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Give an Internet Freedom Disk
An anonymous reader, perhaps the blogger himself, writes to tell us about a new blog aimed at getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD. The blogger doesn't call it that, preferring instead "Internet Freedom Disk"; Linux is never mentioned. The submitter adds: "This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant." Cheap, last-minute, and you can make them yourself. The blogger isn't selling anything; he provides links to Ubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs. Or pick your favorite.
Doesn't the pots and pans cycle use up more energy/water? Doesn't it end up costing you more money each year?
Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS. If I dropped copy of Ubuntu on their lap at Christmas, they'd immediately be suspicious of it. On booting, they'd complain that it wasn't Windows and that'd be that.
Reminds me of giving out mince pies in front of church on Saturday - most people couldn't understand why we would possibly give away mince pies. It was just a nice idea for shoppers walking past. Same with OSes - people expect to be charged, if they're not, they instantly assume that it's of low quality and crap, or there's some kind of benefit in it for you. Linux has more chance of being taken up if it was a $500 OS. Then it'd be a status symbol and everyone under the Sun would want it, or aspire to own it.
For example, I got this job when the previous 'IT-man' got a job at the government to think about strategies to work with computers in a school and explain them to teachers. The next year, my school got a network.
Where do I get a live CD that supports winmodems like the one which comes on my laptop? I only have this laptop and I'd like to see why Slashdot has been promulgating this OS for nearly a decade. From what I've been hearing it's much easier for non-IT admins nowadays but still has the same, unfriendly and impersonal support of RTFM.
Most modern translations are trying to strike some balance between readability, preservation of the nuances in the original languages, continuity with familiar readings from earlier well-known translations, introduction of better copies of original texts that weren't available to previous translators, better availability of other original-language material that helps us understand the way the language was used at the time the original documents were written, and of course there's the problem of dealing with poetry.
The King James translation was fairly conservative for its time (finished 1611), trying to retain much of the familiarity of the popular Geneva translation (which was politically awkward, because that had a lot of Puritan notes and commentary printed with it, and the King wanted stuff that was politically Anglican), and the Geneva translation retained a lot of continuity with Tyndale's and other translations, so even though the English language had been changing radically during the 1500s, and almost all of the "thee" and "thou" and "ye" and "hast" had gone out of popular usage by 1600, a lot of late-1400s grammar was in the translation. On the other hand, the KJV is still very accessible today, partly because it gradually became influential, partly because Shakespeare remains influential, and partly because the translators, while they were trying for broad readability, were a bunch of Southerners (that's London, Oxford, Cambridge, not Alabama
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And another thing. How many people who you give this to are going to fully understand the concept of a LiveCD versus an OS on the harddrive? Even if anyone actually tries this, how many people are going to fully grasp that it runs poorly because the entire OS is on the CD, and how many people do you think are just going to look at it and say 'What is this? Wow, it runs like shit. Glad I've got Windows'? I very much doubt the net result will help Linux adoption.
Of course not, and even if someone does feel that way that doesn't mean they are being oppressed.
/., and others) have been fed a steady diet of business-first thinking -- the notion that we should view every issue chiefly in terms of business interests. The posters are usually young, they haven't read much, but they aren't stupid, merely ignorant of the long struggle many people make to ensure freedoms for themselves and others. They've also been taught to not give any mind to the condition of others, so speaking and thinking in narrow economic ways is de rigeur. For them, business-first thinking is never seen as pushing something down someone's throat, that ideology has the privilege of being viewed as the norm. So when someone talks in terms of freedom (or, perhaps, ethics and social solidarity), that talk must immediately be reframed as inappropriate. One easy way to do this is to mock them for being "religious" which gives others readers a cue that such talk isn't tolerated. After all, businesses greatest achievement is convincing people to divorce their work from ethical examination; we musn't have people asking questions like what kind of society they want to live in.
But many who post to websites like this (Digg,
Digital Citizen
That said, I think this is a wonderful idea. Someone mentioned that people don't get excited over Operating Systems. Well, not when you put it like that. Just show off some of the things about it, and people WILL get excited about it. Wobbly windows are awesome. The first time I saw that, I wanted to install Linux JUST for that, to play with them. I think that is kind of the point here. It's just getting people to USE the thing, hoping the features will sell themselves.
Personally, I think it's genius. It also has the potential to help the USER to switch to Linux. Granted there is a pretty big difference in just running a LiveCD, and actually installing the thing, but many installers these days are becoming simpler for those new to the show. There's a part of me that wishes this would get more publicity, just because it has the potential to create some really good happenings for the Users.
In short, people would see how Linux stacks up against Windows (the good, bad and the ugly), and some will undoubtedly make the switch. As Linux captures more of the OS market share, along with MacOS-X, Microsoft will scramble to keep pace. This could create very REAL, and VIABLE competition for Microsoft, which I think would be beneficial to EVERYONE. The ONLY reason that MS is still on top, is because people find it too hard, or too inconvenient to make the switch to Linux (for various reasons). This has the potential to go a long ways towards overcoming that hurdle.
All in all, (and this coming from an MS Fangirl), well done. Very well done. The real question is, will this make it to enough people, and will it actually accomplish what I'm thinking it could.