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Negroponte Sees Sugar As OLPC's Biggest Mistake
griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."
Wow, my first thought was he must be on his deathbed and trying to scam his way into heaven. Then, I saw the first name.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The biggest OLPC mistake was Negroponte.
Things whent downhill the second they started working with MS.
Seriously, they should have stuck to ultra-cheap durable laptops, rather then try to cater to MS's Windows. They lost their focus and thats the end of them.
From the article(writer's words, not Negroponte's):
The "$100 laptop" term was the OLPC marketing failure. If the XO was again called the "Children's Machine", or better yet "the best educational tool for primary school children in the developing world", which isn't as catchy as "$100 laptop" but much more accurate, he would be crowing about multiples of millions of childrens, not just about one.
But calling it something like "Children's Machine" instead of "$100 laptop" might not have given it the chance of catching investor's or public's eye and might have died a death similar to many other types of custom machines. And running it on top of regular distros is not really feasible because the requirements for the OLPC were like 1 GB NAND flash drive and 256 MB. Run Ubuntu on a 8 year old machine now and you will realize that it's exactly very usable, even for web browsing.
This space for rent.
I now have an inexplicable craving for cookies.
Amazing how an interesting and informative comment can be totally ruined by pointless racism...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Its a shame Sugar didn't turn out to be as popular as it could have been. I know as a kid I used to play with the computer for hours on end, changing settings and playing with QBASIC (gorillas anyone?). By giving children an open source OS to play with (as well as some kind of instruction) they might have really had the opportunity to learn something.
However, in terms of the OLPC goal, they should of gotten on their knees and begged for Windows XP. Giving children all around the world laptops is the more important goal than spreading FOSS, and the lack of a windows environment is what helped its competition grow and crush the project. I remember at least one major sale was blocked because Intel's competing laptop (which was more expensive) had a windows environment. If they would of dual booted sugar, the children would of found it and learned it. If anything else, just to annoy their parents.
shithead who decided microsoft windows simply MUST run on the OLPC in 60 days?? and now his professional evaluation of the open source operating environment he wanted to replace is that it sould have been sitting atop vanilla linux??
whats left? a big bold redmond boilerblate on the case that says "fuck you red-hat" with clippy waving the bird?!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Compatibility is a very, very important feature. And the more complex something is, the more important compatibility becomes!
Every technology has its "API" - the specific interface between it and its environment. And it's very, very, very important to ensure that this "API" is consistent with existing implementations of the technology in order to be successful.
We have many different models of cars, all with their respective features, at price points that range from $2,000 to $200,000 and this is OK because they all have steering wheels, gas/brake pedals for the right foot, and will fit on a standard road.
Take *any* of these basics out of the equation, and you suddenly have a non-starter. The interface between a car and the gas station is but one simple parameter, and yet electric car company startups have come and gone simply because this simple interface breaks.
When looking at an operating system, it's very, very important to maintain compatibility between the operating and applications, sure, but it's also important to maintain compatibility between the operating system and its USERS. It's vexing for users to switch from MacOS to Windows, or from Windows to MacOS, and both have long-established, entrenched interfaces that they are all *very* slow to change. Windows still has it's "X" window kill switch in the top right corner, etc.
With this in mind, it's not a surprise that a whole new graphical interface for a start up caused all kinds of problems. Sure, it's innovative, logical, easily learned, etc. The meta-language Esperanto has all these qualities, yet we all still speak English, with all of its spelling oddities and grammatical exceptions and cruft from its thousand-plus years of history.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Negroponte sounds like he was the kind of kid that even the geeks stuffed into lockers.
And what a shame, cuz he's always seemed like such a pleasant, down-to-earth, inclusive fellow...
Hey, guy, I think most of your points are valid on some level - but why resort to a completely gratuitous racial slur. Making fun of people's names is what I would expect from 3rd-graders.
Brett
First, advertising it at first as a $100 laptop was a mistake...it's stupid to announce a price before you figure out what your cost structure is going to look like.
Second, and more importantly, the distribution plan was flawed. Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government. Most charitable organizations learned decades ago that trying to get corrupt governments interested in doing something for the interest of their poorest citizens is a recipe for failure.
What they should have done is sold these things to charities that already work in these areas and have knowledge of the difficulties involved and would know where the greatest need is. They should have been dumping these things on charities as fast as they could take them, but instead they were busy trying to get these governments to distribute them, thereby assuring they were only going to be going to countries with relatively stable governments with experience delivering large-scale deployments of things like electrical power to their residents. This means the people that would get them were the ones least likely to benefit.
Third, they didn't do enough to get the American public interested in the project...sure, there were a bunch of stories in tech rags about how cool this was going to be and how no one could get them unless they were a poor person in a third world country, but that was it. This meant the people most likely to have the spare cash to donate to this cause didn't know enough about it, and never had a chance to get their hands on one except through the short-lived "buy one, get one" program.
The Internet is fast becoming what electrical power was 50 years ago: It separates the people who are able to participate in the global economy from those who can't. The so-called "digital divide" has been largely closed in this country, but it remains a huge problem globally. The OLPC program is and has been a great idea with a piss-poor implementation plan.
When your customized system takes 2-3 times as long to boot as Windows on the same hardware, you probably have made a mistake. Maybe next time don't write it all in python.
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
No, the biggest mistake that the OLPC mas that they didn't make cheap, rugged computers. If they had stuck with it, I would imagine they could end up turning a profit by selling cheap computers to the first world. Instead they decided to go with MS and now rather than having a usable, cheap rugged machine their new vision is using (relatively fragile and currently expensive) multi-touch screens for everything.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have to admit, I was convinced, and continue to be convinced by the logic behind Sugar.
The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.
More than just an eBook conduit, the device is supposed to be a collaborative learning aid - allowing kids to create and share over the network, conceivably creating learning communities beyond their own village.
I'm not a Negroponte fan, but I partly agree with him. Not that Sugar was a total bust, but that overall utility would have been increased if Sugar had been an application running on a standard Linux distro, rather than a whole desktop environment. There might have been less griping from the G1G1 people who thought they were getting a "laptop" rather than an educational appliance which is what the XO is with Sugar as its desktop environment. Could have been an easier sell to governments as well for satisfying similar expectations. Then Sugar could have been allowed to do its thing in the classroom context it was designed for, while leaving open the option to use it more as a regular laptop outside of that context.
Loose lips lose spit.
Sugar is a great interface for new users, but it is way too different from what is out there already. M$ has established what a computer interface should look like. Even GNOME and KDE have elements that are similar to Windows. The decisions to buy into these laptops are being made by people that use a windows interface. When they see an XO, they see a toy not a computer. To them a computer has to have some kind of menu and windows.
Develop thicker skin. You don't throw out all the good stuff just because you find one element offensive. If the U.S. government had told Von Braun to fuck off on his rocket ideas just because he used slave labor in his factories and was a SS officer, we wouldn't be celebrating the Apollo landing anniversary today.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The big mistake OLPC made was Nicholas Negroponte. He's too much into his own self-importance. His thing was dealing at the national leader level and getting himself into the press. What was needed was somebody who knew how to get a low-cost product out the door and sell it in quantity.
The OLPC should have been in a bubble-pack in every Wal-Mart and Walgreens in America, in every souk in the Middle East, and in every market in India, selling at a small profit and dropping in price every three months. But no, Negroponte had to try to make big deals with governments. That might have happened after they actually had the product out there in volume.
Sugar has had it share of issues, to be sure, but this notion that OLPC should be a hardware company is quite absurd. Thanks but no thanks -- hardware is a commodity that you can get from anywhere. It is the creation of innovative software, specifically tailored to children, that makes the device interesting or not.
The meta-idea of rethinking UI from the ground up, and building something specifically directed at kids, was a wonderful idea. Frankly, the reason I bought a G1G1 machine was that I hoped to experience a fresh and wonderful user interface.
I think Sugar was a sad failure. I don't quite know what to make of the obvious riposte that I don't belong to the target audience. But an awful lot of the official Sugar documentation seemed to me to make too much use of "proof by repeated assertion." A file system organized primarily by recency (the Journal) instead of space (the Apple pre-OS-X Finder) or nested hierarchy (pre-GUI)? Wow, what a strange idea. What a fresh idea. I couldn't imagine how it could work, but all these people said it did, so after giving up on imagining it I paid $400 to experience it. Well, it sure didn't work for me.
And the claim that it works for kids because they "naturally describe what they are doing"--sorry, I just don't believe nine-year-old kids are going to type text tags and descriptions into every Journal entry so that they can find them again. Subject to correction by anyone who's actually watched real nine-year-olds playing with an XO and seen them tag and describe Journal entries, but the last several times I asked this online nobody said they had.
UI design seems to me to have peaked sometime in the early 1980s, when computer companies still needed to seduce laypersons who weren't already trained on computer usage. As "computer literacy" became more and more of a career necessity, computer companies were able to get away with more and more complexity. For me, an important downward turning point occurred when Microsoft violated Apple's UI guidelines, which stated that documents should always re-open with the insertion point positioned where it was when the document was closed--a special instance of the principle that things should stay where you put them. Microsoft couldn't be bothered; with Word, like Sisyphus, you always start with your insertion point once again having rolled down to the bottom of the hill. Other companies, eventually including Apple, followed suit, and this minor but significant point of UI design was lost, along with many others.
A fresh look at UI design is desperately needed. UI design is now in the hands of power-user snobs who revel in their ability to handle complexity. Ordinary people resign themselves to forever feeling that "I'm just a dummy when it comes to computers." The world desperately needs a user interface so simple a child could use it. A pity that Sugar isn't it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
every time some new way to apply linux to comes to fruition i find that the biggest part of it is just a reinvention of what is already available, its a waste of resources!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...followed quickly by the hardware at #2.
Seriously, they missed the boat on faster chips by about a generation, chips that would have been 'good enough' to do web browsing and video playback at a low power draw. The Geode (right?) in the XO is just too slow.
That's how trolling works.
Free Martian Whores!
John Negroponte is not African American.
Nor is he mentioned in the article.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I've been an OLPC skeptic from the beginning: it is a poor value option for the markets to which it is being directed (where the money could be spent more effectively just by paying for teachers), there are better options for less money (see the PlayPower project) and it is really about a very old model of aid, in which rich countries treat poor countries as little siblings receiving hand-me-downs rather than understanding their distinctive social dynamics. The PlayPower project also gives more opportunities to local economies to actually produce the hardware and software involved, something else relatively ignored by OLPC.
OLPC was crippled by hubris from its inception. I wouldn't blame its problems on Sugar.
I think we shouldn't celebrate this fact, that whole program was only there for propaganda purposes, not scientific.
Wow, you just went out and said it. For your information, the preferred nomenclature is American Ponte of African Descent, or maybe Pontifex Maximus in keeping with the whole ego thing.
I am in an excellent position to evaluate this issue, having purchased one of the first XO OLPCs through the give-one-get-one (GOGO) program for an 11 year old child, and then obtained an Asus Eee PC netbook running Xandros Linux (a window-ized interface to Debian Linux, along the lines of Ubuntu).
The 11-year old's verdict: thumbs down for Sugar, thumbs-up for Xandros. She gave up with fiddling on the XO after a few weeks, but loves to use the Eee PC. As the network support resource for my household, I can further point out that Sugar shipped with unusable wireless security (WEP only), which some months later was upgraded to WPA, but with this fatal flaw: every time the computer is powered up the user has to reenter the entire passphrase to get wireless access. Since a rather lengthy and obscure passphrase had been previously selected to provide household network security, this was an intolerable nuisance to an 11-year old. And dumbing-down the household security for the convenience of one cheap product is unacceptable to this network support resource.
Perhaps the passphrase remembering problem has since been fixed (since the XO is not used by its target audience any more I am not inclined to upgrade the OS to test it) but it illustrates the fatal problem with the Sugar approach: writing a decent OS is hard work, and taking a quick and dirty stab at it gives a foundation of sand for the whole offering. Absolutely they should have run a solid robust proven OS (Linux) for the system, adding on what ever they felt was needed.,/p>
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Seriously, as public statements and press coverage go that is about the best interview of Prof N about OLPC I have ever seen. It was sneaky that the bit the FA is named after is in a pullout outside the main article.
The OLPC XO effort was fantastic and developed some great technology AND a really neat little computer with the most open specifications ever. Sugar's software architecture is still not portable enough and that is a problem, but it is one that could be solved with programmer hours. You buy those with money, and SugarLabs is a charity. So, go code or donate, eh? I'll throw in on a bounty to increase Sugar portability. Get it to build and run natively (not X Window, mind ... there's some native GTK stuff) on Mac OS X 10.3 or newer and I've got $100 USD for you. I expect some other folks will chip in for a similar offer for a version that runs natively on Win32/64 (also no X Window, native GTK exists).
Now, where the heck is My TouchBook! On that note, how does Sugar work on armel, hmm?
<script>alert("I never liked JavaScript, really; it just seemed a bad idea.");</script>
I'm a guy thats had 3 linux boxes and all the rest OS X Apples, so I'm not a MS-friendly troll. Sugar just sucks. The array of educational apps are totally fine. I've been tempted to overwrite the OS with Ubuntu, but actually desire the edu-focus for my toddler, who has already inherited this machine. Now that Windows is in the picture I see this whole project as a curse on those its trying to help. My understanding is Sugar was unlike most of the FOSS movement, written by a Temple of one/few people rather than a Bazaar of multiple-minds. An object lesson in failure.
Why is this marked troll, its a good idea. The major problem I could see is keeping connectivity with the "cloud" even if it was (geographically) locally hosted.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Reading this quote made me think:
"But what we did...was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management--it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess."
I always thought that sugar was the graphics interface(Window manager, desktop and widgets, something like kde or gnome, but lighter).
So is he confused about what sugar is, or is sugar really a kind of mini os, operating on a linux kernel? Why should sugar for example include a wireless driver as part of sugar, instead of including the wireless driver as a standard linux driver, and then letting sugar communicate with it, as it would with any other driver.
partner up with Google to use ARM processor based ChromeOS laptops (,,,)
Each village gets a web server with wireless Internet access that can run Cloud applications in Google Chrome to save on storage space and invent new Cloud applications to run with Google Chrome.
Exactly, but, HTML5 defines it so that servers are not needed for web apps to run. Each web app, could be 200kb, is cached and stored on the ARM laptop's memory according to how the Chrome Browser works. Each web-app only need to be updated when new versions are published. And web-apps also interact with a local database hosted on the $100 Chrome laptop itself.
As for what village servers should be, I think OLPC should develop $50 WiMax2WiFi, WhiteSpaces2WiFi and HSDPA2WiFi routers. Those routers can also have a few GB built-in storage, be able to host low power USB hard drives eventually as well (where the USB hard drive is only powered when data needs to be stored onto it from a flash memory based multi-GB buffer). Then basically one router only required per village, and OLPC needs to keep going the meshing WiFi systems to spread that Internet in each village.
Chrome OS needs to manage meshing as well, the setting should allow for Web apps and local databases of contents also to be automatically shared on Mesh networks.
Before we all jump on the OLPC/Sugar hater bandwagon, let's read the actual quote:
So it sounds like the problem, as Negroponte see it, was the Sugar was written as a pseudo OS/large chunk of user space when it should be acted more like a kiosk application on top of more traditional software to run things like power management.
Sugar it's self, as an interface, still seems like a good idea to me. It's a good idea to give people a simplified user interface for basic tasks. Why should kids in Nigeria or Malaysia have to learn a "traditional" interface? Remember our "traditional" interface exists because of historical storage limits (which for OLPC don't matter, you don't need everything on a 50kb disk, you have hundreds of megabytes free) and user training (they were familiar with CP/M, DOS should do files the same way. They were familiar with DOS, Windows should do files the same way...).
It's very hard for us to switch off of 20-30 years of average people being used to files onto something more like a journal or database, but something like the OLPC was the perfect chance to get computer users who weren't saddled with all that (at least initially).
Sugar: Good idea, implemented in a way which broke the layers of abstractions it should have been built on.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I was at a trade show and saw the OLPC a couple years ago.
In theory you could pick one up and play with it.
In practice, all were broken in one way or another -- missing keys, broken mice, frozen software, broken wifi antennas, dead screens...
If you can't even get your stupid device to work at a *trade show*, then you've got problems. Why would I buy something that clearly doesn't work?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This was their worst error: they tried to make business with countries with corrupt governments. OLPC tried for years to sell to Mexico, with no avail, instead Mexico choose a commercial company for their massive computing for children projects (eg. enciclomedia www.enciclomedia.edu.mx). OLPC had no money to "lobby".
I can't believe this doofus is trying to lay the blame on the OS. I had a fully functional X server running Linux in the early 90's on a 486/33. How they could screw up the coding so bad as to drag a 400MHz processor to its knees is just amazing. The flavor of Linux involved is irrelevant. There was so much layering of interpreters and scripts that the house of cards couldn't help but be dog slow. If the smalltalk junk hadn't been somebody's pet project before OLPC the system might have had a chance of working well.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I am responsible for a half-dozen different "appliance" server platforms. They all have Linux at the core, but a specialized CLI and GUI (usually web-based) layered on top for administration and maintenance of the box itself, and configuration and monitoring of the application it runs. They are by no stretch of the imagination Unix servers, despite a *nix-like core underneath, where the user can't get at it easily (or at all).
This is standard industry practice in the year 2009, and not a "mistake."
The mistake made wasn't committing to Sugar first, the hardware second - the rush to cram Windows on their boxes was stupid and self-defeating. The OLPC was best categorized as a personal computing appliance rather than a general purpose workstation, and Sugar was and is fantastic for this purpose. By committing to the learning-appliance concept, they could tweak Sugar to run on whatever hardware offered the most bang for its buck. Processors come and go, storage drives obsolete themselves like clockwork... it doesn't matter. The processor isn't the purpose, the RAM is not the point. The point is that the kids have a computer that's easy to learn, rewarding to master, simple to maintain and reliable under all circumstances... and that starts with the interface.
Besides, Apple doesn't have a problem running its interfacer overtop *nix.
The key to it all is that kids own their machine, so all the admin stuff (networking, power management, etc.) *needs* to work within a consistent, simple GUI.
That said, from the first time I heard of OLPC, through all of its iterations and twisting and turning of the plot, I always assumed that OLPC was bound for failure. Not because I wanted them to fail. As little as I thought about the idea, implementation and execution, I thought that at least their heart was kind of in the right place, if a little misdirected.
I was never able to figure out just who the eventual product was built for. In a western or otherwise developed nation mindset, a child has belongings, receives an allowance or "walking around money" and has personal objects that are his or hers. Step outside of this privileged world and the notion of a child's right to personal property becomes a strange thing indeed.
When I set up a therapeutic feeding center in a disaster, conflict or famine hit area, much of the time, we have to get the people to feed their children right then and there. Why? Because if they don't, half that food's going to end up on the market. This applies to any aid good in most of the poorest countries. Plastic sheeting for sheltering IDPs and refugees? Within two weeks, you'll see that stuff as commercial building material in town.
So this notion of distributing laptops to the poorest of the poor, the kids who buy 5 sheets of paper at a time for school, is absurd.
Okay, so it's not for people who are THAT poor. The problem is that once you get into the range where some people wouldn't sell the laptop for money in order to cover other basics (such as school uniforms or supplies), you're in that class of nation that has extreme inequalities. This is the type of country where the family with a maid, a cook and a driver sees open sewers on his drive to school. Generally, these are the countries that are the most corrupt and the haves will take while the have nots will never get. Is this the type of country to which the OLPC was supposed to go?
The proposed models of distribution never made sense. The only thing that did was the mass-market argument made by some. The "put them in blister packs in the checkout rows at Walmart" crowd. Unfortunately, the realities of a commercial venture conflicted with the philosophies of the people running the show.
Personally, I think their biggest mistake was not selling it to first world consumers. I know a lot of people who would have liked to buy one, but couldn't. This was a fatal mistake since their plan required being able to produce large enough amounts of these to be able to sell them cheaply, and they were turning away the people who were willing and able to buy at the time.
I think this is only a symptom of the biggest mistake, which was a flawed vision of how this project needed to work. Negroponte thought he could swan into the offices of big-time politicians in third-world countries and just talk them into buying these computers en masse, even while he insisted they were not really computers (and could not run Windows) but educational tools. Educational tools? At $100 a head (and climbing)? How many of these countries are investing $100 per student to build schools? What's more, how well has this model ever worked for vaccines, or malaria nets, or cooking stoves? The only way Western countries have managed to bring these things to the poorest people of the world is for independent charities to strap on their boots and go deliver them by hand. Governments are not going to do it for you.
Further, and more to your point, so you put a $199 laptop into the hands of a child of a family that doesn't earn $199 in six months. What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed? One of the main reasons people in third-world countries have lots of kids is that they need them, particularly in areas where people are regularly knocked out of commission by malaria for half the year. So how long is it going to be before that family sells the OLPC?
And then what? Exactly. The OLPC ends up in the hands of ... someone who can afford to buy it. This is Negroponte's real biggest mistake: Denying the basic forces of economics.
If, on the other hand, he had put them into every Wal-Mart -- or screw that, Walgreen's -- and every souk and ever bazaar, in the teeming millions, it might have had a shot. The only way to counteract the economic forces in the poorer regions is for not just the cost, but the value of the device to be low... and the only way to do that is to bump up supply. Keep focused on making the devices virtually ubiquitous, as commonplace as bicycles. In short, the OLPC project needed a lot more people on board and a lot more money backing it. It needed the participation of international charities and it needed to be subsidized by people buying the devices here (at a "novelty" markup, even).
Instead, they went with the "I just need to go shake hands with Nice General Abouda, and he'll help us out" model. Seems like a recipe for failure, to me.
Breakfast served all day!
Angstrom or something similar would have done.
It can be easier to design the hardware to suit the software sometimes. Use chips which have good drivers.
I'm sure OLPC inspired these small cheap netbooks that seem to be flooding the market now.
Apparently the people moderating my comments don't understand why moving things to the Cloud would improve on the OLPC project and solve the problems and fix the mistakes.
Yeah it is a good idea, and on topic with the story. But since I am Orion Blastar I get marked as "troll" or "offtopic", and I get used to that sometimes. Someone can write the same thing as me and get "insightful" and "interesting".
Consider that Sugar is written in Python, it can be easily ported to Jython and then run in a Java Virtual Machine via the Cloud. Once that happens not only OLPC machines can access it, but any other computer device with a Java Virtual Machine and Internet access.
It is a good idea, but because I came up with it and not someone else it is a "troll" or "offtopic", please see my signature for why I get rated as such.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I didn't think the OLPC was anything special until I saw the Sugar environment.. it's the best, most innovative software I've seen for international children. Sugar is what makes the machine what it is - and therefor far better than any other hardware/software combination that has been produced. If the implementation (as to what layer it goes down to) is the issue.. then I guess that's up to them and their development efforts. But the fact that kids can "view source" on any screen that they see I think is golden. If not right away, that should be something that reaches down to the very core of the OS so that kids can learn down to the core as well. If it's just an app, that's a good start but it should go further. The naming/marketing is a hurdle though, yes.
only "poor" countries. China is currently in better shape than most of the west, BUT now would be the time to sell it to the west. Books cost LOTS of money. The ability to put a $100 computer in a child's hand with 20/year for new material would lower most of the school budgets.They really should be targeting the west.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Then celebrate the accomplishment, not the motivation.
Funny, because I rarely hear about any Asian people being demeaned with that epithet.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Like many great technologies before it, the biggest and most lasting contribution of OLPC has been in its imperfect imitation by other companies.
Standard disclaimer, I've used a zillion operating environments, like most /.'ers, with my favorites being VMS and Ubuntu's flavor of GNOME (In MY DAY, we used punch cards, and we had to punch the holes out with a hand-bone of a squirrel we had to catch and skin ourselves. Now get off my lawn!). I also bought a GOGO Sugar machine. My kids hated it, I hated it. The wireless would lose all connectivity after each 24 hours (yes, my DHCP lease was infinite), after taking days of fiddling just to get it to talk to the secure wireless modem. I eventually gave up and got a USB wired ethernet connection. It still would hang randomly, though less often. And the only thing the machine ever did was FireFox. The "documentation" was more missing than real. I chalked all that up to the program being more focused on getting the machines to Peru and Mongolia. But it didn't make the system any less painful to use.
It now sits on the floor in my office, in a dusty heap. If I ever get the motivation I'll put a flavor of real Linux on it, but that's pretty unlikely.
If it had come out with a semi-standard Linux interface I think it would have stood a better chance of success, if only to me. How long did it take to develop the environment and apps when the resources could just as well have been devoted to making a lean and mean distro to fit the hardware? Poor resource planning, it seems.
In the immortal words of Tom Lehrer:
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
They didn't just lose focus, they lost a lot of goodwill by working with MS.
The push for XP came from the education minister - the guy who is expected to sign a purchase order for 100,000 units.
This was a fatal mistake since their plan required being able to produce large enough amounts of these to be able to sell them cheaply, and they were turning away the people who were willing and able to buy at the time.
The XO-1 was something of a cross between an e-book reader and a netbook - when neither product was clearly defined or particularly economical to produce.
The first to dive off the pier-
usually misses the deeps, hits his head on a rock and drowns.
The netbook may still lack a clearly defined market: Many netbook buyers aren't happy [June 21]
It wouldn't be entirely unfair to describe sales of the Linux netbook as "a flash in the pan."
OLPC needed to sell millions of units each year to avoid being lapped by its commercial competitors. I don't think that was ever going to happen.
That's not a good comparison to the post that sparked his comment.
Von Braun offered more than comments. When a person's entire topical output is a written comment on a message board, then overt racism in the comment is cause to ignore the whole thing.
Simply put, a comment on slashdot is not *important* enough to override the derision such outright racism deserves.
That's my opinion, yours might differ -- but I think that overlooking such blatant racism is tantamount to approving of the racism.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
... if he had chosen some other OS+Desktop? Linux flavors? OS X as Apple had proposed? Imagine what would the OLPC look like now running iPhone OS. But somehow I think by 2nd year there would've been lawsuit from someone, or back-stabbing manufacturers, or supply line problems that it'll still cost more than a smartphone, and he would've switched to Windows XP anyway from marketing pressures. So all this reflection is pointless.
To make a really bad car analogy, bad marketing didn't kill GM, in fact marketing kept GM on life support for decades *in spite of* their crappy cars.
The XO as delivered during the first G1G1 (and to country projects during that period) was nearly unusable. Hardware functionality was great, but the software didn't measure up at all, in several respects. Software was still experimenting in blue sky when they needed to be delivering on goals.
First, it didn't perform acceptably within the severely limited RAM (severe for non-memory-footprint-optimized software). Most likely running the same software on the XO gen-1.5 refresh will fix that level of performance issues.
Second, the software was not complete, in that promised features were not yet implemented. Some were important in the real world, like the advanced power saving. Things crashed a lot.
Third, the software implemented experimental ideas like the Journal, which were under revision without taking end-user feedback into serious consideration.
[And Fourth, it was damned hard for willing FOSS volunteers to contribute meaningfully. The build you could easily download and run and report bugs on was far obsolete from what the developers were running, and getting in sync with them was tough.]
From what I could see on the developer mailing lists, they had a severe cat-herding problem. Too many smart people going in whatever direction their creativity and youthful self-confidence took them, rather than getting all hands on deck to recognize the shortcomings and get them fixed *now*. I think they undertook this project in the spirit of constructivism, when they needed to switch gears and deliver a product. Too much green hat, not enough blue hat.
Those are my opinions as a fan of the project.
Although many here have already decried Negroponte's politics, alliances with Microsoft/Intel, the distribution model, or Sugar's technological structure as possible points of failure for the OLPC project, nobody has mentioned one of the project's biggest flaws:
What was the educational value of the OLPC? Where were these free textbooks and online teaching resources? Many educators in the first world would love to get their hands on these mythical free educational resources touted by the OLPC project and its supporters.
If we can compile a range of free educational resources (specifically engineered and targeted for children), we can solve more problems than any piece of hardware possibly can. Laptops are nice, but useless unless you have information worth accessing. The developed world hasn't found good uses for laptops in the classroom....why would someone think that they'd be more practical or applicable in countries that don't have access to running water?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Is Vista the Ferrari in your analogy?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Yes, and because the the propaganda value a lot of good scientific progress was made, while the propaganda-free space "exploration" program of today is constantly on the verge of collapse due to budget cutbacks and nay-sayers who would maybe let us have a few robot probes but would never put a man on Mars. Sometimes propaganda is called "marketing," and sometimes it really does make the difference.
It's a shame for everyone who read deeper into this, because the whole pretext of this story is based on an over approximation.
Negroponte said this:
[T]he biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application
He in no shape or form said Sugar was a mistake! He is talking about the implementation, you fools! It is like saying the automobile was a mistake, when the inventor just said he should have used a cleaner engine.
The person disagreeing with the words they put in Negroponte's mouth says:
Sugar was not a mistake, it is one of the defining aspects of the XO laptop, and saved it from even more unfavorable comparisons to traditional laptops and accusations of being underpowered.
Right. So in what way are you disagreeing with the claim that Sugar should have been more modular, the system architecture should have been simpler, and that Sugar could have been more interpolatable with other systems?
Those were the things I was interested in, plus the original idea of a built in biodrive power supply, the crank. I have several different freeplay/bayless radios and they are spiffy. I sure would like one, and at 100 bucks, the original target price. . I'll hold out until it gets closer. Those new arm based netbooks will be coming out soon, but I doubt any of them will have that sunlight readable screen or a windup auxiliary power supply. I was thinking of cannibalizing one of the spring/windup radios and having a DC out put jack for the thing. They last (roughly, pretty close) 30 minutes on 60 cranks. Just for a hoot, and because the power goes out here all the time. Now I just use battery lamps and an inverter and a big marine battery, but I'd like the crank for a little emergency and fun laptop, and for outside use. The *screen* like you say though is the biggee, I've never seen any electronic screen IRL that was worth a hoot in bright sunshine. Supposedly the lady inventor who came up with the OLPC screen left and formed her own company, but then I never heard whatever became of any projects with this tech she might have had. I am not aware of any major laptop manufacturer using her screens. Wonder why not? I know those kindles, etc have a viewable in bright light screen, but don't know if any "real" laptops have them yet. They might, I just haven't heard of any.
Good link, thanks!
the fundamental idea behind the project was corrupt. the idea that computers are essential for early education is a joke. we have seen most every child in the west given access to computers in endlessly wasteful school technology programs and of course at home. whats come of this? every other kid becoming a programming genius/math wiz? or tons of people posting on the youtubes and twitter:P after decades of school computer spending we know the answer on the real value of computers in the classroom. if they had been effective as claimed we wouldn't be importing scientific/engineering talent from other countries at the rate we are, we'd have a ridiculous supply of our own. just as how all those early computers in elementary school got used for "oregon trail" and "carmen sandiego" the thinking behind shoving tech into little hands was based on fantasy. they should have spent the money on better basic education programs, not tech. and not just in the developing world, but here in the west as well.
The XO-1 was something of a cross between an e-book reader and a netbook
I have to disagree. The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way (I own one, and I'm quite happy with it). IMO the only reason it gets a comparison to an ebook reader is because they had to figure out a way to make the screen readable outside. Frankly, I wish I could say that either my laptop or my netbook were usable outside, that would be really nice.
The first to dive off the pier-
usually misses the deeps, hits his head on a rock and drowns.
Sad, but true...
The netbook may still lack a clearly defined market: Many netbook buyers aren't happy [June 21]
Well yeah, they're unhappy for the same reason a lot of XO-1 buyers are unhappy: they had no understanding of what it was they were buying.
I'm quite happy with my netbook (HP mini still running HP's distro), but when my non-computer-geek friends use it, they question my sanity for buying it. The difference is, I'm not expecting it to be a real computer. I already have one of those sitting on my desk hooked up to a 26" monitor, plus a real laptop for when I need to do some real computing on the go.
The netbook is light and small, so I don't mind carrying it around everywhere I go. I can get on the net, run openoffice, do a bit of coding in vi... basically, it does most of the things I need a computer for when I'm on the go. I'm not going to try and squeeze MATLAB onto it, but if I ever get around to setting up remote access on my desktop that should be taken care of as well.
In short, the key to being happy with your purchase is to know what you're buying, and don't expect it to be more than that.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Marketing was extremely successful - the buy one get one program was oversubscribed initially. Then it fell apart - why? because kids didn't like it. Sugar is confusing and obscure and extremely limiting. My kids were extremely excited at first, but the barrier to entry was just too high. Even the couple of neat applications they did like were hidden by obscure icons and took a long time to find even with adult help. But no more applications (at least that could be easily found) - and after some frustrating excursions into 'obscure command line solutions' hell there is no enthusiasm to keep trying.
When the product just doesn't deliver, the marketing challenge is exponentially harder
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
I never understood OLPC. They were so proud of themselves offering "compact functionality for the price" or such... so why not just Reuse&Recycle the best of Last Generation Tech?
Fast sample from ebay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/LOT-OF-1000-DELL-OPTIPLEX-P4-2-8GHz-512MB-40GB_W0QQitemZ220452263147QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3353fa94eb&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A2150|293%3A1|294%3A50
Or if the link gets eaten,
LOT OF 1000)DELL OPTIPLEX P4 2.8GHz/ 512MB/ 40GB
Item condition: Used
Time left: 13h 2m 56s (Jul 21, 200915:34:05 PDT)[Refresh]
Bid history: 17 BidsSee history
Current bid: US $31,433.00
That's nice. $31 per machine. $10 for a HD, $10 for a monitor, $10 for Setup Labor to install an OS. $ 10 for transport. $4 Misc. That's $75 for a machine. And that's at "expensive US prices".
Why are laptops so special? Desktop at home, Desktop at school, take homework back and forth on media.
So then the second-tier problems can get solved, like "who's gonna build the support structure?".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Actually, what the guys at OLPC did was to ensure that the OLPC XO-1 laptops would still be able to dual-boot to Linux in case Windows was installed.
See this email from the OLPC Developer mailing list from Mitch Bradley, one of the developers at OLPC:
At the moment, OLPC is doing approximately zero work on Windows. That wasn't true last year. I spent several months last year making it possible to boot Windows from Open Firmware. The reason I did that was to prevent Microsoft from "taking over" the XO machine. Their plan was to purchase machines and instruct the factory to reflash their SPI FLASH boot ROM with a conventional BIOS - which would have prevented OLPC's Linux from working. It would have been possible to boot a different Linux distro from that BIOS, but it would not have been bootable from NAND FLASH, the OLPC security would not have been available, OLPC's special power management would not have worked, and the OFW-resident management features like diagnostics and NAND update would have been lost. Essentially it would have been a one-way ticket to Microsoft land.
That one-way road was unacceptable to Nicholas. He insisted that, if any machines were to be able to run Windows, they must be able to dual-boot.
In fact, this shows Negroponte is actually pro-linux.
http://www.object404.com
What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed?
The goal is NOT to turn kids into computer geeks. It's about providing them access to educational material on all basic subjects. It's about teaching them reading, math, history, and all the basic stuff you learn in primary school. At a total cost that is probably not so much higher than basic school books for a few years of school, but provides much wider access to knowledge.
Also, it is an experiment in modern educational methods, where you learn by doing, collaborating, etc, as opposed to passively receiving knowledge from a teacher.
Finally, this is not meant for places where people are starving. Obviously, if you are starving you need food, not an educational tool. It is meant for places where there is enough food, water, a teacher, and a school building that at least sometimes gets electricity. There are plenty of such places around the world. Just because one can't afford an SUV, doesn't mean he's starving.
Negropontes' biggest mistake was getting into bed with Wintel. We don't really have any idea of the machinations that went on in the background to sabatage the OLPC. But his road to Damascus conversion must be one of the most unexpected since Scott McNealys.
.. is promoting its Classmate PC (CMPC) in Nigeria to various organisations as well as government'
"AMD is our partner, which means Intel is pissing on me. Bill Gates is not pleased either, but if I am annoying Microsoft and Intel then I figure I am doing something right,", 2006
'Negroponte says that a Windows operating system is in the process of being fine-tuned on the XO as we speak. "Microsoft and OLPC are in discussion on how to release it', 2008
'Intel
'The organization is in negotiations with Microsoft to load Windows on dual-boot versions of the XO laptop', May 2008
I'm amazed that any of these projects make it out of brainstorming with the "need" for modern hardware. There's already ASICs/FPGAs of the Apple IIe and C64, why aren't there platforms being built around them? It seems like building something even with 386/486 industrial SBCs would make more sense, construct around off-the-shelf parts.
--- Do you believe in the day?
160 MB is not much for a modern Linux distro with a GUI. If you want a Debian/Ubuntu base, try plain Debian using something like LXDE or OpenBox, or try Crunchbang, which is an Ubuntu derivative that should be OK in 160 MB if you use a slim web browser such as Midori/Webkit, Opera or similar. Firefox is just too heavy for 160MB unless you limit yourself to only a few tabs. The nice thing about Debian/Ubuntu as a base is that you have an enormous list of apps available, and very easy security updates.
I also set up a Windows 2000 machine the other day for someone, mostly because it had to run Windows-only accessible apps and I only had a few hours to set it up. It ran well, but then Xubuntu also worked pretty well and was also quite easy to setup, and unlike Windows 2000 will get security updates for a long time with easy upgrades every 3 years for the stable version.. However, Crunchbang would probably run better than Xubuntu as it uses OpenBox rather than XFCE.
If these are too heavy for your requirements, try Tiny Core (10 MB download, can run in very little RAM e.g. 32 to 48 MB for GUI I think), Puppy (very easy to set up) or SliTaz (a little larger than Tiny Core and comes with more "out of the box").
The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way
Lionel once tried to sell a robin's egg blue and pink train set to girls - who despised the thing as much as any boy.
The lime green designer laptop with a Sugar UI risks making the same mistake.
The most successful toys mimic what a kid sees in the adult world - and the most sophisticated of toys become a rite of passage - an entry into that world.
That's definitely true. my daughter definitely prefers a "real" laptop, despite the fact that the XO-1 actually does far more that's of interest to her.
From a functional perspective, the XO and Sugar are really well designed for their purpose. I have no difficulty imagining that they would be successful in an environment where "real" PCs aren't ubiquitous. The physical package is rugged and well designed for the ways children tend to do things. The Sugar interface is very discoverable, albeit hard to get used to if you're familiar with more standard interfaces.
In the first world, you're right: my daughter wants a laptop just like mine. She's constantly trying to steal my netbook, which in all honesty is less functional than her XO. She just wants something that's exactly like what her parents use. If her parents didn't have computers though, as mine didn't, I'm willing to bet she'd be as happy with her XO as I was with my Speak'n'Spell (which I wore out).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
It was mostly power, portability and durability concerns that drove the creation of OLPC. The E-bay systems offer none of the above.
In third-world countries, power is in short supply, and is spotty when available. It is also expensive. We would be run out of town for offering people computers + monitors that used 100-150 watts like the desktops you mentioned.
Portability was seen as a selling point for OLPC because, then the computer could come with the owner everywhere. Not only does this guarantee that the computer never leaves the owner's sight (theft deterrent), but it also means the owner will have the opportunity to use the computer in ways we cannot anticipate.
Durability is just as important as the above, because if it can't last, it will be outright rejected. These are the same sort of people who insist on buying Toyota light trucks because they will still be running a decade from now - if the price is high, durability is a top priority.
Yeah, it turned out to be a bad concept overall, but that doesn't mean the intentions were wrong. It was much better an idea than shipping old PCs to Africa.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
At the time MikeFM made the above comment, this was the sig he was using.
Put it together yourself.
Q.E.D...
You are welcome on my lawn.