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A View From Inside the OLPC Project
icknay writes "Here's an interesting rant on the OLPC from someone who worked there, including: 'The core mistake of the present Sugar approach is that it couples phenomenally powerful ideas about learning — that it should be shared, collaborative, peer to peer, and open — with the notion that these ideas must come presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm. We reject this coupling as untenable. Choosing to reinvent the desktop UI paradigm means we are spending our extremely over-constrained resources fighting graphical interfaces, not developing better tools for learning.' I have an OLPC, and the OS itself seems quite unfinished. I buy the argument that it would be better to focus on Sugar as educational software, and let it run on Linux, Windows, whatever."
That last comment about Linux/Windows/Whatever doesn't match up with the discussion about UI paradigm. UI paradigm means the way the user interface acts, not what OS runs it.
That said, the UI paradigm of Sugar falls into the Kiosk world, along with MythTV. I would have liked to see that run as an application, minimizeable and windowable, but under XFCE or IceWM for a Gnome-like UI and integration with a standard platform.
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I've been disappointed and underwhelmed by Sugar in the form that it was delivered on the G1G1 units.
Now, I'm not a kid, and I've been brain-warped by decades of exposure to the Mac, but I really feel a lot of cognitive dissonance between Sugar's stated design goals and what's actually been delivered.
For example, one of Sugar's key design principles is "recoverability," and it says "However, the primary and essential means of recoverability remains the ability to undo one's actions."
Nevertheless, the keyboard has no marked "undo" key, and very, very few of the Sugar's activities appear to support any kind of "undo" facility.
Similarly, I've read the theory of how the Journal is supposed to work, and I may be wrong--I don't have any kids to try it on--but as nearly as I can tell, the only way you can find past Journal entries is by a very left-brained search capability that requires you to have labeled each Journal entry as you make it.
There's a long essay on how the Journal is supposed to work... revolutionary, non-hierarchical, etc. But I've found "tagging" to be a royal, royal pain. It's all very well to say that "Tagging will become a fundamental process for all types of data and activities on the laptops. Fortunately, children have a natural inclination to describe their world and the things they see and do." As I say, I haven't watched kids use the thing and maybe they "get" it, but I find it extremely hard to envision a ten-year old typing in tags every time he creates a journal entry.
While I'm intrigued by the idea of a GUI that is new from the ground up and informed by a fresh way of looking at things... to tell the truth my main motivation for participating in G1G1 was to experience Sugar... I'm quite disappointed by what's actually been achieved.
Right now, Sugar is a program launcher, no better than the Apple Dock or the Windows Tray... and to this aging brain, at least, the Journal simply doesn't work very well. Much less well than the Mac Finder as it existed in 1984, for example.
However, the problem is that I think open source is a key educational feature for OLPC. The concept of a "view source" button thrilled me. I grew up at a time when you could take the back off a TV set and see the tubes inside, and smash a tube in a vise and see the plate and filament and so forth inside. Maybe I couldn't build a TV or modify a vacuum tube, but just the conceptual readiness of looking inside was terribly important.
I was disappointed in the absence of a working "View Source" button in the G1G1 build. I think it's very important that all the code in the XO be open for inspection, and that definitely includes the GUI. So however bad Sugar is, I think it would be a disaster to replace it with a proprietary GUI.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I have to agree. In my mind something like OS X lite, the iPhone interface, would be ideal for this concept of learning. Rapid, limited OS decisions coupled powerful applications.
Negroponte's dismissal of Steve's offer, only to arrive at Bill's door is rather odd. But, as the eeepc has shown, we will arrive there one day soon with or without the OLPC.
What I can't get over is the fact that the OLPC project has been plagued by so many problems. First the price increases, then the Windows fiasco (depending on which side you're on), things that don't work... While I know it's not an easy task to design, implement, and distribute a $100 laptop to kids in developing countries, perhaps a group less prone to political infighting (HAHA!) should "fork" it and start their own project.
..for the Register. The review is here.
There was and is such a focus on making this a purist social program that will change the way people do things, that it is being rejected...
When I think about the OLPC project, I think of the great screen, great battery/energy management - and I want both, with the already developing
software, Sugar or not.
Where is the OLPC Project now?
Is the OLPC Project still shipping computers?
Is the Uganda keyboard lawsuit killing the project?
Who cares if Microsoft runs on the OLPC hardware?
I'm seeing this same thing on every recent article about OLPC. Can someone help me understand?
1. OLPC repeats and repeats they are committed to Sugar.
2. OLPC then says they are unhappy with Sugar and are replacing Linux with Windows... because they are unhappy with Sugar.
3. OLPC says they are going to port Sugar to Windows.
So let me see if I understand where they are coming from. The think Sugar is a mistake so they are going to solve the problem by porting it to Windows and switching the underlying OS from Linux to Windows.
WTF! Am I the only person who gets braincramps trying to parse the doublespeak coming from OLPC?
Democrat delenda est
> There's a lot of spin and intentional ignorance here and it spills out best when he says this:
Spin? Spin is what organizations do to put bad news back "on message". This is one guy, ranting. One guy who was really involved, who went out to do the deployments to places that make the term "backwater" seem a goddam metropolis, and one guy who is really bitter about what he saw. If you read about, oh, one or two paragraphs more, it's quite obvious he doesn't think XP is going to save what he considers a fundamentally doomed project.
Imagine your IT department deployed 40,000 laptops (that's about as many people as work for Microsoft) and didn't have one single person on the payroll to actually deploy the things into the field. Now imagine that in Peru.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Seriously, WTF?
The most fun software projects I've done have involved reverse engineering. Telling people that they need to have source code stops them learning about debugging, or IDA or Ethereal. They'll just turn into Web 2.0 script monkeys who don't know about things like this.
Which means if they ever get a real job and need to work with third party binary components, they'll be fucking useless when those components don't work 100%.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You could also argue for just using the cheapest Windows or Ubuntu notebooks instead of less powerful custom hardware that currently doesn't cost much less. Vegetable oil-powered generators and solar panels may not be out of reach of villages targeted by OLPC. Let different ideas in hardware and software compete and the best ones win in each target market.
When Apple approached OLPC about basing its mini laptop on a light version of Mac OS X, it was rebuffed because the project wanted everything to be fully open source and unfettered with proprietary software. Now it's ready to put Windows on the XO?
With Mac OS X, the XO would have a native environment for running free software including Sugar, along with or in addition to running commercial Mac software. Unlike clone PCs, there's no vast range of hardware to support. Development tools are simpler and Apple currently has no business plan for selling its dev tools. That seems to make far more sense than slapping on a OS designed primarily to run on full sized, corporate desktops with expensive Office software licensing.
It's too bad OLPC set such lofty ideals about open development, setting itself up to drop them immediately and become yet another extension of a monopoly that doesn't have the technical merits to run on low cost mobile devices.
iPod Game Console, Tablet at WWDC? Highly Unlikely
After reading the article, it becomes apparent that they did NOT have proper business management of the OLPC project, and you don't get managers of large projects from teaching staff and professors.
I found it a depressing read. With a key person who focused on the half dozen key concepts and stuck to them, maybe OLPC could have been better with fewer hiccups. It would likely have taken a Steve Jobs to make the decisions & push needed buttons.
I see the value in business picking the best commercial hardware choice.
I do NOT see the value in forcing proprietary solutions on the third world, but also do not see the value of having software OS & Applications that can get corrupted in a device to be thrown out in the middle of nowhere. In other words, I think it would take running the OS & core applications in flash memory.
The UI is a core issue. Why should it be materially different from what a billion computers already run? If the students are going to be able to go onward from OLPC, then their "language" must be "compatible" with the other "computers" they will see later.
Too many questions. Not enough answers. Then politics hits along with MS Money.
"The cost of developing it aside, what is the problem with having the ideas "presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm," when you're giving the machines to communities in which the per capita rate of computer ownership is practically nil?"
He wasn't talking about the problem of getting people to accept the interface.
I believe his point was that with the OLPC's limited resources they pretty much managed to do nothing BUT get the "entirely new graphical paradigm" MOSTLY working. Not much of educational value was produced, unless you really do believe that this hardware, OS and UI have mythic powers akin to the monolith in 2001...
It would be kind of like starting a transportation project and as a first priority deciding that you didn't want to use any wheels because they seem old fashioned. Sure you might come up with a fantastic mag-lev train for a handful of people, but was that the mission or was enabling the greatest number of people to get from point a to point b?
If there is indeed value in putting computing devices in the hands of children, then time becomes a paramount factor. The time it takes to truly innovate a "new paradigm", learn to use it effectively, and then produce the software that rides on top of it and makes it worth having done in the first place... is longer than it takes a child to grow up... That means deferring the supposed value of the project to a later generation.
The project of getting devices to children who can gain value from them should be a separate project that is NOT dependent upon the "new graphical paradigm" project. By all means pursue the second project, but don't block the first project while you do it.
Of course this whole argument begs the question of how much real value the devices would actually bring to the children's education. So far I have heard ZERO arguments for the project based on verifiable research. I've also heard ZERO arguments against the project based on verifiable research.
I see the whole "Windows on the XO" situation as a deal with the devil, and it's not an easy deal to make. From what I've been able to tell from reports since I started following OLPC shortly before G1G1, Negroponte had trouble getting the buy-in from education ministers in various countries based on the fact that the XO runs Fedora/Sugar. If you don't get large-scale buy-in from countries to buy your product, the per-unit cost goes up and threatens to sink the whole project because the magical $100 ($188 for G1G1) laptop now costs $450 to produce.
OLPC's official statement about the XP-on-XO rumours for a time was that OLPC has not devoted any resources to Microsoft for the effort to get XP onto the XO, and it was a pet project by some people at Microsoft, but, at the same time, XP could be/have been a compromise to get more countries to buy the OLPC. So... was it really a "we'll let them mess with the beta units JUST BECAUSE WE'RE NICE" thing? Or did one part of OLPC push for XP compatibility for wider adoption of the XO-1? OLPC's security guy (I can't remember his name nor find the cited source at the moment, sorry) is on record as saying that he will refuse to sign off on XP on the laptop unless Microsoft uses the XO's onboard Bitfrost security structure and abides by it. (For people unfamiliar with the XO's security design, among other elements, the machine is designed to be secure without saddling the child-user with a mandatory password--by default, the machine boots straight to the GUI without any user interaction beyond power-on.)
I own an XO and love it, but I'm cautiously looking into getting xfce on instead of Sugar because I'm learned enough to handle direct access to the file system without a CLI to prevent me from deleting files unless I know what I'm doing. Sugar is, also, in its current state, fairly cumbersome and occasionally cranky, but it's basically still a beta.
The freedom he's talking about isn't the "freedom to do whatever you want" but the freedom to explore. In the autocratic family structure you describe, the parents can be strict mormons who don't allow their kids to have fun and require them to marry off at 15, or they can be easy-going sure-have-a-couple-sips-of-beer-you're-18-they-can-draft-you types. The point of the learning argument about proprietary software is that you can only learn so much about the proprietary inner functions.
your buisness argument is pretty good though, however, the OS functioning differently didn't affect those of us who grew up in the 80's when schools were hooked on apple, and now use OSX, Linux, and Windows on the same machine. (maybe those of us are a rare breed... i don't know)
quoting TFA:
Stallman similarly called a Windows port of Sugar "not a good thing to do". Here's the thing: such a port is only a waste of time if free software is not the means here, but an end Well I would agree if development tools were equally available amongst the two. Development tools for windows are for the most part flawed unless you buy a license. Since part of the point of this experiment, I would think, is to see how the developing world can help us innovate from their own background experiences, I think FOSS makes sense as a basis for the project. Further, it helps prevent hardware obsolescence over the long term, and since this is a philanthropic experiment, I should think that would be a goal.This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
"and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh)."
That fallacy keeps getting repeated.
Soon after my son's 1st birthday, I set up an Ubuntu system for him. I loaded gCompris, and spent about 5 minutes showing him how the mouse works. A few days later, I spent maybe 5 minutes showing him how to load gCompris from the menu. Within a few days of that, he had no problem loading his computer and loading his software. I soon found that he was also loading other programs he liked to use. Klotski seemed to be a favorite of his. It took all of 10 minutes of 'training' to teach a 1 year old child how to navigate the Gnome desktop with no problems. He couldn't even read, and he had no problem loading the programs he wanted to use. There is no way that Gnome can be called a difficult to understand UI.
This is also why to the chagrin of many geeks, the desktop metaphor just won't go away. It works, and it works well. It is incredibly easy to understand both for advanced users and novices alike. I can't count the number of articles and comments I've read where someone is saying that the 'desktop' needs to be replaced because it is 25 years old. Really, it doesn't. There have been many refinements to it, and I am sure that more will come, but the premise is rock solid.
Being a long-time linux hacker, I was quite fired up about G1G1... so much so that after getting the first OLPC, I went ahead and got a second one. I struggled quite a bit to make sense of Sugar, but amazingly enough my 8-year-old son figured it out quite quickly and only laments the lack of flash support (which would keep him glued to miniclip all day, I'm sure). Given that it seems to make sense to 8-year-olds, Sugar might well be the right way to go for kids in the third world.
When the Freeplay Foundation designed the Lifeline Radio they chose not to re-invent the wheel.
Instead focusing on the design of a rugged multiband portable - in appearance and operation a radio like any other. Building on the infrastructure and experience of eighty years of educational broadcasting.
It was and is a project that would rank zero for ideological or political correctness. But the radios are out there and the program is on track and on budget.
But here's the thing: learning new stuff is the whole point of an educational laptop like OLPC. If you give kids a system that works out of the box, then you're spoon feeding them. Just give them a half finished system and tell them they can finish it themselves. It's frustrating and painful, and they'll learn something.
Obviously, he's gotten too old to be willing to learn something new every day, which is why he thinks "dicking around" with a PC is a waste of time. And we should take his views on how to help kids learn seriously? Gimme a break.
I stopped reading TFA after that paragraph, because if he can't see the fundamental contradiction between what works for an old guy who's tired of learning, and a kid who's soaking up everything around him, then his other views on Sugar and whatnot are probably not worth reading either.
While it's sad that Ivan believes OLPC has lost sight of it's goals, you might want to keep an eye on what's happening with OLPC Australia.
The Rudd government is looking at providing sponsored laptops for children. OLPC has set up an Australian office as a consequence. Jeff Waugh has been appointed board director, and seems to understand the issues well.
"The easy answer to that question is that at the moment Windows doesn't exist on the machine," says Waugh. "It is completely irrelevant to the value of what the whole project is all about. OLPC Australia has been set up without that ever being on the agenda. The core principal that's repeated often about the project is that it's an education project not a laptop project. Part of delivering on that idea is the open source platform. The community built around the not only the technology but also the content and the use of the device. There is a community angle that permeates everything on what the device, how it works for kids and that sort of stuff."I have no idea as to why Windows is regarded as relevant to this and some of the stuff in the press about running Sugar on Windows and things like that - well Windows is just an operating system that doesn't deliver on the vision of OLPC."
I have no doubt that Microsoft will attempt to subvert this project, as it does everything else, but so far, the Rudd government has delivered on most of their promises."I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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I have both the Eee and the OLPC; The OLPC is the better-engineered laptop by a mile. Different leagues.
toresbe
Sugar doesn't need to be cross-platform! It already runs on GNU/Linux -- and any PC running Windows can be persuaded to run GNU/Linux, a lot more easily and cheaply than the other way around. If developers are really so averse to creating a small (because OLPC itself has limited RAM and storage anyway) partition from which to run GNU/Linux, they can always do their development work from a liveCD.
All this smacks of an attempt to subvert a noble effort to teach people to fish into a way of selling even more expensive, proprietary tackle and bait.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I have, actually. Python makes this very easy, you don't need to worry about the underlying OS as long as you program in a platform-agnostic way, ie use os.path.join(path, file) rather than path + '\\' + file, and only use relative sizes and positioning for GUI elements.
You're right about testing though, even if there are no (or very few) code changes, you do need to test in every supported platform which takes time.
Well, learning to do things that require you to think and act indepedently requires freedom.
Perhaps your family was the most autocratic system in the world, but my experience of family life was quite different.
My siblings and I always thought of our parents as strict, but years later my mother contradicted us and claimed she was extremely lenient. We were both right. We grew up (figuratively of course) in an enclosure with iron walls, but the enclosure kept expanding. While the wall was always close enough that it loomed in our minds, we seldom challenged it because there was always new territory to explore within the walls. Then, one day, after the area within the walls became sufficient for a lifetime's exploration, and we'd shown ourselves responsible and competent, the walls were gone. We were allowed -- no, required -- to think and decide for ourselves what was responsible and what was not. And that was parenting at its toughest and most hard-nosed. Play with matches if you want, but do it in your own house and carry your own insurance.
The reason parents erect walls is to protect their children; the reason they expand those walls is to raise competent children. What is the reason to erect walls around students in technology education? Exactly who are we protecting? Do the training wheels ever come off?
The disadvantage of authoritarian parenting is that it keeps children infants when it comes to dealing with things they don't have rules for or experience with. The advantage is that you can ensure a predictable response in a certain situation, so long as circumstances around that situation haven't changed very much. The advantages and disadvantages of authoritarian education are the same. Authoritarian education prepares its recipients to be subordinates.
A technology education built around what is currently in common use in the "business world" prepares students in developing countries to take subordinate roles in that world. It's great if you want a nation of workers that staffs call centers, and does the other menial work of the information age. It's great if you want a cadre of bureaucrats who will execute the programs devised for them by wealthy "development" agencies faithfully. In short, arbitrary technological dependency is just the thing if you are aiming for economic and political subservience. It's not so great if you want a people capable of solving their own problems creatively, or carving out their own niche in the world economy.
And it's not really that clear that the developed world is that well adapted for the conditions of the mid twenty-first century. Our economies are predicated on cheap and abundant energy and resources, and cheap disposal of wastes. We are going to be hard pressed ourselves to adapt and improve our material well being. The developing world, with its lower resource footprint, could well experience major gains in quality of life while we struggle to maintain own our own. But they won't be by adopting first world lifestyles; they don't have the accumulated capital to bootstrap a resource intensive lifestyle as wealthier societies bid up prices.
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At that time, you could browse the ROM and OS of an Apple II or C64 (the Apples even provided a nice disassembler - and the original II had an assembler and the Sweet-16 virtual processor) and, with some work, fully understand it. You could study it and, with the proper tools (an EPROM programmer, some soldering), modify it. You could package and sell your modifications.
You can't do that with any modern computer. You can't learn from watching a multi-layer motherboard where you can't find out what connects to what in what fashion without a multi-thousand-dollar lab and a high-res X-ray machine. You can't just look up what a modern thousand-leg GPU does the way you could with a 74LS74. There are no books on that. You can't cut a trace and rewire something, not anymore.
Different times require different tools. Open source is probably the only way to see what happens in a computer these days. That's why the OLPC should be open from top to bottom.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Amen. Up until now, I have been a huge supporter of this project. This article pretty much made me write it off as dead. I work in a semi-rural school district in North Carolina with about 14,000 kids. Many of the kids and a fair number of the teachers are comfortable with computers. We have a decent WAN and a fairly stable Internet connection. Even given this, there is no way in hell I would try to implement a 1:1 laptop program yet. Deployment would be a nightmare. I can only imagine deployment in the wilds of Peru. The problem is that you can't just throw laptops at the populace and wait for the Angelic choirs to start singing. You need policies, ways to charge the things, training for teachers on how to do wikis, blogs, etc. It takes time, effort, and a willingness to be open to new, paradigm-shifting ideas about education. This is hard enough in tech-savy America. I had always assumed that a big part of the OLPC project would be OLPC people going out in the community to help students and teachers integrate the machines into education. I was shocked to hear that there is pretty much NO plan for integration and deployment. You see, computers in education are really not about the software. Computers are a tool. It's all about how you use the tool. Get ready, this thing will crash hard and Bill Gates won't need to do anything to make it happen.
No processor manufacturer will be able to undermine anything, because the patents covering the first-generation ARM processor are expiring soon -- and while early ARM chips were considered excessively RAM-hungry (every instruction occupies a 32-bit word) modern 80x86 devices are also RAM-hungry -- especially when running Windows -- so RAM prices have fallen to the point where it's economically viable to use old-skool ARM with a fully-populated memory map (you'd probably have to use bank switching; the addressing schema is only 24 bits wide, giving 16M * 32 bit words. ARM, like its spiritual predecessor the 6502, doesn't differentiate between memory and I/O buses). And did I mention that it manages all this with about 24 000 transistors?
.....
It would hardly be beyond the bounds of feasibility to set up a clean, modern factory in the third world somewhere to make patent-free ARM clones for use in mark II OLPC machines. Since all the software is Open Source, it doesn't matter what the underlying processor architecture is just so long as there's a port of GCC available for it.
Actually, maybe that is exactly what all the major players are scared of
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Windows is crack" aside, My point is that none of this matters. NN has an agenda of getting as many laptops to kids as possible. He will do that in any way he can, and his current idea seems to be to ditch Linux AND Sugar AND any educational principles. Just ship as many laptops as possible. So running Sugar on top of Linux, or a minimal Sugar with Linux just don't matter unless you completely go around NN and OLPC.
Which, I think, is the right thing to do.
-- John.