He posits that Microsoft is facing serious competition from Linux on netbooks and other low-end computers, such that if it wishes to protect its application market (mostly Office), it had better give away the OS. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that he really understands what “open source” means, instead using it as a synonym for “free of charge.” You can download most open source software free of charge, but as the name implies, it’s about more than price. In fact, it’s really about availability of source code. It just happens that if the source code is freely available, it’s really hard to charge much for a compiled binary; as a secondary effect, the application is usually free.

Nevertheless, let’s restate the first sentence of this post as “Will Microsoft be compelled to give away Windows for free?” And the answer is that it already does. Or close to free: Large computer retailers like Dell certainly aren’t paying what you would pay for Windows when buying it in a store. In fact, according to Babcock’s article, they’re paying $34.00 a copy. And here’s a tip if you work for a large company — when the Microsoft rep comes around trying to get you to upgrade to Vista, or Windows 7 when that time comes, tell him that you’re conducting an internal study examining the feasibility of switching to Linux. Your price will come down dramatically too! Linux has mostly damaged Microsoft by serving as a handy negotiating hammer for organizations whom one suspects weren’t even seriously considering switching in the first place. People don’t have to actually adopt Linux for it to eat into Microsoft’s profits.

That it has become such a credible threat is a benchmark of how far it has evolved over the past few years. However, that may not amount to much in the marketplace as long as Microsoft is prepared to cut any deal to keep organizations from switching teams.

And speaking of those potentially Microsoft-threatening netbooks, how is the father of all netbooks, the OLPC XO, faring? I suppose the answer is in how you look at it.

From a hardware perspective, there are problems, especially if one examines the response to OLPC’s two G1G1 (give one, get one) campaigns. G1G1 was a program where if you paid for two XOs, one would be sent to you, and one to a needy child somewhere in the developing world.

In 2007, G1G1 netted $37 million. In 2008, it netted $2.5 million, necessitating the firing of 50% of the OLPC staff. What happened? OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte blames it on the economy, but I don’t think the economy alone is sufficient cause for such a dramatic difference. Another approach to the question might be: Why was 2007 so successful? In part it may have been the birth of the netbook, the idea of a wee, inexpensive laptop which would be everything you needed for simple tasks like web surfing and email, coupled with the marketing of the XO as if it were a wee, general purpose laptop. But its success quickly turned on OLPC, as many people, upon receiving their XOs, were dismayed to discover that the devices sported a radically new operating environment, a graphical one designed from the ground up exclusively for use in the classroom, and following the pedagogical philosophy of constructionism. It was called Sugar. By the time of the 2008 G1G1 the cat was out of the bag regarding the XO.

And the final reason the 2008 G1G1 may have been such a dismal failure was the simple fact that Nicholas Negroponte is a colossal buzzkill who, by getting into bed with Microsoft, pissed off hoards of open source fans who were cheering for the project, as well as working for it. The chief software architect, Walter Bender, resigned over the matter. Personally, when the 2008 G1G1 was on I considered hyping it a bit, here and there and to friends or wherever, but it just didn’t feel worth the effort. There was a little voice in the back of my mind saying “Just die already.” It’s hard to see how the OLPC can continue with such a profound deficit of vision at the top, now that many like Bender have left.

If you were to ask how the software is doing, however, the answer would be somewhat different. When Bender left OLPC, he set up Sugar Labs to continue the OS’s development. Sugar is released under an open source license, the GPL, so there’s absolutely nothing stopping him from continuing on his own. Indeed, he has something of an advantage over OLPC in that, while no one is going to give you hardware for free, people will give of their time and talents for something they are passionate about. Sugar is alive and well and carrying on, with plans for the future. These include Sugar on a Stick, basically a bootable USB stick you can use to boot into the Sugar environment on most any old computer. Sweet.

Negroponte isn’t abandoning his commitment to OLPC’s software platform, Sugar. As he wrote on the OLPC Community News listserv:

Sugar needs a wider basis, to run on more Linux platforms and to run under Windows. We have been engaged in discussions with Microsoft for several months, to explore a dual boot version of the XO. Some of you have seen what Microsoft developed on their own for the XO. It works well and now needs Sugar on top of it (so to speak).

Meanwhile, Walter Bender may have resigned from OLPC, but Sugar is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows anyone to do whatever they like with it, provided credit is given where due. That’s exactly what he intends to do, and not even necessarily on the XO:

Over time there are lots of things that will happen with Sugar in terms of efficiency and platform independence. Already, the community has by and large ported Sugar to Ubuntu [a form of Linux]. You can do an “apt-get Sugar” and if you’ve put the right repositories in place, you can install Sugar on Ubuntu. There is also a live CD that some folks in Austria put together, so you can run Sugar from your CD drive. There’s a lot of discussion on the developer forums about how to make all of that happen more efficiently.

The flip side — it’s been attributed to Steve Jobs, though I never heard him say it — is that if you really care about software you have to work on hardware. Certainly there are a lot of hooks from Sugar into the OLPC hardware, because the hardware itself is pretty special. But while I think that the things that OLPC has done with the hardware are necessary for successful deployment, I think that there are compromises that can be made with other hardware in the short term. So [you could get Sugar running on] other laptops and even other computers.

Walter Bender in Xconomy

So, to summarize, one side holds the position that Sugar should be able to run on other platforms, whereas the other side asserts that Sugar should be able to run on other platforms. Not much of a split, it would seem, except that you can google your way through everything said and written by Bender and I doubt you’ll ever find him advocating Windows as one of the platforms on which Sugar should run. In fact, as he also wrote in Xconomy:

I think the culture around free software is actually a powerful culture for learning, and one of my goals from the very beginning of the project was to try to instill in the education industry some of the culture and technology and morals of the open source movement. I think it would greatly enhance the learning and education industry and their ability to engage teachers and students. So many different things are tied up in this concept. It’s both about freedom, and the freedom to be critical. Criticism of ideas is a powerful force in learning, and unleashing that is, I think, an important part of the OLPC mission.

So there you have it. It’s not about the XO, and it’s not about Sugar — both sides are committed to both those manifestations of the OLPC project. But even if you could get Sugar to run as an application suite on Windows, with its own program manager and activities journal, there are those in the OLPC project, and others who felt so strongly about these matters that they had to leave, who would still be opposed. These are the ones who believe that open source software in general is critical to the mission of education, and that closed source software, especially that of a convicted monopolist corporation like Microsoft, is not only undesirable, but detrimental to that mission.

So when Negroponte characterizes his opponents as “open-source fundamentalists,” he’s not entirely wrong. A less inflammatory term would be preferable, though — say, “people uncompromisingly committed to the empowerment of educators and students through the freedom which open-source software provides.” That’s a bit more of a mouthful, but it does sound much nicer, doesn’t it?

As it turns out, however, there’s nothing wrong with “the hundred dollar laptop” that a couple of hundred dollars worth of peripherals can’t fix. I have tamed the beast. But be forewarned, what follows will astound you. Ladies may wish to leave the room. Behold, I present to you: Locutus of XO!

Fortunately OLPC has made it very easy for grownups who received an XO through the “give one get one” program to get a key (actually a bit of code), copy it to the flash memory or onto a usb stick, and go to town. This particular stick is a fast 4GB capacity one with a cool red light that blinks when there’s activity. If you’re doing this at home, avoid usb sticks that have a small, undeletable partition to hold their free Windows software.

With Ubuntu and XFCE I have a completely normal environment to work in which is faster than Sugar, and where it’s easy to use multiple applications at once, including the blessed Firefox web browser. The file management is normal and easily explorable — as opposed to Sugar’s cryptic hidden data store with the hexadecimally named files.

A.ii : the swap partition. Swap allows the OS to use storage as virtual memory, so if you run out of memory (and the XO only has 256 MB) it can swap out less used contents from RAM to free up more. It’s usually a hard drive partition under Linux, and there is something similar for Windows as well.

The XO doesn’t have a hard drive, and so uses the flash memory instead. But that’s problematic; flash memory (like that used in SD cards and usb memory sticks) is good for a large but limited number of writes, and using it for swap may seriously reduce its life. So I’m using this cheap 1GB usb stick instead. If it dies, it’s easy enough to replace and no data lost.

This stick has an orange light which blinks on activity, so I have an actual visual indicator of when the system is swapping.

A.iii : tunes! 4 GB worth of song files.

The final thing plugged into the hub is the keyboard.

B: Speakers. No built-in laptop speakers are going to offer an audiophilic listening experience, but the XO’s make other laptop speakers seem symphonic by comparison. For listening to music, external speakers or headphones are a must.

C: DVD/CD player/writer. This one is just for show, as it refuses to play DVDs under Linux — not just an XO problem. It’s plugged into one of the usb ports on the other side of the monitor from the hub.

D: Keyboard. The XO built-in keyboard is definitely for kid-sized hands, and not well-suited for an adult touch typist.

E: Wee wireless mouse, because all track pads suck, and the XO’s is no exception. Its receiver is plugged into the other of the usb ports on the other side of the monitor from the hub. It also has a light, green, which blinks on activity. With all these blinking coloured lights, this is clearly the future. Or Christmas.

F: 8 GB SD card. Don’t bother squinting; the SD slot is hidden on the bottom right of the monitor, so you can’t see it. I use the card largely for data storage. With 8 GB on SD, 4 GB on the first usb stick, and 4 GB of tunes, not to mention a GB of swap, I have considerably more space than the 1 GB the XO comes with.

So there you have it. When a friend suggested that I just get a MacBook instead, with its superior processor, memory, built in dvd drive, better speakers, and so on and so on, I just snorted. Anyone with enough money can get a MacBook, but forcing an educational appliance designed for use by kids in the developing world to function as a regular computer, that’s an accomplishment, even if it does take 20 minutes to set up and get booted into!

Hm, maybe I could trim a few minutes off that if I replaced the usb memory sticks with a single, small, 1.8″, usb external hard drive with partition for OS and tunes, and a regular swap partition . . . But only if I can find a hard drive enclosure that has at least one blinking, coloured light.

(chopstick rails prevent interference with XO’s keyboard and trackpad)

I got the wee wireless mouse from the same source, Brando, usb.brando.com.hk. Prices are good on many items, and they charge a flat $3.00 to ship anywhere. From the stamps, it looks like my order cost over $10 US to ship, so they’re folding some of the shipping cost into their pricing.

I have another order in for an even smaller keyboard, and for a slim dvd burner.

Thanks to the Seattle XO User Group for putting me on to Brando. Brando has lots of neat little usb things that will be of interest to people with this emerging class of wee laptops, or for crazy MacBook Air owners. For them, Brando also has a variety of usb hubs to make the most of that one usb port.

There was room for improvement, though, especially in the area of ginger prep. As Barley Legal’s proprietor Saul points out in the article, sliced ginger (as opposed to shredded) is used in order to end up with a product that has as little physical ginger matter in it as possible — just pure ginger flavour. However, the process of peeling is a bit like shredding, and it would be wise after peeling and slicing to add the step of carefully rinsing the ginger to remove as much fine particle as possible. Why? Check out this vid I made of the final product…

I did three takes with different bottles, and while that wasn’t the best, it was the most dramatic, so in the interests of both education and entertainment, there it is. It ends abruptly because my little digital camera doesn’t believe any shot should last longer than three minutes.

Saul also mentions in his article that the product would be better if a proper champagne or brewer’s yeast were used instead of plain old baking yeast. He only features baker’s yeast in his article to make the point of how simple this is, achievable with gear and ingredients common in many kitchens.

It may be that if I had used a more appropriate yeast my ginger ale would smell less sulphurous. I tested bottles throughout the fermenting/chilling period, and the scent was most noticeable on day three. As was the volcanic effect: when I opened a bottle that hadn’t been refrigerated, the foam-over problem was about 10 times worse than in the above vid.

The sulphurous smell diminished with time. I would recommend two days minimum refrigeration for a better smelling and better behaving ginger ale, though even after a week in the fridge, if you’ve got a lot of particles in the sediment, you still risk foam-over, as the video demonstrates. There’s no avoiding sediment (pour carefully), but best if it doesn’t have wee bits and pieces in it.

Finally, I should add that Saul makes a major point in his article of warning people not to use glass bottles. The amount of pressure in the bottle from carbonation is very high. With a plastic bottle, if it’s too much, the cap will hiss or the bottle might even split, but with glass . . . Well, natural carbonation is only fun until someone puts out an eye.

Next attempt I will also add an apple and a stick or two of cinnamon, just for kicks. What can I say, I’m a wild man.

I am writing this using its simple word processor. I have a mouse and full size keyboard plugged in to the usb ports, as the keyboard is tiny….

…. and I’m not a fan of track pads, not even fancy track pads like on the MacBook. The monitor, however, is surprisingly decent, small, but very high resolution.

I could write a book about this thing, but I’ll focus in this brief article on why the XO is not for the average user, and in the process reveal something about the structure of XO, or more precisely, its Sugar graphical environment and application suite.

The important thing to understand about the XO is that it is intended to be an education appliance, as opposed to what most would think of as a pc or laptop. The degree to which you can easily configure and customize a toaster is limited primarily to how dark you like your toast, and the XO as appliance is similarly constrained. Working on a project where they could define constraints has given the XO developers a great deal of freedom to deviate from the norm in creating something specifically for the classroom.

For example, hierarchical concepts like file systems and directories (“folders” to you Windows users) and such are hard, so why not do away with them? Instead, Sugar keeps track of everything the user does in the Journal. I don’t worry about saving this document as I type it, that’s the job of the Journal. And if I leave off, shut down, and return to it tomorrow, I can open it via the entry in the Journal and continue working. Likewise if I want to look at that photo I took with the XO’s built in camera, it will be in the Journal. If looking for pictures, I can constrain the Journal to display only pictures entries, and likewise for other application types. Or perhaps that should be activity types.

Sugar is very much organized around the idea of “activities,” and this Journal model suits that. It might not be a good model for a corporation or news organization, but One Laptop Per Child is aptly named. Even though, under the hood, it is running a multi-user operating system (the Fedora Core 7 distribution of Linux), the laptop boots directly into the Sugar environment for one user, named olpc. This one user can do many things but typically only one at a time, and serial journal suits that model very well.

As you might guess, there is no Start button to bring up a mess of menus and potentially confusing options. Instead, there is the Frame. The Frame is called up by moving the mouse cursor to a corner of the screen.

Along the bottom of the Frame are icons for all the applications in the Sugar suite. Looking at the XO in videos at YouTube.com, I suspect the number of applications that come preinstalled has expanded over time; in some of the vids, XO doesn’t have enough applications to fill the bottom Frame, whereas mine has enough that a scroll arrow is necessary to access them all.

So you may be thinking, “Simplifying the computer’s interface sounds like a great idea, why would he say that this isn’t for me?” Well, let’s take the “Record” application (excuse me, that should be “Record activity“) as an example. Here we can record sound, video, or just snap a simple picture. The picture module even has a timer.

Look ma, no hands!

Wonderful. And in the context of the environment the XO was designed for — a classroom full of kids, each with a computer connected via the OLPC mesh network — pictures, vids, files, and activities of all kinds can be easily shared or collaboratively worked on. It’s a technological masterpiece, a self-forming network, no sysadmin required. Wherever two or more XO’s are gathered within range of each other, there a network shall be. If one has access to the internet, then the mesh network has access to the internet. It is brilliant.

But you, the average computer user, aren’t part of that wonderful scenario. Suppose you snap a shot and you want to send it as an email attachment to someone? First of all, there is no email application for you to send email with. Okay, no problem, there’s a web browser, right? So we can use web mail.

I open the Sugar web browser. You may have read somewhere that this is Firefox. It isn’t. It uses the same code base, but is stripped way back. On opening it, you might think it doesn’t have an address bar. That is because the address bar does double duty as a title bar. If I pop the cursor into where the title is displayed (currently “OLPC Library”), it will switch to showing the address of the current page which I can replace with the address of my web mail.

As an aside, it really is amazing how good most web sites look on this small monitor. I would not have thought it possible. There is a lot of genius in the XO hardware, but giving it a monitor this nice at such a low price point is a real achievement.

Okay, I’ve started a new message, and have clicked on the add attachment link. Google gives me a field and a browse button. I click the browse button. Nothing happens. Why, I don’t know. But the browser was the first app I messed with when I got the XO, and I discovered as well that it doesn’t handle htaccess based authentication (simply won’t let you log in), nor sites that use self-signed certificates for secure server (SSL), just refusing to display, with no warning/option to continue. It also does a crappy job of most flash. It is the worst browser I have ever used, going all the way back to the early days of Mosaic.

I discovered that Opera makes a browser tailored for the XO. So I installed that. Here is a page of instructions, including how to add an icon for it to the Frame. And yes, you have to use the command line. The moment you feel any need to go beyond the constraints of this appliance, it will very likely involve the command line. If you have any sort of aversion to that, that alone is why this computer is not for you. It also helps to have a sysadmin’s understanding of Linux, with special focus on the Fedora distribution. Then be prepared to spend some time googling for XO/Sugar specific information. (Fortunately, there is a lot of it out there.)

But supposing you knuckled-down, followed the instructions, and managed to get Opera installed, would you then be able to send that attachment? I fire up Opera, go to my web mail, and log in. Same as before, except this time when I click on the browse button, a browse dialogue pops up enabling me to search for my file and attach it. Huzzah!

But not so fast. We don’t deal with such troubling concepts as files anymore. Taking a picture is an activity recorded in the Journal. How do you attach an activity?

Hm. The XO developers have created an idealization at the level of the graphical user interface, but obviously they couldn’t get away from storing text or images or whatever somewhere, and we know that the underlying operating system is UNIX based, and UNIX is all about
files; everything is a file, even devices are treated as files, so you know that picture just has to be a file somewhere if only you could find it.

I’ll tell you where it is, but you won’t like it. It’s in a directory called
/home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore/store, and all the files have names rendered in hexadecimal which look like this —
e611f43f-1db8-4224-9cae-ba381ad9dee0. Why? Because we don’t care about files! That’s all stuff the OS needs to keep track of, not fuzzy wuzzy humans like us! Unless, of course, we’re looking to send a picture as an email attachment to someone. Or if we need to find the file we just downloaded. That’s why you can’t simply use the default web browser to download Opera. The file would wind up in the datastore with an obscure hexadecimal filename, hidden as effectively as the Ark of the Covenant tucked away in that large warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So is all lost? No. If you’re fine with the command line, the file command may yield some clues about which file is your picture. If you don’t mind giving up some of your precious storage you can easily install the uber-thumbnail viewer gwenview from the command line, since it is in the yum repository (su, then yum install gwenview). Nice, but it has a lot of associated dependencies which also get installed, so your limited storage will take a hit.

Or we can try to function within the constraints using a USB memory stick. Here’s what we do. Stick the USB stick into one of the USB ports. Go to the Journal. At the bottom you will see an icon representing the USB stick. Theoretically . . . I don’t see it. Hm again. Perhaps a reboot is in order.

How terribly embarrassing. Rebooting to fix things is so Redmond. But it did the trick. So anyway…

Find the Journal entry for the image, and drag it onto the USB icon, thus copying it. The USB drive will be mounted under /media and will have a meaningless name, but not so bad as the file names in the datastore. So I find it using the GoogleMail browse for attachment dialogue, select, send the message on its way to myself at another address, and confirm that yes, indeed, it is possible to send email attachments from the XO! All you need is Opera, a webmail account, and a USB stick.

Of course if your cute, little Linux based laptop was an Asus eee pc or a CloudBook, you could have just added the image as an email attachment in your email application without the fuss and complication.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m down on the XO. I’m actually really fond of it. Now that I have Opera installed, it can do email, download files, and, of course, surf the web more than adequately. If nothing else, it’s a wonderful little portable web browser, which is really all I need when I’m between desktops. And I also managed to install an mp3 player (again, required some geek chops), so not only is it a small computer, it’s also a very large ipod!

And for the kids these things are designed for, the whole OLPC idea is from beginning to end absolutely brilliant. A classroom full of these appliances, one for each kid, and one for the teacher, all networked automagically together, facilitating collaboration, and learning and all that good stuff… sheer genius. So while it might not be the best laptop for a regular computer user, it is better than anything Microsoft, or Asus, or whatever corporation could have come up with for this very specific role in the classroom.

And, of course, if you have the geek chops it is a wonderful geek toy. You can have your girly MacBook Air, my laptop has more character by far!

The GlobalLink

The GlobalLink was a device used by the characters on the TV series Earth : Final Conflict. The show had one good season before it was dumbed down and limped on for four more before being cancelled. The GlobalLink was a kind of video cellphone/PDA/mini computer with a decent sized screen which rolled into the handle when closed.

When I first learned of research into flexible displays some years ago, I figured that actual GlobalLink type devices could not be far behind. On his blog, Jamais Cascio notes similarities between the GlobalLink and Polymer Vision’s Readius ebook reader.

But it’s just a friggin’ ebook reader! Come on you boffins, you’ve been working on flexible displays for years now, but still the best you can do by way of what I’m looking for is the iPhone and the Blackberry? What is the hold up? I hope it doesn’t take as long as it took me to get a flip open Star Trek-style communicator. Back in elementary school, we would make our own communicators out of cardboard and tape. A button would be added for weight so they would flip open better. Now I have a clamshell mobile phone that would have been the complete envy of that long ago playground. But I had to wait decades for it!

Polymer Vision says

It is our mission to put a rollable display in every mobile device. To achieve that the company is working on colour and video capabilities which will be achieved in the coming five years. With those capabilities mainstream introduction will be a matter of time. (In interview with telegraph.co.uk.)

Five years! I guess that’s not happening this Xmas. But if Polymer Vision is going to drag its heels, perhaps LG Philips will have something out sooner.

Maybe next year.

The XO-1 Laptop

You have probably heard of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative with its objective of putting $100 laptops into the hands of children in developing nations. These machines are now in production, though they failed to meet to meet their price target; instead, they will cost $188. The name has also changed, to the XO-1 Laptop.

But don’t look for these in a store near you. They aren’t for you (unless you’re a kid in a developing nation, perhaps one who has one already and is reading this on it even now. Hi, kid. Welcome to the internet). But generous folk who wish to buy one for donation will be allowed to purchase one for themselves as well, through the Give One, Get One program.

If you’re purely concerned with supporting the OLPC program, you could, of course, just donate $400, asking nothing in return. And if you’re just looking for a cheap laptop, you would probably be better off getting something more powerful at the same cost as two XO-1s, like the Asus eee PC.

The specs for the XO-1 are not impressive. The reason I want one of these things, as opposed to an eee PC, is that it’s really cool in a very geeky way. It’s a computer whose hardware and software both have been tailored to serve an important need. It’s not corporate crap shoved on bleating masses suffering the conspicuous karmic consequence of obesity for their mindless consumption and endless farting of fetid greenhouse gases from between their flabby pustule-bestrewn ass cheeks. No, it’s much nicer than that. The XO-1 is a smart product, by smart people, addressing in a practical way the pressing social and technological problem of the digital divide.

If you want a powerful laptop that will do all sorts of things, even run a resource hog OS like Vista, then the XO-1 is definitely not for you. But if you want to own a bit of history, and an educational appliance that will probably do a decent job of web surfing and presenting text (it has a high rez mode for ebook-like functionality), then you have until the end of December to get one. That’s when the Give One, Get One program ends.

I’ve ordered mine. It will be my Xmas present to myself. And to some kid somewhere. (Hi kid. Hold on tight to that laptop, don’t waste too much time on games, and don’t get caught surfing porn on it.)