The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs » OLPC

Where’s there’s smoke up your ass, there’s Microsoft

Lastangelman — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 20:48:02 +0000

Microsoft will steal from just about anybody, won't they?

It's amazing the things you can do with GIMP these days

Leaked images from Microsoft skunkworks of it’s Courier project have been popping up as the date to the release of the iPad goes closer (I’m still holding out for a last minute delay beyond the April 3rd date). This looks closer to the second generation XO tablet that’s been on OLPC backburner for awhile now.

BTW, netbooks on the rise in Africa

Lastangelman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:12:33 +0000

Netbooks, including the OLPC XO, are on the rise in emerging nations in Africa. OLPC would actually have that market sewn up if they also sold the green monster individually instead of only limiting themselves to selling in bulk to educators. You know, a lot of kids never make it to school in Africa.

They tend to be home schooled, if at all. Bulk purchase makes sense if you’re selling to a school district in Tuscaloosa but we’re talking Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania fer crissakes! I’d be getting the green monster into as many hands as possible in as many ways as possible. You want the local governments to buy and distribute these babies? You can barely afford the bribe to get in

the door of an education minister to any of these countries. Grow up, dude. I’ve been to many of these places, I know how the system works. Money talks, bullshit walks. That’s why Microsoft got in many of these places first, crybaby.

Negroponte snubs Jobs advice

Lastangelman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:35:11 +0000

Because Negroponte knows exactly what he is doing and won’t listen to the single most successful and wunnerful tech genius of the decade.

Over to you Dear Leader. Give us the rest of the story.

Sugar update to current XO model

Lastangelman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:22:26 +0000

Sugar,

the interface for navigating

on the XO laptop, is due for an update, and

coders from Fedora have been hacking furiously before the little green laptop becomes supplanted by, oh, I dunno, this

or this

or god forbid this

But, by golly, someone thought, well, why can’t I run Sugar on any net book or computer?

Ta da!

Now, not only can you update the OS on your OLPC laptop, you can import that Sugary goodness to any device that has USB interface. Say, if Sugar OS can run on anything, wouldn’t that make the green plastic thing obsolete?

That’s why Negroponte isn’t running Apple or any other profitable tech company!

Negroponte claims credit for “netbook revolution”

Lastangelman — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:35:49 +0000

In a refute to this publication’s story of where the OLPC project went wrong, founder Nicholas Negroponte lashes out like a wounded schoolboy after getting his ass kicked by a fat freckled female classmate.

Money quote: You can thank us for the downward price pressure on the laptop industry, not to mention the fact that OLPC is the birthplace of the netbook, soon to be 30% of the world market.

Yes, no thanks to you Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Actually, this reminds of something. Back in the eighties, after he quit Wings and saw his popularity drop off the face of the earth, Denny Laine used to go around saying he invented ELO, not Jeff Lynne & Roy Wood. True, Denny did quit the Moody Blues in 1966 to start a live pop band that had amplified strings and rock instruments playing onstage at once, but nobody was interested ‘cos that version kinda’ sucked (some defenders claimed he was merely ahead of his time) . And nobody bought their records. Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood figured out how to do that, then Roy left to create something even weirder, and Jeff kept taking ELO to the next level and getting better each time and eventually made a gazillion dollars. Meanwhile, Denny makes and loses his Wings fortune, and tries to get people to pay attention to him. Sad, really.

Deutch-tard prefers OLPC design over anything by Apple

Lastangelman — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:20:38 +0000

Heresy! Dopey kraut designer rejects Apple products in design exhibit. The money quote (that will get both arms and legs broken within the halls of Cupertino): “I couldn’t show any other computer, not even an Apple, because the story behind OLPC is so strong,” he explained.

Borg launches sinister plan to bring even more misery to Third World children

Steve — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:27:00 +0000

How will they do it? By shipping Windows XP on a poorly built, underpowered, unreliable laptop. As Monkey Boy said in a statement: “At Microsoft we believe that everyone in the world should have equal access to blue screens and freeze-ups and viruses. We hope this program helps prepare kids around the world to become frustrated, annoyed and unproductive members of the global work force.”

Nothing like a bloated operating system on a tiny processor with not enough RAM, right? Just when you thought life couldn’t get worse for people in the Third World, sure enough the Borgtards find a way to do it. What’s next? Seeding clouds over Burma?

You know what? I weep for the poor kids who will grow up using XP on XO. I really do.

A stunning look inside the OLPC fiasco

Steve — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:07:00 +0000

Ivan Krstic used to be the head of security development for OLPC but he quit recently as the entire place began to fall into chaos. Turns out the mess is far, far worse than anyone on the outside could ever have imagined. Check out this long essay in which Krstic lays it all bare. It’s amazing stuff, and in case you don’t want to read the whole thing let me boil down the essential bits:

* OLPC was never really about learning; it was about freetards promoting free software. Now it’s not even about that. It’s just about selling laptops.

* Walter Bender: “I quit because I can’t continue to work on a lie.”

* Richard Stallman is a total fuckwit who thinks OLPC is evil for shipping Windows on the XO machine.

* Krstic recently got fed up with Linux (after 12 years) and bought a Mac — only to discover that OS X eats Linux for lunch. (Welcome back to the real world, freetard.)

* OLPC never had any plan for deploying laptops. Out in the field, in Peru and Uruguay, it’s a total mess.

Great stuff, right? So do you think Lesley Stahl will do an update for 60 Minutes and ask Saint Nicholas to explain what went wrong? Will anyone hold this idiot’s feet to the fire?

Coming up next on 60 Minutes — The big lie: How a band of arrogant, ignorant, academic blowhards squandered millions of dollars and conned the world — until it all came crashing down around them.

Now that would be a show worth watching.

Freetards turn on Negroponte

Steve — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:14:00 +0000

Well it’s a full-blown civil war raging among the OLPC team. Check out this stunning article where one of the freetards goes to town on Negroponte and says he and others will now follow Walter Bender, the other leader of OLPC, who has left in a huff after battling with Negroponte. How hilarious is this? The project isn’t even modestly successful — in fact it’s been a dismal failure — but in true freetard fashion, it’s already forking. Now we’ll have two ridiculously understaffed pointless projects and they’ll be competing with each other instead of working together. Great work, shitheads! Have any of you seen Life of Brian? Remember the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean Popular People’s Front?

Splitters!

So why are the freetards turning on Saint Nicholas? Double-N’s big sin, in their eyes, is not that he made a shitty computer that doesn’t work and nobody wants; it’s that he’s now decided to run Windows on it. God knows I hate Windows as much as anyone (and more than most) but does this not kind of lay bare a really unpleasant truth about the OLPC project — namely that it was never about education or poverty or helping kids and was, rather, all about a bunch of amateur techies trying to prove that they could make a better computer than Microsoft and Intel?

Guess what, freetard morons. You couldn’t. You didn’t. What’s worse is that even now, when the Third World “customers” you thought you were “helping” are telling you, explicitly, that they want Windows, you’re still in denial. You’d rather kill yourselves than design and deliver the product that these developing countries actually want.

Meanwhile your pals at Asus and Intel will charge ahead with their cheapo machines that actually work, while you dickheads sit in Cambridge examining your butts with your thumbs. It’s like Beastmaster once said to me: It’s not that we’re so smart; we’ve just been really lucky in our choice of enemies.

UPDATE: Now Richard Stallman is weighing in on the OLPC-Windows controversy.

OLPC plagued by "stuck" keys

Steve — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:03:00 +0000

See here. These POS machines are crapping out because they used shitty parts in the keyboards and now the keys are getting stuck down and you can’t get them unstuck. The freetards who bought them now find themselves stuck (sorry) with machines that don’t work. Money quote: “Meanwhile, members of the forums are also reporting that by taking the keyboard out of the XO laptop and rubbing on the underlying sensor, you might fix the stuck key, but that’s not a 100% solution.”

Somehow Intel must be to blame. Or Microsoft. How long till Double-N comes up with some new conspiracy theory?