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OLPC Downsizes Half of Its Staff, Cuts Sugar
One Laptop Per Chewbacca writes "Nicholas Negroponte, the leader of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has announced that the organization will be laying off half of its staff, cutting salaries of the remaining employees, and ending its involvement in Sugar development. The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows. Ars Technica concludes: 'The OLPC project's extreme dependence on economy of scale has proven to be a fatal error. The organization was not able to secure the large bulk orders that it had originally anticipated and fell short of meeting its target $100 per unit price. The worldwide economic slowdown has made it even more difficult for OLPC to find developing countries that have cash to spare on education technology.'"
If you're changing your original goals (I'm thinking particularly about Sugar here) mid-way through, you'll crash faster.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Think the recent fad of netbooks has anything to do with it?
Its just a bad time overall.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
Congratulations, you crushed a competitor and, at the same time, destroyed hope for millions of needy people.
Even if you disagree that third world governments buying these laptops would have done anything, at least it might have gotten them interested in greater investment in education.. it might have gotten them thinking that more of the first world actually gives a shit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Netcraft is about to confirm something.
It was a failure before it started.
Gone!
Let's see... A **TOY** computer for the same price as a real one... CUT ME A SLICE OF THAT!
its been proven linux notebooks sell. look at the eepc and acer one.
OLPC trims fat, cuts sugar
If they had just shoved it in Dixons for GBP£199.95 in the first place, I'm sure they would have been down to $100 by now. All this ideology is just bollocks.
Even though I thought it was a stupid idea, it did have one redeeming point. It would have turned a small segment of the population in those countries into producers instead of keeping them as consumers.
When they decided to support Windows, that killed the only positive point I could see in it. They would be kept as consumers.
They can save money by switching from Windows to Linux!
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
schools. Particularly grade schools and middle schools. A laptop that doesn't need maintenance. They launched that initiative 1 year back, but it was too little too late. They were actually quite hostile toward selling it in America or developed world.
Now, I don't believe computers are all that great in the classroom, but if they wanted economies of scale, it would make more sense to sell to the rich, gadget-happy country first to build up production and also legitimacy in the eyes of 3rd worlders. I imagine if MIT pushed it, some Massachusetts area schools might have adopted. Then the OLPC project could have put that on their resume as well.
No one got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM is true, and if the competitor is a relatively unknown, untested entity, doubly so. I think the move to Windows just killed it though, since it didn't differentiate OLPC laptop from any other to the casual observer.
That they can also save money by switching to Geico.
I'm certain that the submitter is correct: Allowing windos in killed the project.
Why? Because projects like this rely on the goodwill of volunteers. That comes from ideology, in a neutral sense, i.e. from people believing in something. Very few people believe in windos. It has millions of users, but few "believers". On the other hand, Linux has a very high percentage of believers among its users, it's easy to find volunteers who will contribute for free, or support the distribution channels, convince their local leaders, and so on.
There are things that money can not buy. You can build a religion on money (see Scientology), but not a crusade.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...never really turns out well in the end.
I am a shareholder of MSFT and Intel. If selling more WinTel solutions causes the stock prices of MSFT and Intel to go up that is a GoodThing(TM).
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
When Intel "stole" the contract for the government of Venezuela, Negroponte was outraged, but what his missing is, its just business.
I congratulate Negroponte for his incredible effort to have a vision to give the poor the tools needed to escape dispair and to build a device, but in the end, if Intel can do it, and do it better - than it really doesn't matter.
I'd like to see the poor using free software, but in the end i'd prefer them to have food in their bellies and using commercial software than having free software and going hungry with a bankrupt OLPC.
Its a shame, because I personally love the look of the OLPC, the Classmate looks terrible purely from an aesthetic perspective.
Congratulations on your FP! Let's all give this AC a big round of applause!
"Downsizing staff" is like "cheap prices". Appears to be OK, but semantically wrong.
Tell us more, have you consumed nuts or MSG recently?
They only wanted to sell the fine things to people who couldn't afford them. The people who could? They could buy one, if they paid for two...
The correct way to handle it would be to charge $250 domestically and put them next to the game consoles in Wal*Mart, so lower middle-class parents can buy them for their kids. 1/5 of 10 million sales would pay for a hell of a lot more "donated" models than half of a hundred fifty thousand models.
Besides, the whole "it's good for you, but we're not letting our own kids near 'em" is pretty hard to swallow and smacks of colonialism.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"...but we'll make up for it in VOLUME!"
I never saw this as a viable business model regardless of the economy. Like many social programs the OLPC concept is rooted in feeling good about participating in the pursuit of a dream. The hungry children in Ethiopia that are handed some hardware instead of a bag of rice are really just a side-effect.
It's pretty cool. My son loves it but it's slow and there are a few other problems, no need to relive them.
The annoying thing is that it was pretty difficult to get one. I was only able to get one if I bought another for someone else, I don;t mind, but really - if you want to drive volume...
And even then I was only able to get one for a limited special offer period.
I can't help but think that so many things would have been different if they had spent an extra $2 on a faster ARM processor and sold them more openly. More XOs in more hands would have yielded more involvement.
Nullius in verba
A 200$ netbook is coming soon and it will run Ubuntu.
And yeah, 200$ not 400$ via "buy two donate one".
The Raven
Spare me the (often incompetent) enthusiasm of youth.
You shouldn't 'believe' in an OS or license like a God. Nobody should.
I believe Windows based computers make up a large market of potential customers.
I believe knowing and using multiple operating systems is a valuable thing. I believe you can't be master of all things. Find a balance.
In the end computers are just tools.
Do you 'believe' in SnapOn, Mac or Matco?
I believe in Haas! Death to Jet tools.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So, they had a problem with half of the staff being too big? Sheesh, I'd hate to be a 6ft+ OLPC employee right now. Do they amputate at the knees, or what?
... and then they built the supercollider.
-1 Informative. Typical damage control is in effect.
I've always thought the problem with the OLPC project was that it developed a product for very young children, when computer literacy is a afterthought for early primary students in the developed world (at least in the US) and in contries where classrooms may not have books or basic utilities, having computers for these kids is simply not worth the cost, and for older children the platform is severely lacking what a "normal" computer is capable of.
From spending time with teachers in early primary ed, non-computer alternatives such as the Leap Pad is specifically designed to teach children to read or do math and are very easy to "plug" into the state cirriculm. When students do go to the computer lab, they either need to buy specialized software, which is expensive to teach them the cirriculm, or just have the kids goof off in MS paint or playing web-games (which is not entirely bad, but less important and effective than other teaching methods). When you can't read and can't do subtraction, being able to draw pictures on a computer is very low on the list of priorities. Because of this, it makes me think the OLPC product out of the box isn't going to be sufficent for real learning, in particular where web access is non-existent or slow/hap-hazard or not in the native language; particularly for young children whom the project seems to be aimed at.
I think the project would have done much more good by producting computers with a standard Linux desktop, OO.org, Firefox, etc... (maybe toned-down versions to run on less RAM/HD space) and marketed them to middle-and-high school age students, particularly those academic performance would make them able to potentially go to university or have a "office job". When I see employees and students (when I am teaching) who can barely use OO.org because they "learned on Word" or can't find their files "on a PC because I have a Mac", it leads me to believe having the Sugar UI, as neat as it is, makes it so different from a computer they'll use in higher-ed or in the workplace that what they are learning isn't going to be nearly as effective. If Windows is the only way to turn an OLPC into a "normal" computer then it seems worth it, even though I'd rather see it loaded with OSS to save the schools money and give them exposure to Linux which is becoming a very popular desktop OS in the developing world in particular. I know some will say "keep it Sugar and let them dump Linux on it", but can you imagine what it would take to re-configure thousands of these machines, let alone creating an install that meets its hardware available? It would be cheaper to buy the machines preloaded with Windows versus all that effort, particularly if MS is practically giving it away. Sometimes ideology is only worth so much when you're strapped to make it happen.
$100 for a machine that is a glorified chat client when the participants are in the same room or an electronic coloring book seems very wasteful when you think of how many crayons, texts, papers and pens that machine is worth to the poorest of poor students. $100 for a real computer to teach college bound students how to be successful and familar with the workplaces requirements, seems like a deal, so long as it is implemented wisely and at a time in the students development where it is going to be worth it. It feels like giving an OLPC to a kid before 4th grade is like giving a violin to a baby.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The OLPC is a noble idea, but I think Negroponte has underestimed the the will of its competitors to ensure OLPC doesn't take hold to give them a clear advantage.
Actually, very few people seem to even understand Negroponte's real idea. The OLPC had no competitors. It was an education project, not a product. It was never about selling a novel hardware device; that was just a means to an end. Unfortunately, there had never been a similar project to set a precedent, so the press and analysts could only view it in terms that they understood: the terms of the U.S. consumer technology industry. As such, it looked as if the OLPC would have to "compete" with cheapie laptops from Intel, Asus, or whomever, despite the fact that none of these later offerings really had the same goals as the OLPC. I think far more damning to the OLPC was the fact that when it shipped it couldn't actually deliver on the project's goals. When you're asking a government to spend a few million dollars on mass orders of a piece of technology, "someday this will set you free" doesn't sound half as good as "turn it on and it runs Windows."
Breakfast served all day!
Negroponte was a fool. He was too confident.
He expected people to just buy this up in the millions without any other companies also jumping at the idea.
"Third World only", this is possibly the most stupid idea of them all.
ANYONE should have been able to buy them, period.
He let in WinTel for crying out loud.
Also, the final one (and technically first): Not For Profit.
He did it all wrong, he made the wrong decisions, and that is why this is only going to get worse until they realize everything they are doing is stupid.
Screw the "we want to be good" mentality, JUST DO IT, regardless of what people think of you, because you obviously can't do it with your current mentality.
I'd have bought one of them, the thing sounded fantastic, then all the problems just piled up and things got cut.
Now, i probably won't because i don't want to give money to fund stupidity.
And before i get moderated a troll, i don't like this any more than you do.
The truth is a harsh mistress.
Like it or not, a lot of people donated their time and energy with the idea of bringing the benefit of software without the dependence of non FOSS.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
My reaction is the same as the first time I heard about this "PC." Why would these impoverished nations spend $100 per machine, when what the kids need are books, pencils and a roof on their school so classes aren't cancelled - Or shoes, so they can walk to school in the first place. If we in the west want to make a difference, instead of buying a $250 PC-toy at Wal-Mart we should give our $100 to a charity that can help with some of the above issues and stop worrying about whether they ran Windows or Linux or used the wrong flavour of WiFi.
I would have bought one if they didn't support MS the way they constantly do. After pissing off Richard they deserve it...
BoycottNovell is an amazing organization.
That is, amazing in how insane they are. They are the epitome of the knee-jerk crowd that taints open source. They and DefectiveByDesign (hello, Genius Bar Invasion bullshit) are the two that come to mind when I think of people doing a lot to hurt the causes they say they're for.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I sent OLPC money because I bought the vision of openness of the system promoting a particular approach to computing. His so called pragmatism felt like fraud to me.
Evidentially they didn't sell very well in the second or third world either, did they?
So the org will now be renamed to Half A Laptop Per Child? Sort of a King Solomon approach, eh?
No good deed goes unpunished...
The Asus EEE really helped launch the market for cheap notebooks and costs are only going to get lower now that the idea is getting popular. Soon it will be cheaper for them to simply buy off-the-shelf netbooks and ship them to children. The OLPC really didn't have that much that made it uniquely suited for the job.
Sugar was "interesting" in the way that requires quotation marks when you say it, but it probably did more harm than good. It made a slow machine even slower and it certainly doesn't encourage practical computer skills. Children are clever. You don't need to make computers simple to make it easier for THEM to use.
That whole mesh WiFi thing was stupid idea. I'm told that it also killed the battery life.
I liked the clamshell-to-tablet design.
The problem wasn't MSFT, or even the underpowered hardware. The problem was Negroponte and his elitist bullshit. He COULD have gotten the economies of scale on his side by selling them to the first world and using his profits to drive down production costs. Instead he tried that forced charity bullshit with the G1G1 program. I originally thought the OLPC was a great idea. His idea of having laptops for all the world's children to learn on was great. But sadly it quickly became all the third world's children and the first world could pay for it. Has he never been to the delta? Seen the kids with books from the Carter administration who live in tar paper shacks? If he would have sold them to the first world he could have helped out a lot of kids here while ramping up production.
And as much as I hate to agree with Twitter on ANYTHING, putting XP on it was a majorly stupid idea. Not only did the run off the FLOSS guys that were writing the code and fixing the bugs, they seemed to have forgotten one simple problem with XP. I have run Xp Pro, Home, WinFLP, and even XP embedded. And the one thing they have in common is they LOVE the swap. And with the OLPC having a small SSD that is a recipe for disaster. And then add on top of that the fact that the OLPC doesn't have enough room for the huge amounts of updates required to secure XP, that it doesn't have the CPU or RAM resources to run an AV or firewall, so the machines will get turned into spambots the second they hook to the net, and finally by putting XP they have destroyed the original intent of the machine.
It was SUPPOSED to be a machine for teaching kids. You know, school work, spelling, math, and to allow them to work together on educational programs through the mesh network. By putting XP what you have done is turn the OLPC into a really shitty Windows Office machine. IIRC all the XP machines get is XP and Office. What the hell good is that? Is there a pressing need to teach third world kids how to make powerpoints? I only hope that when the OLPC goes out of business, which they will, that some enterprising company buys up the plans and productions facilities. Because with the economies of scale it could be a great laptop for ALL the world's children. But as long as Negroponte is at the helm, it is going nowhere but downhill.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are there markets for accessories and upgrades for XO?
There are constantly supply of XO in ebay. This machine deserve a better treatement.
Touch screens, keyboard, upgrade MB, and other accessories can give the XO a longer life.
Commencing with money making phase.
... ... ... ...
...
Charging for lazors
I wear my sunglasses in the shade
OLPC with without Sugar
it's Delicious
The morning dawns and Sun rises
n: Profit!
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
I need a sunlight readable screen with good battery life, light weight and rugged construction. I liked the one I bought in 2007's G1G1 enough I bought another one during the 2008 G1G1 campaign. The improvement in the Sugar interface was good enough that I reinstalled the OS on the older machine.
Now, I'm seriously looking at casemodding them to fully ruggedization and solar power. Then there's a fairly simple method to double the RAM. Now to explore improved cooling and overclocking...
BoycottNovell ... taints open source.
When trolling, you should avoid such obvious give aways. +1 funny, -2 troll.
If you want to be religious, find God. If you want to do tech, then don't become a fanatic.
The OLPC would make an excellent Netbook. An "Adult" sized one selling just for under $200 would be a great seller. And, as a bonus, it would give you the economies of scale necessary to produce a true $100 OLPC. Heck, he could have sold the original OLPC in the U.S. and Europe as a computer perfect for young kids. Within a year, he'd have enough scale to hit the $100 price.
Unfortunately, Negroponte didn't want to compromise on his beliefs. This was suppose to be the computer for the underprivileged kids.
I am not sure on Windows. Windows was designed for a large desktop computer and has failed miserably in situations where screen real estate and memory considerations are limited. Windows Mobile never took off despite it's inherit advantage of syncing with the Windows desktop and IT department support. Windows never managed to make it into the home outside of the office. Scientific Atlanta is very happy with Linux on their setup boxes.
I can see why the developing world cast aspersions on the OLPC. There was a certain first world, I know what you need arrogance in the whole project. They wanted a REAL computer, and to them, that means it runs something like Windows. Maybe if this ran a standard consumer Linux system rather than the graphical sugar, these countries may have felt better about it.
I do believe that the OLPC project did end up making Netbooks quite popular. The OLPC did show that there was quite a bit of interest in the development of small computers, and other companies then filled the gap. If you look, you can find a Netbook just below the $300 barrier. Next year, it'll be at $250, then $200. With in five years, the $100 laptop may actually be commercially available.
There is a big problem with this....you donot get a section of the populace that knows about technology to take them out of poverty.... You need to get them to know about networking, technology etc so that they can devise stuff that fits their environment...you guys in the west have no interest in low power communication to villages etc...why would you innovate in that domain. they will if they have the knowledge and capabilities and know what wifi or radio communication is... Allowing for just food always create a population still living in the 1700...
Let's think about this, Nicholas Negroponte wants to sell cheap laptops to Venezuela, but seems not to realize that his older brother, John, has served as a sleaze-bag and all around go-to hatchet man for republican administrations all the way back to Reagan, at least.
Good ol' Johnny was instrumental in making sure the U.S. aided and abetted human rights abuses in Honduras, and backed the contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Surely, even an MIT professor realizes the Sandinistas were the legitimately elected, albeit socialist and indiginist, government.
Socialist and Indiginist, now what other country in Latin America has a government like that. Let me think. No, no, don't tell me. Yeah, I got it Venezuela!
If Nick can't connect the dots on that one, he needs to get another job.
If they cut half their staff, does that make it two laptops per child?
Given the amount of links you posted from that website, you should probably mention that you are quite the star over there, complete with things like these:
Aw, shucks. This is also where you confessed to your massive sockpuppetry of Slashdot:
I understand your activities here are quite the topic of conversation over there.
Worthy of mention also is the fact that you have done nothing but paste links to the Schiestowitz blog for the past year or so. Anyone looking at your comments and journals can attest to that. That blog is of course what some people call a den of paranoia, and other choice things. As for the operator, this is one of the better summaries I've read.
All of this of course pales in comparison to your nymshifting, sockpuppetry, trolling and massively obnoxious behavior that has made you the joke of the day around here. All of that is documented here.
So please, don't pretend that you're some FOSS hero on a mission bringing enlightenment down from the Schestowitz heaven for us poor Slashdotters to gape at in awe. You are a troll, an extremist, just like your friends, and I wish that none of you were involved with free software in any way. You are the worst of the worst. If I need references on OLPC or anything else, I'm sure there are more dependable sources for them than your best friend's "I hate everything" blog. Seriously, this is a man that insults and questions Linus Torvalds' way of life and the amount of children he has because he didn't march to step on a software license. What the fuck. You all should be put in a mental institution. You are worse than the worst shit you've ever tried to make up about Microsoft, as if they didn't do enough actual bad things.
Go away.
I agree about the elitest attitude, although I think that Sugar was almost as bad as XP. I tried it last year and it was terrible.
As for what the OLPC was supposed to be for... I don't think anyone ever really decided. Every time I've brought up what it was for, I have been lambasted that I had it all wrong. So, I went to their website, and all I could find was a bunch of Dilbert style buzzword bingo.
If as you say, it was intended to be an educational tool for things like spelling, math and to work together, then the mesh network was a horrible idea. In fact the entire project was over engineered from the get go. I could easily build a computer for math, spelling and simple programming for under $100 at single unit retail pricing. Even adding the criteria that it would run from a hand crank and be MORE durable than the OLPC. REAL engineers with access to bulk wholesale pricing should be able to do far better than me.
Personally, I think the OLPC was just a way to get free R&D by convincing people that the money they were donating was for charity.
This is just a shot in the dark, but you haven't spent a lot of time dealing with academics, have you?
I'm not slighting you at all -- it's just that I have dealt with a number of academic eggheads, some of them even in my family, and most of them are insufferably arrogant bastards.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have to admit it takes a special kind of panache, in the face of the evidence, to blame this on Microsoft. Or "M$", as you so cleverly call them.
There are billions of users running Windows.
Windows is simply and shamelessly a product of the market place - and that for many folks is its highest recommendation.
The simple truth is that the "true believer" is very hard to live with.
OLPC came bundled with a constructivist philosophy of education and the ideology of FOSS. It was in many ways the quintessential product of the Father-Knows-Best Geek in Academia.
Look, there are many, many things that we could spend our resources on that would greatly improve the lives of children everywhere.
Giving them each a laptop is about 364th on the list. Somehow they are magically supposed to be able to participate in the 'new economy' as long as they can connect to the web? WTF?
Watch Born Into Brothels. Then tell me that the first thing we need to do is to work to get then LAPTOPS. Jesus.
-Styopa
An overhyped project by Negroponte ends up in failure. The man's made a career out of it. What else is news?
If it had been a commercial product I'd have been on the phone to the credit card company within minutes, asking for a refund.
The View Source button, billed as an intrinsic part of the project, did not work when I received my XO (first G1G1 batch). It still did not work when I updated to the latest release software (the one where the activity icons are in a circle around the XO "buddy"). And of course if they move to XP it is guaranteed that it NEVER will work.
The much-ballyhooed twenty-hour battery life turned out to be about four. Despite numerous changes in software that were supposedly intended to address the issue, the battery life is now up to, maybe, four-and-a-half hours... depending on how you test and whom you talk to.
It's all like a throwback to 1977, when you were just thrilled to have an actual computer in your hands and didn't fuss about the fact that it didn't have 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to have, or do 3/4 of the stuff it was supposed to do, because heck, it turned on and booted and the vendor said it would be keeping all its promises Real Soon Now.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I disagree about the elitist attitude. Since when is intelligence and the application of knowledge considered elitists on a nerd/geek forum, lest keep the idiotic redneck point of view on myspace et al where it belongs, the elitists are the rich, greedy and pseudo celebrities. So Nicholos kicked off the OLPC which focused some real attention on bridging the global digital divide and the importance of being able to provide accessible low cost computing to make the knowledge of the world available to the children of the world.
As it is the OLPC really helped to kick off the growth of Linux on netbooks and establish it it as the future of education for children upon a global basis. As for the future of the OLPC well M$ did put the kybosh on it that by whispering sweet 'nothings' into Nicholos's ear with the intent of souring the project because of course low cost PCs in the hundred dollar range is the death of an operating system, office suite combination that basically quadruples the fully function cost of that hardware.
So the OLPC project brought focus to the problem and did it's job in demonstrating what could be done and now a range of hardware software solutions are evolving to provide the needed solution, low cost netbooks with a FOSS software stack for the education market.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
90% of your links are to a site that makes up 90% of its "news". Do you have any creditable documentation for your claims?
I think they should have started by getting these kids paper and pencils first.
yet they refused to sell it to people who wanted to buy them, and had the cash.
I don't have any links to support this theory, but I believe that the contracts they negotiated with parts suppliers prohibits them from selling an assembled product in specific markets where other OEMs are selling products with the same parts. In other words, VIA probably said, "We're selling you these chips AT COST. Don't sell your laptop in the US, where Dell and other vendors are selling laptops with our chips that we sold them at a profit." To get those deals on parts, they had to promise they wouldn't dump the cheap laptops on developed markets.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Invasion? You mean, taking advantage of Apple's online retail booking system and getting people to voluntarily go and ask questions of their paid customer service employees?
Join the Free Software Foundation
If you don't run the Mac OS, you are not who the Genius Bar serves. Harrassing employees is extremely disrespectful IMHO. If you got me, I would have said, "You can run Ubuntu in Parallels, X comes with every copy of the Mac OS X, and many Linux distros do not support EFI out of the box."
--Sam
no, what was elitist was the entire concept. money that could have been spent on teachers, reducing classroom sizes, improved school infrastructure was being asked to be diverted into gadgets for children when it has NOT been proven that putting gadgets in the hands of children in first world countries has been a magical solution at all. far from it, every attempt to add computers into classrooms in the us has been a botched failure based on fear and ignorance. millions of wasted tax payer money funding children playing oregon trail, playing ridiculous math games and such on expensive hardware. teaching children amount "guis and mice" and how to type when such skills are easily picked up by the new generation without such classes, the fears were totally unfounded. it is not a cost effective way to spend education budgets in the first world, never mind the developing world. now basically every child has access to a computer in the western world, whether at home or the library/school lab. are all these children coding genius's because this access? lol, what actually happens when you get tech into childrens hands is that it becomes a communications toy. myspace, facebook, youtube whatever. now these things are fine, but asking for developing countries governments to fund universal access to such stuff is ridiculous.
1. Form factor: Fabulous screen but the keyboard only allows those with small hands to use it. It loses value for high-school aged kids and needs to be 3cm wider.
2. The Windows direction is bullshit. We all know that Linux is not just the better choice, it's the one with momentum.
3. We also know that, when it comes to costs, what could be cheaper? Negroponte's Microsoft argument is spurious at best and a sellout at worst.
4. Each recipient country should have been directly involved in pre-loading their entire curriculum and pretty pictures of their current despotic leaders on every desktop of these little machines. This would have increased buy-in - big-time.
5. Swirl in a basic selection in the language of the region from http://gutenberg.org/ and http://www.wikipedia.org/ you have a decent pedagogic resource
6. Negroponte's reluctance to mass market the device to the home-town crowd was foolhardy. At the onset of the program, the First World consumers had credit to burn to buy a funky 'toy' computer for their kids from, say, Amazon. Forget buy on get one. Just sell one to you and me and make a profit to support the organization. At the time of it's introduction, the eagerness to get one's hands on the device was very high - a huge opportunity lost. Furthermore, the program should have been rolled out to the victims of Katrina (for example). The optics would have been excellent.
7. Distribution - the biggest flaw and a huge fiasco. Local aid groups should have been tied into the program rather than sending ONE GUY to set up all the machines for Peru. Training and distribution could have been piggy-backed onto existing NGO infrastructures.
8. Sugar: This should have come as phase two of the project, not from the get-go. Though simple and intuitive, it was not mature enough for prime-time. Don't try to be Apple and make an iPhone without zillions of bucks behind you.
9. Play well with others - it's obvious from all the spin-offs and rifts that Negroponte lacks the ability to work well with others. Some major big-bucks philanthropist should step forward and take the reigns.
10. Get the thing into University labs. Create a feedback loop to improve the software and usability experience. Use the world's educational resources rather than locking it down to a select few.
All in all, I'm incredibly disheartened by the slow, agonizing winding down of this very creative concept. How long it will take to die is anybody's guess.
*** Don't be dull.***
Apparently you are new to the conversation. Nobody says that spreading knowledge is what makes them elitist. What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale. When they did offer the OLPC in the 1st world, they were not going to let those dirty 1st worlders soil their holy work by letting them just buy one. If they are not willing to donate a machine to the 3rd world, then they are not worthy to be part of the OLPC club. Even if that means that 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale.
I could personally build a rugged hand powered computer for under $100 from single unit retail priced parts, but the OLPC group thought that wired networking and 8 bit processors were beneath them. If they were going to make a machine, it wasn't going to be a rugged really low cost machine. It was going to be a machine that made the 1st world envious, even if that meant that the 3rd world couldn't really afford it.
The OLPC group were elitist because they were not going to soil their hands with FOSS software that already exists, and would run just fine on the hardware they built. No, they insisted that they could write a better desktop than the ones with hundreds of thousands of man hours already put into them.
No, MS and Intel did not kill the OLPC. The OLPC is dieing because instead of building a machine that would bring computing to the 3rd world, they built a machine for well to do Americans and then didn't want to sell them to them. Heck, they would have been better off buying truck loads of Nintendo DSes and R4s than what they did.
So, no, it isn't the spread of knowledge that makes them elitists. It is the fact that they are unwilling to spread that knowledge if it doesn't stroke their ego and make them cool.
The OLPC is one of the most botched projects in my memory.
I want a cheap FOSS laptop more than most people, but it was a horrid design and very poorly implemented.
I've run machines from TRS-DOS, MS-DOS, Geoworks, EVERY Windows, Ubuntu, Zenwalk, FreeBSD, Amiga, Atari, several horrid commercial OSes for video production (Chyron was horrifying). But Sugar has to be the worst OS I ever laid eyes on. It didn't work at all. I couldn't even figure out how to open one damn thing, and what little experimenting I did was PAINFULLY slow and awkward. I could barely open wikipedia.
Can we please just have a FOSS XP clone with all our favorite apps and Urban Terror?
Firefox
Thunderbird
Winamp (or an exact replica)
Gimp
Open Office write
Nero (clone)
Pidgin
utorrent (clone)
Zsnes
Urban Terror.
This suite of tools works perfectly in XP, and well and fast. It seems like we could have a nix distro with these included on a laptop for $200.
I don't get it.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The specs were licensed freely (except the wireless and that was under discussion to change or be dropped).
So, yes, Namibia could build their own fab, make the hardware and sell it to their own people. Or make more and sell it to their neighbours too.
Rather than having them AND their neighbours paying the first world the profits the first world expects from their investment.
that not thinking people are bad and will play dirty seems to make you (in your eyes) an elitist arrogant prick.
THAT'S the fucking problem.
For fucks sake, if you had lived when Jesus was about, would you have called him an arrogant elitist prick because he thought Judas wouldn't sell him out?
You arrogant elitist prick you.
The stupid thing is the business model. They should just release the thing commercially to anyone who wants to buy in order to get enough orders to sell it on a massive scale and lower the price. OLPC was ahead of everyone on the netbook thing. They could have been what the eeepc is now. The eeepc was created because the head of asus wanted one of the OLPC laptops as a toy and couldn't get one. So they made their own. The Olpc could have owned the netbook market and it would have given them the means to change the world like they wanted. Just shows how academic heads can't run a business.
The organization has had serious problems with production and deployment and has been fragmented by ideological debates as Negroponte shifts the agenda away from software freedom and towards Windows.
Uh... Not to be a pedant, but to my understanding, the agenda never was 'software freedom', it was 'a tool that children in developing nations can use to learn and communicate and expand their skills and frame of reference'.
Free software enabled that (in the form of hacking on the machine itself), and Windows prevented it, but if software freedom was ever 'the agenda' they had the wrong attitude the whole time.
The OLPC project used open-source software because it was cheaper, and found the benefits of flexibility, but if they weren't thinking of the children first, the project would always be doomed to failure.
+1 I need mod points urgently!
The economics of scale idea was good imho. A large part of the price of computers (or any goods for that matter) is what the middle man takes.
By selling huge volumes at a time directly from the producers your cost structure is entirely different. And if you do it the right way you can be a lot cheaper. Also he was not selling goods in a traditional way at all. The OLPC is/was about an educational project. Like selling a school book to a country. They were not selling to the consumer at all, but to governments providing services. And that is all about politics. OLPC was popular, so a lot of countries signed on. But in many countries corruption is a very big factor. So many countries didn't follow through, because there was not enough pressure.
I still believe OLPC did everything right (well maybe except the including Windows part), they just didn't mount enough political pressure. I saw the XO first hand. It is a superb piece of hardware well suited for its task. I couldn't evaluate the software much.
In many poor countries books are taxed as luxury items, that is how expensive they are.
Even when the books are pirated (imagine, the original are so expensive that it pays of to photocopy the original and sell the copies) the cost is still substantial.
An electronic copy delivered via the Internet costs practically 0 to distribute. You can hardly beat that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In Mexico for example the books for primary education are all provided by the government. The distribution of theses books would be immensely cheaper in an electronic format.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don;t mind, but really - if you want to drive volume... And even then I was only able to get one for a limited special offer period.
This is what I found annoying. Everyone else here is complaining that we have to donate one, but they basically wouldn't let me help "drive volume" even with the "donate one" offer. The OLPC came out long before the EeePC, but I missed the first offer, and I didn't have the opportunity to buy one until I already had an EeePC.
Books are very expensive in poor countries. In many of them the government assumes the cost of production and distribution of books for primary education since the population could not afford them otherwise.
If each child had a cheap laptop the books could be distributed electronically, saving millions that could be put to other uses in the educational system.
Just that would be justification enough.
But something else elitist people in this website forget is that having a computer with access to the Internet is really an equalizer in terms of access to knowledge and the world economy.
Many children would be able to learn English and other languages by browsing the Internet (heck, many did so by watching Sesame Street on cable TV, the Internet is vastly superior on this regard), all children would have access to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, both items they would never see otherwise.
And of course they would be computer literate, which is a competitive disadvantage they will have to deal with: workers in other countries are raise with computers around them, people in poor countries may never have seen a computer before they are 18, so they start disadvantages when they go into University or looking for a job.
In an era where pretty much any job requires computer literacy it is a huge disadvantage not to be familiar with the basics of how a computer works.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What makes them elitists is that they were not going to soil their exclusive clientel by allowing those dirty first world kids to buy one, even if that means the 3rd world kids cannot get the benefit of economies of scale
That's not elitist. That's just being stubbornly doctrinal and a bit naive. Frankly, Apple is a bit more elitist, since you've got to have a fair bit of cash to get the hardware. Linux, while not quite elitist, is certainly selective in that you must be more industrious and inquisitive than the average computer user to use it.
Yes, the OLPC project should have simply sold XO units to whom ever had the cash. That's what a for-profit company would have done. Attempting to leverage the wealth of the industrialized nations to support the 3rd world ones isn't such a bad idea. I bought an XO in the first round of G1G1. It was $400, which wasn't an onerous hardship for me at the time.
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME? I still don't understand that at all. It's like these guys wanted to do a soft launch with their hardware.
Negroponte is considered something of a demigod at MIT, having founded the Media Lab. But I do think he executed poorly on this project because of his lack of business experience. I wonder if his brother would have done better.
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
He hasn't consumed any nuts, but he eats dicks every day.
As it was though, it was a glorified netbook.
No, it is the first real netbook. It's also the first cheap robust child friendly pedagogic computer that is a little more usefull then AlphaSmart and the likes. It invented the cheap general purpose school computer market.
It may be a failure as a product, but it was not a failure as a tool for spreading ideals.
Everything about Negroponte and the OLPC is elitist. The project was doomed to failure from the beginning and the only positive was the creation of the netbook market. They assumed (like do-gooders everywhere) that their good intentions would pave the way to success; now they blame evil bad everyone else when their pipe-dreams turn to shit in the face of reality.
A Thought Experiment: you are the Secretary of Education of a poor, small, rural and backward 3rd world nation with an even smaller budget. Do you:
a) buy quirky, beta-quality hardware running quirky, beta-quality software that is only being peddled to other poor, small, rural and backward third world nations.
OR
b) go with mainstream hardware and mainstream software that does the same things the rest of the world is doing?
You're just as elitist as they are for assuming you know what's best for the aforementioned countries. Pull your head out of your dirty hippie ass - the market is going to win out and a successful OLPC project would seek to harness existing manufacturers rather than bypass them. Did you really think Intel and Microsoft would stand by and watch their paradigm be destroyed? Please note that I am neither defending nor condoning their actions but merely noting their inevitability.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Well, what's a computer for? It's just a general purpose device. It doesn't need to have a specific use in mind when you design it.
The OLPC was for children to do whatever they like with (within the limitations of the device). It was a general education tool, with a child-friendly user interface, social tools, office and education software, and programming, as well as references like Wikipedia.
Now it's just ... Windows and Office.
I can't believe the number of posts here from people claiming how "obvious" it was that the OLPC would never work, and if Negroponte would just fix this or that aspect of the development strategy, the hardware, the software, the pricing, or the partner program, then everything would turn up roses.
There was nothing obvious about the adventures of the OLPC. They were defining an entirely new class of machine that, even now, has no true competitor (and no, none of the current netbook offerings have it right yet: they cost too much, they draw too much power, they can't be used in full daylight, and they aren't nearly rugged enough.)
When you are charting something this new, it attracts the best and brightest. These kind of people have huge egos, that's part of the package. So the fact that there have been lots of sparks flying is no surprise.
When you are trying to change the status quo this completely, it attracts intense opposition from the entrenched competition. I doubt any of us would enjoy putting up with the hammering, back-stabbing, broken promises and endless fight for oxygen that is probably a daily experience for the OLPC executives.
So, I say, cut these people some slack. Go buy a OLPC, and see what all the talk is about. I've been using an OLPC for a year now, and am daily impressed with how very different it is from any other device out there.
When you find yourself reading an ebook, and pass from the deep gloom of a subway station into the direct sunlight without even thinking about the fact that a normal PC can't do that, then you're graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself grabbing your XO without a case, walking in the rain to your car and throwing it on the back seat without a second thought, then you've graduated to the new OLPC world.
When you find yourself propping your XO up on a bowl in the kitchen so you can browse recipies on the web while you cook, and don't worry for a second about what might happen if you spill something all over it (been there, done that), then you've graduated.
This thing is really different. Give it a chance.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
here's a fun game: How would the OLPC have helped these people achieve that goal?
By giving them access to a superb eBook reader that can also run simulations and deliver things like latest prices for their crops so they can't get screwed over as much by jobbers from "the big city".
A lot of what can help people in the developing world is things like little eBooklets that teach either specific data like how to make a water purifier out of a trench, some branches and some plastic sheet and concepts like what a microorganism is and why you want to keep your children from drinking water that will give them diseases.
In the nineties a lot of NGOs focused on making latrines. Nice idea. I've now met waaay too many people who have visited those places for followup and found that since education in why clean water is important wasn't included, the latrines don't get maintained.
If you want to help people advance, then a device that can sit and run thourgh drills to help them learn how to read is golden. One that can go even farther and do things like teach better crop rotation or how to build a lower cost cob oven is wonderful. Add in the "spontaneous" creation of a peer to peer telecommunications system and you are seriously changing their lives for the better in a permanent way.
That was another big problem, they didn't have a clear set of examples of what it was actually FOR. As it was though, it was a glorified netbook.
My country (Uruguay) was the one that invested the heaviest in OLPC (all the school-age kids are getting it), and the main problem is not the computers themselves, or Sugar OS or whatever... it is that there wasn't a plan in place to actually use them for something worthwile (textbooks, etc..).
Teachers are NOT happy about that.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Why even bother with software? If the goal is learning and collaboration, just sell the hardware and include a hard copy of the system specs and some books on hardware-specific programming. Eventually, the cleverest third-world children will write all the software their classmates could ever need.
Microsoft and Intel promised cheap laptops with Windows to all countries interested in the OLPC project. Now those countries have neither and will never get anything of course, but at least Microsoft got rid of some more competition.
That's not true.
Windows users of iPods/iPhones are just one example of a non-Mac OS user going for support at a genius bar. They also provide pre-sales advice.
And Parallels is non-free software. I'm kinda glad more things don't support EFI. EFI is pretty terrible for freedom.
Join the Free Software Foundation
I participated in the G1G1 program on the dual basis that I could write software for the platform, and I could do something nice for a third world child. It seems that Microsoft has outsmarted me again. The OLPC is a lousy Windows machine and not worthy of my time to develop software for. My idealistic hope to do something nice for a child has come to unknown results. I can only hope that some child used it to access the Internet for a while, and that in and of itself would have been valuable IMHO. Otherwise I guess I am the owner of an orphan green notebook computer that never was able to access my Apple Airport wifi router because of WPA problems that were never fixed. Keeping a WEP setup just for the OLPC is not worthwhile because of the security implications. As the french would say, se la merde. I am a switcher and no longer write software for Windows, other than accidental compatibility based on Python. I am disappointed I guess that things didn't work out better overall for OLPC, but at least I tried.
I've always kinda liked the original idea of $100 laptop. Too bad OLPC couldn't do it. I'd have said those $350 little things at walmart killed it, but OLPC was already too dead/ill to matter. What I always thought of when I thought of OLPC was those $40-50 barbie laptop toys that you can see in walmart. They make want to cry.
We should be able to get real laptop abilities for kids at $50. Heck, my first computer was an apple IIC, my first real introduction to programing and such was the TI82, and I remember my parents paying an arm and leg for a 486 with 400 MB of HD space and CD drive. We should easily be able to design and build a laptop for kids for $50. Those $350 laptops make me drool. If we can do that for $350, the we should be able to get a 486 or a P2 level chip with a CF reader and keyboard, screen for $50.
I'm not like slashdot group think. I'd actually want windows on it. Maybe Windows 98 SE. It's been awhile since I've played with a Win98 machine. I'd think Win2000 would be far more stable, but it would drive the specs up. If you want XPHome, save your money for those $350 laptops and get your kid one of those. Every time I've played with a linux desktop, I've thought that it wasn't quite there, yet. If you could get it to run and do a few decent tricks that turn out to be a glorified e-book reader for $50 than I'd buy it just to play with linux. Linux can be a pain the butt to run on a desktop. I'd much rather have a toy laptop that doesn't really matter have something like linux on that I could play with rather than my real PC.
Slashdot just doesn't think realistically. I've yet to have the cash to buy one of those $350 laptops because they are still too expensive for my family. I'm more pissed that those that should have been able to push an affordable and useful toy for kids have just been spinning their wheels and wasting their time.
This is a late replay, so I suppose no one will read it, but I had to write something since a lot of people here clearly have not used the machine.
I used the computer for 5 months on a wilderness canoe trip. The hardware is definitely a fine product. What a lot of people don't realize is that the OLPC accepts a wide variety of power inputs, so instead of buying a regulator for my solar panel I could plug it directly into the computer. The keyboard was annoying at first but I quickly got used to it. The keyboard did develop "sticky keys" (caused I believe by the humid environment) but I was able to open it up and fix this. There were too many tiny screws to keep track of in a wilderness environment but most of them aren't needed. I threw tmany out and can just snap the computer open and closed if I need to clean it up inside again. Some sand did work its way into the computer but I suppose little can be done about that. The display is innovative and could be put into a low power consumption, monochrome mode - you don't see color in sunlight, anyway.
In summary the hardware was an iteration away from perfection, but was already much better suited to that kind of environment than any "first world" hardware will be any time soon. I will be very disappointed if the company does not continue to drive development of this hardware.
On the other hand, the software really was a complete disaster. They should have stuck much closer to a standard distribution. Why redesign the clipboard? WTF does redesigning the security model have to do with educating children? WTF is wrong with the programs and files paradigm? If you want to teach children to hack the OS you can't screw around with these things. At one point if you wanted to download files from the browser, the process involved taking the command line to the download directory, where downloaded files were automatically zipped to. The file names were arbitrary alphanumeric sequences, so you had to check the file size and date to guess which one was the one you just downloaded, and then unzip it to where you wanted. Seriously. There were many things like that that made the thought of development on the system itself nightmarish. I pretty much gave up on the Sugar applications - I used vi to write my journal, and often elinks to browse the internet, when I was in range.
It's no surprise the countries asked for Windows, they just wanted an OS that wasn't broken by design. As soon as I got home I upgraded to Ubuntu and have not looked back. Kids aren't stupid, they can figure out a real OS if you just give it to them.
Gee, it's almost like all those people who said that just throwing a bunch of laptops at kids isn't going to magically help them actually knew what they were talking about.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Frankly, I never did cotton to the Sugar UI (let's stop this talk of it being an OS please). I'm now running Ubuntu on the XO and I'm happier for it. Running XP on the XO hardware will be a joke.
Can you give me any useful advice on accomplishing that? My kids have been unsuccessful; they've been googling and following various how-tos but none have worked so far. They've had to reformat back to the OLPC OS distro every time in order to get the XO working again.
If you can supply any links or tips I'll pass 'em along to the kids. Thanks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That doesn't make sense. Unless the OLPC hardware and software were being made by the people in the countries buying them, they would be consumers no matter what OS was preinstalled. 99.99% of open source developers are in first world countries
99.99% of computers are in those countries, think about cause and effect here.
With a secret-based proprietary OS, you cannot become a producer, with an open OS, once you have the computer in your hands, you have that option open for you.
Most people will be happy to be users, just like how most people aren't musicians, but once you make the instruments available, then those with the inclination to do it have the opportunity.
You can't take the sky from me...
>...he market is going to win out Ahem. Have you read a newspaper recently? -- That said, I agree that putting together an ultra cheap Linux machine and selling it in the U.S. and Europe would, in a few years, have created a market for thousands or millions of used machines as consumers upgraded or moved on to more sophisticated machines, which could have been systematically purchased Mr. Negroponte and his ilk, and shipped to 3rd world countries. -- This would have saved nobody's ego. Not Negreponte. Not the 3rd world countries who might be too proud to purchase hand-me-downs. Too bad for them. -- It WOULD, however, have accomplished the goal of getting usable laptops to 3rd world children. -- And just a note "Dirty Hippie Ass" is no different from any other racist or religious insult. Should I refer to your "Dirty Conservative Christian Ass?"
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
why Microsoft wants Windows on the OLPC
They want to shape the minds of kids in a way that will increase shareholder value.
You can't take the sky from me...
Sorry, I was obviously assuming that my audience was already aware of how NN fucked up. He assumed Microsoft, Intel and all the politicians wouldn't play dirty. Then he whined about how dirty they were playing. They just ignored him, so he had a little hissy fit, then started making concessions. Game over. All of which could have been avoided if he had shown a little restraint and gotten buy-in from the big players.
You assumption that the dirty play would have ended at some reasonable point astounds me.
You can't take the sky from me...
Those idiots had no intention of buying Apple products--they were doing it for the hur-hur-hur "nerd cred" that comes from doing something so titanically stupid. The grunts on the ground aren't going to change Apple policy and the people who do wouldn't have even heard of the stupid little stunt. It was an idea conceived of by the basement dwellers and reaffirmed by the echo chamber of fellow gnulots that don't understand how the world actually works (and how that differs from how somebody might want it to work).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
People who might have been willing to buy an XO for $200 were probably put off by the $400 price tag. If their goal was to increase volume to drive down cost then they should have pursued sales ANYWHERE they could get them.
Their goal was to get poor kids learning opportunities otherwise denied to them, not to give cheap geeks a cool toy. They had trouble meeting the demand, much like Nintendo does with the Wii: Selling more to hose who don't need it would have made things worse, not better.
Their attitude seemed to be that we ought to be grateful for the opportunity to donate. My issue with that is that they chose to dicate the amount of contribution. That combined with the attitudes they seemed to come across with made me very hesitant to donate a dime to them.
I think the attitude problem here is the guy who demands cheap toys and refuses to contribute to charity, not the guys who deny cheap toys to those who won't contribute to charity.
You can't take the sky from me...
These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun :-)
If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon: here (subscription probably required)
H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)
Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.
Table of contents:
At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP ;-))
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
...he market is going to win out Ahem. Have you read a newspaper recently?
Yes, and wintel boxes still rule the market by an overwhelming margin. I get my news online- where do you?
Anyway, you're correct that a cheap linux box would fill the bill nicely.
Not the 3rd world countries who might be too proud to purchase hand-me-downs. Too bad for them.
Careful, your cultural elitism is showing. Why are you so sure it's pride and not a well reasoned desire to buy something better than used machines of dubious parentage? There's plenty of charities shipping used boxes. A high profile effort like OLPC ought to aim higher. The problem is they aimed too high & thought they knew better than the rest of the world. Wintel boxes still rule for a reason - standardization isn't always a bad thing.
Should I refer to your "Dirty Conservative Christian Ass?"
You could, but you would be both wrong and also expose your lack of a sense of humor - something that often seems lacking in elitist liberal do-gooders who "know" they're right because they have good intentions.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Amazing spin, there, byolinux. They were asking questions that they KNEW were not answerable by customer service. They were attempting to deny service to customers who actually needed to use customer service (their announcement specifically said they wanted to tie up every available appointment).
This was a DOS attack, plain and simple.
Customer service can't answer "Why can the iPhone 3G only be activated by Apple and AT&T?" or "The iPhone 3G has GPS support. How can users be sure that the GPS cannot be used to track their position, without their permission?" or even "Why does iTunes still contain so much DRM-laden music?" -- sure they can.
They were already answering questions about iTunes Plus with its limited amount of DRM-free music, for one.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Why wasn't the G1G1 programming running ALL THE TIME?
My assumption is that they couldn't afford to sell that many units.
I got one for my 7-year-old son in the first pass of the program. He likes it well enough, but it's really only worth maybe $150 in value, tops.
My biggest issue is that the system seems to assume that someone else is going to go out an collect a bunch of apps to make it useful for coursework - which, to my mind, is the harder problem to solve in the first place. So my kids enjoy a few specific parts of the system, but there's no scalability to lead them onward and upward. Even something on the order of what the Leappad/Leapster systems have would be helpful. Something where they can keep learning at their own level within the system even as they become more accomplished. I can completely see the potential for the unit to be useful for kids from 4 to 12 or so, but it's not there.
Hmm, a more pointed version of my complaint is that the system has a bunch of stuff on it which I can imagine computer geeks thinking would be useful for kids, but what it needs to have is stuff to make it useful for teaching kids about the world. Computers are just a tool.
I happen to be biased, but right now I'm more excited by the potential of Android in this space. Android plus an Eee 701 seems at least as compelling as an OLPC for first-world usage, and cellphone hardware is getting cheap enough that I can imagine it being able to address third-world usage, too.
Microsoft has been sabotaging this effort from day one.
I still remember the stunts they pulled in africa.
Have you actually played around with one? There's a LOT more there than just a "glorified netbook". There are a lot of very cool apps that IMO are quite well designed to teach kids about the possibilities that computers make available (I'm not talking about a basic office suite and the internet; the one I have has something that seems equivalent to Kate and a WPA bug that has prevented me from connecting it to the internet). I'm talking about programming and multimedia production, presented in ways that are accessible to kids like my 7-year-old daughter with little to no intervention on my part.
The purpose of the OLPC is quite clear; to give kids in developing nations a leg up into the digital age, and for that purpose it is very well designed. What they were able to do within the limits they imposed on themselves is astounding, but to know that you have to actually sit down and play with one. Sadly, what information the project makes available really gives you no idea of what the thing does.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Being as intentionally disingenuous as you are is demeaning to everyone involved, including yourself.
They specifically wanted people to clog up appointments so people with real problems and questions couldn't get in--and evangelize to them while they wait, too.
This was a meatspace DDoS, and you encourage people to join the organization that sponsored it. Bravo, sir. Bra-fucking-vo.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Check to see if you can do this.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Ironically, this is probably the crux of the problem. I can't just go out and buy and OLPC, I have to go through some hokey G1G1 dance at amazon, oops wait, it ended Dec 31, too late, sorry...
That's hard to cut someone some slack about since it's spitting distance to something like ooh your not part of the "club" you can't invest in this Madoff fund even though I know you really want to, but if you can wait just a little while, an opportuntity might come up later where you can invest, but you can't ask any questions...
That kind of crap just doesn't pass the smell test with me...
Nah. Book an appointment at all the Apple Stores in the area... around here it's 4 I think.
But you'd like to paint the FSF as doing a 'meatspace DDoS' as it helps you write them off as loonies I guess. Tell me, are you a Mac user?
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News. Also online, but not the Yahoo, MSN variety. I'm too elitist for that apparently. I like ft.com, the economist, the wall street journal and other liberal rags. Peakoil.com too despite the fact that it depresses me utterly.
Wintel rules the marketplace. Granted. Good marketing beats good engineering every time or we'd all be using macs. Lesson learned long ago. I'm aware that Windows solved the device driver problem through standardization. How important is that today?
FYI, I've bought and profitably used numerous used machines of dubious parentage. They served their purposes and made money. Had I been too proud, this option would not have been available to me.
LOL. I've *never* been accused of being a do-gooder (Just ask my tenants), or humorless for that matter. As for elitist, I grew up poor and rural. It did not make me an admirer of either.
Best regards, from a fairly clean, politically uncategorizable, non-christian.
That's why his elitist crap was never questioned. By not allowing direct sales to everyone who wanted one, he insured that they would never reach the number of units that would start driving down costs. Just because that's something a for-profit company would do doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. In this case, it's a damn good idea.
There were a lot of people that would have probably bought one, but didn't want to pay twice the real price for it. Face it, there are lots of people that don't a rip about the 3rd world. The failure of the G1G1 program is an example of this. The wide-eyed students that go on about wanting to develop solutions for the 3rd world would be better off thinking of solutions that can be used by anyone. They will probably have a better chance of it succeeding and becoming a real product rather than a few prototypes sitting in a basement of some aid bureaucracy collecting dust.
ditto?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Not at all; I can't stand the OS X look and feel more than anything, though they do put some great ideas into their machines. I've got a Windows XP Pro laptop, two Linux servers (one running the LAMP stack and also running my Windows 2k3 and Windows 2k8 virtual machines, the other my Mono development box), an old SPARCstation running some flavor of SunOS (don't have the thing plugged in), and an old laptop that dual-boots Xubuntu and XP Pro, though the latter gets more use as it's turned into my media and emulator-playing machine.
I work on whatever works properly and is the best tool for whatever I'm working on at the moment. I'm writing a web-based browser game in my spare time in PHP/MySQL; most of my consulting is either in .NET or in helping .NET people work better with Mono because they want to get away from Microsoft licensing costs.
I don't need any help from DefectiveByDesign to call the FSF a bunch of loonies. They've proven that very well themselves. And not for their licensing per se, though their licenses are unethical (CDDL/MPL good, BSD good, GPL bad--take a look and figure out why), but because they want to tell everyone else what to do with their code.
Code should only be free (and I use the real-world definition of "freedom," not Stallman's) when the creator chooses to make it so.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
It's true that the AMD Geode processor in the XO is underpowered. It's almost as slow as a Cray-1. But that's partly the point. It runs on only half a watt. The XO _maxes_ at about 8 W, an essential design point for villages where they take car batteries in a donkey cart to get them recharged somewhere else in order to keep their mobile phones running.
I agree about selling to the First World, which we are in fact doing. There are 15,000 units in Birmingham, Alabama, and trials in New York. Likely-soon-to-be-Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois is a strong supporter of giving every child in Illinois a laptop and a real education. (Blago is due to be impeached next week, with a trial in the IL Senate to follow.)
It's still about education. We're getting moving now on post-Gutenberg digital textbooks. Not PDFs of dead tree books, that is, but interactive learning systems based on Smalltalk, or incorporating the digital oscilloscope function of the XO, and much more.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks
It's also about social transformation. Google
OLPC ethiopia-implementation-report
or
OLPC Astounded-in-Arahuay
to get both the reports and the discussion about them.
As for XP on the XO: I am greatly looking forward to the spectacle of Microsoft shooting itself in all of its shareholders' feet by sponsoring trials of dual-boot XOs. We are going to see tests of Fedora Rawhide Linux and Sugar vs. XP and a lame set of so-called educational software on the same hardware by the same people, hardly any of them on the Microsoft payroll. I have not been able to think of a suitable Onion headline that could make this seem worse for M$ than it already is.
"A knot!" said Alice, ever ready to be useful. "Oh, do let me help to undo it!"
http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4053.0
I maintain that port -- it's unofficial, so I don't have any connection to OLPC project or Canonical, however the port is intended to be an adaptation of the current Ubuntu release with minimal changes that allow it to work on XO hardware and support XO-specific features (screen, power management, etc.) It uses Ubuntu repositories for packages installation and updates.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Who is elitist? Can you please reflect and expand on your repeated use of the word "backward"? It is simply shocking to read your writing.
You are probably employed by an agency that MS uses to disperse abject BS. The sugar interface is not the real point. The point is that Linux allows the user to have access to the source code and a panoply of free software and utilities. It also gives you the ability to update that software at will. At zero cost. No EULAs etc. XP gives you nothing but MS crapware. The registry bloats. the updates cause bloat. Before long you are beseiged by malware and trojans. The dishonesty of winning goodwill by espousing open source, only then to betray that honourable course, that is shameful.