Slashdotted

I seem to be up at Slashdot.org again with the OLPC; this time with my OLPCNews piece combing through the video of Windows on the OLPC (also published on JonCamfield.com. The comments are a lot better this time around, with a few complaints about my clear anti-MS bias.

You know when slashdotters are complaining about your anti-Microsoft bias, you must be doing something right.

To amend my comments and clear any doubt of where my bias lies; I added this as a comment to my XP/XO comparison:

Now, I could be totally wrong; but I somehow don’t think that a few months of hard work by the folks over at Microsoft somehow magically turned XP into a low-end-computer miracle working educational platform and also solved all of the various XP security holes at the same time.

Also, I'll freely admit it -- I'm biased here. I think XP is the end result of a bad marketing plan and will be a continuance of the same in the ICT4D world -- not a disaster, per se, but far from a success. The fact that countries have been asking "does it run Office?" means that it is being marketed as a laptop, not as an educational tool with a lot of power and flexibility built in. So people are treating it like, frankly, an IT project and not an educational project. At that point, why bother with this funky little thing? Get a beige-box system; or an Asus. Or focus on local telecenters instead of 1:1 computing programs.

Do countries have the right to choose to run XP on the OLPC? Sure. Do I think it's a good idea? Not really. So yes, this is a biased article, but I hope I presented what appear to be the most grievous problems in using XP as an educational tool, compared to the current Sugar release (The joyride releases are much more responsive and with a cleaner, more consistent UI).