Basically you read Ivan Kristic's post, he starts off saying he's always been against the Sugar UI.

Where in Nicholas Negroponte's interview does it say he thinks that the core Linux hardware/software development was the mistake?

Where in Nicholas Negroponte's interviews does he say he thinks Windows support on the XO is better than optimized Linux?

Talking about working for the evil empire, I'd say Ivan Kristic working for Apple should not have too much to brag about.

He's a genius for sure, and the work OLPC engineers have done for XO-1 was simply amazing considering the very small amount of engineers employed by OLPC, but I simply don't get why Ivan doesn't simply recognize that an open platform like XO simply cannot and should not try to block Microsoft from doing whatever they want if they want to port Windows XP for the unit as well.

Simply put, how can Ivan be working like this on an OPEN X86 based project and then demand that Microsoft not be allowed to port their Windows OS to it?

You guys a so wrong. OLPC is alive and strong. A million children are using it every day, and that number is increasing steadilly. Quit talking about it in the past tense.

Mesh networking is crucial to OLPC:

- Children in poor areas with NO internet connection can still collaborate on projects, share data.

- Children in poor areas with LITTLE internet connection, can all share the same hotspot thus providing much cheaper Internet access, down towards $0.20 per child per month. This works.

ARM Processors consume ALOT less power than X86. With ARM you are talking milliwatts of power used to run the laptop, not watts.

OLPC always said they'd reach the $100 price point by selling many millions of laptops. Initial goal was at least sell 6 million units to reach that price goal. Now, with "only" 1 million units sold, and an unsupported AMD Geode based hardware that uses non-optimized anymore components, you can't expect them to be able to lower the price.

Though OLPC is launching XO-1.5 based on the VIA processor in the next few weeks or months as you can see in the videos on my http://olpc.tv/ Using this new lower power VIA processor, OLPC can speed it up 4x as well and still lower the cost and lower the power consumption.

You complainers about Windows support need to learn that it's BECAUSE OLPC is an open platform that Microsoft is able to port Windows XP for it. You are completely ridiculous not understanding that for OLPC to not support Windows XP, they would have had to build a closed proprietary system. Since specs of XO are opened, and it's X86 based, Microsoft is obviously able to read the specs on the Wiki and build a port of Windows XP for it. It's just plain stupid to keep asking for OLPC to somehow block Microsoft.

Give 1 Get 1 program was not a failure at all. Tens of thousands of laptops were given for free in dozens of countries. To create those dozens of hundred or thousand-laptop OLPC pilot projects. Those projects would not have been financed if it wasn't for the G1G1 program.

Now sure, you can critisize OLPC for not having found more money if you want. I find it that considering they are just a 30-employee non-profit, finding $200 million to fund those 1 million first XO laptops is pretty decent achievement no matter what. Sure, I'd prefer if they had access to billions of dollars to help millions more children get laptops. People in rich countries are greedy, they only care to pay for stuff that they can get for themselves.

Also, to reach those 100 million children, OLPC needs to have more than just a couple dozen engineers working on the whole optimizations of hardware and software for the project.

What OLPC managed to build in XO1 and XO-1.5 with 30 employees and the little budget that they could get is absolutely amazing.

But what OLPC probably needs for XO-2 to absolutely work and sell laptops soon at $50 to revolutionize education worldwide, is thousands of engineers and the support from Barack Obama and the European Union.

So OLPC's political agenda definitely needs to be more targeted towards the politics of education and aid of the USA and Europe and with much more ambition to make things happen in huge scale as quickly as possible.

Quit posting about OLPC being a failure. It is absolutely not.

Thanks to OLPC, we have soon 50 million netbooks in rich countries.

Thanks to OLPC, children have soon millions of cheap lower power laptops in poor countries.

Thanks to OLPC, the PC/Laptop industry's interpretation of Moore's law has totally been reshaped, every 18month now PC/laptops will be half the price instead of 2x more powerful and with 2x more bloatware.

Sure, I would have been happier, and so would most other Linux geeks if OLPC had shipped 100 million laptops to poor children by now, and not just 1 million units. Reason for that not happening yet in multi-hundred million scales though are several:

1. Intel will do anything it can not to be killed off by a non-profit laptop technology revolution. Including abusing of monopolistic situations and corrupting politicians.

2. AMD is not much interested in helping OLPC succeed in lowering the cost of laptops and PCs. Lower cost also means less profits and margins for AMD, and AMD has enough problems with profits and margins as it is.

Looking forward, to reach those 100 million poor children sooner rather than later:

1. OLPC needs to find an alternative to AMD as soon as possible. VIA is planned for XO-1.5 which could hopefully ship a few millions of units in a few months time, if VIA supports this move of OLPC creating a cheaper and lower power market using their processor. XO-1.5 could reach the $150 pricepoint soon and enable dozens of commercial netbooks using the VIA processor and also copying on the way OLPC is using the VIA processor.

2. OLPC needs to implement the worlds best ARM processor based laptops for XO-2 working with Google to implement the so called Chrome OS on those. Cloud computing can work also for places without stable internet access, HTML5 supports offline web apps and offline databases. OLPC needs to push Google to make it work on WiFi Mesh networks as well. XO-2 can start at $100 when released and reach the $50 price point, when manufactured using any of half a dozen ARM processor companies chips. All of TI, Qualcomm, Marvell, Freescale, Nvidia and Samsung, all those ARM processors should fit in the XO-2 design. Competition will bring the prices down faster.

Well if you don't like Sugar, you can just follow one of many online tutorials to install any of many other Linux distributions on it.

euhm. Perhaps you didn't know, but Windows works on the same X86 hardware that is made for Linux. All details about the XO is open source. So really, asking for Windows not to work on the device, is moronic.

Eeepc consumes 10x more power and costs upwards 2x as much. Not sunlight readable, not sand/water proof, not shock proof, not mesh networkable so many other things that are absolutely required in those places the 1.2 Million OLPC laptops have so far been delivered.

Exactly, but, HTML5 defines it so that servers are not needed for web apps to run. Each web app, could be 200kb, is cached and stored on the ARM laptop's memory according to how the Chrome Browser works. Each web-app only need to be updated when new versions are published. And web-apps also interact with a local database hosted on the $100 Chrome laptop itself.

As for what village servers should be, I think OLPC should develop $50 WiMax2WiFi, WhiteSpaces2WiFi and HSDPA2WiFi routers. Those routers can also have a few GB built-in storage, be able to host low power USB hard drives eventually as well (where the USB hard drive is only powered when data needs to be stored onto it from a flash memory based multi-GB buffer). Then basically one router only required per village, and OLPC needs to keep going the meshing WiFi systems to spread that Internet in each village.

Chrome OS needs to manage meshing as well, the setting should allow for Web apps and local databases of contents also to be automatically shared on Mesh networks.

Yup and again, consider, if OLPC was using a Lithium-Ion battery it would have over 20 hours of battery life in ebook black and white mode.

But again, OLPC prefers a cheaper, safer battery, that absolutely does not have any polluting chemicals in it and that lasts about 3 times as long in terms of battery charge cycles. 2000+ recharge cycles before losing capacity versus 500 for Lithium-ion types.

In western countries, people don't care much buying a new laptop every 2 years, in developing countries, the OLPC XO-1 has to last at least 5 years of daily use.

You are probably using a big fat heavy 6-cell battery to get that type of battery life, thus a normal 3-cell battery on a netbook is 2.5 hours.

It's a fact the OLPC XO-1 consumes less than 10x less power than an Intel powered netbook.

The question shouldn't be only about the battery life of the battery, it should be about if the kids can recharge the laptop using a hand crank, using a bicycle or other human power generator system.

That's just not true. In full backlight mode and WiFi you might get 3 hours on the OLPC, but in black and white outdoor sunlight readable mode, in ebook mode without WiFi, you get 12 hours on the OLPC while netbooks get below 2 hours with a similar sized battery.

Fact is OLPC chose a lower capacity battery using a new type of technology which, doesn't pollute, doesn't explode (like netbook batteries potentially do), and most importantly the OLPC battery lifetime is much longer. A normal netbook Lithium-Ion battery lowers it's capacity already afte 500 recharge cycles, after about 1500 charge cycles, a normal netbook lithium-ion battery usually is totally dead. While the OLPC battery keeps its charge capacity for moe than 5000 recharge cycles. Which means the same OLPC can last more than 5 years with the same battery capacity while netbook batteries last only about 1-2 years.