

Nicholas Negroponte's sweet nonsense omelet - blasdel
http://radian.org/notebook/nonsense-omelet

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blasdel
It's depressing when your condescending mystery-meat GUI 'written by 2 Gnome
developers' is the least-shitty piece of your project.

The 21 hardware bugs he links to don't even begin to cover all the
ridiculousness.

One bug I'm intimately familiar with is the "first open-source SD card
implementation" in the custom CaFE chip that turned out to be neither --
Marvell never released the HDL sources, the only documentation is a PDF that
lists but doesn't describe registers, and it doesn't really implement SD.
Originally if you slept the CPU, on wakeup the SD card would disappear from
the bus, which absolutely fucks you if you were booting off of it. The only
fix I found was to add a 1s wait to the wakeup process -- the design target
for the entire sleep/wake cycle was <100ms!

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TomOfTTB
THANK GOD! It's about time the publicity started to turn on this project.

I've been fighting my own little private war against Mr. Negroponte's XO
project for some time and it's for just these reasons. The XO has always been
a crappy notebook. It was "built by press release" so it looked real good on
paper. All the politicians and pundits could smile and praise the $199
computer that would bring poor kids into the next century. While behind the
scenes anyone who took a real look knew it wasn't usable.

So Mr Negroponte and a bunch of crooked politicians in third world countries
get to look great by foisting crap onto already taken avantage of poor kids.

------
ars
Funny, the windows shutdown bug that is linked at the bottom was marked as
"Fixed" 3 hours ago. I guess someone who works there reads this blog.

~~~
blasdel
The blog's author was one of the senior developers at OLPC -- he designed
Sugar's innovative security model: <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Bitfrost>

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jamesmcintyre
The ambition of the project has been inspiring, the slowly encroaching failure
is a little disheartening. If it's true, however, that the XO spawned the
netbook than OLPC has succeeded in an indirect way. First netbooks, then
kindle, then Apple's answer to the netbook, then the commoditization of these
products, then hopefully the ubiquity of these devices brings cost to a point
where something like the XO vision ends up in the hands of the children by
shear momentum. Negroponte, and OLPC, has been a catalyst. Don't deny them
that much!

~~~
jerf
Netbooks happened when they did when the hardware prices came down far enough
to make them not a complete joke. They are a brain-dead obvious evolution of
the laptop platform, just one more step on the almost-equally-braindead-
obvious evolution to some form of ubiquitous computing, with our cellphones
leading that charge.

So yeah, I don't credit them with the netbook idea. That credit goes to the
hardware people who drove down LCD and computer prices.

~~~
philwelch
The netbook idea isn't even new--it's just a new word for "subnotebook".

~~~
blasdel
As someone who purchased several 'subnotebooks' years ago, I can confidently
say that 'netbook' is not a synonym.

The machines in the 'subnotebook' category cost at least five times as much!

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MaysonL
Mr. Negroponte seems to have half of the Steve Jobs RDF down pat, without the
design sense and attention to detail that makes Jobs's method work.

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torpor
We have 3 XO's in the house. None of them work much. Well, one of them has
been drawn on by the 2 year old who loves to play TamTamJam on it, but thats
all. Everything else is borked, and to be honest I just can't be bothered
administering the thing. The 2 year old gets more excited playing with the
Aspire One running UbuntuStudio than he does with the XO.

A pity, because they sure are shiny.

