is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?

James Cameron quozl at laptop.org
Tue Jul 21 07:53:21 EDT 2009


On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 07:37:44AM -0400, Walter Bender wrote:
> More seriously, I don't know if it is possible, but getting Nicholas
> to stop making a "scrambled egg" out of the software stack with his
> "omelet" analogy would go a long ways to reducing the confusion in the
> media as well. His continued insistence that Sugar is an operating
> system--the problem--is being spoken out of ignorance and does not
> reflect well on either project.

When talking to non-technical people, "operating system" means what they
see on screen, the user interface.  I've not heard Nicholas on this, but
going with the incorrect definition is probably a reasonable fallback
plan ... take for example the word "hacker".

I was at Parkes Radiotelescope last weekend for an open day, relating
to the site's involvement in the Apollo programme, hundreds of people
strolling past to get a tour of the dish ... demonstrating with my wife
Sugar on five OLPC XO-1 units ... and we frequently had to decline to go
into details ... when asked what operating system, we would say
something like "Sugar desktop on top of the Linux operating system" ...
and this will no doubt be remembered as "Sugar".  We found about 25% of
our visitors already used Sugar desktop on their kids.  Quite a select
visitor group ... they had shown dedication to science and technology by
travelling four to six hours by car to get there.

Now, if it was a group of journalists, I'd have to be extra careful.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/



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