Your independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of One Laptop Per Child's "$100 laptop" computer, the OLPC Children's Machine XO, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte.
As reported by Gizmodo, Microsoft and OLPC just announced the first official pilot of XO laptops running Microsoft Windows.
I am Lionel Laské, President and co-founder of OLPC France and to be honest it's not really a surprise. We hear from months that the agreement between OLPC and Microsoft will be a good way to win new country deployment. Remind you the Negroponte talk about Egypt:
It runs Windows XP, unfortunately
"When I went to Egypt for the first time, I met separately with the minister of communications, minister of education, minister of science and technology, and the prime minister, and each one of them, within the first three sentences, said, 'Can you run Windows?'" Negroponte says.
Let's say also that my feeling is that lot of volunteers waited for a long time a new major announcement for XOs deployment. Each new deployment is a new reason to believe is this wonderful project and we miss of this.
The drawback is that, of course, each news on "Windows on the XO" is very sensitive in the OLPC community. Just remind you the resign of Walter Bender and the fact that most OLPC volunteers come from the open source communities and you know what I mean.
By the way OLPC means "One Laptop Per Child" so we should be happy that new children could have the opportunity to have a laptop, including on Windows XP. So the Peru announcement seems to be a good way both to have a new deployment, to give more XOs to children and to confirm the vision of Nicholas Negroponte.
Unfortunately the reality is different: Peru is not at all a new OLPC deployment. According to the OLPC Wiki Peru agreed for 10,000 XO in 2007 and for 81,000 XO in 2008. So Peru children currently using XO on Sugar. As a result: this announcement means that the number or XOs will not increase.
Pointing to the learning-focused OS
It means also that only a part of the 91,000 XO in Peru will be used with Sugar. It sounds like a way to say "Finally Sugar is not so good". The Gizmodo article talk about "Sugar to XP transition"...
This announcement also add confusion just before the G1G1 2008. If you're an OLPC News reader, you know that there is already lot of confused things about the G1G1: price, date, dual-boot or not, countries, … which force OLPC foundation to publish a specific press news.
My feeling is that each time there is a confusion there is a risk to lose a XO buyer. And each new XO is very important because each new XO give us the promise to decrease the XO price from some cents. When the "100$ laptop project" is a "188$ laptop project", others laptops hit the 100$ target today: see the Minimote announcement, a laptop for only 98$.
My feeling is also that each time there is a confusion there is a risk to lose an OLPC volunteer because each announcement on Windows hurt Sugar volunteers. And each volunteer is very important to give support and help to the coming new XO users.
It's why I'm afraid that this announcement is not really a good news.
It's been almost impossible to not stumble across laptopmag.com's hands-on experience with Windows XP on the XO since the article was published last Tuesday. In case you haven't seen it here's a link to the story called "Exclusive Hands-On With OLPC’s XO Running Windows XP" and the original verdict which read:
Windows XO
On paper, a dual boot XO gives kids the best of both worlds: the somewhat boring, but ubiquitous Microsoft OS and its giant universe of software together with Sugar, which is packed with learning tools for kids. However, our early peek suggests that the XP portion is not ready for primetime, as evidenced by the slow boot time, slow application load time, and trouble with multitasking and streaming media. We hope OLPC can fine tune the performance without increasing the cost.
The reason why I'm saying "original" verdict here is that laptopmag.com's editors put up a note a day or two after the article was originally published, saying that they learnt that the Windows XP they had looked at wasn't a final version. This came after Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch blogged about the fact that his XO running Windows XP performed significantly better than what laptopmag reported:
I am finding a totally different experience with performance and load times much different and much better than the Laptops folks are getting.
Apart from this slight confusion the laptopmag.com hands-on contains a couple of interesting pieces of previously unknown information:
We like that you can record video in Windows Movie Maker, just like you can in the Sugar camera program. It looked like you could edit movies in Movie Maker but we cannot imagine that works well with the allotted hardware.
With 'record' being one of the most popular activities on the XO (because which child doesn't like taking photos?) I was always wondering whether Microsoft would provide a stand-alone application for taking photos and videos. Now at least the video part of the question seems to be solved so the question remains which software can be used to capture photos. After accidently stumbling across a totally unrelated review of Microsoft LifeCam VX 5000 earlier today I'm thinking that its software could potentially fit the bill:
...the software's interface is quite stylish and very intuitive, albeit rather basic. Aside from the dashboard, which is switched off by default, there are only four 'buttons'. The first three start/stop video capture or audio recording, and take still pictures. The last one lets you access the folder where these files are stored, which seems to be set to a fixed location...
Otherwise we'll have to wait and see whether 3rd party applications will be made available for that purpose.
Another interesting observation was made with regard to the install size of Windows XP:
Because the onboard storage is too small to accommodate XP, the system boots a slimmed down version of XP off the SD card slot (that is hidden under the screen). When the 4GB SanDisk Extreme SD card was inserted into our test unit it booted right to XP (as you will see in the video below).The 4GB card was about half full (1.81GB) with Windows XP and other Microsoft applications and Firefox. There was about 1.97GB of free space left on the card.
1.81GB seems to be quite a lot for a slimmed-down Windows XP even considering that it comes with a selection of Office 2003 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook). If I remember correctly already two or three years ago people used tools like nLite to put Windows XP on a diet of only 250~300MB. If this almost 2GB is the standard requirement then the developer's using the red XOs (laptopmag.com calls them orange) that come with 2GB flash-memory aren't going to be too happy. Even with 4GB SD cards being available for as little as $12 in single-quantities (compared to $6 for 2GB SD cards) this adds another couple of bucks per machine when purchasing the Windows XP version of the XO.
Again the aforementioned Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch tells a slightly different story because he mentions his sample coming with a 2GB SD card which had about 1GB of available storage capacity left.
Overall I have to say that I'm not really impressed. Having used Windows XP on the Geode LX platform many moons ago I knew what performance to expect (and I actually think it's quite good). It was also quite obvious that neither the Mesh nor collaboration (except for MSN Messenger that is) would be supported. And even though the screen-rotation didn't work when laptopmag tried is this is a trivial issue and I'm sure it will work in the final software versions. Supporting the outstanding display is such a basic requirement that again it was obvious that Microsoft would do it.
So some of the big questions that remain unanswered are:
battery life: How long does an XO with Windows XP run away from the AC outlet?
software-updates: How will children and teachers in schools without internet connectivity be able to get software updates? Will Microsoft also release a specialized version of Windows Server 200x to be used in combination with these XOs?
sharing: Is there a quick and easy way to share files without having to rely on USB thumbdrives?
Note: I'm not suggesting that the current Sugar software is necessarily all that great when it comes to these issues. But there's been an enormous amount of progress in all three areas (and many more) lately and I definitely see things moving into the right direction. With Windows XP on the other hand I don't see any feasable short- or even mid-term solutions when it comes to addressing these challenges.
However, as always the real test will be children and teachers actually using the laptops so it's going to be interesting whether Microsoft's marketing department will release some information about that in the weeks and months ahead.
Despite the impression that Microsoft "massaged" the Windows XO video let's for the moment presume that the video was simply edited a bit oddly, and that the demo was the state of the art, XP on XO performance.
Did you watch it closely, while taking copious notes about XP on the XO performance? Well, I'm enough of a geek that I did. And the results are not pretty.
James Utzschneider and Bohdan Raciborski walked us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO, showing off a few common tasks - the general OS, recording and playback of audio and video, power management and the ebook mode, and document sharing.
XP on the XO
Microsoft starts with its "good news" that XP boots faster (but not four times faster) than Sugar; (1:05 into the video). Good going, folks. First off, it turns out that XP doesn't boot that much faster, as the scene only shows a boot to user login, not to the full user interface.
Worse, Microsoft had to cram in an SD card to make XP and Office work. The OS (and MS Office as well, I presume) are resident on the SD Card; from James' blog, emphasis added:
As I have posted earlier, we had to write multiple custom drivers and a BIOS to get Windows to boot from an SD card in order to do the Windows port to the XO. This is the initial implementation customers will be able purchase when the product RTMs and will be a "Windows only" XO that Nicholas Negroponte himself has described as running "really fast."
Customers can also choose to buy the existing Linux/Sugar XO. Longer term, the OLPC plans to write a new BIOS and increase the amount of flash storage on the XO to support a "Dual Boot" option that would enable children to use either Linux or Windows on the same machine. This is fine with us as long there continues to be an excellent Windows experience on the XO.
Having the operating system on an SD card makes it really difficult to upgrade to a larger SD card (or replace a broken one), view photos from a camera, or share documents using an SD card instead of a USB key.
Sugar and other Linux versions on the XO do take longer to boot; but once the suspend and hibernation features are completely working (and the current Update.1 Release Candidate has most of it working) -- you'll never need to turn it off, rarely reboot, and it recovers almost instantaneously from sleep, so this to me is a non-issue.
Recording audio
It goes quickly downhill from at 1:36 in - James and Bohdan shows us how to record an audio file on the Windows XO. Remember, in Sugar this means pressing the "Record" activity on the bottom toolbar, selecting "Audio" (it defaults to photos, and the one "Record" activity records anything -- photos, video, or audio!), and pressing record -- done.
In XP, James navigates through 3 sub-menus of the Start Menu (Start-Programs-Accessories-Entertainment, for you following at home with your own XP, because when I think "record this" I think programs, then accessories, then entertainment!). So after finding the Sound Recorder, he then has to muck with the custom audio properties (Stereo sound and normal compression??) before recording finally. Right. That's intuitive.
We wanna sing & dance!
Recording video
At 2:20 he loads up Windows Movie Maker to capture video (again, to do this in Sugar, you'd just change from Audio to Video in the Record activity). Again he mucks with compression/quality settings (1/2 MB bitrate and 30 FPS -- really? I just want to press "record"). It works and has the standard Windows Movie Maker timeline/video editing capabilities.
"Sharing"
Microsoft expects teachers using Windows XOs to have USB thumbdrives (at 3:19) and be ready to pass them around their class to share videos/photos/recordings and such. Heck, I don't even let my thumbdrive leave my sight at work.
With class sizes of over 30, how long will it take for each student to plug a drive in, have it pop up, copy a video to their desktop (again, providing they have any space left over after Windows and Office), and then finding the "Safely Remove" icon in the taskbar, clicking it, and correctly selecting the thummdrive and not the Windows SD card, and then passing it to the next student.
Sharing a video becomes an all-class-session activity, when it should be done through improvements to the mesh and a peercasting video tool. To be fair, outside of shareable activities, the process currently doesn't work much better on the XO (at least without a School Server to host the shared file).
The swank OLPC XO-1 screen
Power
Putting the laptop into the tablet configuration in Windows seems to switch it to the no-backlight screen mode (4:00); which I hope is not automatic if a child wants to, I dunno, read a book at night in a house without any other light source? In no-backlight mode, he claims you can use the laptop for 20 hours, which I find hard to believe, but if Windows isn't supporting the mesh network and therefore the wifi is also turned off, it's remotely possible.
I watched full-screen video with wifi off on a flight recently and it lasted the full duration of the two and a half hour movie, plus another short TV episode, plus plenty of time left at the end to play the Implode activity (my secret XO addiction) before having to turn off all electronics for landing; so in full, CPU-sleeping screen-off mode, it probably could last that long. Maybe Sugar users should turn off wifi and see how long a backlightless Read activity can last?
Wifi
At 4:50 he shows us how to access a wireless network. Now, as a guy who often gets calls from parents, friends, parents of friends and friends of friends trying to connect to a wireless network in XP, I can safely say that configuring wifi on XP is one of the most confusing tasks ever to be standardized.
No mention of support mesh networking, which may mean that the laptops are not connected to even a local network once they leave the access-point connectivity of the school (if there's even good connection at the school; my experience with Jamaican schools built with lots of rebar, cinder blocks, and metal roofing all played havoc with omni-directional wifi ranges).
Security?
Not mentioned in the video of course is the dire need for security software -- anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware, anti-phishing and so on that's suddenly very important if you're releasing XP+IE machines to people who haven't developed a callous shell of cynicism and doubt when approached by Nigerian 419 scams, "Your computer is infected" flashing malware banner ads, and the like.
By the time you load all of this up, the low-power computer will slow to a barely-usable crawl. MS Defender may help against some of those; but we're back to adding cruft and cost when we look at anti-virus vendors.
Pinball teaches gravity - right?
Conclusions
Sugar had its faults; no doubt about it; but it was clean and intuitive with a core belief of an "unlimited ceiling" of upward development -- Sugar was an adult bike with many layers of training wheels that could be removed; with lots of integrated paths to help do just that with eToys teaching programming methods and the various puzzles teaching slowly-more-challenging problem solving skills.
Windows is designed against this, with no programming tools built in, and an almost anti-hacker/explorer/fiddler philosophy that goes beyond it merely being "closed source" to putting up impediments to learning any useful skills.
A draft of this entry was originally published at JonCamfield.com
Are you itching to ditch Sugar for an adult operating system? And does Ubuntu on the XO leave you wanting more?
Then you have another, proprietary option: Microsoft Windows XP on your XO laptop, making it a Windows XO computer. The first step to the Dark Side is easy, just update your XO firmware to OLPC Firmware Release q2e10.
This is the first test candidate for OFW2 series firmware that supports dual-boot of Linux and Windows XP. And we're not talking about the special red XO laptops either, this will allow XP to run on any XO.
But before you get too excited about upgrading to a Windows XO laptop, this XO firmware will not run a standard XP distro. Like the dual-boot video shows, you'll need a specially-prepared SD cards with an OLPC-specific version of Windows XP.
You'll also need to check your Open Source Software morals as you boot up.
Do you remember all the hoopla around the XP on the XO announcement in May? Where Microsoft gave us a press release, blog post, and a video, all announcing Windows XP for the XO laptop. Well, thanks to the sleuths on OLPC News Forum it looks like Microsoft may have faked two of the three.
The image is definitely an overlay -- lower corners obscure the screen border, and black areas around the screen are nowhere to be found.
However diagonal graininess of the blue background seems to suggest that it may be taken on XO or XO emulator, and pasted to compensate for camera's contrast/dynamic range. Pretty strange considering that XO screen is not particularly bright or glossy.
If you look at the photo on James U's blog post, you can really tell the difference - his image has the XP screen looking way more natural. And if that were the only trespass, who really cares, eh? Everyone Photoshops.
Yet, its not. Just take a close look at the Microsoft XP on XO video:
If you want skip the XP on the XO debate and really see what Microsoft has accomplished check out this video of Unlimited Potential's Bohdan Raciborski showing off Windows XO.Microsoft's James Utzschneider has this to say about the XP on XO effort and results:
So the long awaited moment has happened, Microsoft has bought One laptop Per Child with sweet promises to Nicholas Negroponte of more XO laptops sales. In what I feel is a massive marketing flaw, Negroponte has allowed the conversation around OLPC to be dominated by comparisons to business class computers. Just read his New York Times quote:
The future XO OS?
Education ministries want low-cost computers to help further education, but they often see familiarity with Windows-based computing as a marketable skill that can improve job prospects.
“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with Windows.”
Now just who does Microsoft trot forward as an example of a possible XO laptop buyer? Save the Children, a large non-governmental organization that according to James Utzschneider, has a Windows-only policy. Let's read their quote from the XP on XO press release:
