Comment on OLPC Can Fight Insurgencies with XO Laptops, Not Guns

2009-11-08T00:58:46Z

this is a brilliant idea that is really changing the world. I wish with the educational and pedagogical capacities that we have in our NGO www.AfghanMMCC.org we could join and be part of this movement.

Comment on BoomingBang: XO Laptop Role Playing Game

2009-11-08T00:29:34Z

Kay,

I am not so sure if that kind of content would be beneficial for children (and OLPC's perceived reputation) at this point.

You are saying to put out Grand Theft Auto like content out there. But I am not too sure if that is necessary.

Children with XO can benefit more from wide variety of other genres of games before they can be exposed to such content in an "entertainment/edutainemnt" form. Especially considering for some countries, what we perceive as terrible act of violence is part of their everyday life experience...

I really don't think something that could be perceived as mature content is not needed for XO's app contents.

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-07T14:07:54Z

I appreciate the advice, but I'm not sure I can use it. It's ridiculous to claim that SL and Sugar developers think the success or failure of Sugar depends on its ability to play youtube videos. Get to know the developers better please before saying such things, you do them a disservice. As for MS and Apple: their K-6 offer is weak and neither is interested in cheap netbooks, the kind most interesting to schools (I'm afraid the number of kids with a $1000 laptop is limited). ZDNet's education blogger has a good handle on what is happening for example. Targeting virgin markets is an approach, but in my view won't assure Sugar's success by itself. As for Sugar on a Stick, how can it not be in the conversation when it is the central pillar of our marketing strategy? Since it bypasses the installation barrier, the most serious blocker to changing a system on a different OS. Read through the SL marketing meeting logs, you will understand how we developed our strategy. Sugar is fundamentally hardware-agnostic and that's what schools need - a consistent learning platform across varied and often outdated hardware. Other pieces - feedback, Activity-to-curricula matching, the XS server for non-XO hardware (such as Intel's offer for teacher's laptops, cf. the Macedonia project) - are missing, but are being worked on. Volunteers are needed; if you or anyone you know wants to assist, you will be welcome.

Comment on BoomingBang: XO Laptop Role Playing Game

2009-11-07T13:28:30Z

It's hard to imagine gaming on the question of "what would it be like if I acted without moral restraint" would be beneficial in child development. Indeed, there have been many studies in negative impact of dress rehearsing sociopathy. The game, however seems an interesting practice field, if it were designed to creative solution of varying obstacles occurring because others are solving from their own vantage point, without the creative murder techniques scenario.

Comment on How Young is Old Enough for Sugar Learning?

2009-11-07T12:52:38Z

I wrote a little program using Scratch that moves the cat around the screen and speaks whatever key my 2 year old daughter presses. (I recorded myself saying each letter and number.) Unfortunately, there are lots of keys that Scratch doesn't support, and my daughter always finds a way to completely hang the system so no keys work. She also loves watching herself in Record (and has since she was one). Haven't tried TamTam with her yet.

Would love to find other little activities for her.

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-07T04:53:52Z

So, what do they do when something does not work?

"...kids figure out very quickly what works or doesn't"

Feedback channels are still something that are welcoming to the already enabled crowd, and it's an interesting challenge to think and *make happen* for those who don't yet know haow to use forums, blogs, lists...

Thanks for the seed of the idea!

"realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play youtube videos"

hear, hear! KISS (keep it simple, stupid) is a great principle we would get more mileage out of, instead of the feature-creep way, which has not affected everything yet, but is lurking dangerously close as interest in the XO 1 as a priority for Sugar appear to be waning, though, hopefully, not yet gone.

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T20:59:48Z

I think is time that SL and Sugar developers to realize that the success or failure of Sugar does not depend on its ability to play youtube videos. Not because is not important but because there is very little chance to penetrate this market dominated by MS and Apple.
Like it or not Sugar's success or failure lays on its 1 mil+ users with XO-1 (and hopefully XO-1+). If they are successful and happy and the data pile in to support it, everybody will pay attention and traction will be gained even in the developed world. However, even then Sugar's aim should be the virgin markets. The ones with the limited resources, the ones that can not "afford" MS, Intel and Apple, and MS, Intel and Apple can "afford" to not to dominate them. The ones that may not have the bandwidth for youtube or even e-books. If a large enough based is formed there, it will develop its own sustainable dynamics and sugar will expand and flourish.
Going for really energy efficient software to couple the hardware and paying attention to the current users and deployments, could double linux use world wide in few short years. Hopping to get 10 million kids in the develop world schools to use sugar on their $1000+ intel laptop is fairly unlikely for reasons that we would take some time to lay out here (and please do not bring SoaS here because that's another lengthy discussion).
So unless SL developers want to develop for the fun of it and show what cool applications they can make or how cleverly can use the cutting edge fedora infrastructure, I would suggest to take the RedHat road. Make something solid efficient and functional for the work at hand. Developing world classroom teaching. Improve it and update it according to your customers needs. The XO deployments.
And if you do not like XOs contract another hardware and work with this in new deployments! Going after the GameBoy/PSP/iPhone kid head to head with MS and Apple, as a side show on top of other linux distros and leaving behind the limited user base you now have, is a recipe for demise.

Comment on OLPC: The Best ROI for Indian Children

2009-11-06T19:35:09Z

Sorry, Wayan, that's about 160 million children in India. Your figure of 25 million is about right for the largest state in India, Uttar Pradesh.

Otherwise, excellent.

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T17:55:21Z

What I've seen is that kids figure out very quickly what works or doesn't. My point is, there are hundreds of Activities with more all the time; I don't believe it would be beneficial, desirable or even possible for Sugar Labs or OLPC to enforce Activity feature sets (not the same as the Sugar shell feature set). It's really a question for the deploying country, district, or school. There's another issue: Sugar and its Activities face a particular challenge in developed countries with gadget-literate kids, who can be very sophisticated - for example, testing an unfamiliar machine by playing back their favorite YouTube video.

Comment on About OLPC News

2009-11-06T17:47:23Z

I am from Congo DRC and would like to know how a rural school from my country can get into the OLPC program; how and where to place orders for these special computers. Who are the contact persons?

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T17:09:51Z

Hmmm let's see ... does the appeal of the new feature tailored for the elusive would-be user outweighs the damage of a horde of unhappy existing users?
How many _students_ are actually using in their _everyday classroom_ the new record activity? Through in some prospective everyday classroom users users too, if you want...
See if this answers your dilemma

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T16:10:52Z

hmmm well, should there be different versions of Record for OLPC and non-OLPC hardware?

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T08:38:19Z

Yes, I must agree that now usability is getting into Sugar, there is actual interest by developers to listen to the users, alas, OLPC and Ceibal do not encourage that upstream kind of sharing yet, but to some extent it is happening.

However, what is the point of "best" and "high quality" in record? AFAIK these are useless in the XO 1

Sean Daly dixit,
"I haven't seen feature creep on Sugar, but I have seen great strides in usability"

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T08:06:30Z

"I'm interested in how the oldest deployed Sugar versions (e.g. OLPC-OS v7.1.x, builds 653/656) can be upgraded to at least build 802."
I can appreciate that you are SL marketing "specialist" but what you say is inherently conflicting and not accurate. Considering that a lot of the readers of this page may have first hand experience with Sugar and/or XO-1 damages SL's credibility.
Does not make sense to "worry" about os653/656 (2 years old) update to os767/802 (1 year old) update when there is _no issue_ on that, and not to "worry" about os767/802 to Sugar 0.86.

"I understand there is software backporting work from the XO-1.5 beta to the XO-1"
Why the latest Sugar version should be BACKPORTED in the 99% of its user base?

"I haven't seen feature creep on Sugar, but I have seen great strides in usability"
"Renaming" Sugar's new features to "usability" does not change the fact that they are new features and things can not be done the same way in let's say 0.82 and 0.86

"On the Activities level, the Sugar Activities Library is a reliable indicator of Sugar version compatibility"
The fact that there are are activities running on 0.82 version does not mean that there is no feature creep with the activities that run on the newer versions.
Besides, if Sugar .82 is the same feature wise, as Sugar 0.86+ then why the heck do it. Don't you have anything better to do?... :-)

"I would say the version of Sugar (and of course the Activities which run on that version) has more impact than the hardware version"
Sorry but this is nonsense. If the version of sugar sugar is important and the version of sugar depends on the hardware, then the hardware is important. No?

Comment on Negroponte: XO-1.75 goes ARM, XO-2 is canceled

2009-11-06T04:54:50Z

Bagging the 1.5 and leapfrogging to the 1.75 is a pretty smart move, actually. I'm impressed by the performance on my son's iPod Touch, which uses the ARM chip. Power consumption is next to nil and its fast. I wish my XO-1 with Xtra Ordinary was running on that chip.

I don't know if this particular rubberized keyboard ARM-based laptop is going to make it to the US, but it would be an XO-1.5 killer if it did . . .

http://www.slashgear.com/wistron-n900z-smartbook-sub-200-arm-netbook-0345776/

. . . 10 hours (!) on a single change on a machine thats slated to retail for $200.

So . . . OLPC doesn't rush to bring out the 1.5 by the end of this year . . . doesn't conduct an abortive and hastily prepared G1G1 program in a still mostly stagnant (but slowly improving) economy . . . getting another year or so out of the XO-1 and eventually providing the 1.75 in the same near-bullet-proof form factor (saving money by not moving to the unproven 2.0 dual tablet format,) yet introducing something that may be able to squeeze half a day off of a single charge.

Yes . . . certainly shocking news but, the more I think about it, it seems to make more sense than the 1.5 to 2.0 path that they were on.

As for the 3.0 . . . I'll get back to you in a year or two. :-)

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