$100 Laptop Platform Moves On 100
The BBC is reporting that Sugar Labs is planning on taking "Sugar," the XO laptop's innovative interface, to the next level and distribute to a broader audience. "Sugar is a user interface that allows children to collaborate even when working on different machines. For example, they can write documents or make music together. The open source software also contains a journal and automatically saves and backs up all data. [...] Sugar Labs will work closely with developers from the open source community to develop the user interface for other computers and operating systems. It has already been bundled with the most recent releases of the Ubuntu and Fedora Linux operating systems."
Loose translation: (Score:3, Funny)
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What, Suger, the 11th Century monk who wrote about Louis VI and VII? How is that relevant?
Don't worry, I was already leaving...
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LoB
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You don't need Sugar for that.
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Re:Loose translation: (Score:5, Informative)
1) MS is not offering their software from the beneficence of samaritan spirit. They are offering it at that price to ensure that even the 5th world will be hooked on their constant upgrade and pay to play cycles. $3/CD is better than zero, and it will lead to sales later on. In the marketing world it's called a loss leader... http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp [investopedia.com]
2) More functionality in this case includes wasted battery usage through OS issues, BSODs, virus prone applications, upgrade cycles that are longer than the XO will be a viable product (read no upgrades)
3) No matter what language it supports, XP still has the same problems, so this is not much of a bonus, here is some data to see what the real language support is:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Linux_language_support [laptop.org]
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/handson/dev/winxpintl.mspx [microsoft.com]
Now, when it comes down to it, neither is likely to support a dialect that is spoken by only several thousand people in the world, but both support a large number of languages making this an odd point to harp on. I've given you a couple of links, perhaps you can point out to the rest of us what huge advantage XP offers over Linux in general and the XO's original system in particular.
3) Redhat, Novell, Canonical et al were not asked to step up. OLPC chose their operating system and MS 'convinced' them to re-choose. I say convinced with all the irony that I can muster in this life and the next. MS is offering a raped version of XP, and not the version you are obviously used to.
Sugar OS was just right for the OLPC and with a few tweaks would have been very nice for the goals of that project.
As for your general attitude in your comment, I offer this review as rebuttal. It's from http://www.engadget.com/tag/olpc [engadget.com] and the emphasis below is mine.
Re:Loose translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
No, its not a loss leader. With a loss leader you lose money or don't make any, MS isn't doing that. A copy of XP costs exactly $0 for MS to produce. Granted, XP did have some costs related to development but now, we are around 6 years into XP and we can assume those have been paid off. With a physical product each copy costs money, in parts, in time, in shipping. With software each copy can be recopied an infinate amount of times without any loss in quality or any increase in cost, compare this to a gallon of milk where each cow can only produce so much milk. Whereas a gallon of milk has costs related to packaging, software doesn't have this problem with downloads where the price of bandwidth is tiny to almost unnoticeable and using more modern P2P technology makes even those costs go away, likewise shipping is free.
This is not a loss leader for MS, a copy of XP costs them exactly $0 to make, and they get $3 for each copy so that is a direct $3 profit for each system with XP sold.
Re:Loose translation: (Score:4, Insightful)
Additionally, there are costs associated with maintaining XP with security updates and bugfixes, running product activation servers, knowledge base servers (all of which need to be maintained) and all kinds of other expenses such as licensing of media technologies.
Don't get me wrong, I greatly dislike MS, but to say there are no costs associated with it is dead wrong. These cost do, however, often apply to open source companies as well, and most certainly some of them apply to OLPC. It may well be that going with MS's deal is just cheaper than doing it all in-house.
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Additionally, there are costs associated with maintaining XP with security updates and bugfixes
Do you honestly think that they are going to support a discount platform with security updates and bugfixes to an operating system that has been earmarked for extinction [apcmag.com]? The plan is to trap people into the vicious cycle of OS dependence, not liberate them. Linux can do anything XP can do and probably more given $100.00 hardware.
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However, the idiotic, criminal,unaccountable school board I work for pays M$ about $400,000 A YEAR for the so-called "Software Assurance Program", which essentially is meaningless, since school windoze labs are still crashing, full of BSODs, malware, etc.
There is NO comparison. M$ junk is a huge money sink compared to anything open source.
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Granted the total spread across the copies is probably less than $1 per $3 licence. But, it's not free. And, no, it does not invalidate your point. (Sometimes people think that because I contradict them that I must oppose them.)
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1) MS is not offering their software from the beneficence of samaritan spirit.
Prove it. It strikes me as extremely optimistic to think that, as you put it, "5th world" nations will magically become 1st world nations in short oder and begin providing significant revenue streams. So if this is a "loss leader" investment they must be thinking in the long term, like 100 years. Pretty odd thinking from a company with a constantly-changing 5 year roadmap.
3) No matter what language it supports,
If you can't read the text on the screen, a laptop isn't much good to you. According to OLPC, on the site you linked:
At the moment, the
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Cool (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cool (Score:4, Informative)
The next level. (Score:5, Funny)
It will also be renamed HFCS [wikipedia.org] to increase marketability. :-)
Re:The next level. But, will it be... (Score:3, Funny)
-Neutral(trasweet), or
-(Aser)Tame?
If they add Sugar CRM, will it be SCHWEET?
don't you mean the $190 latptop. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Included in distros? (Score:2, Interesting)
I just fired up my Kubuntu 8.04 system and, looking through the available packages from the Ubuntu repositories, I can find no trace of it. I tried various searches - sugar,olpc etc - but nothing. Can anyone discover the alleged bundled sugar interface?
I have run it in VMs in the past, but would have liked to have another fiddle with it.
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aptitude search sugar
aptitude search sugar | grep XO | wc -l
19
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$ sudo apt-get install sugar
[sudo] password for hardy2:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
gnome-media-common gstreamer0.10-alsa gstreamer0.10-plugins-farsight
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good libavahi-gobject0 libblas3gf libcamel1.2-11
libebook1.2-9 libecal1.2-7 libedataserver1.2-9 libfarsight0.1-2 libgfortran2
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Re:Included in distros? (Score:5, Informative)
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Note to self: Check all is up to date before querying TFA
Re:Included in distros? (Score:5, Informative)
1) sudo apt-get install sugar sugar-activities xserver-xephyr
2) create xephr-xinitrc file in your home directory with this line in it: exec
3) run this to start it in a windowed xserver:
xinit ~/xephyr-xinitrc --
LoB
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LoB
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"Buy an XO laptop with the XP built in"
Now which one seems the more obnoxious? Right. If you're gonna troll, try to stick to trollable subjects, oh Anonymous Shitstain.
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attention racist slashdot posters (Score:5, Funny)
And whatever you do, don't respond to this post with your favorite humorous variation of Mr. Africanamericanponte's name. That would be truly depraved.
P.S. My "captcha" word is "enemas". No joke. This place is sick.
Re:attention racist slashdot posters (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward
It really should say "by courage-challenged person of an alternative identifier."
Re:Asus got it right (Score:5, Insightful)
If nothing else, the OLPC project was responsible for the low priced UMPCs which we can now buy - remember the price of a UMPC a year or two ago? It was cheaper to buy a pretty high spec (but full size) machine.
The OLPC project has lost its way - perhaps because of Negroponte, perhaps because of Intel or maybe pressure from other (Redmond?) forces. Whatever, the OLPC original idea was great - create a functional, robust laptop and include a user friendly interface, a simple peer to peer networking system to allow sharing of files between these machines, an OS which allowed you to learn how things worked etc.
Because of the political infighting which has taken place, the project seems to have lost the support of those who would be of most use to it - i.e Open Source enthusiasts who could have worked on the XO machines and the Sugar interface to create new programs. So the folks behind that Sugar interface have taken it to the community in the form of this new effort called Sugar Labs - intending to develop, with the assistance of the community, the interface and make it available for other small UMPC machines - including the EeePC.
IMHO, this is to be applauded and I for one will certainly have a look at it again. The only small snag at the moment is that it doesn't seem to like running in my VM install of Kubuntu. But I am sure I can find a spare drive here somewhere to install (K)Ubuntu 8.04 or another supported system and fire up the Sugar interface.
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Suuure you're going to find a spare drive to install a new OS in order to install a VM to run a UI that won't run natively on any hardware that you can buy. Even if you lived in a region in which Negroponte graciously condescended to sell you a "$100" laptop for $400, delivery would be "when we feel like it, you ungrateful capitalist swine" and support would be nil.
Don't get me wrong, I too like the idea of OLPC, and it's good that it's (arguably) driving down prices, form factor and power consumption of
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Once I get a few minutes, I will draw up a list of those other odd deps and send the
Hat trick? (Score:1, Redundant)
Piss off Microsoft? Check.
Piss off the RIAA? Hmm, probably.
Please, please, please: let the kids make movies together.
Wild Fire (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't like Sugar (Score:3, Interesting)
I like the idea of OLPC, I like the hardware, but as someone who has used pretty much every OS out there I personally just didn't grove with the OS. I hope that the intended audience feels differently.
Re:I don't like Sugar (Score:4, Insightful)
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Music (Score:2)
Get that damned "ARCHIES" tune out of my head!!!!!
"Moves On"? (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's perfect simple. Now that OLPC has decided to see other UI vendors on the side, Sugar is also free to "move on", to a park bench, where it will lie huddled under a pile of OLPC manuals, swigging Sterno from a brown paper bag.
Sugar is dead. XO/Linux is dead. XO/XP is the only viable platform, as most neutral observers concluded from day 1. The bulk purchasers of the XO don't want to teach their countrys' children to "learn", just want to turn them into productive MS/Office(tm) drones. Sugar was ne
Cost effective (Score:1)
Why Sugar? (Score:1)
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Inexpensive laptops are important, Sugar is not (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm ecumenical when it comes to operating systems and user interfaces. I use Sugar, Macintosh, Windows (both XP and Vista), Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu, Nokia IT OS (Debian variant), and iPod Touch on a daily basis; plus a couple of others on a less-frequent basis. I'm pretty well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of each of these platforms. I have my preferences, but am no fanboy.
Sugar's interface fails on a number of points. It is very reminiscent of the old MIT interfaces of the 1970s where hackers built what looked good to them with little/no effort to have a professional designer tell them what to do (much less say "no" to bad UI issues).
The icons and graphical elements are poorly considered, and design decisions seem to be based more on "be different from anything else" than what makes sense. Typical are the icons for "Erase" and "Resume" in the Journal; these icons look like "do not enter" and "stop".
The use of color is quite poor; most of the Sugar interface is monochrome except for the little user indicator, which you can almost, but not quite, make look like what is on the lid of the XO if you do scary stuff at the UNIX shell level. The activity icons in the main interface have the same two additional colors.
Now, if they had any sense, the little user indicator would graphically match what is on the lid (presumably keyed by serial number) without impacting other icons. Even if they're limited in the main color palette (e.g., due to power considerations) they could have done that.
The actual activity icons are terrible. Some are alright (e.g., Browse and Write), but others are bizarre:
A comic strip balloon for Chat.
A snake for the Python development application (cutely called "Pippy").
The RSS application has a common RSS icon, but it's called News Reader. I can't imagine how a kid with no prior computer experience would interpret it.
Acoustic Tape Measure is an activity to measure distance between two OLPCs using sound. A cute toy, but the icons is a dolphin with sound coming out of its snout.
Additional things wrong with Sugar:
As noted about, many of the activity names are silly or simply bizarre.
There are four music activities: TamTamJam, TamTamEdit, TamTamSynthLab, and TamTamMini. These should be consolidated into a single Music activity.
There's a toy oscilloscope. OK, kids like talking into a microphone and seeing his voice show up as waves. We all remember going to the science museum as little kids and doing that. But this application is called Measure, which implies something quite a bit different.
Memorize is a sample game. Games ought to be under a general fun-and-games category.
The Terminal emulator and Log Viewer both ought to be under an advanced mode. Not necessarily hidden, but from the main activity it should be a something that indicates that you're getting into the internals (perhaps a screwdriver and pliers as an icon) and not pedagogical work.
Speaking of the log viewer, there's a lot of scary error messages in the logs suggesting that the software isn't very well debugged.
Then there is what is missing. Since the focus seems to be for education, the paucity of bundled references and the assumption that you can get what's missing from the Internet is astonishing. What is bundled seems to reflect the interests of the OLPC developers rather than pedagogical purposes.
The mouse control is idiotic and annoying (to put it mildly). In many of the activities, controls are near the edges of the screen, but if you put the pointer too near the edge Sugar takes over and you have to move the pointer back and wait.
There is no consistency in controls between activities. Every activity does things its own way, based apparently upon the individual programmer's preference. Sheesh, this is the sa
Re:Inexpensive laptops are important, Sugar is not (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as the touchpad goes, it does need some work. There has been a lot of work on drivers lately (forcing re-calibration more often) that should clear up some of those problems. Again though, that isn't really Sugar's fault. That is a driver problem which is the fault of either the kernel or X11.
The issue with controls being on the edge of the screen is something I've noticed. You can turn off the automatic frame thingy though (and just use the frame button to activate it). This should be the default.
There are some good games available. Tetris and SimCity are both fun. One is even sorta educational.
Some of the icons are bad, same with Windows, same with MacOSX. Why for instance is the icon for Photoshop CS a quill on a blank white square? Or my new favorite is the icons for page down and page up in Publisher 2007's print preview. You can just barely tell that there are arrows on those icons, if you look really closely.
I think it has some potential; it's certainly not perfect yet. I like the journal (though I don't like how often entries get duplicated, and activities should ask you to name them when you hit the keep button to save). All in all though, it wasn't that hard to get used to, and after having installed some non-sugar apps on it, I can see why they shied away from the traditional GUIs. I would say that their fear of overlapping windows is a bit intense, especially in Browse where it actually renders many pages unusable if they require a usernam/password prompt in a dialog(perhaps having dialogs that work like ones in MacOS X, where they slide out of the titlebar would work).
Also, I believe Apple offered MacOS X for free but they were turned down.
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Let's be honest here. The back list of titles available for the Windows OS is enormous. Under all software licenses.
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Pretty soon, once you start paying all the fees, you're looking at a $900 laptop. There is Open Source software for windows, but a lot of that is stuff that comes from Linux.
Now, maybe with this XP deal Microsoft is willing to take on the translation task for more than just
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one suspects a good deal more than the geek is willing to admit. how else do you explain the world-wide dominance of the Windows OS?
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These are not bad icons. (Score:2)
But talking about bad user interface design...
There is no consistency in controls between activities. Every activity does things its own way, based apparently upon the individual programmer's preference.
Sounds like Vista to m
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I do think that your complaints are off target though. For example I don't really care about the icons or names of the programs, that's easy to tweak.
The colour scheme is deliberately fairly monochrome, the laptop screen has a monochrome mode and the interface has to work in that state.
I found all the OLPC distributed activities followed the interface guidelines. The share combo is always in the same p
The Sugar Labs home page (Score:5, Informative)
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Why is Sugar gone from the XO? (Score:1, Insightful)
There's an ugly pattern here (Score:3, Interesting)
2008:
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to ensure passage of OOXML as a "standard", in many cases overriding overwhelming votes to the contrary to railroad the standard through a corrupt and now discredited process.
Monopolist buys local bureaucrats to demand monopolist's products rather than free alternative (Sugar, OS X), railroading their OS onto what was an open, educ
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The OLPC laptop hasn't been selling in anything like the numbers the idealists expected.
The price just keeps edging skyward.
Meanwhile, the designer of OLPC's display has moved on to greener pastures. In a year or two, perhaps three, the XO's hardware will be out-gunned by every budget laptop on the pla
More Grand Delusions (Score:4, Insightful)
We learn by asking questions that are important to us. Teaching leads the child to ask questions that may or may not turn out to be important to them (although I'm going to give you a free pass on calculus) but will equip them with the skills required for employment.
This is the fundamental purpose of the industrialised method of teaching children on the grand scale where they are incarcerated in school from the age of 4 to 16 (I'm using my native Scotland as the model here, other rates may vary.) I am a teacher, I am not terribly impressed by a lot of my colleagues but in their defense - no machine or application can do what a teacher does. This is why so many great creative minds were produced in the last century in the post-war period - people had the freedom to think.
Of course by the sixties school boards were squandering valuable financial resources on TVs, movie projectors, film loops and other idiotic assorted garbage to the detriment of spending money on traditional classroom resources - books, desks, chalk and teachers and by this time the career was held in such contempt and so poorly paid that the schools were filled with the empty-headed using sociologically based - learning by screaming or whatever dumb theory of the day was popular and all conducted in the language of political correctness.
A quick look at some figures (freely available on the Scottish government website) shows how much the Scottish states spend on education from a GDP of approximately 56 billion GBP.
Have a look at any private schools (curiously called public schools in Britain) where the paying customer determines what is considered a successful curriculum.
The have computers where they should be, in the computer classes.
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But no, they will never be a substitute for good teachers.