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?

Comments

I bet this USB sticks will be used...

[Utopia]

...to store just music or other files.

Re:I bet this USB sticks will be used...

[fyoder]

...to store just music or other files.

Yup. When I was a lad back in elementary school many years ago, they gave us all copies of the New Testament. A friend of mine carved through the pages of his to create a secret compartment.

You can lead a kid to the gospel, be it Christianity or OSS, but you can't make him use it. At least not as you might intend.

Re:Computers on a stick?

[amrust]

No, but it does mean your K-Fed CD is something else on-a-stick.

Sacre Bleu!

[dangitman]

French kid 1: "You got OSS on my USB stick!"

French kid 2: "You got USB stick on my OSS!"

Re:There is more....

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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.

Re:There is more....

[metlin]

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).

We Hate France

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We Hate France

[ISurfTooMuch]

I have to agree with this statement, but I think it's important to point out that it's the right-wing nutjobs who hate France, not a majority of Americans. I still laugh at the whole freedom fries/freedom toast thing. Morons. These people seem to forget, or they never knew, that if France hadn't helped us during the Revolutionary War, we'd likely have lost, and, had we lost, you can bet that the British Crown would have punished us severely. We have a lot to thank the French for. They've given the world culture, good food, and philosophy, and they helped liberate us from Britain. Oh yeah, and there's that statue they sent us. I'd say they've earned our respect. As for the flash drive project, I don't know. I have a feeling that many kids will simply erase them and use them for storing files. I applaud the effort, but a live CD or DVD might have been a better idea. What I'd do is set the CD/DVD up so that, if the kid runs it, they'll find a link to send them to a page where they can request the flash drive. That way, the drive will only go to those who are interested in using it for its intended purpose. Sure, they can still wipe it, but at least they'll have the chance to experience OSS before they get the drive.

I think this is what their getting

[c41rn]

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.

Re:Computers on a stick?

[Joebert]

It's there, just that by the time you get through half of the batter you end up throwing the thing away before you get to it.

Boot from USB?

[DavidD_CA]

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.

Outrageous!

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:There is more....

[popo]

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.

Re:Computers on a stick?

[timeOday]

Interesting, isn't it? While technically wrong, it shows how commoditized computing hardware has become... apparently it isn't even noticeable to some people. All that matters is the user's data and applications.

well, since you asked....

[c6gunner]

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.

Re:There is more....

[AKabral]

and renaming the "USB" sticks the "FrenchB" sticks . . .Take that you darn Americans!