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Negroponte vs Intel
Yogi_Stewart_4 writes "More OLPC/Intel love — apparently Intel used 'underhanded' tactics to try to block sales' contracts of the OLPC, trying to reach the customer directly after an agreement had been reached.
"They would go in even after we had signed contracts and try to persuade government officials to scrap their contract and sign a contract with them instead. That's not a partnership."
Mr Negroponte cited an example in Peru where Intel sales staff tried to persuade the country's vice-minister of education, Oscar Becerra Tresierra, to buy the Intel Classmate PC."
IF targeting the 3rd world, the classmate sucks:
a) There are cooling holes on it! Hello dirt and debris.
b) The keyboard is non ruggedized, at least compared to the XO.
c) It uses a conventional montior arrangement rather than the OLPC "behind the monitor" arrangement. This means that it has a complex, wire heavy connector through the hinge rather than just a USB and power connection.
I don't see how the classmate could last 6 months in a third world environment.
I question some of the OLPC's intent, but their hardware design blows away that Intel POS its not even funny.
Test your net with Netalyzr
I wanted to like the OLPC -- no I wanted to *love* the OLPC. I wanted to love it so much that I wanted to tell the world how awesome it was, and how everyone should participate in the give one get one program.
Then mine arrived in the mail.
Initial reactions were off the charts. The packaging was even excellent! The machine is sturdy, well-built, solid, cleverly designed, rugged, and absolutely perfect for it's purpose. I can't say enough about how many of the design decisions were fantastic. The keyboard was perhaps smaller than I had anticipated, but with the intended use case scenarios even that didn't detract from the brilliance of the hardware.
And then I turned it on.
Anyone who says that the interface is revolutionary or different is trying to put a nice spin on it. Yes, some of the organization and terminology is novel, and one could even praise some of the attempts at getting you to re-think how computers work. But the entire thing feels astonishingly like X Windows from the late 1980s. The interfaces are clunky and inconsistent, and worst of all it suffers from a pervasive design philosophy of "because we could" not "because we should." I could easily forgive a lack of graphical polish, but it's much more difficult to forgive the nearly-20-year giant leap backwards in interface design.
I know what the slashdot crowd is thinking... "it's open source! Write a new UI yourself!" but that's not the point. My point is that I wish the OLPC project had spent half the effort on the software that they did on the hardware -- if they had, then maybe we really would have a device that would change the world. Who knows... maybe a version 2 will have a new UI that actually will.
This is disgusting. In this day and age where corporate responsibility is a prominent issue, how can Intel go and try to sabotage a charitable organization? Is the Red Cross or Unicef next cause they may have AMD chips in their computers? Do they think they can capitalize on 3rd-world children? Will the dollar difference between the OLPC and Intel version be negligible to those people? What hot-shot marketing guru thought this gem up, was it Scrooge McDuck?
I would like to see Intel publicly humiliated for this. Personally, this changes my decision to use Intel in my next computer. *sigh*... Why does the devil have to make chips?
The difference is that the OLPC is:
vi +
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove/paranoid.htm with 'only the paranoid survive'. Hey, those bleeding-heart commies have taken business that is rightfully OURS, that means war.
I'm fighting back this year by buying more and more from employee-owned (John Lewis, I'm from the UK) organisations, cooperatives (Telephone Coop, local credit union), mutuals (Royal London) and anything else that doesn't have shareholders and then lastly for-profits with a verifiable social agenda and a record of honourable behaviour (harder and harder to find though).
I'm having a hard time explaining that open-source/Windows is an ethical choice too, many people here seem to only understand that in the context of food-miles and sweatshops, not in the context of technology.
As I work for non-profits, they often say 'we get really good discounts from Microsoft', so we don't want any, without considering the deeper implications. I now send them to this: http://www.freegeekvancouver.org/en/node/125 comprehensive and well-stated.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Because we are sure they did use the same tactic already on a market where the Classmate is sold with Linux:
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/
Can't we accept that maybe the wintel evil couple still exist?
"Classmate specs are better than XO. There is a bit of goods in XO hardware, but not all that much"
Depends on your definition of 'better'. I don't think the OLPC hardware should be underestimated. The Classmate may have a faster processor and more storage, but it also has a shorter battery life, no 'e-book' mode, no mesh network, isn't nearly as rugged or user serviceable, and costs more. Given that a 366MHz processor and 128MB RAM is a perfectly respectable combo as long as the software is tuned for it, flexibility and longevity ought to be a more significant factor than raw [on-paper] grunt.
There's a nice recent take-apart here:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=218
Obviously a great deal of thought and design has gone into these beasties. If only my own (much-battered) machines were built like that...
All that being said, the law is expensive to enforce, and in international bargains it may be different and difficult to find justice because of issues with jurisdiction, enforcement, substantive applicable law, and expense, meaning that breaching a contract amounts to what may be seen as, and is in effect, a form of theft.
While the Classmate is more powerful than OLPC, it also uses 10 times the power. Intel had to donate generators to their pilot projects before they could use the classmate. OLPC can run on hand cranks. I would say the Classmate is a better fit for industrialized countries with easy access to clean power, but not for the places OLPC is trying to reach. I believe that Classmate also doesn't have mesh, so that connectivity from the school would only reach as far as a WAP.
I agree. The support wiki is full of holes but it seems to be getting filled out. The great advantage I see in the buy-one-give-one program was to get it in the hands of people in the FOSS community that can find such weaknesses and fix them. We can support OLPC by developing applications and providing input to the project.
In the rush to get everything done on time I'm betting no one coordinated their UI ideas with everyone else, and now each activity is built from the ground up without a unifying lead.
That's why god invented "version x.2"
You can't take the sky from me...
Intel is no different than Microsoft, does anyone remember Zylog? Intel will do to chip makers what Microsoft will do to software makers.
I can't say AMD is more ethical, but it is at least a counterpoint to the Intel near monopoly of P.C. CPUs.
Something Pez forgot to mention is that you can emulate an XO relatively painlessly. There is even a premade image file that is available that you can drop into say QEMU and see what it's all about.
A few caveats: Use something with virtualization which unfortunately means x86. Trying to run this emulated on a high end PowerPC system was saddening. Yes it is only a 433MHz target, but 433MHz is pretty high when you think about it. The other thing to keep in mind is that the premade image wants to change the display to about 1024x768 instead of the XO native 1200x900. The Sugar manager seems to be fine with it but most activities (XO apps) will not display properly.