Talk:What keeps me going/Sameer Verma

I do own a soldering iron, so I know *exactly* where you're coming from.  :) I've had my XO apart a few times in the last year. (I had an incentive -- I own one of the failing keyboards.) It's also the same place I'm coming from. If OLPC were to shut down, I for one would continue to use my XO and to write (or try to write -- still learning GTK) code for it. And hope to find someplace on the web where like-minded enthusiasts would continue to exchange ideas.

Can the XO change the world? I think it already did -- just not enough. There's still too much that's marketeer-driven (as opposed to market-driven) about the NetBooks. I remember when personal computers (we didn't call them that) used 8-bit, two-megahertz processors. And we hobbyists wrote tons of content for them. I got a lot of work done on a Z80 processor with 64K of RAM and three 100 kB floppy disk drives -- probably more than I do these days using a multi-GHz X86 with a couple of GB of RAM and half a TB of disk.

At least it seemed so because I wasn't just USING the computer, I was UNDERSTANDING the computer. The XO was the first machine to come along in about a decade where the owner at least had the possibility of understanding what he was using again. When I signed up for the 2007 G1G1 the "deal maker" feature was the "view source" button. Too bad that hasn't happened yet (as a generalized feature at the OS level, not as a special case in a few activities). It would have made my life easier early on, but now I've figured out a few work-arounds and can locate the code files I'm curious about. It's also too bad that the hardware isn't as open-source as the software.

Let me tell you where OLPC has really missed the boat: Once upon a time there was a company called Heath which made electronics in kit form. When they jumped on the hobby computing bandwagon in 1976, they did one thing that no other manufacturer that I'm aware of did before or since: they established a Users' Group using personel from inside the company which provided a technical information channel from their hardware and software developers through the Users' Group's newsletter and set out to educate their customers about the innards of their computer (both the hardware and the software) until the customers themselves became the main source of content and even a few ideas in the add-on hardware department.

OLPC has been planning for content to be provided by the customers (at least the G1G1 owners and the "grassroots" people). But they forgot that in order for third-parties to develop content (especially, but not limited to software content), the third-parties must first learn how. And OLPC hasn't educated us! OLPC/SugarLabs has created a large corpus of code that only they know how to use properly -- that's just plain wrong if they expect external developers to be able to help.

Composing of tutorial materials and establishment of a tech support channel for the programmer who hasn't been working with Sugar since its inception and maybe (like myself) is still learning Python and has never used GTK before should have been at least started before the G1G1. If that had been done, chances are we'd have ten times the content for the XO by now. Instead, we're seeing a push to run legacy linux applications under Sugar and the very people who could be developing content are off hacking ways to put their favorite linux environment on the box so they can abandon the limited world of Sugar Activities. (I won't even mention the ones who want to run XP or OS/9 instead. Oops -- I just did.)

Anyway, I've probably imposed on your time far longer than all this discussion is probably worth, given that the current direction of the project seems to be even less about providing software content than it was twelve months ago. -- Davewa 17:01, 13 January 2009 (UTC)