-
I would hope that the project's principles will allow for more free software to do those jobs. Giving the students free software today can inspire them to develop such free software in the future. We can and should switch to free software to do these jobs (free BIOS, for instance) when it works. We should help those working on such things now. Recent history shows that when we work on such programs and switch to using them we gain the freedom over our own lives.
I too would like free software for all the parts of my computer that run software (as opposed to those that run instructions burned into ROM, which might as well be hardwired circuitry). But progress on these grounds will be made one step at a time. There's an old aphorism about winning a revolution by using the enemy's bullets; of course, the free software community is fighting a non-violent revolution, but using what's available often means using something repressive to build something better. Had the project chosen a proprietary OS where perfectly good free software exists, that would have been a different situation entirely; fortunately for the children using these computers, the project leaders say they aren't choosing proprietary software.
Digital Citizen
To paraphrase an old proverb; give a man a commercial OS, and they will not need to buy another for a while, teach a man to use a free OS, and they will have an OS forever.
for a kid, something like GIMP is MORE than enough...heck, they will use the default paintbrush tool and the default color and start drawing. At the end, the drawing is a bunch of squiggles. But to them, it's an ice monster. They will ask you how to change colors. You show them, they're happy. They will find out the rest in their time. You then show them gradients....they play with them...Sometimes you get a little ahead of yourself and try to explain to them layers, opacity and filters...they lose interest. Why? because they want to draw their ice monster and all they need is 3 shades of blue.
With kids, what I've seen is that their imagination plays a MAJOR role in what they do. So, something even as limited as paintbrush is good enough to them. The ones who want to learn more about drawing will do so. They will come to you with questions. You show them how to do what they want and they will remember because that is what they are interested in.
Same with word processors. They will play with font sizes and bold, italics and underline fonts and will explore every button on the word processor to see what it does. They'll use character and line formatting to write "their story". Maybe a few figures here and there. it won't be structured and it won't need a table of contents - and openoffice is more than capable for those needs. They are also not bothered by it's sluggishness...to them...that's the way it works...no complaints.
Its the same with something like inkscape...as long as they can print their pictures or save them to work on them again, they're happy.
And yes, I do know what you're talking about and when stuff goes wrong, they will wait for you to fix it and then they're happy to get back to what they were doing. One thing with Linux stuff...you generally only have to fix it once. Once it works, it works well. That suits kids perfectly.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I think the grandparent of this post completely misses the point that everyone is different. Some want to play with the OS, some want to play with music programs, some want to play with art programs, some want to do word processing, some may want to do programming. We can't presuppose their intents and desires.
Forcing them to use open source software is as bad as forcing them to use closed-source software.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
I don't know why Steve bothered offering. If the machines don't have SSE3, Rosetta won't be able to run any PPC binaries.
Common sense is not so common.
1: Sell cheap laptop with OS X to poor kids 2: Familiarize them with Apple's proprietary software 3: Give them some iPods, too 4: ? 5: Profit!
Way to sidestep the global marketing brainwashed groupthink and reject the use of sex to sell products! You certainly are creative and revolutionary. Well done.
i supose that any current system that may be used on those laptops will have to be adapted, but is easier to adapt from the open source because their have more devs knowing the internals and they're already working without hw acceleration.
Now, i supose that the only benefit that Apple can get from this is mindshare and publicity, but they won't to open source their desktop, so why don't they give more help to the gnustep project? it can be like a low end OSX running with linux/BSD kernel; with it they can give to people a taste of its framework and they will have lot of future developers trained to make free and commercial software for OSX?
Go Linux, go Linux, go Linux,....oh god, no, they're going with Linux, /. seems to be go, go, go, but as soon as they do something with them then everyones, no, no, no. Its the funniest thing I've seen since the last election.
Go Apple, go Apple, go Apple,....no, no, not the Apple,
Go M$, go M$, go....hold on, wtf.
Every time Linux or Apple come up, everyone on
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Drag a folder to the dock.
Right click to get a nested list view, left click to get the actual folder.
Done.
I'm surprised your post isn't moderated as troll, calling the grandparent poster's point asinine with no explanation at all. I'm also glad that the free software community doesn't hinge on you to progress.
Digital Citizen
If MIT has no other ulterior motives, they should let the recipients decide what OS is best for them.
So why should you? Jobs' bit in the story is a small tidbit.
A good story, though (and no thanks to the "editor")
Because they may be doing it for higher causes. Some people, even those in corporations, still would like a better world for their kids.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
What, you mean like this?
If you think about it, GNUStep running on Darwin is already damn close to replicating OS X with Free Software. Sure, there's a few things missing (notably, Core*), but if OS X started getting really widespread adoption like this, those holes would be patched up quick.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This project will fail and fail misrably. nd all you, right on linux guys are a buch of idiots. If you actually thought about it you would realize what a disaster this will be. inux itselfe can be hard to work with, the gui is nice but most of the time I find myselfe using terminals and manually editing the etc files because the gui configure apps are woefully lacking in usability and configuration options. f these laptops were dfor a country full of geeks and weirdos that were being trained to be some kind of sardukar of the tech world than linux would make sense. but we are talking about deploying these things to countries where people can barely read let alone operate a computer. this is like the south park episode starvin marvin, where the misionarys are giving the locals bibles and telling them not to eat them. if you are going to give computers to people who will need to use them to learn the basics like reading writing and basic communication, you shouldn't give them a computer that requires advanced computer troubleshooting skills so that they can install ( read, get rpm, install, find missing dependancy, get rpm, install find another missing dependancy, repeat ad nausium.) the reader neccesary for the digital book that is sopose to teach them how to read. The target people for these laptops arent the type of people that will want to tweak the OS. Hopefully someone will wake up and at least offer the choice of linux or OS X as an operating system for these computers. that way budding geeks can choose Linux, and the people who just want to learn and use their computers can use OS X. as someone posted ealier, why not also offer windows if its for free. let the end user decide not someone who is trying to push an agenda. f apple is smart thaey will offer a 200$ educational laptop and drive this project into oblivion.
They're not "value added", they are freedom removed. Users get the software minus the freedom.
Digital Citizen
If everyone is so eager to help why not just give them Windows, OSX and RedHat? Let them decide what they want to put on their $100 laptops.
Great now I can't get a 100$ OS X laptop because of some open-source zealots and their principals.. MAN!
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
...my entire GUI menu under the cursor at all times. I could deal with it. Eliminate a lot of wasted movements with proper button controls and a little muscle memory. I don't like anything permanent taking up screen real estate. I find "tool bars" teh evil. I use them, because that is primarily what is presented with the mainstream OSes, but still...if the hand is on the mouse the mouse should be able to do most anything you want to do. This is very similar to what the pure CLI guys like, be able to do everything from the keyboard and not use the mouse. I just prefer the hints and gestures of GUI control over the rote linear stream of memorized commands, even with shortcuts.
Eventually, someone will come up with an interface that combines the best of keyboard and mouse in one unit, and I have a sneaking suspicion the big breathrough will be coming from the gaming/console using world, and not the desktop/workstation world.
That is what it is about. Alot of people out there claim that Linux is hard to use and understand, when the reallity is, that it is just different than what they are use to. Hopefully, this will create the first generation of Linux users who are not comprised mostly of "Geeks". I hope that this will inspire poeple to give Linux a chance.
This is not RHEL, and this is not Fedora. This is not GNOME at all. It's a completely different UI. There's no "bundled crap".
Also, Slack probably doesn't have engineers to throw at the project, paid. The other commercial distros might, but they're not participating for reasons I know nothing about.
These computers use proprietary processors from AMD, and doubtless a lot of other proprietary hardware. So how do they get to claim "100% Open Source" while using proprietary components? Why do hardware manufacturers get exemptions for their closed Intellectual property models?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I don't know the answer to my own question, but the hardware point you make is only really valid as long as the drivers are all open source as well. Anyone know what they are using in that regard?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"very well?" You must have a LOT of patience. I've placed OS X on older G3 Macs, and I've found it incredibly difficult to be productive. Processes take forever.
I can hardly stand OS X on an older G4 with 256 megs of RAM.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Or how about clean water to Bangledeshis, who are dying by the thousands due to arsenic poisoning? For the price of one of these computers, we can supply a family with safe water for years. These people, too, will create jobs, products, and knowledge that will benefit all.
That is exactly the mindset that proliferates ignorance and vulnerability in the "masses".
Ignorance is not bliss, it's apathy.
That is why they wanted to use open source so they can tailer the OS to the hardware. If it has something that would be unreasonable to run on the hardware than make the nessisary changes.
Same with the apps on it. Slim it down, make it run smooth, and be functional. On Windows/Office you might be able to remove some components without violating the lincense.
When will the Apple-lobby on /. (which is also, largely, an anti-American and pro-homosexual lobby) realize that Apple is just another proprietary vendor, just like Microsoft, only not as successful.
You can't like open source and like Apple. If you do, that means you're simply a crazy nut who hates Microsoft.
Why not go with a completely free Linux distro like Debian instead of a commercial one?
They should have come back and said - we'll take it, if you make the whole thing open source and not just Darwin. Free the Aqua!
Someday I think Apple will go there, but it would have been good to have a push. In the meantime I agree the most important thing for this laptop is to keep the software as open as possible so people that end up with one can really make the device work for them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Did Jobs really expect them to bite the hand that feeds them? Red Hat has donated $2 million to this project, so it would be a real slap in Red Hat's face if the project decided to use a non Red Hat OS.
Yeah, but I'm just more worried about system resource usage. That is why I'm recommending a stripped-down distro.
You all have valid points, though. I'm just a bit of a stuck-in-the-mud, really :)
Oh, and I don't live in my parent's basement. I actually live in a college dorm, and, in 32 days, an apartment (with luck - I'm graduating from college).
Besides, my parents don't have a basment.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
You have a chance to get an OS that's easy to configure and use or an OS that no one really uses who isn't in a technical field that's not all the easy to use or configure. This is supposed to be for kids so you would have their interests in mind, not your own ideological interests. What do you do? Make the stupidest fucking decision imaginable! What a fucking asshole! This is why no one takes open source etc. seriously. Its filled with ideologues who have no concept of the real world.
Gee, that conjures up a real cute Norman Rockwell kinda mental picture. Beaming child with laptop photographed beside contaminated drinking water source, siblings smiling through malaria-crazed eyes and old grand ma-ma, the only adult not to have succumbed to AIDS, cranking the handle merrily while she waits for the arrival of real electricity to the village so that what little food they have doesn't spoil and so she doesn't have to scour the land in search of the odd twig for the cooking fire. Kinda makes you feel all warm inside. I'm busy developing some new games for them right now, like "Ringworm Jim", and "Sim Sanitation". God bless ya, Mr. Jobs (and all who would sail with him).
Mr. Negroponte discussed the project last week with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Craig Mundie, chief technical officer of advanced strategies and policy. "We're in serious discussions to determine what the appropriate type of involvement is with us with their project," says Mr. Mundie.
... how about none?
... funny how much loathing you have for a man whose human worth far outweighs your own. *lol*
Install Linux and give it to kids who don't know how to use a lightbulb! (there may be a little exaggeration there)
If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but at least don't try and sound like you know what you're talking about. Maybe you could include a disclaimer illustrating this fact. All it does is influence even less knowledgeable /. Readers to believe in your little imaginary universe! That's not a good thing if all you spout is BS.
FYIFTLKSR (For Your Information, and For The Less Knowledgeable Slashdot Readers): There are *NO* pipelines and/or busses/anything else that are available to OS X that are not also available to *ANY* modern Linux kernel. Furthermore, all of Apple's stuff is compiled with a slightly optimized version of GCC (which ships with OS X) that isn't hugely better at its job than plain vanilla GCC for PPC.
The *only* instance where most OSS software falls flat on its face in the PPC world is if AltiVec is at all applicable to the task at hand... Because few people code against it, or the Intel/AMD equivalents for that matter--so the point is moot. On the other hand, many-most Apple(tm) and third party OS X multimedia applications use it.
Except for the fact that SSE3 is a core component of OSX on x86 and currently no AMD chips (to the best of my knowlege) have SSE3 capabilties.
They want an operating system "that can be tinkered with," which displays the standard Slashbot geek assumptions:
1.) That everybody is a goddamned operating systems kernel engineer instead of a user who wants to get some fucking computer work done. 95% of you people have never even modified a single line of your local Linux kernel source tree.
2.) That there will always be a majority of kids who aren't interested in staring at lines of source code to feel good about their "software freedom." Give me a break.
3.) That the tiny minority of kids who would actually be interested in Linux and 100% open source would just wipe OS X off the laptop and install Linux for free anyway.
4.) You guys obsess over making every little kid a coder, when XCode/GCC ships free with OS X, and these kids could have been designing the next great Cocoa apps. Cocoa simply whips the butt of everything else out there.
5.) There are TONS more creative kids than coder kids, and think of all the incredible creative stuff that would have been nurtured here. iLife ships for free with OS X. Now these kids won't get to have Garageband for free, or iPhoto for free, or iMovie and iDVD for free. But hey, now they get to experience the joy of having to install two entire desktop environments and libraries just to run each other's apps! Have fun with a "package management system" and a fragmented filesystem hierarchy that dumps files all over the place instead of in well-designed bundles!
6.) Which leads to my final point. These kids will be taught the wrong ways to do things instead of the right ways. App bundles, real application APIs, real drag-and-drop, etc....
But, the designers' wishes triumphed. Oh? What's this? Red Hat donated $2 million to this project, and now they're getting used over OS X? Ah, that's why. So much for free and open. Only the designers got what they wanted. I guarantee a kid given a choice and presented both systems would have gone with Apple...
"Sufferin' succotash."
I find this comment very funny. My kids have used Linux exclusively to do their homework for over 5 years now. My daughter is now a senior and my son is a sophmore. They have both been on the A honor role throughout their entire school life. They are by no means computer literate. They wouldn't know a shell script from a shell fish. I don't recall them ever asking for help using any of the applications I have provided for them (OpenOffice, gimp, Mozilla/Firefox, Evolution, etc).
I believe that their homework experience would not have been much different if they had used OS X. I just didn't have to pay anything for the OS or applications I run on my systems. I do believe however that their homework experience would have been MUCH different had they been using Windows. They would have had to fight for computer time with all the viruses, malware and crashes.
He would have made it Open Source.
Tag lost or not installed.
They keep saying how economics of scale will push the price of these things down to about $100. BUT they are only talking about selling them in third world countries. These are not the people who are buying all kinds of tech. They should start selling these in the US, Europe and Japan. They'll sell millions of them and the prices to produce them will plummet.
NTITE
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
Why subject the kids to a computer they can't control completely?
You mean the freedom to discover that it is much more difficult to tweak your device drivers to work properly than to pay someone to develop it? Real freedom there, pal.
Not free as in speech, or free as in beer, but free as in Kool-Aid.
They are doing just that. The fact that RedHat is doing it, doesn't mean they are just installing a stock Fedora release on the boxes.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Consider: If this project ever actually gets past vaporware, the platform they use will get a large population of first-time computer users in nations which are still developing markets. In other words, they stand a good chance of becoming the defacto standard for said nations. Since software has zero cost to make copies, and you have no chance of selling your product to be used on these anyways, you would have to be retarded not to offer to let them use it or free. I'm amazaed Microsoft hasn't offered. If anything they should charge money to be the OS of choice (which considering Red Hat's large donations, may be exactly what has happened).
"Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that just works. Sure its a real steal at no cost. But for kids, the cost of the OS doesnt matter. The fact that it just works is good. But what they really want to do is get into the internals and rip it apart to see what makes it tick. What better candidate than something that's open source?"
It depends on what the goal of providing kids with cheap computers is.
If the goal is for the kids to use the computers as tools to use in school to learn non-computer subjects, MacOS X with the bundled applications (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, graphing calculator, etc.) provides fantastic learning tools. Though I'm far from sure that $100 computers could be used for photo and video editing. Of course, the availability of thousands of educational programs for the Mac would certainly make the computers more useful for general education than a Linux computer (which has relatively little educational software available).
If the goal is for the kids to learn about computers, Linux is an OK answer. Since all of the source is available (though you won't be recompiling the entire OS and application stack on an $100 computer, so this is somewhat academic), it's a bit better than MacOS X on this score, where most of the environment is OSS, but with a proprietary framework and many applications). But from the perspective of being a software environment that's open for exploration, Linux or Mac OS X can't hold a candle to Squeak Smalltalk (http://www.squeak.org/).
I suspect that the reason that they turned down Apple wasn't because of what teachers or students want or need, but the goals of the people running the project. They (I am guessing) really want to create an open source consumer platform, and this "education" strategy is a way that they've picked to bypass Microsoft's dominance of the desktop OS market. I suspect that they picked the goal of $100 total cost including the OS, storage, etc., because it precludes x86 CPU's and Windows licensing costs and resources, so MS is excluded by definition. So if your goal is to jump-start OSS as a consumer platform, you won't want to use Apple's proprietary OS even if that would be better for the teachers and students, because it doesn't achieve your real goal. That's not to say that this goal isn't legitimate (in the long run, you could argue that jump-starting OSS on the desktop is good for everyone), but it's a long-term strategic goal that is more important to Red Hat, for example, and makes the computer much less useful for students and teachers for the next few years. I suspect that Apple knew that their offer couldn't be accepted by Red Hat (who wants Linux) or MIT (who wants a "clean slate" for research), but felt that it was better to make the offer than not.
Whatever the reasons, if they don't want to use the best OS for religious/strategic reasons, they really should consider Squeak Smalltalk as a platform. It has some advantages over the traditional Linux application stack:
- Smalltalk was designed and has been used for educational purposes for three decades. Squeak Smalltalk in particular is a fantastic teaching environment. There are all sorts of powerful components available (e.g. http://www.opencroquet.org/, a distributed 3D environment, http://www.squeakland.org/ which has tons of great code generated by students and teachers, http://www.squeakland.org/school/HTML/essays/essay s.html, which documents a huge number of educational projects based on Squeak Smalltalk, etc.).
- Squeak is completely open source, written in itself. This makes it much easier to understand than all of the layered technologies that are "Linux", which makes it more useful for students.
- Squeak is far more resource efficient than the full Linux application stack. It can run over Linux, or Windows, or MacOS X, or WinCE, or even without
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
That crank idea is great! I wish this laptop I'm using right now had one. How long will it be before someone writes an ap to play "Pop goes the Weasel" while you crank it? Or just play some caliope music and display a dancing monkey.
+1 Funny
I'll feed the troll...
1) I've never modified kernel code myself. But if I wanted to, or had to, I could. With an open-source kernel, you're free to change things on a whim. With a proprietary kernel, even if you have the technical ability, you're screwed.
2) I don't browse through random source code for fun (though sometimes for profit), but open-source software gives me that warm-and-fuzzy feeling because I prefer the whole community attitude (for the most part) over some monolithic corporation that's more interested in getting me to fork over $100 for their latest app. Others might take a strictly moralistic stance.
3) I suppose they could install anything they like. Choice is good.
4) Sure, Cocoa is nice. GCC is also nice. wxWidgets is even nicer, and easily portable across both OSes. Preferences vary from person to person, and YMMV.
5) Silly me, I didn't realize that modern *nix distros were strictly coding environments. And here I've been mixing audio, putting together home movies, editing photos, and doing my daily email/document/browsing/desktop-yada-yada on Linux. Must be a bug.
6) You misspelled "Mac" as "right".
"Oh? What's this? Red Hat donated $2 million to this project, and now they're getting used over OS X? Ah, that's why. So much for free and open."
Last I checked, if someone gives you $2M and an operating system with no costs attached to it, you aren't paying them anything -- ergo "free". If the source is "open", you can modify it as you like -- ergo "the other free".
Easy peasy.
You'll notice that you said some people in corporations. The official stance of the corporation however is not to give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling inside. The only purpose that a corporation has is to make profit. Yes many individuals want to create a better world. Some of those individuals work in corporations. Those individuals should be commended for their forward thinking views.
The corporation would be pissed if it participated in any community service that did not receive any attention, publicity, mind share, or free advertising. The bricks and stones of a corporation headquarters don't shine a little brighter when it has helped another person.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
The manager of the laptop project was quoted saying (in response to Job's over) that the project's aim was to improve the children's lives, not further disadvantage them
The real story here has nothing to do with $100 laptops, Linux vs Mac OS X, or Open vs. Closed Source.
Steve Jobs proposed an arrangement under which Apple would allow computers other than its own to run Mac OS X.
Just this summer, Apple VP Phil Schiller was telling the media, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Now, this is a long way from selling boxed copies of OS X for installation on whitebox PCs, much less a bundling agreement with Dell...but still, it's a significant development. What other devious schemes might Steve Jobs have for OSX86?
Whoever modded the parent "Flamebait" was on crack. It's informative.
Why not revive the Tiger Learning Computer and add a little color LCD monitor... couldnt be much different in price and has plenty of software :) //c
It was an all in one solid state implementation of the Apple
http://www.apple2clones.com/?q=image/tid/165
there's no replacement for displacement
Speak for yourself, bud. I'm as right-wing and left-brain as they come. I heap scorn on "creative" people every day. Art is shit, I always say. Yet I wouldn't give up my Mac for anything.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Consider: If this project ever actually gets past vaporware, the platform they use will get a large population of first-time computer users in nations which are still developing markets. In other words, they stand a good chance of becoming the defacto standard for said nations. Since software has zero cost to make copies, and you have no chance of selling your product to be used on these anyways, you would have to be retarded not to offer to let them use it or free. I'm amazaed Microsoft hasn't offered. If anything they should charge money to be the OS of choice (which considering Red Hat's large donations, may be exactly what has happened).
And one fine day a western man was shopping in the streets on Congo when he bought a pirated OSX CD for a penny, and *pfft*, there goes Apple's multi billion dollar hardware sales.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
If they want to call the operating system "Red Hat" or use Red Hat logos, that would require an agreement with Red Hat and could be expensive. Otherwise, Red Hat Linux is free. There are plenty of clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are freely available, for example CentOS, and Fedora Core is free software.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
> They want an operating system "that can be tinkered with," which displays the standard Slashbot geek assumptions:
Methinks you live up to your name. This is just the standard "stupid slashbot" didn't think of X retort.
That said, it was nice of Apple to offer, even if they didn't use it.
I've recently had the chance to work on a 30" monitor, and the menu bar is still delightful. what's important is not that it is far away, but that it is always in the same place.
But truly, for most applications it is simpler on a mac to take advantage of the keyboard shortcuts and right mouse context menus...
I still find it surprising that most people seem to think that Macs don't have these things...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
If MS had made a similiar offer for XP, then slashdot would
have been filled with "drug dealers offering the first
hit free" type of comments.
Ya, go ahead mod me down.
Any of you arguing geniuses think that maybe they could provide multiple OSs on disc and let them try both, play, choose and learn? Duh, they're free so give them both. Where's the problem?
Half the commenters here seem to be saying that OLPC should just have accepted Apple's offer. I doubt that they'd say the same if it had been Microsoft rather than Apple.
Fortunately, the people behind OLPC have a longer-term vision (or just Red Hat's influence...)
"In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home."
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html
So this $100 laptop does not necessarily have to be used as a computer.
Heck, if they can overclock it, maybe it can be a hotplate too!
That THEY can tinker with.You are assuming that these laptops will be just like any other personal computer you or I know. What they will probably be is a "virtual book" which has an easy way to write documents, surf the web, and use built in educational programs:
He said the child could use the laptop like a text book.
As in an appliance, not a full laptop. So that means that Jobs probably offered to have OSX at the core of this appliance and the project people said "its easy for us to make a limited purpose box with Linux because WE can tinker with it." As in the development libraries for the visual stuff is open. Plus they are not going to ship the laptops in single pieces, so there will be extreme nerdiness involved to get them to work:
The device will probably be exported as a kit of parts to be assembled locally to keep costs down.
So its not like the project leaders turned down $100 iBooks for the kids.
But hey, don't let my making sense get in the way of your Linux bashing party.
Open Source Sushi
Red Hat require you to pay for security updates?
+++ATH0
Who cares if OSX isn't open source? It's a hell of a lot better than anything Redhat's put out lately.. this is a loss for the children who will eventually use these laptops.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Shouldn't that read "Fedora Core" instead of "RedHat Linux" ? The last RHL (9) went EOL April 31, 2004. I guess it isn't "RedHat Enterprise Linux" that they will be using ?! After all if they would be using "RedHat Enterprise Linux" it's also "free of charge" since normally RedHat sells "RedHat Enterprise Linux".
You hit the nail on the head!
The point is not to give free tools to people - it is to educate a small percentage of the 3rd world people to a level of expertise in which they will be able to support the information processing needs of their countries, i.e. create affordable software for which they don't have to send money out of their countries to Apple/Microsoft/etc.
Giving out free Mac OS Xs would just make sure that they will only end up using the computers and not tinkering with them at all. This would create a situation in which the 3rd world people would remain cheap labor for sports shoe manufacturers while the (expensive) IT expertise would remain in today's economic powers.
I'm almost tempted to mod you off-topic, but instead I'll just point out that grandparent's tongue seems to be firmly planted in his cheek.
If you aren't going to have the drivers for a card open source, then what does it matter if some OTHER parts of the software are closed as well? Why should the window manager (the part that is closed on OS X) have any more reason to be open than a video card driver? That's the line of thinking you are going down.
My point is that the hardware costing anything becomes meaningless when it's really just an extension of closed software. Hardware is nothing without the software to make it run, so in the full context of this story if the box does not have drivers that are fully open source then they are indeed being hypocritical in saying they will not take on OS X. If the drivers are indeed open then there is no conflict of philosophy and the action is well understood.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It looks like towards the end MS knucled into this projects and just about forced them to allow windows on the system
Redhat as a distro is terrible the upgrade path and support cycles for non-enterprise versions is horrible. RIP $100 laptop.
I'm sorry, but I am one of the seemingly few people who don't think that Apple are really a lot better than MS. Ok, they can design decent hardware and software, but they still seem to have their eyes on world domination just like Bill and co.
I really doubt Steve Jobs was making that offer out of the kindness of his pearly white, stylish Apple branded heart. I think it was probably that he imagines that many of the people using these cheap laptops, or perhaps the countries that are buying them are going to eventually become wealthy enough to be consumers of Apple products in the future. If they are all used to Mac OSX and Mac software, then they aren't going to even consider Windows or Linux when that time comes - that's pretty much the problem with the MS Monopoly now.
I suspect MS would have offered too if the $100 computer makers weren't concerned about the OS being open source. I don't think MS minds too much about pirates using Windows in countries like China - it's better than them using another OS completely.
"Because I can't tinker with...{list of applications}"
That's like saying Linux isn't open because Alias won't let me tinker with the Maya source.
Nothing is new here, just packaging it cheaply and going to use the fact they want 15 million of the same parts put onto the same boards all the same way to drive the price down.
I expect over 5 years that this laptop could be made for less than $40 each.
I want one of the $200 versions as long as it has more RAM and flash drive space for the extra cost.
I have been looking for something to use anywhere that is light weight and rugged as opposed to my heavy full sized laptops.
Primarily I want something to run vi on to edit C computer programs and compile and run them. Something like this would be fabulous as a text editor.
>>Of course, the 13 Principals will have already lined their bank accounts with millions.
And how are they making millions when each company is paying $2 million to the fund each?
Red Hat Linux -> Check
Mac OSX -> Check
Windows XP -> Very Friendly (if you include the above two, the Billy G. will be foreced to play too.) Check
Wouldn't the best solution be to hand out a couple of DVDs with each of these laptops, that carried ALL of these OS's?
Let the kids try/play with all of them. Now that seems like an education to me.
All you people arguing OSX vs. RedHat are missing the frickin point. While I would like to state for the record that OSX on my friend's G4 powerbook was unforgivably slow (even compared to a Windows XP machine with similar hardware ie. mghz/RAM/HD), I think that what everyone should be concerned about is this:
Is it really ethical for the companies that will be manufacturing these to be making a profit off of third-world school children?
I personally believe that AMD, RedHat and any other companies that will be involved in the development of this should commit to providing parts (such as processors) and the laptop as an entire unit to developing nations AT COST.
From reading the article, it sounds as though they've agreed to provide the technology to developing nations for a REDUCED PROFIT, NOT at cost.
You have to keep in mind part of the way PROFIT works: in a profitable transaction, someone's getting jipped. That is, someone is paying more for something than it is worth. How much something is worth is defined as how much it costs to manufacture.
In America, to the middle class, we're simply happy if we believe we're not being jipped too much. As long as the profit margin on each sale is less than say, 50%, we figure it's a decent deal. But for people who are already poor and disadvantaged (by definition, if you're poor, you're disadvantaged), JIPPING these already poor and disadvantaged people DOES NOT SEEM RIGHT.
Perhaps I misunderstood the article. But I think that IF they were to be provided at cost, it would have been mentioned in the article.
I'm sure this offer was not declined because OS X is not suitable for the project. It couldn't be because it offers little opportunity for the project to customize the system for the limited environment it will be running in. I am sure it also has nothing to do with the fact that it does not natively support most of the thousands of open-source applications that the project will certainly want to take advantage of, rather than paying for proprietary software. I am equally convinced that Apple would not make such an offer as a cheap publicity stunt. The MIT project leadership are simply a bunch of idiots who are too dumb to know that they should transfer their work into the divine hands of Jobs, who can do no wrong.
Kudos to Apple!!
Good point. I'd go further though and say if these are to work, they should be about the people using them appropriating them for their own means - not "join us" but rather "join with each other and find your own way, develop your own solutions". "Join us" sounds a little too much like nineteenth century missionary activities - "here, starving dirty savage, take these gifts from us and you can become like us, almost as good us, in our image". "Joining us" might be one solution, certainly on several dimensions, for example skills and knowledge sharing, but I'd emphasise as you do in your post the hope that the computers are appropriated by the communities and developed independently as soon as possible.
Micro$oft might be "very friendly" to the project, but the only OS that they might get to run with any functionality on such limited hardware is WinCE. Somehow, the "free as in beer" unrestricted open source version of ANY M$ OS has never materialized. Nor would any applications that M$ might offer ever be open source. Since this defeats the stated purpose of the $100 computer agenda, why would anyone switch?
Without an unencumbered open source OS and applications, regionalization would not be possible, at least not to the extent that Red Hat Linux(TM) would be. Both India and China have hundreds of localized languages, as well as the African continent. No doubt, though, that Micro$oft marketing types wetted their pants at the prospect of another 2 billion users of their OS and apps. It isn't like M$ hasn't flogged the letter and spirit of monopoly laws with their viral M$ tax on new PCs, heavy discounts to schools and universities, FUD by any means possible, etcetera.
/usr/include/sys/tty.h: * (c) UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. /usr/include/sys/tty.h: * the permission of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.
-AC
This is the 667th post on this topic. I win it. Laetitia still loves me.
Well I find this interesting due to the fact that Apple seems to be open to allow other hardware vendors to use their OS. Since the days of cloned pre-Mac OS X PowerPC macs Apple have denied that anything other than their hardware would run their OS... So unless Apple was only offering Darwin this seems like a rather significant change of policy from a company they supposedly is gonna hardwire their OS to their hardware.
is the fact that if this takes off, then they'll be millions of new linux developers out there - all producing efficient code.
This is a huge threat to both MS and Apple equally.
I'd have thought both of them would release cut down freebie versions of their own OS to try to get market share - I wonder if they'll be any mechanism to stop alternative OS being installed. If there isn't I'm pretty sure a large number would switch to the MS/Apple OS, fragment the market and pretty much stuff up one of the whole points of the project. If there is, then this is all a bit evil DRM...
...instead of getting things done and interacting with the rest of the world, these kids will have the pleasure of fucking around with RPM dependencies and libc incompatibilities. Great, principled move fellas.
The machine is 500MHz, has no disk, a 1 megapixel dual mode display, and 1G of RAM (*not* 128M, as you claim here).
o +reality/2100-1044_3-5884683.html
Specifications were gathered from these sources:
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000120060924/
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003707.html
http://news.com.com/The+100+laptop+moves+closer+t
-- Terry
Such as News Corp? Please...
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
You need to install the Java 2 SE 5.0 release 1
s e50release1.html ...and then select it as your default Java.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/java2
-- Terry
I went to the article and they show a picture of a notebook computer with a crank handle on it. I would assume that this is for developing nations that do not as yet have an electrical grid as part of their infrastructure.
That's fucked up.
No running water. No electricity. No toilets. But they'll have a notebook computer. Will it have WiFi? I wonder how they plan to do WiFi or any networking without electricity.
I remember in the 70's people were bemoaning the fact that there were more television sets per household than there were toilets: "All that shit coming in and no where for it to go out." That was 35 years ago. Today we have the same problem with computers only now we're applying it to the entire planet.
Imagine what this will do to the economic structure of software development. We're sending RedHat OS computers to the same dudes that Sally Struthers has been trying to feed for 30 cents a day. I wonder how long it will be before that same half naked grubby little dude has your job because you aren't willling to work for $1.00 a day like he is.
Welcome to a global economy.
I wonder if they would rather have a working toilet?
Nothing is stopping Apple to produce a special osX version for this laptop and distribute it free on (sponsored) DVD's, if Apple doesn't do this then the offer wasn't serious but just cheap marketing. Maybe it was just a warning to all that osX is going to be licensed to other computer makers.
Not that "tinkerable" - I expect that the source code for everything won't come loaded on the machine.
v ing-5/113030655622200.xml
According to several recent articles, the machine has a bunch of USB ports, Wireless mesh-topology networking, 1G of RAM and no hard disk; the storage will all be flash.
See also:
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/faq.html
http://www.nola.com/living/t-p/index.ssf?/base/li
-- Terry
I'm glad there are other people as upset about this descision as me, but I can't believe how many other people on slashdot jump all over this "everything must be open source, otherwise it sucks/is evil/whatever" crap. I don't want to start a flame war or anything, but I'd love for someone to explain to me why "open source is the only way to go for all software". Not a rant, not a list of crap M$ has done, just a concise paragraph outlining exactly why "software MUST be open source". 'cause frankly, I just don't see it. I think OSS is great in certain areas, but I really don't see why it has to be the rule.
--Not to be worried, Pitr fix.
Gretchen Miller, director of world-wide marketing for mobile systems at Dell Inc., said she didn't think a $100 laptop would be powerful enough to meet students' needs. "We don't believe it's feasible at this point to manufacture a $100 notebook that meets our quality performance standards. Those things are all customer driven," she says.
Sure Gretchen. And how much does your cheapest laptop cost?
About $499 it turns out, after rebate.
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Actually, it'll be very hard to load another OS.
These boxes are Flash + USB + keyboard + display + WiFi/Cell + 1G of RAM. No CD/DVD drive, not floppy drive, no removable storage interface at all, apart from the USB.
The way you'll have to go about the initial OS load is to either put it on the flash parts using another process, or sucking it in using boot-from-USB (the networking won't work until you have the software for it).
In other words, they're just not going to have the equipment available to (re)image the flash in the things in the field, unless someone happens to have more complete equipment than just the laptops themselves.
So the OS choice is all or nothing (personally, I'd say they'd be better off with OS X, and not just because I'm a kernel engineer for Apple), and you will need to pretty much pick one and stick with whatever's pre-loaded.
If they are smart, they can maybe make them self-heal in the field using another laptop, but it doesn't look like that's the plan. The alternative is probably to write-protect the area of the flash containing the OS bits to keep them from getting stomped - basically, two partittions, with the base OS partition being mounted read-only. Any other approach means that it becomes a doorstop, and it's unrecoverable without someone with a big machine or a USB dongle that can cause the system to be reloaded.
OS X does make more sense for these things in general, just because it's better UI, but I can respect their decision.
Even so, it'll be really rare (perhaps impossible) for the end user to tinker with the OS kernel itself, even going with full Open Source like Linux; it's highly unlikely there will be enough storage in the flash to hold the entire OS source code anyway, so you'd (again) need compute resources that you're not making available for people to download and build their own kernel, and (re)image one of the flash parts with a newer version of Linux.
Practically, this means the Open Source nature of things isn't really going to buy the end users anything, unless they have sufficient resources that they likely didn't need the laptop in the first place (or didn't qualify for it).
-- Terry
besides the arguments of whether red hat or OS X would be better for this project, when Steve Jobs offers to put Mac OS on an x86 laptop not made by Apple, this is once in a lifetime event, and I would think that you couldn't turn him down.
besides, i don't see why kids like this need something like red hat linux. all they want to do is run a bunch of learning programs/paint/word processors? what is so bad about having a closed source operating system? 97% of the world does anyway...
not only that, but if you dedicate yourself to only using open source, you miss out on the tons of interactive software for kids that's out there (especially on mac)
not to mention the fact that the mac has much better compatibility than red hat for the majority of commercial products on the market. and the fact is, sometimes open source just doesn't cut it.
don't get me wrong, though, many times open source alternatives are fine programs, but many times they are just alternatives.
Prior to comment, I'd like to say that its a shame that the enemy of my enemy is my friend doesn't seem to work anymore between OS X and Linux. Its the Apple zealots vs the Penguinista's now... and it doesn't even seem to be a M$ plot... What's surprising to me is that hard core developers in the know are leaning towards Apple in a big way, and this is just due to a brilliant principle built into OS X: please the developers (we've screwed them in the past... now we make up for it).
Apple made a slightly wrong move in even contacting these geniuses... and all they have to do now is have a worldwide campeign after these laptops are distributed offering their OS for free. I think that the speed at which these laptops switch will increase at exponential rates.
Now that I've made my comment, I'd just like to say that I am probably an Apple zealot. I haven't loved everything they've done, just most of it, and I'm not a developer, just a technophile. The problem with linux, and the reason why what I've suggested above will work, is that linux breaks itself. It is not just that it is suprememly configurable... its that if you are not constantly on top of things, it will just break on its own accord. You take two of these laptops side by side, one running linux, the other OS X, and the one with linux will be a paper weight within months, and the one with OS X will continue to work and work and just work. It was silly for the Makers to turn Apple down, as linux is in dire need of user support, and there is no support infrastructure, espescially one that could handle something on such a large scale. Apple has excellent support already in place.
What I want to know is... what company has enough balls to complain to our government that this whole project is anti-capitalist, and that it engages in anti-competitive practices... and get it shut down?
The Admin and the Engineer
Then again, Red Hat has been stretching the definition of "free" in a lot of ways over the last couple years, heh.
Feel free to elaborate...
The ideal solution to me would seem to be to make the Red Had developed OS package the default, and treat it as a sort of 'reference implementation' but invite Apple and Microsoft to support the hardware as long as they follow similar rules... I.E. all supported OS setups should have free updates on the .edu hardware and provide a similar set of packages.
Make it a niche that is valuable for all three to compete in, and allow instructors (or school systems) to choose which is used.
No wonder Apple wanted to get their OS on those laptops. The exposure alone would have reaped plenty of reward when all those kids grow up and continue to use OSX.
True, it's not "Free" - but it is a tax deductible charitable contribution, so I assume that in reality it is costing them less than two million.
Could you all maybe explain again why it is so important to keep OSX off white box or non-Apple hardware in the West, and ALSO so important to have it running on generic non-Apple hardware in the third world?
Community service benefits corporations, because the better off people are, the more shit they can buy.
It is nice to see views from both sides of the coin when it comes to OSX. I work in education, have serviced Macs for going on 6 years. Heavily from OS8.6 and on.
I have noticed many things that cross the board as far as Mac Hardware and OS Revisions.
There is no such thing as a responsive or Fast Mac. I have serviced 100's of PPC 5260's all the way up to XSAN's with a 2 metadata controllers and a NAS Head. All of which share the same pace and feel when it comes to reaction time and general usage.The most important role the Mac's have filled for our educational uses is bridging the total novice gap. The most inexperienced computer users grasp the environment faster with one mouse button and the historical drag and drop Application installs, that OS9 touted.Simplicity and ease of use is the foundation that Apples have stood upon. This appears to me to be the source of devotion from Mac Fanatics.Macs have been in schools for years.This is how Apple grabbed its foothold. Other than that there are much better tools else where. Our district has finally left Mac's behind, cause of the lack of Software availability, and the costs. Each piece of software we have tested runs much better on a PC, jeez I wonder why. Maybe cause Software companies write software with
profit in mind, so who would you put your money into if you were a software company, a Mac? Or would you right code for that which 90% of the Market controls. It is money. When Apple dropped OS9 they left a large niche they carved out in education behind. They will not recover from that. When most of the School Districts move to PC's the Children will not be brought up in a mac world, hence less fanatics, thus Apple will either need to conform or die. PPC to Intel that is an interesting situation.???? There is simply better Hardware available and much more software choices for everything else. There is no evidence that there is more or better software for Mac's. Quality of construction for Macintosh Hardware is another issue. Ibooks are flimsy, the plastic is cheap and not strong, hinges are weak,the power adapters connections constantly separate and break. There is no such thing as extended battery life for Macs It is amazing that Macs are typically much more expensive, and typically of less quality. An all around Bad investment. Unless you are a One Button needing novice. "Oh, but Mac's are not for simpletons the have robust BSD underpinnings." I highly doubt typical Mac users have even looked under the hood let alone used it to change rights, or Port some OpenSource Apps,ssh'ed somewhere. You don't need to pay for that "BSD Core" There are plenty of distro's that are free and will run on 1/10th the machine that OSX will run on. If one of the benefits of OSX is the ability to have access to Open Source apps then why pay a company to give you crap hardware to run it on? So you can have a Dock, and Genie Affect? There is no need to spend that kind of money for a GUI.
If Apple donates, say, $2.1 million, I suspect that OS X would be made available.
I also suspect that this may be part of the, ah, negotiations around such a donation.
Still, on its face, it's a cool offer.
Why not accept the offer of OS X, and install RedHat also, and set them up with dual boot. Anyone who can handle Linux to the point of "tinkering" can handle dual boot. Anyone not interested in "tinkering" who wants to just "just work" could easily be shown both and then use whichever.
I think the level of complication added by dual booting would be outstripped by providing the choice. The only downside would be the extra HD space taken up.
Tom Anthony
Aren't these kids in third world countries underpriveleged enough? Now we are going to stick them with a crappy OS to top it off?
* Si hoc legere scis numium eruditionis habes *
And pray tell, how do you think most of todays professional software developers learned the game? Don't think these countries will need software developers? Just look around you at how dependent modern economies are on computers to drive up efficiency and try to tell us how the developing world will ever catch up if it can't bridge that divide or how they can bridge that divide if they don't have their own developers and can't afford to hire in developers from more developed countries.
And before you even try to bring up shrink wrap software, that's a tiny part of the software needs of a typical enterprise. The vast majority of software engineers are employed to work on internal projects that are never turned into sellable products but that are used to support business operations.
If the developing world is going to be ready to take the leap to a more computerised business environment over the next 15-25 years, they need to start teaching kids now.
Look at India, and how important software engineering skills has become to them. To get there, India put in decades of heavy investments in education in engineering disciplines and science. It's a great credit to them that they saw the value of it and took advantage of the fact that they were willing to take the cost despite the many short term fixes they could have spent the money on instead.
This is about education, not about making everything dumbed down and as easy as possible at the cost of teaching kids less.
In the developing countries, all OS's are free -- bootleg versions, complete with support provided by local shops. And the OS is Windows, often '98, and the applications are primarily Office, and IE.
When debating why Steve Jobs' outreach was rejected, there might be some consolation in thinking that the prospect of Linux being the permanent OS on the machine, is uncertain, unless something is done to prevent Windows being installed on the hardware. BTW, computers in the east have, for a long time been costing in the $300- $500 range for a fully configured P4 system.
Feel free to elaborate...
... oh, the horror! I think I'll switch to gentoo or ubuntu now.
Wah, Wah, Wah... Redhat no longer puts a desktop version for 50 bucks on store shelves.
I don't have the bandwith to download fedora... boo hoo
Redhat changed the default theme on KDE.... sniff, sniff
They just want to make money charging for support on their enterprise version!
Lets think about this for a minute- what is this negative mindset with anything closed source these days? I'm a big fan of open source, and use hundreds of open source applications as does anyone with various Linux machines and the few windows open-source products. At the same time, I use tons of closed source programs and am quite happy with both.
These decisions should not be made based on their open-source-dom, but rather on their quality. What is better? easier to use? more powerful? of course with the target market in mind. If a closed source application is licensed with the same distribution rights (which in this case it was), why should it being open or closed matter to its inclusion?
If Microsoft offered WindowsXP for free as well as patches, do you think they'd take it? Why not? Especially if they threw in some added application suites for it.
I am pro-open source, but it has it's place in the marketplace like anything else. If a closed-source solution is better (is it?) then are they really going to need to modify/view the source of the OS?
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Yes, there are open chipsets. See www.opencores.org.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The project didn't want another BitKeeper situation. No matter what Apple's intensions are/were, the possibility for the "free" license to be terminated is too big to risk the entire project.
You've been at the Mac Zealot Kool aid I see. The only real thing about a Mac's user experience that is superior is it's software install. It doesn't get much easier than drag & drop. Spotlight's nice but most users I watch save every damn thing on the desktop and never use it. They might have a nice wallpaper somewhere under all those icons. Linux has Beagle and Windows, well they will probably integrate internet search and desktop search and in the process leave a million exploitable holes, but that's another matter.
After that is starts going downhill. First, closing the only open window does not close the program. This is fine for those who don't mind pointing the mouse into the far left corner and scrolling down a menu to exit the program. But from the amount of users I find with 10+ programs running unknown to the user, this should have been fixed years ago. It's 2005 and Mac finally makes a multi button mouse, their OS has supported them for years. Yet they have been inadvertantly selling other peoples stuff years. Go to CompUSA, every one who buys a Mac at some point goes in and buys a Kingston, MS or Logitech mouse with scroll wheel. Every other major or minor OS in the world is wrong and apple is right? I pay almost $2000 for an iMac and they couldn't throw in their frickin top of the line also over priced mouse? Another oddity, the menu at the top of the screen. Great! instead of moving the mouse a 100 pixels or so I again have to move way out of the area I'm working to access a menu, whose bright idea was that? Now lets look at uniformity, brushed metal, white, white with stipples, top window bar blended into the window as to be invisible ( aka System Preferences), brushed metal window, window with a visible top bar. Things that are pretty much standard practice on every other OS/GUI in the world, are different on a Mac. And usually it seems for no good reason except to be different. It's fine if all your ever gonna use is a Mac, but that not ever gonna happen in the real world.
I use several OS's daily, I own two Mac's and two Linux Machines. At work I develop on and administer VAX, SGI, Solarix, Windows(NT,2K,XP), Linux and Mac's. No OS is perfect period. Linux is like an old friend, it can be a server, a desktop, a laptop and it's the perfect system for people who love to tinker, like a hot rodder who has to have chrome wheels, Nitrous tank, and a million amp sub woofer. And it's great for a small talented IT department to build web apps on and a full set of network services at 1/8 the cost of other proprietary systems.
Useability, some distros have it some don't. But generally once you've used one GUI you can figure out anything. Why is it, people will call a system admistrator to find out how to use a piece of software? The administrator has not used every single feature on every piece of of software there is, but instead starts checking menus. Mac users are just as as bad at this as others, in fact ability seems to inversely proportional to position. And guess who gets the expensive Macs?
All that and I still bought an iMac, why? One word .... iPod. :)
The only purpose that a corporation has is to make profit.
Wrong. The only purpose or or legal reason a corporation exists is to protect its investors private holdings from being targeted in litigation. That is the nature of the corporate charter set by Federal and State laws. A corporation has no legal or social obligation to its investors to make a profit, but by the nature of investment it is what they prefer them do.
I mean people tend to not invest in corporations that don't make profits, so by default most corporations try to make a profit because that will make a return on the investors investment.
No one usually would invest in a company that didn't make them returns on their investment, but on occasion people do. Take non-profit corporations for example. They have their own legal tax bracket.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"When keeping it real goes wrong."
I mean... You have the marketing power of Apple and Steve Jobs and you give it up for fucking Red Hat? Goddamn some of these FOSS people are idiots.
I stopped using a mouse a long time ago for this very reason. A trackball can be spun quickly with a finger, and stopped when it gets near the target. It also allows the precision of small movements that is lost when the mouse sensitivity is turned to hyper-speed-at-a-tiny-touch mode. Plus my wrist never has to move. Plus it is fun to spin my shooter in (insert 1st person shooter game) with a trackball.
If it had been the "on elaptop per gay child" project, they would have taken the offer in a heartbeat! However, we all know that Apple products won't boot for the heterosexual.
The only purpose that a corporation has is to make profit.
Wrong. The only purpose or or legal reason a corporation exists is to protect its investors private holdings from being targeted in litigation. That is the nature of the corporate charter set by Federal and State laws. A corporation has no legal or social obligation to its investors to make a profit, but by the nature of investment it is what they prefer them do.
huh? Your primary obligation as a corporation is to your stock holders. If you dont keep them happy they get rid of you and get new managment. So your both wrong and right, but what you both said is NOT the ONLY reason a corporation exists. Yes you need to be profitable and yes a corporation can protect your personal assets from litigation (although piercing the corporate vail is always possible given the right circumstances).
but to say you dont have an obligation to your stockholders is bunk, its everything they teach in school and in the real world, its all about keeping your stockholders happy. There the ones that tell you what to do if you screw up and they are the ones that replace you if needed, your more then obligated to keep them happy. At least in a public company situtation.
remember as a company exec you answer to the stockholders.
But this is with 256MB + of RAM. 64MB? You're gonna have a LOT of disk caching going on. More than I'd be able to stomach, though your mileage may vary. If you're really running OS X on 64MB, add a bit of RAM and see what a difference it makes.
I did find a G3 that wasn't happy with OS X: a beige Powermac. OS X is supported through Jaguar, but the Powermac just wasn't interested in playing at 266Mhz with its stock 64MB RAM. I reloaded OS 9 until I can scrounge up a 256MB stick or two. Then I'll add a PCI video card and load Panther. It'll be fine.
Panther must be the second-biggest bargain in OS these days, right behind Linux. $50 new at Amazon, and it runs pretty much everything you can do with Tiger.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
At the same time, it's a bit of a shame this didn't work out. The primary objective of the $100 laptop is remote education, and there sure is a LOT of excellent Mac-based learning software out there.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
We have only seen a portion of the deal. Is it not possible that Red Hat, like AMD, is receiving something of monetary value for each unit delivered. And there is going to be a for profit $200 machine. How much will Red Hat receive for that?
This "donation" could be pay for play. I tried to lookup the "One Laptop Per Child" foundation to see what its non-profit credentials were. They have no website and all hits seem to go to the MIT media lab. And even if it is "non-profit", we have seen many businesses run under the guise of non-profit that actually serve to generate large profits for their management, i.e. AARP, Credit Consolidation, etc...
How much does the One Laptop Per Child foundation pay Negroponte and Mary Lou Jepsen??? Red Hat and AMD for their services or hardware?
Let me see if I understand this. The point of the program is to get laptops to poor children in basically 3rd world countries cheaply. So they are going to install a hard to use OS on a $100 laptop for kids that probably have never seen or used a computer before instead of letting apple install their easy to use OS when there is no price difference?
Doesn't sound like they are trying to do whats best for the children here at all. The program is going to fail and be a laughing stock.
Man, I wish I had mod points. You hit the nail on the head and drove it right through the board. :)
just to set the record straight -- donating computers to kids and schools
has long been part of steve jobs' mission -- he personally offered to donate
a hundred thousand computers to every school in america back in 1979...
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist
(exerpt from Smithsonian Interview with Steve Jobs)
SJ: There were two kinds of customers. There were the educational aspects of Apple and then there were sort of the non-educational. On the non-educational side, Apple was two things. One, it was the first "lifestyle" computer and, secondly, it's hard to remember how bad it was in the early 1980's. With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job. You needed to know a lot. Things were kind of slipping backwards. You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It's called Macintosh and it is so much better. It's going to beat you and you're going to do it."
And that's what Apple stood for. That was one of the things. The other thing was a little bit further back in time. One of the things that built Apple II's was schools buying Apple II's; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames (Research Center). I didn't see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.
We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can't wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn't afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don't make any money, you loose some but you don't loose too much. You loose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to Kthrough 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn't have that. We decided that we were willing to do that.
It was one of the most incredible things I've ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said "If this law changes
...as he should be
The corporation can neither shine a lighter brighter for helping another person, nor be pissed by not receiving any attention. The corporation is an artificial entity. There are only people who can feel and behave one way or another. The people are the employees, the shareholders, and the consumers. And all are free to be as altruistic as their conscience dictates.
I happen to be a major shareholder of a mid-sized corporation. We do a lot of charity work that doesn't get us any pub or mind share. We do it because we (the owners and executives) are also members of our community and want things to be well here.
The idea that corporations are sick, twisted, self-serving entities is as absurd as the idea that they are caring, giving entities. There are only people. Everything else if fiction.
but to say you dont have an obligation to your stockholders is bunk, its everything they teach in school and in the real world, its all about keeping your stockholders happy. There the ones that tell you what to do if you screw up and they are the ones that replace you if needed, your more then obligated to keep them happy. At least in a public company situtation.
The problem is that statement is way too over-generalized and doesn't really ecompass what the real nature of a corporation charter.
IANAL or a MBA, but I have looked into creating an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) and know about it than I would like to know. Shareholders can often influence a company if they are the owners with voting stock. If the company does not have voting stock then then it is just monetary sway of keeping the investors money with the company.
People have been told over and over again that the purpose of a corporation was to make a profit and appease the shareholders which is totally unfounded when you look at the nature of a corporate charter in legal terms. A legal charter is nothing more than creating an artificial entity that protects its investors from litigation of their personal assets when someone sues the corporation. You sue the corporation and it runs out of money, but you can't go after the shareholders.
That said... A corporation is only obligated to appease share holders if it wants to. I mean the board member and CEOs could in fact declare all corporate elections null and void and have a revolt of sorts, but they would quickly loose the capital of all the investors unless of course the investors went along with the people still in power.
Corporations do need money to operate to pay its employees and needs an investment base in order to grow, but if someone created a corporation and made it so that they had firm control of the leadership process, they could very well not intend to make any money at all if they so choose to do so.
They may not get investments or capital support from others in the process... So it wouldn't be very long lasted.
But it is a fallacy to assume that corporations are forced by law to make money. They only do so because it benefits those running them, work for them, and those who invest in them.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Who would go all the way to Congo? If I wanted a pirated copy of OS X I dont have to leave my desk, plenty of places to download it for free. OS X cd's dont even seem to have rudimentary copy protection like most game cd's do. Be realistic, how many people from developed countries (apple's market) visit undeveloped countries and buy pirated software they could easily get for free at home? Lack of availability of illegal copies is not what makes people buy software.
1. Bundle Free OSX
2. Get people addicted using OSX in poor countries
3. Make governments order OSX
4.
5. Profit
If you're gonna consider Kubuntu, you might as well go with MEPIS. That way you can actually use the entire Debian package tree.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
VIA Antaur. Designed for laptops. Has free open source drivers for every piece of hardware.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I wonder if this means he's decided he wants to be involved in a cheap computing resource for the children. It seems like if he decides he wants to do something, it is going to be done- whether other people think its a good idea or not. He has been pretty successful with only a few failures but an overall impressive track record. Perhaps turning him down means that in a not-distant future, we'll see a resurgence of inexpensive education machines from Apple. I would welcome that much more than some vaporware from the MIT 'Media Lab', even if the project IS funded by RH and Google (among others)
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
Well, maybe middle school aged kids.
For the tots, I'm thinking more along the lines of KidPix (http://www.hotornot.com/r/?eid=OSHMEZE-WBU). Wonderful stuff, and easy enough for a three-year-old to grasp and run with.
For that matter, OpenOffice (or Word, or whatever) is overkill. Something clean like Pages would be much better.
The problem, of course, is cost. Even if OS X was free, most of the interesting, kid-friendly software is not, and wouldn't be. So you'd be running Gimp and OpenOffice on OS X, which would be more painful and just as intimidating as on any other *nix.
Tongue in cheek or not, the point still stands: Studies show that artists, and the artistically inclined, tend to use Macs. Windows and Linux are for unadventurous sorts.
Apple's customers are like no others--a rich blend of the most sociologically elite with those seeking elegant, simple computing... Unlike users of Intel/Windows computers, a significant portion of Apple's users are active , exploratory , avant-garde and early adopters . The activities they enjoy are unique in the way that they more often incorporate rich media such as video and music as well as more active prosumer behavior than many more passive Windows [and Linux] users.
With above-average household income and education levels, the Mac population [is] very attractive [intellectually as well as physically.]
I saw a prototype today. It was running Fedora:i s100USDPC.jpg.html :-)
http://www.agol.dk/gallery/v/NielsPublic/wsis/Tun
(not the green cardboard modex, the plexiglass one
That's fine for now, but surely going to change when they leave the "prototype" phase:
"A small team of Red Hat engineers are customizing a Red Hat distro to the processor and hardware specifications of the machine."
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/3393
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I know,for a fact, that some corporation go to great lengths to disassociate themselves from some charitable causes.
Obviously if you tracked the SEC reportings you could find out that information, but 99.9% of the population do not do that, and therefore it's pretty fucking anonymous.
A corporation is an entity ran by people, and if those people decide to do something for charities sake they do it.
Of course since its anonymous, know one knows, therefore small minded people assume it doesn't happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
who is starving, poisoned, and under constant threat of thuggery or worse? You do not need to make these people rich before they can begin to boot-strap themselves, but one needs to start with providing basic sanitation, safety, food, and water. Survival first is a necessity.
Hell, what the heck are they going to do with a computer in a place that doesn't even have reliable energy sources? Or are you saying we should only engage in this project in places that already have electricity, in which case we are spending money on relatively rich people.
I was just thinking to myself as I read the article, about how to distribute a commercial version...
How about having a base price, of say $200, so every purchase helps fund the project... plus, the option of paying another $100, which would directly pay for one child's laptop in a developing country. Possibly allowing a website where this child, and the donator could exchange e-mails back and forth ( a form of indirect moderated contact, would be better than direct contact, for various reasons I believe ), or something similar.
The commercial version could even have special graphics on the case to indicate the owner made such a donation, like a status symbol of sorts.
Just a quick thought I had anyway..
Read the linked articles; in the last one it says:
"The proposed design of the machines calls for a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and an innovative dual-mode display that can be used in full-color mode, or in a black-and-white sunlight-readable mode."
There are plenty of other articles out there. In May, they were spec'ing it at 256M (not the 128M being claimed in this thread - that was last December), and in July this went up to 512M; now it's 1G. If you can read Kanji, there's several sites that actually have more information on the current specifications that they are looking at using.
This is to be expected if the main storage is flash memory - due to the limited (though larger than in the past) number of write cycles, they are not going to be able to swap to their main storage, so everything will need to fit in memory - hence the need for more memory.
If they dropped X11 and went direct to the video card instead, they could thin things down more; I actually expect that they will in fact do this, since most of the office packages under Linux these days are absurd memory hogs, and with X11 overhead on both ends on top of that, plus a window manager separate from the display server, they are going to be looking at exhausting their memory budget very quickly, even with as much as 1G of RAM.
-- Terry
Corporations could do whatever they want. They could donate all their money away. They could buy tons of trout. They could attempt to maximize profits at all costs. Monetarily successful corporations chose the last option. Trout salesmen probably chose the last 2.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
The idea that corporations are sick, twisted, self-serving entities is as absurd as the idea that they are caring, giving entities. There are only people. Everything else if fiction.
One person's fiction is another person's truth I guess. I disagree that corporations are as good as the people who work in them. There is some sort of herd mentality that goes on in corporatons where good people turn into corpororate monsters. That herd mentality extends from the executive suite to the loading docks. I have seen time and again people do things in a corporate environment that they would never do as indviduals. Lieing, stealing, backstabbing, exposing people to hazardous materials and worse - ostensibly all for the good of the company - are common everyday behaviors in the corporate world, and most of the people wouldn't think of doing the same to their neighbors. Corporations are universally much worse than the individuals in them.
So you think the corporaton you invest in is good and wise because they say so? Think about it - have you ever heard ANY company, from Enron to Hooker Chemical to Wal-Mart say they are anything but great, wonderful, philanthropic pillars of benevolence and honesty?
If the foundation technology (chipsets, etc.) are so old and cheap to produce, then I would suspect the reasons for keeping it closed are also old and cheapened.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
But they *are* doing it as individuals. The corporation certainly can't "lie, steal, backstab, expose people to hazardous materials...." People make those decisions. It may be that people use the mask of a corporation to shield their behaviors. But maybe it's the anonymity of the corporation that reveals who those people really are.
Having worked for several Fortune 1000 corporations, I meet people who would cut off their arm before they work violate their ethics; and I meet people who would sell out their mother for a buck. But the ethics of a corporation are inherently the ethics of the people who make up the corporation. Corporations don't make decisions. People do.
When I mentioned that I was a major shareholder of a corporation, I didn't mean that I invest in a company and they tell me they are good. I mean I actively participate in the functioning of a midsided corporation. And I know first hand that we regularly make decisions that negatively impact the bottom line because our corporate values specify that we exist to benefit the employees, the community, and the shareholders. Obviously, we are not going to allow ourselves to lose money on a regular basis. We created the company many years ago to make money. But we also won't violate our ethics to make $12 instead of $10.
I understand that many corporations don't operate with this type of philosophy. But many do. In both cases, it is the people (primarily the shareholders and the executives) that set that tone and define those ethics and make those decisions.
They could buy tons of trout. They could attempt to maximize profits at all costs. Monetarily successful corporations chose the last option. Trout salesmen probably chose the last 2.
Ah, but you missed the fatal flaw...
If you maximize profits in the extreme, you often canibalize the company by layoffs and short term gains by altering methods of profits and the company slowly goes into a death spiral leaving the long term investors with the short end of the stick when the company just up and folds.
Maximized profts != company success.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Gee, we set up our 4 kids, and 5 of the neighbor's kids with Linux for day to day use. All of the machines available are in constant use. Oops, sorry that I didn't realize that kids are too stupid to adapt.
At least with *nix file permissions, each child has private file ownership, and their siblings can't delete each other's homework for more space for MP3's.
I suppose that we could set the kids up with a virus, worm and spyware vulnerable OS if that is really what you think is best.
Repeat after me:
Market share
Market penetration
Remember your history. Apple had the greater market share in the education market. Remember Microsoft's punishment in the anti-trust lawsuits? They gave Windows based machines to schools as a part of their reparations. They were getting market penetration in an area which they had no foothold as their punishment. Gee, I guess that'll teach 'em, won't it?
Have you heard about the Hooters application process? They hand the girls a bra and say "Fill this out."
If you want to convince Apple to develop their own inexpensive Mac, check out my petition at www.petitiononline.com/m1a2c/petition.html.
This is not a Athlon or Duron running at 400MHz -- this is a GEODE running at 400MHz. It's about the speed of a Pentium/200 -- with a good tailwind. Imagine running OS-X not on a 5 year old computer but a 10+ year old 1st generation PowerPC. Can you truly believe that OS-X will run good on this computer?
...back in 1997. It was called the eMate, it was based off the Newton, and was designed for the education market. And like the Newton, it was unfortunatly canceled when Jobs came back. So I think the project leaders are a little foolish to dismiss Apple out of hand.
Seymore Papert recently held a talk at the University of Maine. The question was asked "Why did you turn down Steve Jobs offer of OSX?" Paupert replied that the quote the news outlets ran with was missing a key detail. Jobs offered OSX for use in China. It was never stated if this offer would extend to the rest of the world. However, the primary reason they declined OSX is they wanted an entirely open source operating system.
Also, Even if they had accepted Jobs offer, China would have declined it.