Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Open videocard? no
open chipset? no
open OS? of course! We have principles.
If Steve offers OS X to you for free, you take it.
Yes!
Red Hat sucks
No!
> I thought it was offered free? So where's the problem?
Your understanding of the word `free` in this context.
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?
Help Fight SPAM today!
"We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
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.
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?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Thank you for your contribution to the campaign. Our department will send you your free t-shirt and mug as promised. Please allow 2-5 days for delivery.
In order for us to more easily identify you in future, would you kindly append your Apple Fan Club membership # to your sig? This will allow for more timely notification of prizes and special offers.
Thank you again.
Sincererly,
Ms A. Shill
Apple Marketing Ventures
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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.
Actually, OSX runs VERY well on an old 333MHz iMac with 64 megs of ram. I won't take the latest version, mind you, but it works well. No lag in the dock or anything.
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.
*sigh* does *noone* read the article? I've already written this several times in several different threads. This isn't free publicity for Red Hat - they're helping funding the project! They've donated a couple of million dollars to this project: "Five companies -- Google Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Red Hat Inc., News Corp. and Brightstar Corp. -- have each provided $2 million to fund a nonprofit organization called One Laptop Per Child that was set up to oversee the project."
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.
And that's what it's really all about in the end. If they adopted OSX, there would be massive vendor lock-in all over the world. Not to mention, they would be dependent on Apple for support due to Closed-source api's. With a free (libre) solution there would be none of this trouble. Not to mention localization possibilities.... This is essentially an empty offer, since they'd have to be nuts to accept it.
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
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.
As I said in another post though this is a low powered low resource computer (a third of the power of the Mac Mini) designed to be powered by a hand generator, and OS-X isn't exactly renouned for being great for extremely low powered computers.
Actually OSX works great on computers with a third of the power of a Mac Mini. Tiger is more than fine on my wife's 500Mhz iBook with just 300 megs of RAM. And I saw a guy in the Apple Store today with a Wall Street edition Powerbook (read: under 300 MHz) and the tech was stunned to see how responsive and usable Tiger is on it.
So, aside from making assumptions and being misinformed, what was your point again?
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
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.
Later in TFA they talk about MS's involvement. They're "very friendly" to the project. I expect when and if this gets close to production, MS will announce virtually free versions of Windows for these laptops, and push them out through schools, and students never seeing the Linux screen after the first day when the teacher hans out the Windows CDs. MS has shown they'd rather pay people to run Windows than see Linux get a foothold.
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.
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
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?
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
Apparently Apple is now doing OS X on Intel. I'm surprised there hasn't been anything about this on Slashdot recently.
They rejected OSX in favor of a better solution.
You should not dismiss the concept of Open Source software as a "silly doctrinaire reason". The economic impact of adopting proprietary software could be enormous and long-lasting. It's critical that this technology be sustainable in the long term without dependence on a single foreign entity.
Apple could easily be gone in ten years, but there will be a continuity of Open Source software until the next ice age.
life in low-res
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.
The universal menubar provides a context menu that never moves.
Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.
Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
In what ways can you tinker with Linux that you cannot tinker with OS X? In fact, OS X gives you far more to tinker with because not only do you have the keys to the kernel and the BSD layer and X11, but also to everything that Apple provides. That answer makes no sense whatsoever."
Well I can't tinker with:
quartz, iwork, iphoto, itunes, airport extreme, spotlight, quicktime, isync, ical,imovie, apple's mail, safari (but you can tinker with safari's rendering engine), ichatAV, garage band, idvd, all the pro applications, and much much more.
Of course by tinker I mean:
-look at the source code
-make modifications to the source code
-distribute the code along with my changes without the possibility of getting sued.
Apple will not allow any of this.
check out the best blog ever:
http://oehlberg.com
I disagree. Principles is one thing, succeeding is another. We forget that using a computer is a difficult and even scary experience for the vast majority of folks, particularly those with very little education. Packing laptops with what is still widely considered the most user-friendly operating system on the market today would certainly have been a wise move, IMHO.
I've been a Linux user for roughly 7-8 yrs, not an old-timer by any means, but I've hit most of the distros, many when they were still in their infancy (RedHat, Mandr[ake/iva], etc.). I've installed Ubuntu for my sister-in-law and many developers at my company use it. But personally (when I'm not posting from my XP SP2 ThinkPad), I'm on a Mac. I just don't have to spend as much time "messing" with things. And that's the fact of the matter.
Flame away.
.....noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with....
That tells me that this project is doomed right now. The supposed recipients of these computers don't want something to tinker with, but a computer they can actually USE to COMMUNICATE and learn stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with computers as such. This is like giving a telephone to someone, but requiring that they first learn the laws of electricity before they can use it to call their friends. To use a gas driven water pump for irrigating a field, it is not neccessary to learn the details of how an internal combustion engine works. To use a computer tool, it should not be required to be able to "tinker" with it. With OSX a knowledgeable person CAN tinker with it, but 99% of those computers will NOT be tinkered with by their users. Because Linux is designed by tinkerers for tinkerers, it will never be a general use computer by the unwashed, non-technical masses.
It seems that people around here immediately ascribe the worst motives to any large company that wants to help even a tiny bit in making this a better world.
All theory is gray
In which case they have open source equivalents on OS X and you can tinker with those.
The point is that OS X is a unix-based system, shipped with an X implementation AND a load of (closed source) other stuff. All you're doing by not using OS X is removing the 'other stuff'. Look at darwin-ports for the equivalent to apt-get...
The Mac UI is streets ahead of linux and windows in terms of useability (IMHO, but hell, I'm writing this!), it's been designed with thought for how to make things simple, rather than just available. I think it's a shame that they won't get access to it...
My personal opinion is that RH put $2M into the project, and don't want someone else's OS running the show, put real or implied pressure on the project heads, and OS X is turned down... The losers are the end-users, in this case...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm not sure who's trolling here. I do know you're wrong on a fair few points...
Your point being ... what, exactly ? You *are* aware that the kernel in OS X is open-source, aren't you ? That all the source code is there, available for anyone to hack on ?
Ah, I see, you're *not* aware that it's an open source kernel (google for 'Darwin OS X') at the heart of the mac ? I guess that makes this point moot too...
I can't see how that's an argument in favour/against either. With either solution they can reformat the drive and install whatever they want ...
*cough*, *choke*, *gurgling death rattle*. You *have* to be kidding. I've used WxWindows for cross-platform apps, and Cocoa blows it away! I've been coding for the last 25 years, and the Mac (and I only started using them a year ago!) is by far the best platform I've ever coded on.
You are also aware the standard compiler is gcc on the mac, right ? I only ask because you didn't seem to know that Darwin was OSS...
Er, I don't think there's anything to compare to the iLife suite on Linux. You're aware that people really make entire movies using Macs, right ? Really. The creative tools are second-to-none. And of course, it runs all the stuff that Linux runs because that's all OSS...
Well, that's a matter of opinion. I think the Mac way works, but I'd not go so far as to label it the 'right' way. I think it's *a* right way.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
So is this laptop going to include some sort of lockout chip whereby it will refuse to run any code that doesn't include source? I have to admit I haven't used red hat in a couple of years, but don't they still include, for example, closed source device drivers and a closed source JDK?
Assuming the offer of OSX was going to include a free copy of xcode (which seems reasonable), I don't see where the major difference is. Was the well-documented but closed source nature of Aqua really the deal-breaker? And more importantly, is it really fair to assume that all of the impoverished masses of the world are willing to trade Aqua for an inferior performing, but open source alternative?
Why not offer both, and let the end users decide which they'd rather have? Unless, of course, this isn't really about freedom.
This fallacy that you cite is at the heart of the whole problem. You know, my daughter is nine, and she's grown up in an all-Linux household. She knows her way around several distos (we have multiple computers) and routinely runs live Linux CDs as well. She uses the whole machine (albeit with a heavy focus on games and educational software), right down to toying with the Python command line occasionally. Mind you, she's still able to use the Windows computers at school, which she sees as almost-acceptable substitutes (she's been heard to complain to the teachers that the computers at school crash, however, stating "They're not supposed to do that.", and expresses disdain for the lack of games that come with a Windows system. OK, I'm proud.). Mind you again, she didn't come to this expertise through having Linux drilled into her head. She just picked it up the way kids pick up anything else, by watching mom and dad. We had Windows on dual-boot on one machine for a long time (it came with one machine which somebody threw away and I brought home and fixed), but she picked Linux over it. I finally deleted Windows when nobody in the household had started it for a year.
What's our secret? Simply that "It's too hard." are words, more than the seven words you can't say on television, that never pass the lips of her mother and I. It turns out that people have a damn-near-infinite capacity to learn if you simply give them the tools to use, the manuals to read, and don't make a federal case about how hard it is!!!!
But thank you so much for doing your part to make this world a dumber place. Thank you for spreading the proprietary party-line that we are too stupid to understand computers, and hence are better off being enslaved by those who know the secret. Thank you for discouraging tomorrow's Einstein before he ever got started. Keep on spreading that FUD!!!
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