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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
(Sugar says.)
Run over to the sugar and other OLPC mailing lists, if you're worried that somebody has killed sugar off.
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!"
Bill you should at least keep your employees on a leash.
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.
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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.