Friday, January 04, 2008

XO: where are my folders?

I shall not stop until I've vented all I have to vent about XO. Hey, for those $400 if I did not buy a functional computing device, I at least bought a right to complain, no? :-)

When you plug in an USB drive, it's supposed to show up at the bottom of Journal as a USB drive icon. Of all times I plugged it in, the icon showed up perhaps half the time.

Actually, it was like this: I plugged it in, it showed up. I unplugged it, then plugged it back in. It did not show up again. I rebooted the computer, it showed up.

Then I was for in for another disappointing surprise. I have several thousands of images and hundreds of videos on my USB drive, all filed in folders according to my own system (when you have that many files, it's not trivial to find a filing system that would quickly let you find what you want). Guess what -- this laptop does not recognize folders. It displays all thousands of files in a flat list, sorted by date/time. I could not believe my eyes. But perhaps I could have guessed that a system that did away with a window manager would go one step further and get rid of the folder paradigm altogether.

You can open a Linux terminal on this laptop (thank goodness for small graces) and cd through directories from a command prompt. So in that sense you can see folders on your disk. But you shouldn't have to be a geek to use folders, no? At least the children this laptop is designed for can't be assumed to be Linux geeks.

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