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Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers
n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
I believe this is a very valuable point.
There is a student in my Advanced Placement Computer Science class that had never seen or ran linux before.
We convinced our teacher that we HAVE to install Ubuntu so that everyone in his intro computer classes had a chance to mess around with and at least be familiar with it. This student had no idea how to use linux, even less the command prompt. Such things that I take for granted like Ctrl-C to stop programs, and ls/dir to list directories. The fact that he can go through programming classes without even knowing these is beyond me, but we have been using Windows since whenever it came out. The students that have not went home and messed with linux/cmd-prompt themselves have no idea on what they are missing out. I personally run Linux because it better suits me.
Unfortunately, the #1 choice is Windows, not because it is better, but because Linux is always considered with servers, hacking, or techie-guru stuff.
I installed Mandrake on my grandmother's computer and she uses it FINE. No complaints from her, other than that she likes it.
Obviously there needs to be choices, I am still waiting to be able to buy a Dell computer w/o Windows pre-installed.
I do not want there to be a linux movement, if somebody prefers Windows, let them use it, but come on, atleast give the opensource/free software a chance.
Are there any school systems that use just windows?
My school is 100% windows (well 99.9%, -.1 for the machine we set up), even the Video Editing room can not use Macs because of a deal with Microsoft & Dell.
Windows? I haven't used that since 1999. Fix the Slashdot Problems
...I'll bite anyway. Most US school systems seem to be all-windows now. Macs used to be a significant minority here, but they were simply priced out of market, I think
When I was at elementary school (Fairfax Co, VA, ca 1990...yay, that made me sound young!) things were a little more heterogeneous: there were maybe a dozen IBM-compatible PCs running MS-DOS, another dozen old microcomputers (can't remember if they were commodore or atari). Many classrooms, though, had Apple IIgs computers.
The fact that high school kids have never seen a command prompt is not surprising at all. Consider this: most sixth-graders in America today have never known another operating system other than Windows, and may have never known an operating system earlier than Windows 95.