Weekly Edition
Return to the Press page
| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy)
Xconomy is running a lengthy interview with Walter Bender about where he plans to go from here. "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. Its 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."
(By way of Ivan Krstić; also worth a read). (Log in to post comments)
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 13:39 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] Beautiful quote. This crystallizes one of the deep issues vexing the OLPC project, though -- selling that idea for millions of dollars to Ministers of Education is a pretty hard sell. That idea -- the creative, disruptive, anti-authoritarian power of freedom -- is pretty much poison to the role of a Minister of Education and the culture that creates and sustains that powerful office. Perhaps they would be happy to pay lip service to the idea, but the actual practice of it -- throwing bureaucracies into turmoil and raising all sorts of unanswered policy questions under their watch -- is something else again.
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 16:20 UTC (Fri) by uravanbob (subscriber, #4050) [Link] So a better organized G1G1 or GiveMany program that would allow interested parties to circumvent the need for Sinister of Education might be called for. Locally, (rural Colorado), I don't much care what the Feds or State thinks, if I could point to a relatively successful pilot and process for implementing a similar project here, I could easily get charitable funding - but getting XO's right now doesn't seem to be very easy - see G1G1 and current complaints about efforts to get Indiana's state project or the Church of Christ's pilot. Several of the local educators are very interested in doing this - so we will see how it goes. That's the essence of open source - the ability to scratch your itch.
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 16:34 UTC (Fri) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] Interesting! Please keep me posted. I'm in Boulder, Colorado. (Two of our beloved LWN writers live in Colorado too, I've noticed.)
Xconomy is a mainly broken site Posted Apr 25, 2008 16:20 UTC (Fri) by barbara (subscriber, #3014) [Link] I enjoyed this interview with Walter Bender despite the fact that the hosting website had an annoying "feature" of opening extra tabs or multiple instances of Konqueror (version 3.5.8). Iceweasel (version 2.0.0.12-1) did not work at all, and gave this error message: open dsp: Device or resource busy The program 'gecko' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)'. (Details: serial 35 error_code 10 request_code 146 minor_code 1) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on gdk_x_error() function.) Has anyone else experienced these konqueror and icweasel (firefox?, mozilla?) problems with this site? Any suggestions for correcting this problem (other than to use IE, :-) ) TIA, Barbara
Xconomy is a mainly broken site Posted Apr 25, 2008 20:36 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Worked fine for me with Konqueror 3.5.8 (proxied via Polipo, so any HTTP weirdnesses would have been smoothed away, but you'd think kio_http would have done that in any case).
Xconomy is a mainly broken site Posted Apr 26, 2008 1:47 UTC (Sat) by TxtEdMacs (subscriber, #5983) [Link] Firefox 2.0.012 was fine. On a older standard Linux distribution, nothing special hardware (tower, not a laptop).
Xconomy is a mainly broken site Posted Apr 26, 2008 8:59 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] > [The Walter Bender interview] hosting > website had an annoying "feature" of > opening extra tabs or multiple instances > of Konqueror (version 3.5.8). Extra tabs/instances... that's a major hint you have scripting on, apparently by default, with way too liberal a setting for the scripting popup restrictions. This since scripting is the mechanism sites use to accomplish their abuse. Even significantly liberalizing my normal default security settings to allowing scripting on the specific site in both iceweasel/firefox (2.0.0.14, with noscript 1.6, updates checked for when I launched) and konqueror (3.5.9, latest as of my last distribution update sync a couple days ago), and even bypassing privoxy so its ad- and popup-blocking are nullified, no additional instances or tabs of any sort. Of course, that's with konqueror set to ask if it should allow a popup (it didn't) and iceweasel set to block them, even when scripting is allowed. However, a quick examination of the iceweasel/noscript unblock options for the site reveals multiple third party adserve sites wishing to run their adserving and potentially tracking and malware serving scripts, as well as ads.xconomy.com (same second level domain, different host, ads) wanting the same permissions. Sorry, allowing them is just begging for tracking/popups/spyware/malware/other-abuse of some sort, so I'm not doing it, even for testing. So depending on what you mean by broken... The site is a purveyor of abuse, yes, but still respects those who configure their browsers to refuse said abuse. I guess that's a mixed result. It does explain, however, how such a site link would make it into LWN, given that the LWN editors could be expected to have their browsers configured not to allow abuse by default, too. I know I would have been oblivious to all the abuse the site attempts to pass off, if it wasn't for your post mentioning it. Actually, I've had that exact problem myself, linking sites that abuse ads and potentially purvey spyware/malware, because my browser anti-abuse and security settings are high enough by default I'm simply oblivious to the experience as an average abuse-tolerant configured browser would render it. If the content displays without issue, I normally haven't the foggiest what a less securely configured (more abuse tolerant) browser might do, unless someone complains about that link I posted, which has actually happened on a couple occasions. Duncan
Xconomy is a mainly broken site Posted Apr 29, 2008 22:51 UTC (Tue) by barbara (subscriber, #3014) [Link] The original Konqueror issue is now resolved by adblocking http://www.idgtechnetwork.com/* The Mozilla issue has something to do with sound and is not resolved yet. Javascript is turned off by default for both browsers.
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 17:12 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] The Ivan Krstić posting really is worth reading - it explains a few things about Nicholas Negroponte's actual decisions in a few areas, compared to what he says happened, and makes me much more optimistic that OLPC will ultimately succeed despite the FUD swirling round the project, much of it bizarrely created by Nicholas Negroponte....
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 19:58 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link] I don't really think it's FUD to say that an effort is in trouble when the corporate entity and the community find themselves at odds with eachother. This is especially true of an effort like OLPC, who needs manufacturing muscle and the ability to schmooze bureaucrats. The typical FOSS community of programmers does not have those abilities. In OLPC's case that end of the equation came from Negroponte and his corporation, so without him I really can't see any outcome for a 'community' -- no matter how enthusiastic -- that could be considered a success. I'm sorry but OLPC has the same chance as Hillary right now, and I read Ivan's comment as more of an attempt to rally the troops by denying how desperate the situation is.
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 25, 2008 21:56 UTC (Fri) by uravanbob (subscriber, #4050) [Link] If by schmooze, you mean pay off. Please, Quanta does the manufacturing and seems to be able to handle it's responsibilities. I'm pretty sure someone like Amazon.com would be willing to market the XO given it's current demand with an appropriate margin. OLPC actually did a pretty poor job of handling the G1G1 program. I really hope that NN can get someone who understands customer relations better that he has demonstrated so far. The community has demonstrated that it can deliver software - that more needs to be done is true for almost any software project - proprietary or open. Sugar is an interesting experiment - but that is part of the beauty - it will evolve to be what it needs to be, because it answers to its users not the CEOs and Ministers of Education. So the question becomes can OLPC provide the XOs or will we have to find another hardware platform - in an increasingly competitive and innovative market segment?
One Laptop Per Child Foundation No Longer a Disruptive Force, Bender Fears (Xconomy) Posted Apr 26, 2008 8:11 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link] My reference to FUD was about comments by Negroponte that create the impression that OLPC added the SD card quite a while back just to support Windows, and that Sugar grew amorphously due to lack of a software architect - quoting from Ivan's blog:Remember that even when Nicholas talks, it is all to be taken with a fistful of salt. The SD card slot didnt get added to the XO for Microsoft, as he is fond of saying, but because we were getting terrible read/write performance with our solid-state storage. Hardware architect Mark Foster designed a dedicated chip to speed things up; that chip, as an unanticipated bonus, made it easy to attach a camera and an SD slot. Nicholas recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it "didnt have a software architect who did it in a crisp way" is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success. The organization decided to move anyway, and extended me a written offer to take over as Chief Software Architect. Nicholas rescinded the offer unilaterally several weeks later, for reasons he refused to explain to anyone. So yes, there was no architect, but thats because Nicholas didnt want one. If he believes thats the cause of Sugars problems, he has no one but himself to blame. Yes, the corporate entity is at odds with the community, but it's hard to understand quite why there is this sort of misinformation (bordering on FUD) from the CEO. This is the same person who also compared OLPC to "working like a terrorist group", which is an astonishingly stupid comparison given sensitivities around terrorism world-wide - even Microsoft would not have made this analogy! He could have made the same point by saying "working like a bunch of activists", for example.
|
|
||||||||||||