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Korea Plans to Choose Linux City, University
thefirelane wrote to mention an ambitious plan in the works by the South Korean government. Work is underway to choose a city, which will become a place where open-source software will become the mainstream operating system. From the article: "The selected government and university will be required to install open-source software as a main operating infrastructure, for which the MIC will support with funds and technologies. In the long run, they will have to migrate most of their desktop and notebook computers away from the Windows program of Microsoft, the world's biggest maker of software. 'The test beds will prompt other cities and universities to follow suit through the showcasing of Linux as the major operating system without any technical glitches and security issues,' Lee said. "
Will they have a football team? If so where will they get the cheerleaders?
Asian girls and Linux? Where do I sign up? WHERE?!?
Don't they know they will be missing out on all the free software you get when you plug a Win PC into the Net? ;-)
I lost my sig...
That's right, training will be enormously expensive. GNU/Linux PCs have a totally different keyboard layout to Windows ones. When you want the cursor on a GNU/Linux PC to move up, you have to move the mouse sideways. In OpenOffice Writer, when you want to make text bold you have to select "underline" and if you want to underline text, you have to select "right align". In OpenOffice Calc, you can't use the numeric keypad; you have to spell out all your numbers in words, like "seven hundred and sixty four thousand, one hundred and fourteen".
Oh, wait a minute, that's bollocks. The keys are in the same place, the mouse moves in the same directions, the options all have similar names and things generally work fairly similar. Anyone who learns like an adult and sees the abstract concepts behind actions, rather than learning like a child and blindly parrotting actions, will have little trouble adjusting.
The one big thing that catches people out is that rebooting a GNU/Linux PC almost never cures it of a fault, because GNU/Linux applications don't very often go unstable for no reason; so if anything is wrong, it is likely to be deliberate {as far as the computer is concerned} and if you didn't actually change any settings, the problem will still be there next time around. That's what we call "repeatable behaviour".
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
* Possible Chamber of Commerce Video Dialog *
Welcome to Torvaldsville, S. Korea! Home of Torvalds University, home of the Fighting Penguins! GO PENGUINS! * Hums the Notre Damne Theme. *
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.