I doubt it. But comparing XP to a stripped down Linux installation that requires me to mount the flash drives and set the screen brightness from the command line is hardly fair.
It's time to stop blaming Intel, Microsoft, The Pope and everyone else. Talk about a tempest in a 'teapot'! I know, and wrote, that windowsCE is a piece of garbage. I have seen and used different distro's on the XO and to be honest they are painfully inappropriate for the machine and more importantly for my needs.
You are the first person ever who described it as "inappropriate" for anything that XO can be expected to do. You also claim that, of all things, Windows CE would provide better functionality. This means, you have either never actually installed my distribution and therefore a liar claiming that you did or a moron if you expect Windows CE to provide better functionality than Ubuntu. For years Microsoft fans claimed that Linux desktop is not popular among the masses because of some real or imaginary deficiencies and shortcomings, and not because of Microsoft monopoly and FUD machine producing obedient and closed-minded customers such as yourself.
Your idiotic comments are the only thing that I need to prove them wrong -- you are so convinced of Microsoft superiority that you expect a port of Windows CE, something that Microsoft itself did not see as a viable idea, to be superior to state of the art desktop Linux distribution that got nothing but positive reviews from everyone who ever installed it in each and every supported environment -- now including XO.
The magical word "Windows" is sufficient for you to believe that it will magically provide you everything you need from a computer despite the fact that it does not run Windows applications, does not support native Office formats, is a barely supported product, by both Microsoft and third-party developers. You completely ignore the fact that Ubuntu, or any other modern desktop Linux distribution has far superior support for your beloved Microsoft Office formats.
You harp about one single feature fast boot-up that Windows CE supposedly has and claim that you want a combination of celphone-like features from a laptop and some magically appearing support for "XO's unique functionality" from what is essentially a dead OS, instead of using a modern desktop environment that supports XO already and boots in a minute -- be it simplified Sugar, XFCE under Fedora, traditional XUbuntu configuration that my distribution provided, or full-blown Gnome, KDE, etc.
You would rather crawl back to Microsoft than use what is available now, and is developed by people who placed an actual effort into adapting their systems for XO hardware peculiarities.
I have spent decades of study and hard work to make all of us a little smarter on average, and to make it possible for people to achieve a little more than what they could achieve before. Judging by your arguments, you are one of those people who can accomplish exactly the same by jumping off a bridge.
I wonder how many 'geek challenged' individuals there are like myself who were only too happy to become G1G1 donors in order to help kids in third world countries learn, but, have become increasingly turned off by the somewhat elite discussions we find here that seem to pretty much leave us out in the cold when it comes to 'down to earth' guidelines that we can readily understand in order to use our XOs more effectively?
Don't boil over, man. Ranting doesn't win converts from the Windows world. I agree with you, and have seen and hand-held people who - after just a few days with Linux - become converts. THAT being said, there are still times where it's rough around the edges. The command line scares most people nowadays, and while most Linux users accept dropping to an xterm as a fair trade-off for the increased functionality and raw power available to users in Linux, it's not a "feature" for most people who have been coddled by point-and-drool interfaces for the past decade-plus.
I'm told it works much much better in joyride but last time I installed joyride it took a long day of hacking to restore functionality. Still, until that's smoothed out, people will long for instant-on capabilities. Most people want something with a low learning curve that works not necessarily "well" , now.
CE, for all its many, many faults, provides that. Sugar, Ubuntu, and the rest will, and will have a much much higher ceiling of functionality, but today, out of the box, aren't feature complete I haven't run ubuntu on my XO, but it is my primary OS at home.
When did I ever pledge allegiance to microsoft? I can't believe I am thinking about defending a company who's products I only use when forced, but you are the most thickheaded person I have seen on olpcnews or the forums.
You really seem pretty high up on your build of ubuntu, but with god-awful power management, it is pretty useless for people who crawl out of their basements. Use of tablet mode? I even had problems using the camera. Give me a break. And furthermore, while I doubt I will use XP on the XO either, at least it supports every hardware feature of the laptop.
And Ubuntu distribution for XO provides exactly that. Except it actually does work "well" for almost everything that is practical to do on a small, low-power device. I and other people are working on adding those things right now. Ports of 7. Firefox 3 works, with all its extensions and plugins. Printing over the network and PDF creation works by pressing a single button. Flash is too slow to play Youtube videos without dropping frames, so I have posted an external Youtube player that starts by pressing a button on a panel after selecting a URL.
At no point any Microsoft product running on XO or other XO-like hardware provided that level of functionality -- with or without tweaking. Nevertheless Microsoft supporters flood this site with whining and screeching about how Ubuntu and other desktop-oriented Linux distributions that were ported to XO, supposedly do not suit their needs while they are ready to accept any -- ANY -- Microsoft product despite the fact that it would be inferior in numerous ways, or that Microsoft has no usable support for "missing" features at this point, either.
My point is that dtizzle and other Microsoft fans are morons, and no amount of improvement will ever make them admit that Linux is a superior choice. This would be still something that dtizzle would still denounce as inferior to Microsoft products. I do not expect people like him to accept any kind of rational arguments, so the best I can do is to demonstrate the scale of their stupidity to others.
As some statements and actions made earlier this year by Negroponte show, even supposedly smart people listen to the stupid ones. This is what caused Sugarlabs split, this is what helped Microsoft lobbyists in countries that potentially can order the laptops, this is what caused massive drop of goodwill on the part of people who actually do useful development.
So anything that exposes such stupidity may help to avoid similar problems in the future. What do you think, your beloved Microsoft is going to provide you? Sugar is currently the only environment that has full power management support on XO, and it's for truly far-away-from-electricity users.
Boot time is constant. It does not have "best" or "worst" case scenario, it only varies between flash media with different speed. I interpret it to mean that OLPC does not have the technical expertise in-house to port Sugar to Windows, and will rely on other companies third parties for this.
Open source software can still be developed and run on Windows. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. A video in the blog of technet. What's the point then? If the children are educated that proprietary expensive software is needed, one really should start using a business model and sell the software. One should charge more and work less on it also, because that's seemingly the best way as shown by Microsoft. Im totally disgusted right now with the OLPC project.
The point of the project is to allow people to experience an open platform, and now its being used for proprietary software from a company that has proven time and time again that they dont care about their customers, they only care about the bottom line.
Vista DRM is a perfect example of this. Microsofts products prevent that. The aim was to improve education in the developing world by supplying the children with a personal educational computer platform. NN just switched to a different financing and sales scheme. That would indeed be a complete breech with the original aims. But that is not related to selling out to MS. You are right that MS has no such plans, and could not care less about the future of these children, as long as they do not use Linux or other FOSS aplications.
Go ahead microsoft,you are treating the symptoms not the disease. So the "contagious" disease will surely kill you.. Because that's what i read the first time i saw the headline and first paragraph. In this instance, I use the concept of buying, not an actual exchange of funds, yet a transaction has taken place. Nicholas sold out the educational soul of OLPC to push low-cost laptops at any cost. C'mon, Wayan, stop the hysterical crying and lies.
You're acting like a scorned midwife whatever that means However, pretending that Microsoft has somehow "tricked" Negroponte with false promises is quite dishonest on your part.
So what will we have then? An underpowered XP machine that is compared with a desktop, or worse, the Classmate, when the XO laptop is not meant for office workers or even high-schoolers. Utter shame. Thanks for bringing up my old post. Just to clarify, my post was not pro-Windows, by any means. I only suggested that Windows on the XO would actually be a good thing for the XO not because XO is a particularly brilliant OS it isn't by far , but because, by failing miserably, it would actually make Sugar look for what it is, an excellent and efficient OS.
I am a Linux user, but I used Windows extensively in the past. I prefer Linux because I know how much better it is when compared to Windows. Sugar is going to be the first OS many kids will be exposed to, and proper FUD campaining and bribing from Microsoft may be enough to convince them that Windows is actually better see for example the recent clash between Mandriva-Microsoft for the classmate in Nigeria.
XO only shines when compared directly to Windows. That is for me a good reason to see: 1. Windows failing I should say installed That is precisely why at least a testing machine running winXP would be a sufficient prove that Windows isn't a good fit for the XO.
Without a comparative testing, it's really impossible to convince people that Windows on the XO isn't really a good idea. And this is where we disagree. It's the industry standard, not the XO. So if the XO does not perform like a "real computer" then it will be yet again branded as a "toy" or "gadget" and tossed aside so kids have a proper computer - for office work.
Hey, you got a plug in the Wired blog tonight. There are probably 12 more good months of Sugar development to go before XP-on-XO becomes a viable installation. By the time they catch up NickF will be right, they'll have a hard time comparing favorably.
I just find the thought of XP on the XO quite distasteful. Suppose they manage to get XP running on the XO. What happens a few years from now when Microsoft stops supporting XP? There is no way Vista could be made to run on XO, so the students will be forced to give up their XO's and buy classmates, which of course is what Microsoft intended all along. Why would it be bad that there is competition from MS? Just face the facts: most major software enhancements are made when there is competition.
MS Office advanced as long as there was competition, stalled for about 6 years, and development surged again when there was competition Open Office. Idem for visual Basic vs Delphi, gnome vs kde, netscape-firefox vs IE, windows vs macosx and linux, Projects also open source without competition sometimes from forks usually stop to have major innovations. Gcc is a nice example. And last but not least: the OS and hardware are not the goal of this project.
Education is. Getting useful content on these machines is more important than anything else. Most of the problems they discuss are caused by MS' monopoly. When all security depends on the understanding of the complete code base AND modern security research by half a dozen middle aged CEO's, involved in Byzantine power plays, you know your future is toast:.
Think of another million networked identical XP boxes in the hands of computer illiterates with neither funds nor motive for extensive AV and Firewalls. This will be Spam squared. But I will be much more concerned about the safety of those children. How many poor families of these students will loose whatever money they do have to Nigerian and other scams? How many children sucked into all kinds of other dangerous communities? The processor is slow, the hardware is really weird, it only has 2gb of storage.
Maybe they can run WinCe or Windows Mobile on it. I think WindowsXP on the machine will just be good for showing people how slow the thing runs windows benchmarks and thus why they should get a classmate pc instead. Besides, isn't Microsoft ending all support for Windows XP in the near future and trying to get everyone switched to Vista? No, MS fired or promoted away everyone who could write a hardware driver. On the Classmate, only a very crippled version of XP runs.
However, there exists something like XP embedded. A joke by embeded standards, but it does exist. What are they going to do with the output on the 'view source code' button for the XO if it is running Windows? Putting Windows in any computer for primary schoolchildren will bias their use towards learning "productivity applications" instead of using a tool for educational purposes.
I've seen this happening in many schools in Latin America, since it's an easy way to "incorporate" computers into learning. Besides the geek arguments about the quality of the OS, investing the amounts of money in computers for them to turn into "business platforms" for primary schoolchildren is a waste of scarce resources. At least, the current software combo that the XO brings forces anyone using it to think seriously about exactly what should run and what should be done with it.
Perhaps Prof. NichoLies is, after all, smarter than all the retards who fight Microsoft and Intel, while he is in bed with them Face it, boys: if getting Windows on the XO guarantees sales, Prof.
NichoLies will do it, no matter how wrong it might be. This project is not about kids. It is not about education. It is not about poverty.
This project is about NichoLies' ego. The legitimate or otherwise concerns of a few freetards on this blog are not something that matters to the Nutty Professor. I wish to add more than my own complaint. I feel I need to add some commentary of my own at this time. The way to beat Microsoft is to one up them always and consistently. Yes, Microsfot can reach out to media with their own spin and even stoop to graft and corruption of third world political figures to bend the truth as far as they think it will aid them.
I do not accuse them of this ugliness; I just want to state that they have the ability to do such. It is the same thing that Linux does with Vista. Show the computing results and let people decide. Sure, if Microsoft resorts to negativity and the lure of money, eventually it will be found out.
How much negative press can one company withstand? The EU right now has its eye on the company because of how the operating system bundles components that violate their trade agreements. They won in court and Microsoft cannot buy their way out of that. The third world countries do not have a functioning body like the EU but is it the market they would rather have?
EU or Africa? That's right, open source! I do not think it would hurt their business model to create such a narrow use platform. If Microsoft does implement a "slim client" for the OLPC that has [mostly] GPL code, then the community can truly test apples to apples with verifiable results. And giving people choices is a good thing. In fact, it is the best thing. As for Sugar and the current OLPC development crew, there needs to be less negativity about others and more heads down work. More applications still need to be written.
Distribution models and closer ties to the public and government officials need to be worked on. There is a lot of work to do. I am denigrating this version of the OLPC. I think it is remarkable that what was once a vision, an idea, actually has real deliverables and works! This is amazing and nothing should detract from that. If we outside the project believe in the mandate, then we too should work to acentuate or live up to its guiding principals.
I myself pledge to let as many people I know about this machine. I also pledge to take the OLPC I will be getting and investigate it, not as a toy, but as a platform that I can grow and add to the community in both programmatic and heuristic avenues. Believe me, it is tougher to provide value and opportunity than it is to develop ad hominem attacks.
But if the OLPC fails to gain market share, it shouldn't be because of a lack of trying on our part. What I dislike about this story is its un ethical side. Is it morally justifiable to take a product the XO hardware produced by people who are not expecting any profit from the venture, and then use it as a platform for the profit of another party?
It reminds me of a poacher raiding the hard work of the local population. I have no such ill feeling toward the Classmate, which is a commercial product built from their own resources. The only thing they've taken from OLPC is the realisation that there are a lot of students who could use something cheap, so they can be turned into a market.
That is fair, IMHO. But to put XP on the XO is not. This is about NichoLies' ego. Is that you, Dan? If not, you're throwing around Dan Lyons' idiotic insults without realizing that he's a complete moron. And your assessment of the OLPC project shows that odds are, you fit in that category as well. This site is biased, but that doesn't mean it isn't right though. Microsoft have forged a monopoly for themselves and they will do anything to keep it, including breaking ISO standards committees, see what the outgoing convenor of the working group dealing with their OOXML submission had to say about the experience.
My kids have never used Windows, and I hope they never will. Agreed with the author.
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