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> Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:00:30 -0500
> From: Casey Bralla <MailList@NerdWorld.org>
> Subject: [PLUG] OLPC Comments
>
> My dad bought a couple of the OLPC mini-laptops (You buy 2. You get 1, the other is
> donated). He messed around with it for a while, then sent it to me to try. I was
> not very impressed.
[...]
> All in all, a great disappointment.
Not to be too much of a grinch, but this is exactly why they didn't
really want to sell the units at all. I guess the payout from the G1G1
program was too much for them to resist.
OLPC is a very specific platform, designed expressly for a very specific
purpose. It is not a general purpose PC; it never was, and it never
will be. (Well, unless you nuke it back to the stone-age and install
Ubuntu or something on it, if that's even possible.)
If you want a small, general purpose Linux PC get an eeepc or one of the
clones that are starting to emerge.
Now, having said that, I fired it up in VMware a while ago and was
totally baffled by the interface too. We aren't the target audience,
and while you can argue that skilled learned on the OLPC aren't very
transferable, in the environment for which it was purpose-built, that
isn't going to matter much.
In the correct context, it's an amazing idea, design, and
implementation. Some of the security features are especially brilliant,
though many don't transfer to the generic PC design we're all familiar
with. (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bitfrost and
http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=security;a=blob;f=bitfrost.txt, also
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/one_laptop_per.html)
My $0.02,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
Microsoft has single-handedly nullified Moore's Law.
Innate design flaws of Windows make a personal firewall, anti-virus
and anti-malware software mandatory. The resulting software arms race
has effectively flattened Moore's Law on hardware running Windows.
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