OLPC's a con - former insider | Hacker News Reader

OLPC's a con - former insider

theregister.co.uk

26 pointsedw51929 comments

"I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies," adds Python language author Guido van Rossum in the comments.

There may be something to what Guido says.

That said, I don't think the OLPC project was necessarily a bad project. Because the whole thing was open source, folks are now free to part the project out: borrow the bits that seemed to work well, redesign other bits, and throw out the rest. That's the best you can expect from most academic research projects.

I'm not surprised to see that OLPC didn't last that long, and that the endpoint is a big explosion. That's the problem with these semi-academic semi-charitable semi-engineering semi-commercial projects: It's hard to have a child with four parents. There's a tendency for the whole thing to devolve into a tooth-and-nails custody fight.

And let's not forget that they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market. People like ASUS and Intel were scared of them. If the entire project has turned out to be "a con" and jack shit has ended up being done for children, you have to admit that in that case they've at least pulled the most successful bluff in the computer industry, perhaps ever.

And I still think that some of the ideas in the Sugar interface - like the Journal, and the pervasive collaboration - are potentially revolutionary. (They "just" lacked the necessary execution.)

Two things I forgot to say:

1) As a former academic, I suspect that everyone who spends long enough in academia goes through phases of frustration where it all seems like "an enormous con". (In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)

2) they essentially created the tiny, cheap laptop market.

Exactly. And that helps children worldwide as much or more as the actual OLPC does.

It can be ugly to watch the R&D sausage being made. Its indirect approach is not for everyone. Every R&D project has a stated goal of "taking over the world" or "curing this disease" or "ending poverty" or something, and almost none of them ever explicitly reaches such a goal. And yet often those "failed projects" publish stuff that gets picked up by the next generation of projects and refined into something good. Or the students who worked on the "failed" project take their experience into industry where they apply it to a real product that actually succeeds.

"(In industry, of course, you learn that it's all an enormous con in your first week. ;)"

I sure hope that was partially tongue in cheek, because if it wasn't, I kinda feel sorry for you.

Many places I have worked have been total jokes and many people I have had the misfortune to work with, let's just say, "misbehaved".

But for each of those places, I found many good businesses where people got out of bed eager to do good things every day. They have produced value for others and have much to be proud of. (These are also the ones who I seek as customers.)

Oh, it's more than just partially tongue-in-cheek! I actually find, as you do, that industry is refreshingly direct compared to pure research, which is why I prefer it.

I used to work at Agilent, a.k.a. "the good parts of the former Hewlett-Packard." And, with the usual handful of exceptions, it really was the largest collection of nice folks that you'll ever meet. So, yeah, I believe in the existence of good businesses.

What I refer to is the emotional learning curve coming out of school. The part where you learn, among other things, that not everybody is trustworthy, and that not every market-leading product is worth what it costs. That the ugly method that is currently shipping is often better than the elegant but theoretical alternative. That some of your company's products are, inevitably, better than others. That any group of more than five people will face political problems, misunderstandings, and red tape. And that without those folks doing the marketing and accounting your business won't function.

None of which actually means that industry is a big con. It's just real. It's not made of imaginary people living in an imaginary land. Academia is the same, actually, though when you're in an especially bitter mood -- or faced with the occasional person who really is a con artist -- you might think otherwise.

lol

I went to business school because I was tired of being a cook and wanted a better future.

The only thing I remember was, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

"How strange," I thought at the time.

"Truer words about business were never spoken," I think now.

I mostly did 1) the other way around, and it also holds true. Concerning 2), few people realise, that hw in the last years was artificially expensive due to lack of concurrence: basically x86 won the CPU arena, a few misses aside (e.g. ARM, which Intel quickly made into StrongARM etc.). This is also true on the sw side: few people realise, that the eeePC uses Xandros, which is basically subject to MS Imaginary Property[1][2], converted to hard $-s. The OLPC is "simply" being accomplished[3].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xandros#Collaboration_with_Micr... [3] http://www.thecorporation.com/

There may be some similarity, but laptops aren't bibles.

they are both tools to help to form your perception of the world.

And both are largely useless if you can't bake bread.

OLPC has done amazingly well. I can't think of a previous attempt at non-profit hardware, and I believe that going from nothing to half a million units shipped in three years would be considered a success even in the commercial realm.

I can't say I'm thrilled with the direction that Negroponte has chosen, but it at least provides some competition to the open-source solution -- system and activity startup times have always been weak points for Sugar.

I recommend everyone go read the source essay by Ivan Krstić, rather than someone's commentary on it. See here: http://radian.org/notebook/sic-transit-gloria-laptopi

so can someone explain why Windows on the OLPC is such a crime -- especially, as I said before, when some countries won't accept the OLPC without it?

whether the goal is learning or shipping laptops is immaterial -- if by shipping laptops the students are learning, then the end goal is accomplished. don't see how opening up the XO to Windows to get distributed to more kids who need it is a bad thing.

Proprietary software keeps users divided and helpless. Its functioning is secret, so it is incompatible with the spirit of learning. Teaching children to use a proprietary (non-free) system such as Windows does not make the world a better place, because it puts them under the power of the system's developer -- perhaps permanently. You might as well introduce the children to an addictive drug.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/can-we-rescue-olpc-from-windows

The opportunity cost of choosing Windows seems quite high: if countries won't buy the XO for lack of MSFT software, then it is ultimately the kids loss.

I would say hordes of American children (and Chinese, Indian, et. al) grew up on Windows. Did that somehow take away the spirit of learning?

if countries won't buy the XO for lack of MSFT software read the Negroponte NYT quote carefully. It is basic colonial behaviour (corruption etc.):

"“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/technology/16laptop.html?r...

"Did that somehow take away the spirit of learning?" The spirit of learning is inherently human (evolutional design), therefore not even MS can take hijack it: taking it away is even more nonsense[1]. But if you think of the real breakthroughs, they are independent of Windows (you cannot beat them by playing in accordance to the rules they dictate: this is what RMS might have meant in the quote above). Google could (have) never eclipse(d) MS, if it were built on it. Nor Facebook, or whatever "web2.00" you might think of. Nor OSX. Most "innovation" or development is as independent of Windows as it can be: though it has to leverage on the userbase. This is why it is "trendy" to consider it as a buggy device driver. Growing up with windows is a factual matter: try purchasing a PC without it: and this begs for even more questions...

[1] though Adam Curtis' Century of the Self is worrying http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22century%20of%20th...

That's a short term view. Microsoft still has a monopoly, but it's dying. Teaching children on windows isn't a good idea IMHO. It's unlikely to be relevent to them when they are older.

The rise of the closed and proprietary Microsoft Windows PC cut off a generation of budding hackers from easy access to programming and software independence in their formative years. It wasn't until I had access to the Internet and DJGPP (the GNU toolchain ported to DOS) that I truly was able to freely pursue my interest in programming.

I see two almost independent objections here, and I think the press has failed to convey this adequately:

- One is the Linux argument; that these laptops should be open to tinkering and closed source is inappropriate.

- One is the Sugar argument; that the desktop-and-windows GUI is not good enough, hence the building of the Sugar UI from the ground up. MS Windows is viewed as inappropriate for the same reasons that the laptop wasn't originally shipped with XFCE or GNOME.

As an interested observer, it seemed to me that both these arguments were prominent design objectives for a long time. It's not surprising that if you drop these objectives, a lot of the people who drank your Original Flavor KoolAid will drop you faster than New Coke.

Both of these arguments sound like "we're going to build what our customers should want, not what they actually want". That rarely works except in a monopoly situation. Maybe OLPC imagined themselves as some sort of benevolent monopoly, but that rarely works as well.

In the case of the second argument -- Sugar as a more appropriate interface -- it may be more a case of "we're going to build what our customers will want, not what they think they want".

The XO has a screen that is not much larger than other ultra-compact notebooks, but with a resolution on par with full-size notebooks. If you run a standard Linux or Windows, any interface text or icons at the default size will be so small as to be illegible. If you crank up the interface DPI to an appropriate size, however, then you lose a lot of screen real estate to menus, toolbars, and statusbars -- something we take for granted now that we have 20-inch displays (just try using Word in a 640x480 window).

What the XO really needs is an interface like a kiosk or mobile device: something easy-to-use that aggressively conserves screen real estate. Sugar fills this role pretty well... the default installs of Linux or XP do not. Windows CE would have been a better choice than XP in this respect (and others), but it would presumably have been more work for Microsoft with less payoff, since CE has relatively few educational activities and doesn't run the "real" version of Office.

Ivan Krstić's point isn't that Windows is bad at all, in fact, he is in favor of it. His point is that the original educational mission of the project has already mostly failed. Those people saying "why not build $100 of water infrastructure per child?" were right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Negroponte gives Big Brother a whole new meaning...

I hadn't actually realized that these two Negropontes were related...

I'm also not convinced that it's relevant. You can choose your friends, and you can choose your philosophies, but you can't choose your relatives.

But you can choose your employer (unless you are a slave, which doesn't apply here, being [] shipping magnates).
It is so simple; so elementary, that most people don't see it (e.g. think of mass-energy relationship).
MIT's primary goals and funding agencies are well known, and so are the little one's scientific achievements, supposedly securing him a place among "the great". Also look @ at the goals of the OLPC, as the whole concept (not as a cheap notebook with little green ears). It is written publicly in B&W:
"At its core, our journal concept embodies the idea that the file system records a history of the things a child has done, or, more specifically, the activities in which a child has participated. Its function as the store of the objects created while performing those activities is secondary, although also important. The Journal naturally lends itself to a chronological organization (although it can be tagged, SEARCHED, and sorted by a variety of means). As a record of things a child has done—not just the things a child has saved—the Journal will read much like a portfolio or scrapbook history of the child's interactions with the machine and also with peers. The Journal combines entries explicitly created by the children with those that are IMPLICITLY CREATED through participation in activities. [...] Each machine is a full-time wireless router. Children in the most remote regions of the globe—as well as their teachers and families—will be connected both to one another AND to the Internet."
http://laptop.org/en/laptop/interface/principles.shtml
"It's data that's practically a printout of what's going on in your brain: What you are thinking of buying, who you talk to, what you talk about." --Kevin Bankston, staff attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
go and figure the rest. Guido's colonisation parallel with conversion to Christianity / XP / Whatever is also very apparent: practically all "orders" are from "client states". The ones likely to vote in favour of the MS Office format to be an ISO standard. Advancing (computer?) literacy in MIT's backyard would be a more ambitious goal ;)

Or as they say, in soviet Russia, the employer chooses you ;)

For a critical look at the OLPC security model as an avenue for surveillance, this paper is interesting:

"Freezing More Than Bits: Chilling Effects of the OLPC XO Security Model"

by Meredith L. Patterson, Len Sassaman, David Chaum

http://www.usenix.org/event/upsec08/tech/full_papers/patters...

"He is the elder brother of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and of the One Laptop per Child project. His brother Michel Negroponte is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, and his other brother, George Negroponte, is an artist."

Conspiracy theories? Do you have more information on the nefarious connection between Nick and John -- I'd actually be interested if this were a legitimate concern.

first of all i dont understand why this project is taking such a long time ... if someone is really dedicated and committed then anything can be done, just like TATA who created $2500 NANO car right from the scratch from patent to assembly every single thing is innovative (http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/14tata.htm) - TATA motivated tens of hundreds of manufacturer and vendors to redesign their auto-parts to fit in NANO car ... OLPC is for poor nations or say for 3rd world countries and i dont think NGOs/Govt./schools have any preference over what o/s it comes with as far as it can launch all educational application. OLPC laptop is not meant for scientists anyway, so what the fuss - just keep it simple and open source and create nice educational material so that kids form these countries can learn something valuable. Also 3rd world countries are very humble and they will be more than happy just to get this laptop (with or without XP).

India has its own "OLPC"[1], not being a client state. Education works best, when you work your way through: there is not royal path to knowledge (or, teach fishing instead of selling cheap fish, if you like).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simputer

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