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French Kids Get OSS on USB Sticks
daria42 writes "To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software. With a word-processing program, audio and video playback capabilities, an email client and an IM client, these are essentially computers on a stick. The council touts this as 'represent[ing] for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends' PCs'." With the prevalence of internet cafes in Europe, that might work better than in the US ... but do you think such a project would work here as well? If so, what software would you want to see loaded up?
In what way?
I guess that means that my K-Fed CD is a a CD player on a CD.
...to store just music or other files.
Still, it looks pretty exciting. I'd love to have that stuff on the go. If France can break out of the grip of Microsoft, then perhaps the end of the monopoly is near.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
French kid 2: "You got USB stick on my OSS!"
... and then they built the supercollider.
So, how would encouraging kids to use computers be anti-American? Do these USB sticks somehow make the internet "less English" and software "less American"? Also, I do think software is written in other places than America, contrary to your assertion.
... and then they built the supercollider.
No one should underestimate the amount of anti-Americanism in this "give-away".
Unbelievable.
This sort of thing is happenning all over the world, including the US and many other English speaking nations.
But suddenly, because its France, its due to anti-Americanism (in spite the fact that many of the distributed apps are written in the US) and anti-English (although all commercial equivilants to the distributed apps have french localisation).
I think someone else how replied to you was bang on the money. Traumatic head injury when young.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
s/anti-Americanism/Communism/
France has fallen to the Bitskrieg! Long said to be secure behind the impregnable Maginot-soft Windows line, the French will now have to face the humiliation of watching Richard M. Stallman parade down the Champs d'USB.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Wow, do you also watch Fox and worship Bill O'Reilly?
Seriously - nothing about the language is being mentioned in the article.
Anti-corporation/anti-globalization? Perhaps. Anti-American? Please.
The president of the regional council, Jean-Paul Huchon, is a self-confessed "partisan of the rebalancing of the supply of proprietary and open-source software" who previously welcomed the launch of the Firefox 2 browser and led the support for a creation of a competitiveness hub based on open source.
If anything, I'd imagine that they are attempting to build a competency around OSS.
Copernics called - turns out the US isn't the center of the Universe (and yes, I live in the US).
Tant pis.
I think that one of the most important things about the internet is how it helps overcome isolationism. It's becoming a little harder to hide inside one's own culture. I suppose they feel that these incursions erode their own culture, but I think it's for the best that we're exposed to more different languages and cultures, however incidentally.
A few decades back, geography created inherent limits on communication. Now the only barrier is language, and given how many people speak some of the biggest languages (Mandarin Chinese, English, French, etc.), even that may not hold out for all that long as people find more need to communicate with each other...
The primary reason for the current far-right hatred of France is the war in Iraq. When USia was pitching the war, France was one of many countries that said that it was an absolutely stupid idea, destined for disaster. Now that the French prediction has come true, one would think that France would be due a certain measure of gratitude and an apology, as well as an acknowledgment that their advice should have been followed. Unfortunately, one of the defining characteristics of the extreme right is that they are unable to admit mistakes. This has had the effect of deepening the hatred and resentment towards France that is felt in some of USia's more trailer-oriented areas.
I just looked into something like this for myself and found portableapps.com. You can load up your standard OSS on a USB stick and then use them on any windows computer. I went out and bought the fastest USB stick I could find and loaded a few of my favorites on there (Firefox, 7Zip, OpenOffice and a few others). It's been really helpful to have the software I want when I am in a variety of locked-down university computer labs and I can do things with this software that the other students around me can't like open some obscure types of compressed files, save documents as PDFs, and browse the internet ad-free. Highly recommended if you often use public computers or work on other peoples' machines.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the point here be to boot fromthe USB to run the OS that is pre-loaded on the stick?
If it's just OSS apps, and you're still requiring Windows OS, then it's not that revolutionary. Why would the user bother with te USB stick if the computer is already booted into Windows and has popular apps loaded?
Not to mention I would suspect that most Net Cafes would prevent booting from a USB device because they want you to run the special "cafe" software they usually have that prompts for your credit card, tracks your time, etc.
Now, if an entire university had a bunch of computer labs with absolutely no pre-installed OS, and gave all their students these USB sticks (with an OS to boot from), then that might be something.
-David
This sort of thing is happenning all over the world, including the US and many other English speaking nations.
But suddenly, because its France, its due to anti-Americanism (in spite the fact that many of the distributed apps are written in the US) and anti-English (although all commercial equivilants to the distributed apps have french localisation).
Exactly!
Damn French! Most English people have been anti-American for ages but all of a sudden, along come the French, gain all the credit and manage to make it look cool in the process!
I demand other nations, beyond the French, get equal credit for loathing the current American administration.
I'm the original poster.
And the great irony here is that I'm the one with evidence and all of you who accuse me of
being a Bill O'Reilly fan are without it. (By the way, I'm ultra liberal, and lived in Paris
for many years.)
Yes, there are knee jerk reactionary "France Sucks" types, and I'm not one of them. But to
deny that there is a powerful (Powerful) anti--American sentiment which is alive and well among French
beaurocrats would be painfully naive at best.
The anti-American sentiment has its roots deep in both cultural xenophobia (no headscarves?), a loss of historic
linguistic prestige (ie: lingua franca, lingua diplomata, etc.) and historical contest with their historic
adversary, England. There are many scholarly books on French anti-amerianism, and its (sometimes hilarious)
manifestation in politics, law and popular culture.
The situation has grown so out of hand in recent years, that the French intelligentsia
write books in an effort to understand their own cultural fascination with America bashing.
(I recommend Jean-Francois Revel's "L'Obsession Anti-Americaine", 2002).
But I see sadly that writing such comments on Slashdot are akin to pointing out that the "iPhone has no keyboard
and will probably make a bad smartphone because texting and email are somewhat crucial". (For which I was similarly
modded down as Flamebait)
There are broadcast limits on networks for all languages besides French. English has its own specially defined limits.
Advertisers who use English words (but not the words of other languages) are fined.
France took center stage during the ICANN fiasco in the effort to wrest "control" away from the US. And who
was the proposed entity for transferring the power to (from NSI)? Why, "France Telecom" of course.
French anti-Americanism is very real. The French have a deep resentment for the pervasiveness of the English language
and for the "American-ness" of the Internet. To deny this is to ignore far too much recent history.
Now kids, mod me down as flamebait and go to bed believing that the whole world is in this together, and that America is the
only country that behaves like a dick. Russia plays fair. China plays fair. France plays fair. We're jerks. I know.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
What software would I like to see loaded up? Well, here's what's on MY USB stick:
Accesories
Calcute, Converber, Convert, Guillotine, Launchy, Boot Floppy Creator, WinRAR, Rejar, XN Resource Editor, Resource viewer, decompiler & recompiler., Universal Extractor, Allway Sync, pathsync, Batcher, Bulk Rename Utility, DataTool, XpAssociate,
Internet
mIRC, Miranda IM, qm - Quick Mailer, Thunderbird Portable, Opera , read_IE_proxy, VNC server for Win32, VNCViewer, ChrisControl, GreatNews: the intelligent rss reader, FollowMeIP (Show External IP),
File Transfer
Quick 'n Easy FTP Server 3.0, Portable WackGet, FTP Wanderer, HTTP File Server, utorrent,
Scanners
Network Stumbler, Angry IP scanner, MozillaCookiesView, IPNetInfo, HTTP Get Headers, SuperScan 4 Beta 1, SmartSniff, CurrPorts, NetStat Live, trout (Trace Route), WhoisThisDomain,
Uniform Server
Start Main Server, Stop Main Server, Start SlimFTPd, Stop SlimFTPd,
Media
CD / DVD
DvdReMake Pro, DVD Shrink 3.2, IFO-file editor, MuxMan, Windows XP Virtual CD, PowerISO, CDex CD-Ripper, BonkEnc Audio Encoder, Nero InfoTool, DVDINFOPro, Alcohol 120%, Standalone CD/DVD Burner, DeepBurner, EasyDVDBurner,
Graphics / Imaging
IrfanView, XnView, PaintStar, Portable GIMP, Resize, animagic32, Analyzer, LiquidIcon Editor, FSCapture, SnIco Editor, ColorCop, SmartMorph,
Audio
XMPlay, coolplayer, 1by1, Foobar2000, Easy MP3 Alarm Clock, mpTrim, WakeMeUP,
Video
Ant Movie Catalog, VLC Media Player, VLC Media Player - no skins, Media Player Classic, VirtualDub,
Office
Notepad++ : a free (GNU) source code editor, TED Notepad for Windows, UltraEdit-32 Professional Text/Hex Editor, ICEReaderRetail, Foxit Reader Pro, PdftkBuilder, TreePad Lite, Spell Magic, Total Organizer,
OpenOffice
OpenOffice.org, Writer, Calc, Base, Impress , Math , Draw ,
System
pstools, MyUninstaller, Autostart program viewer, Dependency Walker, DiskRecon, DiskImage, PassWordRenew, RegEdit PE, RegScanner, Registry Monitor, TreeSize Professional, ImageExplorer, Tola's patching engine v1.8, AbsoluteShield File Shredder, Removes hard to remove files, WhyReboot,
HD Tools
HDHacker, HDD Temperature Monitor, HDSpeed, HD Tune, Partition Table Doctor 3.0, Partition Table Editor for Windows, PartitionInfo Windows NT Version, Symantec GhostCast Server for Windows, Symantec Ghost Explorer, Symantec Ghost,
Info / Benchmark
Game XP, ClockGen, CPU-Z Application, aida32, everest, USB Browser, Parmavex WinAudit, RightMark Memory Analyzer, ServiWin Service and Driver manager,
Copy / Undelete
ActiveUndelete, Restoration, Unstopable Copier, BadCopy - Disk & CD Data Recovery Utility, raid,
Maintanance / Repair
Windows XP SP2 TCP/IP patch, ClamWin Portable, CCleaner Portable, xp-AntiSpy, Norton WinDoctor, Norton Disk Doctor, Ad-Aware SE, JkDefrag, Disk Analysis and Cleanup Utility, WinsockFix,
Security
TrueCrypt, Keylogger Detector, KeePass Password Safe v1.05, Omziff, Internet Explorer Passwords Viewer, WirelessKeyView, pcANYWHERE password, PasswordsPro, SAMInside, SAMInside, pwdump2,
Windows Shortcuts
edit_lmhosts, System, Add or Remove Programs, Computer Management, Services, Performance, Display, Network Connections, Printers and Faxes, Sounds and Audio Devices,
Games
lwwin, zetrix, rh, Bridging_the_Gap_v1, Process Explorer, My Computer, DSynchronize, DM2, Firefox, x2 - explorer replacement,
And all of it menued under PStart.
(unless the school put out some dough--every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback)
Since money is not charged per copy of Linux, they do not include software that requires a payment to be made per copy. MP3 decoders and codecs require a payment. Detailes are here;
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/
Once you download a codec or decoder, getting it licensed is a problem.. They won't take your money. From the Q & A;
1) Do you license mp3, mp3PRO and mp3surround software to end users?
No. We license mp3/mp3PRO software and patents to developers and manufacturers of software applications and hardware devices.
They don't want to deal with retail, they want to deal with wholesale. The minimum annual payment is $15,000.
See the minimum royalties on the bottom of this page; http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html
every OSS system I've used required some shady means of enabling mp3 playback
It's because they provide no way to properly license it. We've tried.
The truth shall set you free!
and renaming the "USB" sticks the "FrenchB" sticks . . .Take that you darn Americans!
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. - Thorstein
The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.