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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."
The NSW State Govt can't organise a chook raffle let alone something such as equiping kids with open source laptops. It has bigger fish to fry.
Besides, the topic is slightly wrong. Rudd isn't part of an Australian State, his part of the Federal Government. Two different beasts. The State won't 'give', it will 'receive'.
Rudd wants to give lumps of cash to a number of States based on need, spending not just on technology, but more importantly on infrastructure, health and education.
If you would RTFA again you'd read that the mention of RedHat refers to other Australian government systems. The Linux distro under consideration here is Edubuntu.
And I'm quite glad of that.
It depends how the debt was incurred.
If the debt is incurred to fuel capital spending, then yes, the debt helps the nation to grow by increasing our productive capacity.
If the debt is incurred to fuel consumer spending, then it's bad debt.
Debt comes with interest payments. Paying interest on the debt only makes sense if the benefit received by the debt is greater than the interest paid. So it really depends how the debt is used as to whether or not the debt is bad.
As for Australia being a "developing" nation: what crap. Australia is not a "developing nation", according to all international benchmarks. We have one of the highest standards of living, next to the US and Japan.
Australia:
Infant mortality: 4 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): ~99%
Adult literacy (females): ~99%.
Life expectancy (males): 78.9 years
Life expectancy (females): 83.4 years
Per-capita GDP: 37,300 $US.
For truly developing nations, these statistics are much much worse. Take India, for example.
Infant mortality: 33 / 1000
Adult literacy (men): 76%
Adult literacy (females): 65%.
Life expectancy (males): 63.1 years
Life expectancy (females): 66 years
Per-capita GDP: 2,600 $US.
(Yes, I know that Qatar has the highest per-capita GDP, that's largely due to its reserves of oil. An outlier doesn't disqualify the general trend.)
Developing nation? Please. You either don't understand the term or are unqualified to speak about it.
I believe the GP was referring to the Late 80's recession (AKA, the early 90's recession) which like our current economic woes was mainly driven by external economic powers, but much I suspect the GP doesn't have a clue, just a significant political bias.
He also tends to forget that Labour had been in power for 5 terms, not 1 (Hawke government (Labour) was elected in 1983 for the uninitiated). He also forgets that the 1982 recession which was worse than the current or 1992 recession was under the Fraser government (Liberal).
Recessions in Australia are mainly driven by by external stresses(to Australia), our economy is tied to other key economies the US, Japan, Europe to a lesser extent(mostly a leftover from our days in the British Empire) and more recently China, because of this when their economies are up so is ours and when they go down Australia follows suit. Whilst personally I'm against Howard (mostly due to his stance on I.R.) he did do a decent job of the economy (granted in the halcyon days of 2000-2005 it wasn't a difficult job). If Rudd keeps the economy afloat in the current global crisis and by all indications he will, he has done just as good of a job with the economy. Australia has the second most stable banking system in the western world, second only to Canada so we will weather the current crisis but we will probably have to pull the belt in a few notches.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
(I love the smell of astroturf in the mornings)
You're missing one critical difference between open source software and Windows: The open source software tends to improve with each release. That can't really be said for Windows.
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." Ed Howdershelt