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Australian State May Give Students Linux Laptops
Whiteox writes "The Australian Prime Minister's plan to equip high schools with 'one laptop per child' may go open source. Kevin Rudd's $56 million digital revolution will include 'laptops [that will] run on an open source operating system with a suite of open source applications like those packaged under Edubuntu. This would include Open Office for productivity software, Gimp for picture editing and the Firefox internet browser.' So far this has been considered for New South Wales and I think other states may follow."
That's a good thing. The reign of Scrooge McHoward left us economically poor and the treasury bulging with cash. We are not the British Empire.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Umm.. no. See, you're a sucker and you believe that a national debt is a bad thing. It's not. A developing nation (and that's what we are) should be in debt. We should be growing and credit is how you do that at a viable pace. We're falling behind because the Liberals think we're just fine the way we are now. It's the same with the aussie dollar. The Liberals want it high so the surplus has buying power on the international market.. Labor wants it low because exports and foreign investment are the only way a developing nation can grow its economy.
The collective delusion of Australians that we're a first world country is the problem here.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The way Microsoft could spin this, would be to offer Windows as an upgrade: "Sure, you can use the government's free offering, but for a truly enjoyable experience, shell-out some money to get genuine Windows on your laptop."
It would not even be much of a stretch, to be perfectly honest. After going through pains of KDE and Gnome on FreeBSD, I decided to try it on the slick KUbuntu (maybe, I thought, the stuff sucks on FreeBSD, because developers mostly test on Linux) — and it is even worse...
KMail, despite ton of really cool features, crashes often, and its IMAP implementation is nefarious. Thunderbird is more stable, but hangs often upon a message with a Return-Receipt (!). Firefox is awesome, but Firefox3, mysteriously looses older version's bookmarks and the back-button changes are quite atrocious. OpenOffice is still way behind Microsoft's on a number of features too.
Reduced hardware support, although not the fault of the OS, is another drawback...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Your slashdot nick is most appropriate.
You obviously did not notice the leader of your beloved liberal party opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, wholeheartedly agreeing with the governments spending package.
The surplus that Howard built was built on starving pensioners and unemployed, labour is finally giving some back.
What kind of "whole" did keating dig, the one where Costello changed virtually nothing, and took the credit for Keatings economic changes.
Are you uninformed or just stupid?