OLPC Chief: Our OS Was Our Biggest Mistake
It's been a while since we've heard anything from Nicholas Negroponte but the OLPC chief recently aired his grievances about the OLPC project and it seems that he is not at all pleased with the Sugar UI that runs on all XO laptops.
In a recent interview with ZDNet Asia, Negroponte was asked about the mistakes made with the XO laptop and OLPC. Negroponte noted that putting the crank handle on the machine was a mistake, however he said the biggest mistake was using Sugar as the operating system.
Negroponte explained that the company should have offered Sugar as an application running on a regular OS.
"Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system," he told ZDNet Asia. "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."
Negroponte went on to say that the move by Sugar Labs to offer Sugar on a USB stick was "much cleaner" and added that with this development, we could see a "naked" XO laptop sometime in the future.
What do you think OLPC's biggest failure has been to date? Let us know in the comments below!
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Fluro green keyboard - burn ur eyes out.
I don't care if they're for children.
Make them less ugly.
Can I get this in cornflower blue?
When the kids grow up and get a real laptop and the way the OS works is differant it will confuse the hell out of them. Even a jump from Windows 95 to Windows 7 isn't a huge culture shock. It's like speaking English to kids all their life then when they are 16 years old dumping them in the middle of China and expecting them to automatically understand the language. In my opinion, if you want an introductary laptop for your kids, get an old battered IBM Thinkpad from eBay with Windows 98 for about £50 and when they smash the screen or pour apple sauce all over it you haven't wasted a huge amount of cash on a piece of junk that looks like it was bought in the baby toy section of Toys R Us.
back by demand makes a good point.
Surely it is cheaper to refurbish older tech so it gets re-used, even if the configurations differ. Any good OS could handle that and it'd still work out cheaper than this crazy idea.
Plus they'll realize that in the 'real world' even with modular standards, there are going to be different configurations.