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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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Isn't that the whole point of it being distributed with free educational software? No propietary software restrictions, copyright infringement for sharing programs, no licenses, no future lock in? It seems to me that this insider can't see past the fact that MS wants to subsidize Windows on the OLPC to lock in a new customer base...
"help! I'm stuck! Someone open the case!"
http://olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=2730.msg21987#msg21987
If I missed anything, correcftions are welcome.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I think plopping a full-blown Gnome or KDE desktop on the OLPC would be a mistake: those desktops work poorly on small screens, and they are incredibly obscure for new users (although no more obscure than Windows and Macintosh).
I think there's a middle ground, though: reuse the Gnome desktop infrastructure but replace the window manager with something simpler that prevents the usual beginner mistakes (losing windows behind each other, moving windows off-screen, etc.).
As for Windows on OLPC, I don't get it. Even if you run Windows+Sugar on the OLPC, you won't be able to install commercial software or commercial drivers with it, Windows books won't apply, and realistically you won't be able to run Microsoft's development tools on the OLPC either. But you will alienate lots of OLPC contributors, and you'll saddle yourself with an OS over which OLPC has no control, and Microsoft secretly probably just wants to kill the whole project anyway.
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!
..for the Register. The review is here.
Within 5 years, every one of these OLPCs will be a node in a Beowulf-cluster spamming network run by a new generation of Jedi 419 scammers. I have seen the future, and it is a nefarious cloud of ugly green plastic that needs to borrow $2,000 to release its family millions from Mugu National Bank.
GREAT JOB GUYS
It's an old military saying, and it's right. By far the most damning bits in his article don't deal with Sugar, Windows or anything else- they deal with the utter and total lack of planning on the part of the deployment folks. (Err, folk) The fact that they had virtually no plan, no infrastructure and no supply chain management indicates to me that they were simply not living in the real world- any Army 2LT could have sat down with them and explained how they were about to fail. How you get to a point where you have a quarter of a million pieces of hardware sitting around with no coherent way to get them to the people who actually need them is beyond me. Why didn't they hire a pile of old brigade S4s? You know, folks who actually have experience getting stuff to people out in the middle of nowhere?
I've been tremendously disappointed by the entire project- the goals were wonderful, the hardware ended up pretty nice, the software has ended up pretty meh, but the overall project seems to be run by pie-in-the-sky idealists, Open Source fanatics and others for whom the real world is a place they only visit from time to time.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
Well, I respectfully submit that the worldview favored by Microsoft actively inhibits learning. As a blindingly mundane example: Make an OS (Windows) which uses filename extensions to divine metadata about certain files (bad, but we'll let that slide for the moment). Next, release a version of said OS which has a default UI setting to hide these filename extensions from the user. This very demonstrably inhibits learning -- even the casual user picks up fairly quickly on things like ".txt" and ".exe" -- and gives people a distorted picture due to the missing information. That, in turn, increases confusion (why are there 4 things called "Setup" in this folder, why do they have different icons and which one do I click?) and paves the way for some of the the crudest exploits (somebadvirus.doc.exe) simply by dumbing down the user. Not only has the prevailing approach by the monopoly software vendor actively inhibited learning, but the net result of that has been several iterations of malware which Just Didn't Need To Happen.
How can you develop a culture of innovation when you promote a mindset which discourages tinkering? Sorry, but in this case half a loaf is worse than no loaf at all. People like Krsti should at least be able to notice this bias in proprietary operating systems and applications. He makes enough reasonable points that it's even more important not to let him off the hook for something like this.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Did you even bother to read the rest of the article? He doesn't even want XP on the OLPC. What he wants is some focus on the application usability in order to further constructivist learning, regardless of the operating system underneath. The damn thing ships with Squeak, the apps are written in python, and they SHOULD manage to run on any platform.
I think most people read about a page in, then rushed back to slashdot to muster their defense of Free Software and Fight The Good Fight, and well, pretty much proved his point: OLPC's mission is being lost by people who care more about meta-issues than either the learning mission (enabled by the software, not really the kernel) or the ongoing viability of the project itself (deployments need support!)
Peru may soon be stuck with 40,000 doorstops. Maybe I'll go take a look at Sugar and see if any of the ideas are worth lifting for a groove-like P2P network.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
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
PS: Besides, you can use a computer to learn about things other than the computer itself, right?
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
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.
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.
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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And if you can't see the difference between frustratingly banging your head against a keyboard to get Linux to run properly and learning something new every day, then you're not really seeing with very clear eyes, I don't think.
:(
Frustrating the end user so that they think that the system is nothing but a frustrating, annoying piece of crap is not a very good way to get people to work with it. Especially not the people who give up quickly because they would rather be trying to figure out how to get potable water instead of how to compile a web browser.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~