I gave the OLPC interface¹ a quick run tonight, and I must say it is… intriguing. I understand, now, some of Robert Graham’s arguments as to why the OLPC may be detrimental to third-world countries instead of helping them get access to more technology. While *I* certainly may find the interface interesting, someone that has never been exposed to computers before will be conditioned by Sugar². Take said person and put them in front of even a GNOME Linux desktop and it will take a bit for them to adjust. Put them in front of something as clunky and bloated as a generic Windows interface and they may actually think you are trying to make fun of them³.
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1. The words have been carefully chosen, for I only really analysed the interface thus far [↩]
2. The OLPC’s interface [↩]
3. Though even in the case of GNOME, the shift may be quite strenuous, I am taking into account that the OLPC is a Linux distribution [↩]

I don’t think this is what recursion in computing is meant to be…

One million bots isn’t that much. Think that some companies have thousands of computers living with near-identical settings - one gets wanked, so do the others. Most residences now have multiple machines, too, in a similar situation. Granted, a lot of these cases mean a limited number of IP addresses are available to the bot-herder - but it’s a failover scenario, one host goes down, the next one can do the herder’s bidding.

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Via Zoso, I got to see Laurie McGuinness’ PC vs Mac spoof commercials. In case you don’t know, these are following along the idea of Apple’s GetAMac series, only in this case PC is the good guy. Oh, and the videos are put up on the website in QuickTime format *snicker*

Both Apple and McGuinness encourage stereotyping through these commercials. They also give the impression that people are locked down to a technology and their work cannot be done in any other way than by using either of the two as they have done always. “I’m a PC and I do spreadsheets”, “I’m a Mac and I do websites”. Yes, different people went ahead and wrote software biased in a certain direction for each platform. PC’s didn’t win marketshare because they could do spreadsheets, but because they were cheaper earlier and a lot of development of specialized software went into Microsoft. At some point Microsoft’s GUI looked better than Apple’s and people thought it would be easier to use in the workplace - not because one was significantly superior to another.

Trends from the last little while seem to indicate Apple’s doing quite well in selling their hardware. Not because it’s pretty, but it doesn’t lock people down to only one technology anymore. This was the winning argument with a few of my friends - you can now run Windows and Linux if you need to, and it costs about as much as your run-of-the-mill laptop anyway. So why not try something new for a change? Even the non-geeks did it and loved it and thanked me.

Me? I bought a Mac for that same reason [but then again I install some obscure OS in a virtual machine every month or so.] To try something new. So I can say I have experience with all the major operating systems and there are good things and bad things in all of them, and that’s simply the way it is.

So try something new for a change. Give everyone a chance.