Two quotes

[C. Scott Ananian]

Linux Weekly News has a paragraph about OLPC in its year-end retrospective
which is it useful to ponder (http://lwn.net/Articles/312000/):

> Your editor included a rosy prediction about the One Laptop Per Child
> project and where it would go over the course of the year. In fact, OLPC has
> continued to work toward its goal of putting laptops into the hands of
> children around the world. But your editor completely missed the way
> internal divisions would rise to the surface and distract OLPC developers
> from what they are trying to do. OLPC seems to have moved beyond the worst
> of that, and much-needed development on the Sugar software continues. But
> the project seems far from its original goals, and the increasing popularity
> of ultra-mobile systems, while vindicating the original vision behind the
> OLPC hardware, threatens to render the XO hardware obsolete and irrelevant.
>
By coincidence, I also stumbled across a glowing review of OLPC's vserver
work from about a year ago.  The killer graf (
http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/11/olpc-laptop-application-virtualization.html
):

> Having done virtualization related work for the last two years, I find this
> approach fascinating;but, it could also start a disturbing trend of people
> opting for this approach instead of trying to solve security problems at a
> more fundamental level. But I got to admit that the clever Copy-on-Write
> approach of the VServer just blew me away.

(For those who weren't there, vserver COW threatened to derail OLPC's first
release due to massive filesystem corruption, sigh.)

As we approach new-year's-resolution season, quotes like these are fodder
for mapping out good resolutions for the coming year.

 --scott

-- 
                        ( http://cscott.net/ )
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