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Comparison of Windows XP and Linux/Sugar On the OLPC XO
griffjon writes "OLPCNews has a comparison of Windows XP to the Sugar/Linux OS on the One Laptop Per Child XO-1, based on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential video, touching on video recording, power usage, boot times, and mesh networking. An interesting, if saddening, read."
I thought MS was determined to kill XP, so what point are they trying to make showing how well it can run on the XO? I find this a bit confusing, like MS is talking out both sides of their mouth or something. Are they really going to stop selling XP as they keep claiming, or are they going to build a "new" windows netbook edtion based on XP, or are they just going to keep offering XP alongside Vista? Seems to me either the second or third options would be the most realistic, but they keep saying the opposite. What gives, MS? TFA also links to a blog containing a claim of an XP RTM for the Intel Classmate
Puzzling.
Caveat Utilitor
MS has no plans to Kill XP. Its the best OS they have going. Now that it is a stable version, and no longer "for sale" on new pc's, they can sell it for $3, and put it on low end laptops in order to reach a new set of customers, and keep them in the MS loop forever.
OK, so I'm a Linux fanboy. I don't find tfa the least bit sad.
Comparing Sugar to Windows XP is kind of like comparing a pushbike to a 747 engine...
They're designed to do different things. Sugar is designed to be incredibly simple needing little training (or reading skill). It allows people to use a computer without having to learn how to use a computer.
Windows XP is a versatile monster trying to offer all things to all people. It is hugely complex and requires the average person a great deal of time to pickup and use.
I can understand why Microsoft might wish to run XP on the X0 but what I struggle to understand is why anyone is comparing them to one another.
If Microsoft develops some kind of child friendly interface that children can use then we can start talking about it. But until that happens you just aren't comparing the same thing at all.
I suggest you read and understand the philosophy behind OLPC, the XO laptop, and Sugar, before posting such blatantly ignorant posts as this one.
Despite all the shortfalls mentioned, M$ marketing will tell you that XP is better than that toy OS but XP is all you can run on toy hardware and be able to do "real work". If you want to do real work right, they will tell you to buy Intel's latest and cripple it with Vista. I know, that has nothing to do with reality but that's what they will tell you.
When it comes to education, they will point to piles and piles of really awful "educational" software available for XP that will soon be ported to Vista. Or they will do what they did here and act like XP + Office and a thumb drive for "sharing" is all you need. Who knows, as the article pointed out, none of it will work once you put in AV and viruses eat it anyway. The sad fact is that XO and Sugar met a real need in a way that M$ can't, but M$ is going to bribe and lie until XO is destroyed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Besides slow, which I can't comment on, everything else you mentioned is a feature. I don't think they're all that bad either.
If sugar was a "real" program (whatever that means) as opposed to a script it wouldn't be user modifiable (at least at runtime).
Honestly when is the last time you saw a novice user create a directory? My mom and my sister certainly don't. On that same note it's not like you couldn't use a naming scheme that would effectively manage your files like directories. All you have to do is prefix related files with some kind of identifier. For all intend and purpose that's what a directory name really is, a prefix. It doesn't matter if it's not supported at the file system level.
If those so-called "spam" files contain the amount of time you spent with a program and other useful things like your interactions with the program then I think they aren't useless. Tracking your time is an important skill that many people haven't learned. Doing it for the user is very useful. The Wii tracks your time it's pretty interesting and useful too.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Firstly let me just say I purchased my olpc to use while I travel to third world countries and off the grid (as mot of them are), I like the olpc for its battery life its ability to be recharged without an outlet, and most of all its ruggedness. Now while I understand that xp is a great operating system and modern. I must say that I would be thrilled to use windows 98' on my olpc. . For a few reasons... 1)Suger is very boring, its like using a graphing calculator. 2) I would prefer to use word 97 and excel, along with IE (or ideally firefox, but beggars be choosers) 3) I am more familiar with windows and do believe that my ability to connect to other computers and receive files will be much more successful than using sugar. 4) hopefully will not need to load from SD card Let me finish by saying I know what the olpc was made for, but as someone who did the whole give 1 get 1 because they genuinely appreciate the innovations of the laptop I am an adult and do use it for work.
What would the philosophy have to do with anything? Maybe you meant specs or white papers or something. Google's philosophy is to do no evil yet if you ask the right people they have. The philosophy really has nothing to do with the actual implementation besides being a guide.
BTW, I'm not looking anything up on this so what did he say that was wrong and such blatantly ignorant posts?
Amazing how one can take pieces of disparate information, couple it with nonsensical comments and very flimsy commonality and turn it into a conspiracy theory.
Remember, just because someone is paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get them ...
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
That's a really bright thing to say. What, you program only with solder?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
The author of the article was clearly biased in his opinion. I won't take a position in the matter, but the author doing so made the facts more difficult to grasp when reading the article.
That the underlying philosophy is good doesn't change the fact that Sugar has still a lot of problems. The journal getting filled with tons of completly useless entries, which basically render it unusable, is just one of them, the other is that even a "Hello World"-app takes almost 10 seconds to start up, while it starts instantly when started from the terminal.
There is no proof that John Negroponte was not in Dallas in November of 1963. I'm not implying anthing, I'm just saying that there is no proof. Coincidence? I think not.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
Wherever Negroponte went, there were death squads. You can call it coincidence if you want. But remember the following military maxim: once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Kids today. Many of us had Apple/Commodore as the first computer, mucked around a good bit just for no good reason, and learned a good bit of how computer works, and there were no Geek Squad. That's how you learn.
Btw, these are going to developing countries where computers for kids makes some sense, not cavemenistan. It'd be nice if they marketed these things here (US) also rather than only those countries though - today's mainstream PCs just ain't designed for kids to learn the basic.
Geek Squad, pah.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Please help me out here, does the author really think that kids in third world countries are going to be doing development work on these limited devices?
I think that was generally the idea, that the kids would be able to change almost anything they wanted in the user environment they were given.
Based on the quote below from the article the author really beleives that these devices should be open to tampering/fiddling. Does he think that if the device fails there will be a geek squad near by?
If I understood correctly, there was supposed to be a reset feature that would restore the original state of the OS if you really screwed it up, so that there needn't be any fear of allowing them to fiddle with things.
Are hacking skills of value when you live in a mud hut?
Again, if I understand correctly, the idea was to avoid putting up artificial barriers by assuming that kids have no need to poke and prod and see how things work. Maybe hacking skills will be of little interest and/or value to most kids, and for them the OLPC was supposed to be at least a container for a lot of textbook material, at a cost less than a big stack of textbooks. And, as a bonus, for the kids that find hacking on software interesting, maybe it's something that will help them.
If you think money is better spent on something else, please agitate in favor of that other option instead of railing against a program that (whatever you think of their chances of success are) is trying to provide education to people that can benefit from it.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
now i really hate microsoft and wish them all the worst, but this article is just plain ridiculous! nothing to see here, move along!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
The concept is to integrate computer technology into areas that cannot afford it. This is more than just "learning how to click things and checking your email", it (at least the initial plan) was to spread the knowledge of computer technology, programming, and to expand interests to areas that are involuntarily cut off from it.
And for your GeekSquad comment: People who work at GeekSquad are stupid. 99% get confused when "unix" is mentioned, so they whip out their nutsack to show that they haven't had theirs removed. I've had to help GeekSquad kids multiple times with issues; in fact one time I had to tell one of them that they have to use the 48-bit MAC address from the person's laptop in order to set up the router, and he blatantly stated, "Well, we only support Windows." Nuff said.
If you can find someone who is struggling with their preinstalled Linux laptop due to the retarded causes (like spyware, horribly fragmented filesystems, viruses, un-needed bloatware, driver irq issues, etc) that are common in Windows, let me know. Hell, Submit a post here when it happens. In the mean time, when someone in a third world country decides, "Hey, I want to make a program just like this (points at app on the screen) they have the freedom (as in costs) to learn about it and complete their goal.
Amazing how one can take pieces of disparate information, couple it with nonsensical comments and very flimsy commonality and turn it into a conspiracy theory....
Ummm... this IS Slashdot... why is that so amazing? Happens here every few minutes!
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
My first computer was an Atari (yes young man they made computers back in the day) and it was a far cry from these systems. We did tinker with our hardware but these devices are made to allow access to information to school children in remote villages where power is an issue. I personally consider anything east of London to be Caveministan but having lived in Europe for a few years I do remember a few folks who thought some parts of France were civilized.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
I had to pry my wife's XO out of her lap to post this. Sugar may be good for kids & education or not, but I found it to come up short. Ubuntu on the XO works well, even plays SD video recorded on Myth TV with out stuttering. It's damn hard to type on this little keyboard.
No one is railing against the program just the author who is missing the point of providing this device to children in "the most remote regions of the globe". Making a device that is easy to break makes failure of a noble endeavor that much more likley. As long as it runs reliably (which apparently the Sugar OS did not) who cares what OS it uses.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
They should have extended the BOGO (buy one get one) promotion or made it possible for people in the developed world to buy one. As it is, noone can develop software for it, because, near as I can tell, you can't buy one.
So, of course, TFA is based on a video. The OLPC is resigned to a third world ghetto and will eventually fade into obscurity, which is a shame.
Oh, as far as I could tell, you were talking about fiddling with the software, not taking a screwdriver to the machine. Sorry.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Yeah, but how many years have you put into your abacus before your fancy Atari upgrade? Oh, they lied to you about France.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This argument comes up a lot; I guess it has a lot of appeal for the geek types, who started out early, tinkering with their {Atari|Commodore|Apple|Spectrum}, learning to program, etc. Sugar is almost exactly aimed at those types of kids. But I can't help but think that such users are a minority, and that the effort is lost on most others. When I think of average kids in my grade they would probably just stare blankly when told about "source code" and go send penis pictures to each other or something.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Start some random activity. (terminal will do)
Having done nothing else, quit the activity.
You have spam!
You get a new spam each time. A kid can create dozens or hundreds in a day, limited mainly by the general bad performance.
These entries have no reasonable use. They are clutter. Important stuff gets lost in the mess.
You're expected to regularly delete these I suppose. This is busy-work. It's difficult too, because you have to take care to avoid deleting something useful. It's additionally difficult because the journal's UI is both unintuitive and abysmally slow.
But that's pretty much the basic premise behind the whole project, no? Sending penis doodling is the purported goal, but if it doesn't work for whatever reason, the kid will try a few things to get it to work, in the process learning a thing or two. Or so the expectation goes.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
By it's very definition, it can be called a coincidence until there is more than simple causal connections . I don't have to call it that at all, it will be that until there is physical evidence. And then linking two people together simply by an accident of birth takes it just beyond conspiracy theory in my opinion.
Or a good story to scare young children and influence naive adults with.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Novice users create a directory all the time; it's not a concept people have difficulty with.
I find it very surprising that there are no directories, especially if these "spam" files are getting dumped to the same place you save your documents and other files.
This is a feature that is embarrassing not to have.
Tell that to the military then. As they say, "three times is enemy action". When death squads appear wherever Negroponte shows up, without exception, a reasonable conclusion -- not ironclad proof mind you, just a reasonable conclusion -- is that one is a consequence of the other.
And then linking two people together simply by an accident of birth takes it just beyond conspiracy theory in my opinion.
Yeah, you're probably one of those who believe George W. Bush earned his presidency by merit, not because he was the son of George H. W. Bush.
I switched to Debian and saw a world of difference from XFce Ubuntu to Debian XFce gtk+ only!
No Gnome except the keyring.
Low memory footprint is essential with flash file system. Allows for lots of caching etc.
With Firefox Gvim and more I'm at about 100Megs ram for programs leaving 150 for buffers and cache.
I turn off disk caching in firefox. No Flash player now but can download the flv with right click so probably a net positive. Flash is annoying.(e.g. Ads)
Etch seems a good fit.. Let people know -- only hires solution yet. Works very well for everything if you tune it a bit. Mp4 movies at 592x256 mplayer sdl -- belive it.
http://layer-acht.org/debian/olpc/
Keep the XO alive...
A coincidence doesn't imply that one shouldn't be careful. If I find that money is missing from my car whenever I give Freddie a ride, it doesn't mean Freddie is stealing. Police use coincidences all the time. Fortunately, our legal system requires physical proof rather than coincidence most of the time. Three coincidences probably would not be enough to convict anyone, that damn reasonable doubt thing and all.
I might be more careful leaving money in the car when Freddie is around. But I sure wouldn't go around telling all my friends Freddie is a thief either.
I don't find it a reasonable conclusion. An interesting theory, but without facts it is baseless. That's like saying 'I don't know where those lights in the sky came from, therefore aliens spaceships must be the cause'. Interesting theory, but I'll need more facts.
Your last comment is irrelevant, there could be hundreds of reasons George W Bush is president without any merit that have nothing to do with his father. Sidestepping a discussion this way is a common tactic that conspiracy nuts use when they run out of evidence. That doesn't mean someone who uses it is a conspiracy nut.
It's just a coincidence, I'm sure.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I read the first paragraph and had no idea of the author's conclusion. I read the second paragraph and had no idea of the conclusion. I read the third, fourth, fifth, and six paragraphs and had no idea of the conclusion.
Tech articles aren't murder mysteries. State your conclusion up front, then explain and confirm it in later ones. I may not have time or desire to read the whole article, but at least this way I get your point right off the bat.
I think it is also a point about whether you want to provide a tool for kids to learn about computers, and hwo to make them work, or just another PC to edit documents and browse the web on like good little trainie consumers. I cut my PC teeth on breadboarded motorolla CPUs and hacking my z80 based spectrum. I also has an amiga and commodore 128 but I didn't use them except for games. However my speccy got to run a robot, interface with my lego, drive my fathers model railway (track moving trains, route them and set points etc) I learnt about electronics, code, hacking, memory management and why not to bump the ram add on. The keayboard was terrible, so I built my own. On my commodore I learnt how to wait for games to load on serial floppy disk. My Amiga got used for a little video editing and sound mixing, but again mostly games. I cannot see a viable entry level box for learning on (and cheap enough to replace if an experiment fails) apart from the XO. I'm glad that sugar isn't perfect, because then my son & daughter might be able to have a go at learning how to fix it, rather than just post up more trash on facebook and twitter. Putting XP on it fails to get the point of what the XO is for. It is very well designed, just not for Microsoft to run their apps on. If you want XP on an underpowered laptop, buy one second hand.
Oh Balmer, for crying out loud - don't you have anything better to do?
Does the author really think that kids in third world countries are going to be doing development work on these limited devices?
I don't see why he would not expect that, I learned my first programing in basic on a much smaller machine in terms of power and storage, even if it was much larger and more power hungry (TI99/4A).
Are hacking skills of value when you live in a mud hut?
I don't see why not, not every application has to be some complex financial app, or web browser, big gui anything. Maybe you need a basic calculater to help you decide when to plant crops. I can easily imagine some farmer wanting to record daily temperatures or rain fail year over year and have the computer provide some basic trends. That is the kind of thing you could do in BASIC or Python and could be highly useful.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Proof is a different matter, but I am willing to bet that Negroponte will be found guilty by an impartial international court. The evil coincidences are just too strong to ignore.
Wow .. that was some convincing argument. I think that maybe you've convinced me and everyone else with your unbelievable use of strong arguments based on sound fact gathering and irrefutable evidence.
Oh wait .. we were talking about coincidences, and I switched to sarcasm. Sorry ....
Police can arrest anyone, anytime. Whether a DA will prosecute or a judge and jury will convict on 'strong suspicion' is highly doubtful.
I think I can safely ignore future posts as just being more of the same. Yawn ... I think i will search for intellectual discussions elsewhere.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Ya think?
No, it doesn't really require conspiracy against conspiracy theories, or even seeing through the old shell game here. This is all FUD. Worry the Boards of Education of some poor backwater (in Microsoft's opinion) easily deluded South American countries about advertised performance. Hide the fine print.
to quote an old spoof of a Darkness Emitting Arsenic Diode spec sheet that I can't seem to find in my archives any more.)
Funny ... I was just thinking the same thing about you.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
(Sugar says.)
Run over to the sugar and other OLPC mailing lists, if you're worried that somebody has killed sugar off.
It is just a coincidence see...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
I see we have reached a stalemate. I keep responding to your arguments with discussions why I disagree, and you just keep repeating the same old tired expressions without any attempt to enlighten other than 'Oh yeah -- well I'm still right' and making statements that you cannot back up with any facts, just conjecture and 'confidence'. Good thing you didn't go to lawyer school, those types of legal discourses would probably get you a job that includes those famous words, 'you want fries with that??'
Maybe someday, when you have matured, you will be able to have discussions with adults. Until then, I will leave you with the only thing that I think you understand based on how you have responded to my posts.
No I'm not .. you are.....Phhhhlllpppptttttt!!!!!!
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The following is verifiable fact, not propaganda: there were death squads in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Iraq when Negroponte was in the respective neighborhoods.
Now for a deduction: wherever Negroponte goes, the killers appear. Feel free to call it a coincidence.
I don't care what you believe. I do care what a war crimes tribunal will believe, once it gathers evidence. And I'm pretty sure what its conclusions will be with respect to John Negroponte.
MS announce XP on XO.
Slashdot goes "Pics or it never happened!"
MS provide screen shots.
Slashdot goes "screenshots can be faked - video or it never happened!"
MS provide video.
Slashdot goes "Whatever, it never happened!"
As if the world didn't have enough windows users already, now they are giving out One Windows Per Child. Who said charity can't be profitable. I hope Negroponte wakes up soon and gives MS the finger they deserve. Not very likely to happen though.
Bill you should at least keep your employees on a leash.
Making a device that is easy to break makes failure of a noble endeavor that much more likley.
"easy to break" as in "booting windows and connecting to the internet without firewall or AV? The OLPC's SUGAR software can be reset to its original state by pressing one button.
Like many ~older~ people, my first computers (Casio PB100 portable computer and then a C64) were tinker-friendly. I learned programming because
1) I thought it was interesting, and
2) the OS I was using gave me the tools to do so right away. Checking the source code of most programs was just a matter of typing "list", and changing it was just moving the cursor and typing.
That's what SUGAR offers. most kids won't do it, but I'm pretty sure quite a lot will. Apart from a possible dev career, programming is a good exercise in logical and structured thinking. So, even if they don't go on and stay in the IT field, they'll probably be better at math and science due to it, and will have better perspectives
What does XP offer in that regard, except the means to learn how to use office software?
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Get on the lists to find out what the real story is.
I shouldn't spoil the plot, but other people might read this.
Sugar on XP is not scheduled to replace either Sugar or Linux. The only people trying (desperately, per the friendly A) to show how XP runs on the thing (and using a lot of slight-of-hand to do so) are with/from Microsoft.
Sugar is god-awful slow. It's not even a real program; it's just a Python script.
So you're saying they should have programmed it in Lisp or Scheme?
I recall Sawmill/Sawfish; one of the best window managers at the time, highly configurable, blazingly fast, written in Scheme.
As for "a real program"... sorry, but AFAICT even a VB program is a real program. If Sugar were written in Logo, it would still be a real program.
I mean, what other kind of program is there? Unreal programs? Fake programs?
You could say it weren't a real program if it never worked at all.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Written like a true "End User".
"I only hope that Sugar lives on. It really looks like a great entry level desktop for educational use."
Does it?
Kids in the third world may have less education, but they're not retarded. There's a difference between a nice, streamlined UI that doesn't get in your way with technicalities (Mac OSX comes to mind) and a dumbed-down "for Kids!" toy UI.
It claims to be a real (eg general purpose) "laptop", but Sugar is designed like a (badly coded) UI for an embedded device like the Amazon Kindle or the iPhone.
Heck, they probably would be better of if they adapted the mobile edition of OS X (the stuff that runs on the iPod Touch). Unfortunately Apple and Steve Jobs don't seem to have much interest in philantropic projects.
I think you meant "Al" Capone not Joe (did Al have a brother?)
It could be that Linus Torvalds is a sleeper KGB agent trained by his father to help re-establish communist domination of Europe by defeating capitolism through the use of the open source concept. More evidence exists for this than your Death Squads idea. FYI - The leader of the Honduran Death Squads was Colonel Juan Lopéz Grijalba, a native Honduran.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
Your comment was written like a true "Geek".
Actually mine was written by someone who manages support for thousands of "End Users". My focus does tend to be how to keep systems running rather than making them easy to break. I would have to say that your comment shows your disdain for end users that is typical of the open source community and is a significant contributor to the lack of success of the linux desktop. You can't expect to succeed if you abhor your "customer".
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
like MS is talking out both sides of their mouth or something
you had me at #!
"educational" software available for XP that will soon be ported to Vista
Isn't the big lock-in idea that you don't have to *port* anything forward? What's the point of Vista if it won't run your existing apps?
Otherwise, port it to a real operating system :)
you had me at #!
Dooooon't feeeeed the trooooooooolls!!
Brrraaaaaains!
haha,
Just give Stephen a fit tinfoil hat and forget about it :P
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
He's also directly responsible for 911 and the killer tsunami in asia.
"Sugar and other Linux versions on the XO do take longer to boot; but once the suspend and hibernation features are completely working (and the current Update.1 Release Candidate has most of it working)"
How many years will pass until Linux gets suspend and hibernate right?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
It gives scary warnings if you yank out the drive without going to "safely remove hardware". Of course, in GNOME or on OS X it's a lot quicker and easier to unmount a drive, as I recall, so the scary warnings are far more reasonable.
.
Confirmed sales of the XO as of May 2008 were 667,000 units. Summary of laptop orders
The XO isn't meeting the reception the Geek thought it would. Not every education minister believes in constructivism.
Some are worried that what would be buying is an overpriced e-book reader -- because his teachers won't have the experience, training, or resources to use it any other way - and neither will his kids - no matter often the geek fantasies otherwise.
The PC outside the grade school classroom looks much like Windows. It may very well be Windows.
That matters to the minister who wants to see kids make a smooth transition into the higher grades, channel them into secondary education, job training and employment.
Yes, Lopez was one of the front men. But read this: Was the CIA involved? Did Washington know? Was the public deceived? Now we know: Yes, Yes and yes..
Yes, or maybe Smalltalk. Something with a fast implementation that still provides users with the ability to tinker with the program while it's running.
Sorry .. it was too much fun to see how he would react and if there was anything intelligent that might come out of it.
Guess not....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Now all the kids in countries where they have had decades of war can play Minesweeper.
If you are at all actually interested in the answer to this question, look into ACPI. The Wikipedia article notes that MS was one of the companies that helped draft the standard. The Criticism subsection is also informative about some of the problems with the standard. There are also numerous other examples of how Microsoft has been quite deliberately poisoning the ACPI well. Slasdot user leoxx posted a comment the other day in the Foxconn mobo thread that you might also find elucidating.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"The Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] notes that MS was one of the companies that helped draft the standard."
So what?
"The Criticism [wikipedia.org] subsection is also informative about some of the problems with the standard."
The criticism is childish. It boils down to two complains:
1. "ACPI is complex"
2. "hardware does not always completely support ACPI"
Both problems are things with which real software has to deal all the time. Especially the complain no. 2 is silly, because such problems may crop up *anywhere*. The operating system should, within reason, work around incomplete adherence to the standard. You may think that by saying "sorry, you're not 100% compliant, go away", Linux kernel developers are punishing the manufacturer and giving them the incentive to improve compliance, but it's not true. They're punishing the guy who thought Linux is going to run on his box and giving him the incentive (rather, more of it) to stick to OS that works. That's not how you do things when you write an OS which has marginal market share on desktops and notebooks.
"There are also numerous [mixx.com] other [wordpress.com] examples [google.com] of how Microsoft has been quite deliberately poisoning the ACPI well."
They are numerous references to the same case of some guy's clash with Foxconn.
"Slasdot user leoxx posted a comment [slashdot.org] the other day in the Foxconn mobo thread that you might also find elucidating."
I wonder why they haven't thrown in "And I would like to rape a few ten-year old girls, too" for good measure.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Baby? Bathwater?
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
From reading the XO wiki it looks like age 4 is about the minimum age that any kid would begin to get any use out of this laptop. does anyone know a link with age recommendations?
Wow, would you like some guacamole for that huge chip on your shoulder? :)
If you're not trolling, might I suggest that you tone down your sensitivity. My post was in no way intended to attack you, but instead to answer your question. Perhaps you misinterpreted the tone of my post?
Your initial question asked by implication why it is that Linux has problems with hibernation and suspend, two functions that rely on ACPI. Leoxx's comment contains a link to an email from Bill Gates, entered into the public court record, describing how Microsoft's upper management echelons were quite seriously working on rendering ACPI unusable for any but Microsoft. I wonder if you went so far as to read that email? It's quite short, I assure you. Given that Microsoft was precisely in a position to carry out such a strategem by influencing how the ACPI standard is defined on the one hand, and how such functionality is implemented by hardware manufacturers on the other by means of their overwhelming market share, we should not find it at all surprising if anyone but Microsoft has trouble working with ACPI.
This line of argument is very straightforward, and at least partially backed up by courtroom findings, which leads me to conclude that your mention of raping girls must be an attempt to distract and discredit, rather than actually dealing with the issues at hand.
Toodles,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Sugar was designed for this task, to go on low end laptops, and be used easily by people with minor or no computer knowledge, yet still be powerful. XP is designed for more powerful workstations, and is aimed at people who know how to use computers, which is why we teach people in college how to use it. Yet Microsoft felt threatened. If the project took off, this means countless numbers of people would be growing up using Linux. When they finally did grow up, what OS do YOU think they will choose? It was a threat to their dominance. So what did they do? Did they go to work designing an OS that will work on the new systems, and be easier to learn? Nope. Instead they stuffed and crammed until the existing product fit, despite the fact that it doesn't use all the key features of the machine, because that would require more work, and the thing barely fits anyways. An Operating system should not be noticed. It should just be there, and help you work or play. Sugar succeeds where XP fails in this regard on this machine. Yet, despite this, MS will push this OS all they can, even if it ends up ruining the project and denying all those kids a useful computer.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
The article complains that Sugar wouldn't need fast boot speeds once they get suspend working. Umm, that's still not working!?!?!?!
The article criticizes Windows XP for bad Wi-Fi client, but it doesn't mention the fact that the original Sugar GUI didn't even support WPA when shipped and users had to manually configure WPA in command line. The Wi-Fi Supplicant in XP works quite well and it's fully configurable in Group Policy for full automation.
The article says that video for the whole classroom should be done via mesh to point out XP's lack of mesh support. The fact of the matter is, mesh doesn't work. See http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=777 and http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=981. If the author has actually tried to stream more than 2 6 Mbps videos on a regular infrastructure Wi-Fi network, he would know how badly it works. Mesh cuts the efficiency of an infrastructure network down by at least half if there's only one repeater station and a whole lot more in real life.
Broadcasting video to a whole classroom using wireless technology actually requires multicast. You only want/need to send (broadcast) the movie once over the airwaves preferably without any acknowledgements and let all the clients pick up whatever they can. Using Unicast is a non-starter and using mesh is ludicrous.
Wait, you mean your mom and sister have NEVER made a single folder on any operating system?
Because that's what you appear to be saying. A folder is just a GUI metaphor for a directory.
Disregard the above.
It's not for geek types! Back in 1980 or 81, the first home computers were practically DOA. They didn't do anything when you switched them on, except print a question mark, maybe, if you were lucky. If you wanted to 'play' with your new toy, you had to find out how to make it do something. It didn't even look good. Unlike LEGO, you couldn't even sort it into piles of same-colour, or same-shape pieces. You couldn't really pretend it was a tea-set. On the face of it, it seems to be an appalling thing to have bought for a kid. But we didn't have penis pictures back then. We didn't have any kind of pictures, except the ones from the camera that was too expensive for parents to let you touch, and cost an arm and a leg to see the results, and then they were tiny things, hidden away like precious jewels. There wasn't any choice, back then. It was interesting new thing, or nothing at all.
I think a scripting language is essential as a primary way of "tinkering" with something like the OLPC. I had never even heard of "source code" when I submitted machine code as a list of bytes (as decimal numbers!) to Sinclair User Magazine when I was a teenager. It was just what I had to do in order to write games, which were still not easy to buy, and mostly not very good, back then.
I moved to a "Vibrant, Multi-Racial, Progressive, Developed South East Asian Nation" a few years ago, and many of my teenage neighbours spend their Vibrant, Progressive, Developing years chasing cockroaches, stealing fags or photocopying colouring in books to make them last longer. The OLPC is not aimed at kids who have considered the option of sending penis pics and decided a 'Code Poet' tee shirt goes better with their emo lifestyle, it's for kids who might develop better given a second or third choice when cockroaches and colouring-in appears to be all there is.
They do sometimes have a PC in the house, but because their parents care about their children's futures, they have gone out and bought a pirated copy of the World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim so their kids can 'write CVs', but they don't allow them to have Internet access because their government cautions that it's pretty much all penis pics, and if they want a 'good job' with the government, they should develop their Typewriter Sim skills, because that's what's really important in some countries.
I wish OLPC was coming here. There are places in the world where managing change is about ensuring the same incompetents remain in charge. If you want to succeed at their game, you really need to improve your World's Most Famous Typewriter Sim skills. If you want to develop, you need absolutely anything else.
Sugar is a few things and simple is not one of them. It is a filesystem API( journal ), it's a collaboration API, and it is an application launcher. All these are designed to provide an easy to use platform for children and educators so that the details of what's going on underneath does not have to be taught to be used.
Do you want to be the one who has to teach the kids what a filesystem is, how a tree works, how 4 different ways to get to your files works, and then each day of class spend half an hour making sure everyone can find their homework somewhere in the filesystem?
The next thing people are going to say is that Tivo sucks because it is not using Windows and the UI they designed is for retarded people.
People need to open their eyes to the fact that what Microsoft dictates is not even close to how EVERYBODY should interface with computer systems.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I don't find it, but I remember after the blogstorm reading Negroponte's response, that OLPC was not using any of its resources to port MSxp to the XO. My memory was that he said that they were basically just answering Microsoft's porting group's questions, and that they weren't planning on actively attempting to prevent the port. Even with all the avalanche of interpretation, I don't find direct quotes from Negroponte, long enough, and in context, to show that he is doing anything more than being willing to talk with Microsoft.
I do see a lot of unsupported interpretation.
Unfortunately, part of the aftermath of the blogstorm is that the article that contained his response is now buried under the tons of trolls and shills who seem bent on making it look as if Microsoft has already won before the game has begun. Typical Microsoft.
Anyway, I'm in the wait and see mode.
Very interesting, thank you for that link. I'll have to keep an eye on that thread as it develops. I'd run into unresponsive keyboard problems a while back on a Dell Dimension 5150, but wound up just booting into XP in the end due to required Windows-only business software (I had previously run XP in VMWare on top of Ubuntu). Methinks I may now have to open the case and find out the mobo vendor...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."