There has been no technical or biological barriers to producing a non-painful or non-surgical male contraceptive drug like this.
Excuse me? Stopping sperm production is non-trivial. There is no natural mechanism for stopping sperm production, like there is for egg production. Doing it with drugs has generally required something like large doses of Testosterone, which has serious side effects and isn't consistent enough for practical purposes.
Stopping egg production, on the other hand, is relatively simple, and there are various natural mechanisms in place for doing so, such as pregnancy and excessively low body fat. Low body fat is obviously a difficult thing to maintain, especially at the level where it effects fertility, and again it isn't consistent enough to be considered effective. Pregnancy, however, is very consistent, even across the animal kingdom. I don't know of a single creature that is fertile during pregnancy.
This consistency, and the fact that it is a natural mechanism, is why there are birth control pills for women; because it's easy, not because of some aleged (imagined, IMO) prejudice that birth control is a woman's responsibility. It is a fairly simple thing to mess with a woman's biochemistry and make her body think it's pregnant, which is exactly what every birth control pill, shot, or implant does (and if you think women get side-effects from those, just wait until you have to deal with an actual pregnant woman on a daily basis!)
does it fuck with your emotions and hormonal balance in the ways the pill, Norplant and Depo do to women?
Of course it does, they only question is how much. There's no way it could work without messing with your hormonal balance, and there's no way your hormones are going to get messed with without having emotional and physical side-effects. The trick will be the same as it has been for female birth control; balancing effectiveness against side effects (dosage), and trading off more annoying side-effects for less annoying ones (formula).
Not for me, sadly. I have a USB keyboard (SGI, it's a really great keyboard, but doesn't seem to work with a USB-PS/2 adapter), and when X crashes it generally seems to take my USB drivers with it, so no KB input for me. It hasn't been a problem since I stopped using KDE, though. Not that it wouldn't happen, but WindowMaker just doesn't crash.
I do sometimes have a problem with either my KB or mouse (also USB) not recognized at boot. Strangely it's almost always one or the other, very rarely both.
For me, it's mostly pictures, and most of those are either of my wedding or my daughter. In most cases I don't have access to negatives or prints for these (although if I did, they would probably burn with the rest of the house). While I could certainly live without them, it would really suck to lose them. That's not really much of an issue, though, since we're talking less than 1G of fairly static data, so a CD-R and a bank safe-deposit box, rotated once a month, is more than sufficient for my needs.
I've certainly lost plenty of stuff in the past that I still wish I had, though. I collect interesting quotes, of which I've lost a few substantial text files, for example. Again, though, that's something I could totally live without, and had I thought about it at the time I would have just backed them up to my homepage space.
Although I don't have any serious need for backups, I can see how other people might. I'm not a person who tends to collect stuff, and I don't place a high value on the data I do collect.
Those were 2 distinct and competing groups. You might as well say that MS-DOS and DR-DOS had compatability problems, it would be equally true, and equally relevant to my question. One was free to choose between BSD and ATT, which were concurrent products. This has absolutely nothing to do with backwards compatability.
the OSF compatibility issues
I don't know anything about that, so I won't comment on it.
in Linux the switch to glibc5 was a major backwards compatibility breaker.
And what, exactly, was stopping anyone from fixing those incompatabilities?
You make some good points, but here's my response:
How many years old is UNIX?
I'm unaware of any significant functional breaks during the evolution of UNIX. As far as I can tell there haven't been any, or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT; minor breaks here and there, but on the whole, compatability is maintained.
And new Windows users don't say exactly the same things?
If you're going to criticize Linux, you could at least come up with something that doesn't apply equally to every single OS on the planet.
There is no such thing as an intuitive interface. A famous computer guy once said that the only intuitive interface is the nipple; he was wrong. Both mother and child have to learn how to nurse, as he would have found out had he actually consulted with someone who knew something about breastfeeding.
What is my point? That nothing is intuitive, only familiar. Anyone who moves to a different OS and expects things to be exactly the same is an idiot. And honestly, once you look at the actual reasoning, the average Linux distro arranges things far more sensably that Windows does. It just seems stupid and backwards at first because it's unfamiliar.
Actually, the GPL specifically says that you can charge for the source, but you can't charge more than the actual cost of physical transfer. So, Binaries $1, Source $1M would be a violation of the GPL, but Binaries $1M, Source $1 is perfectly acceptable.
Around 2 years ago I got a job at a small engineering company that did custom industrial automation. When I was hired I was employee number 6, and the CEO/Sales/Chief Engineer/Head Machinist/General Manager's (yeah, one guy did all that) computer was also the fileserver. While I was there the company grew, and they hired a Chief Engineer, a Head Machinist, and a General Manager. The General Manager (correctly) decided that we should have a fileserver that wasn't doubling as a workstation, and immediately started talking about dropping a few grand on a Dell box and Novell.
Being the closest thing the company had to an IT guy, I pointed out that we had an old CAD workstation in the back room that was pretty much useless as a CAD box now, but we could slap a decent sized hard drive in it and a barebones Linux/Samba install on it and call it a fileserver, and that would probably serve our needs just fine. I gave him a brief rundown on what Linux is and why it wouldn't cost us anything, and his response was "Who else is using this Linux thing?"
I didn't have a single example I could point him to, so he brought in some consultants who drew up a nice several thousand dollar plan to rewire the whole network and buy a big fancy server and a real router and switches...
Yeah, Mandrake had a page full of testimonials, but they were all from small companies no one had ever heard of, and so they were useless to me. Certainly there was nothing newsworthy, which was unfortunately what I needed.
I won in the end by going over his head to the CFO (the CEOs wife), and she immediately liked the sound of a couple hundred dollars v. several thousand, so I got the go-ahead, and that discarded CAD box has been serving faithfully ever since. (Of course, when lay-offs became necessary, I was also the first one called aside by said GM, but that's the price you pay for being right sometimes)
Anyway, if I'd had some examples like the ones that are getting posted on/. recently, I probably would have been right and employed. Yeah, it's pointless for you to keep hearing that Linux is cheaper because you already know that, so don't read them. As for me, every one of these articles is another thing I can stuff in my ammo box for the next time I get asked that question. What's obvious to you and I is anything but to the average manager.
Even if Office is the best productivity suite available, is it so much better that it is worth the extra cost of the software and the O/S needed to run it?
Not to people who have no need for the alleged additional functionality that Office provides. I have yet to encounter a task that I could do with Office that can't do just as well, and often more easily, with OpenOffice and Mozilla.
If that is true for me, a person who is very familiar with MS products, then I think it is certainly true for someone from the backwaters of India who has little, if any, experience with computers at all.
That might be a danger if Linux were actually crap.
I think the point you are ignoring is that in the 70s and 80s the vast majority of goods imported from Japan (and China, Taiwan, Korea, etc) were, in fact, poor quality, cheaply made, CRAP! Similarly, that goods of poor quality were refered to as "K-Mart Kuality" was a direct result of the fact that K-Mart sold low quality crap! These stereotypes, and the phrases/epithets they spawned, didn't just appear out of nowhere. In the majority of cases they were simple statements of fact.
Also, I think calling KDE a "Windows clone" is absurd. While there are some basic similarities, those similarities are generally also shared with other GUIs such as Aqua, namely general default placement of toolbars and desktop icons, and the placement of basic window controls. The actual function, and functionality, of the two environments is quite different.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that while Linux may lack visual polish, it is quite often functionally superior to Windows. I think it is much more likely that we will be hearing "damned Microsoft crap!" (especially since I hear that regularly right now, and have never heard anyone say "cheap Linux crap!").
2) You don't know what the hell you're talking about
Let me explain:
Counter-Strike and StarCraft both run just fine under WINE, and have done so for years (I personally know people who were playing CS under Wine over 2 years ago). Unreal Tournament doesn't need to run on WINE since both UT and UT2003 have native support for Linux (Although, for the record, I know people who were playing UT under WINE, again, over 2 years ago).
Since this is easily verifiable fact, it is quite clear that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
having the governor officially reject capitalism is a good step for socialism.
While this statement is technically true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand. The issue is not one of Capitalism v. Socialism, but rather one of government accountability and transparancy. These two issues are completely different and distinct, and only an idiot who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about would get them confused.
Though some of the official stuff, as well as the more family-oriented shops may change to Linux, the vast majority of cyber cafes will still be running pirated games under a pirated Windows.
That may be true in the large cities, which actually have economies which are able to support privately owned cybercafes, but India is a very big place, and the vast majority of it does not fit that description.
I think it's better to reduce peopless dependency on Windows only apps first.
Step one is to stop providing them with pirated MS Office CDs. As long as Joe Consumer isn't actually paying for it, he'll see very little reason to try anything else. You may think you're Stickin' it to the Man when you give away pirated MS software, but you're not. You're actually helping MS expand and maintain their monopoly, which is far more valuable to them than the actual cash they lost on the sale.
Step two is to present viable Open Source alternatives, which basically means OpenOffice and Mozilla for most people.
When the majority of apps they use are available for Linux, switching is a non-issue. At most they'll have to get used to a new menu structure, but having multiple desktops should more than make up for that.
Many of the poor parts of India are kept poor by their lack of information access. For example, they are unable to obtain information about the going price for rice, so a distributer can come in and buy their rice very cheap, and the farmers don't even know they're getting screwed. When they can get a decent price for their rice, then maybe they will have enough money to start taking care of things like clean running water on their own. Giving handouts and taking care of peoples problems for them is always a second rate solution. Self-sufficiency has to be the goal of any program designed to help the impoverished, and increasingly, even in third world countries, self sufficiency is dependent on education.
They can do everything email clients can do, without spam.
There are already a small number of spamers working IM effectively, and it could get as bad as e-mail at any time.
The funny thing is, I ditched IM a couple of years ago because I was getting way too much spam, and what I did get that wasn't spam was 12 year old korean girls who wanted to talk about the weather and thought I was cool just because I live in CA, which is pretty much the same as spam for a 23 year old college student.
Do you find information on how to build a nuclear device in your library?
Yes, actually, my high school library in fact.
The real question, though, is: Does the government need to be prodded into action through public release of their vulnerabilities before they think about nuclear safety and security?
The fact is, MS has known about this hole since October 4th, and this exploit was publicly available on hacker boards before then. MS decided it wasn't really a security vulnerability, so obviously the released exploit isn't really a problem, right?
Face it, MS deserved this black eye. They've had ample time, and have chosen not to respond. No one else has been harmed by this, because the exploit was already available in the wild.
Incidentally, these are all signs of bad programs for adults, too.
Which is exactly why I say "kid friendly" is a straw man. Designing a good interface for a kid really just means designing a good interface for a human, with the erroniously added requirement for cartoonish graphics.
children think VERY linearly
Regular conversations with my 2 year old daughter have convinced me otherwise. Linear thinking is learned behavior, and a little casual people watching at the local strip mall should be enough to convince you that not everyone learns it. Even something as simple as cause and effect is learned, and often has to be pointed out.
Most GUIs are not simple, they are very cluttered, and children (at least the inexperienced ones) and the elderly tend to get lost in them, overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of information presented to them.
Also, for my daughter, a GUI is not usual. She is not a computer user in any sense; she rarely pays attention to it at all, and when she does happen to look she's as likely to see a console as a GUI since I prefer the console for most things. There is nothing unusual about CLI for her. She can't read, so she's not going to get anything more out of CLI than GUI, probably much less, in fact. At least with a GUI there are somewhat meaningful pictures. In CLI, there is only text, and she only knows maybe half of the alphabet.
I agree about GUIs being limited, though.
Anyway, a while back I was talking about computer interfaces with an older woman (50ish) who was in my Network Operating Systems class. She had been using computers for about the same amount of time as my mom, who finally upgraded from her 1928 Underwood almost 3 years ago. She very much disliked GUIs, because they're so busy and gaudy that it's hard to find what she's looking for, kind of like trying to find your way out of a casino. The CLI, though, is quiet and focused, and therefore much easier for her to function in.
I have to say, that completely changed the way I thought about human-computer interaction, and really clarified why I have always liked CLI. I strongly suspect that it plays a large part in why children might be drawn to it as well.
My first computer was a TRS-80 with a broken cartridge slot,a BASIC programming manual, and 2 game cartridges (which I couldn't use, because the cartridge slot was broken, but I could dream about how much fun I would have when I was finally able to recreate those games on my own, in BASIC. Talk about naive!)
I might have gone farther with it at the time if I'd had any way to save my work, other than writing it out by hand and typing it in again next time I turned the machine on. Man, did that suck!
I have to say, though, that since then every computer I've used has seemed ludicrously simple!
Make sure you're seen in front of them running some really slick and attractive WM. With lots of shiney customizable things that can be tinkered with.
I think the current definition of "slick and attractive" is not what you want. I've found that simple and uncluttered is much more attractive to kids.
My daughter (2.5 years) pretty much ignores the computer most of the time, but when she does pay attention to it, it's generally at a time when I'm doing something uncluttered such as playing a fullscreen game, watching a DVD, or hacking C in vi. Strangely, she seems most interesting in CLI apps. I could probably amuse her for hours by bringing up man pages and letting her identify the letters she recognizes.
Anyway, you make some excellent points, just don't be too sure that the slick and shiny will win out. All manner of slick electronic toys come and go every year. Almost every little kid has a basic stuffed animal of some kind, and they're generally very attached to it, but how many kids do you know that have a Teddy Ruxpin, or one of those dolls where the hair grows or changes color with hot water? Of the kids that you have ever known that had one, how many actually cared about it for more than a couple of months?
Young kids don't understand the value of a dollar nor the importance of freedom and until they do it's silly to force it on them.
Young kids understand what they are given the opportunity to learn. My 2-year-old knows what money is, and she knows that we have to buy things before we can take them out of the store. She knows where to put the item on the checkers counter, and at which point she will be able to handle the item again. That these things are bought with money shouldn't be difficult for her to understand, and if she hasn't figured it out already it's only because I prefer to be cashless.
Likewise, any kid that has been grounded or put in time-out knows the value of freedom. Relating it to software may not be a simple thing, but they already understand the basic concepts.
The whole "kid friendly software" thing is a straw-man. How many of us had kid friendly software when we were kids? Even the games I loved and played all the time would be considered kid hostile by todays standards, and yet I, a kid, had no problem using them.
Retraining is an adult issue, not a kid issue. Kids adapt quickly and easily, they have to; the bulk of their first 20 years is largely training and retraining.
The fact is that your kids are far more adaptable than you are, and will have far less problems making the transition. As far as technical advice on how to do it, here are my suggestions:
WINE: If all of your kids games ran fine on Win98, dedicate a Gig or so to a Win98 install to point WINE at, that should take care of most of the compatability issues. The last time I set up WINE it gave me the option to make copies of the important Windows bits for its own use, that way you don't have to worry about your Windows install being corrupted by anything other than itself. A single Windows install, accesible over a network should be sufficient for anyones WINE needs.
CDs: The real problem here is autorun, which Linux basically doesn't do, and for very good reasons (there may be a way to make it work, but I'm unaware of it). However, it's not that difficult to make an icon that will automount the CD and run the app. If your 3 year old can play the game at all, then s/he can learn to click on an icon. A clean dismount at the end could be problematic, though.
Lock-ups: My personal experience has been that if you use one of the "bulkier" GUIs (like KDE), you will not get more effective stability than you currently have with Windows. I recommend something lightweight. Not only is, say, WindowMaker a lot more stable than KDE, it's also a lot simpler. It might be radically different from the Windows interface, but that may be a good thing. I switched from KDE to WindowMaker a few months ago, and I've found that with proper attention to setup, the easy things (launching Mozilla, OpenOffice, or whatever) can be made incredibly easy, and the really hard things are still possible via easy access to XTerm. Any Linux graphical environment will offer that kind of flexibility, and KDE and GNOME apps will still run just fine if you aren't actively running their prefered envirnment, so long as you have it installed.
Also, no OS will make you safe from 3-year-old caused lockups. If there is any way for you to, say, open another terminal and recover from a command line, your 3-year-old will discover it and lock that up, too. This is just a fact of life that you'll have to learn to live with, at least until the kid gets older and learns not to thrash about on the keyboard.
And finally, my response to all the social conformity advocates telling you to stick with Windows: Would you be as critical if he were swithing to a Mac? Why should switching to Linux be viewed any differently?
Slashdot Mirror
There has been no technical or biological barriers to producing a non-painful or non-surgical male contraceptive drug like this.
Excuse me? Stopping sperm production is non-trivial. There is no natural mechanism for stopping sperm production, like there is for egg production. Doing it with drugs has generally required something like large doses of Testosterone, which has serious side effects and isn't consistent enough for practical purposes.
Stopping egg production, on the other hand, is relatively simple, and there are various natural mechanisms in place for doing so, such as pregnancy and excessively low body fat. Low body fat is obviously a difficult thing to maintain, especially at the level where it effects fertility, and again it isn't consistent enough to be considered effective. Pregnancy, however, is very consistent, even across the animal kingdom. I don't know of a single creature that is fertile during pregnancy.
This consistency, and the fact that it is a natural mechanism, is why there are birth control pills for women; because it's easy, not because of some aleged (imagined, IMO) prejudice that birth control is a woman's responsibility. It is a fairly simple thing to mess with a woman's biochemistry and make her body think it's pregnant, which is exactly what every birth control pill, shot, or implant does (and if you think women get side-effects from those, just wait until you have to deal with an actual pregnant woman on a daily basis!)
does it fuck with your emotions and hormonal balance in the ways the pill, Norplant and Depo do to women?
Of course it does, they only question is how much. There's no way it could work without messing with your hormonal balance, and there's no way your hormones are going to get messed with without having emotional and physical side-effects. The trick will be the same as it has been for female birth control; balancing effectiveness against side effects (dosage), and trading off more annoying side-effects for less annoying ones (formula).
Let's see:
UT2003: native Linux support
Quake3: native Linux support
RtWC: native Linux support
Counter-Strike: running just fine under Wine for over 2 years
Honestly, what would you do with that $300 card under Windows that isn't covered above? CAD?
Pro/E: currently being ported to Linux
Not for me, sadly. I have a USB keyboard (SGI, it's a really great keyboard, but doesn't seem to work with a USB-PS/2 adapter), and when X crashes it generally seems to take my USB drivers with it, so no KB input for me. It hasn't been a problem since I stopped using KDE, though. Not that it wouldn't happen, but WindowMaker just doesn't crash.
I do sometimes have a problem with either my KB or mouse (also USB) not recognized at boot. Strangely it's almost always one or the other, very rarely both.
For me, it's mostly pictures, and most of those are either of my wedding or my daughter. In most cases I don't have access to negatives or prints for these (although if I did, they would probably burn with the rest of the house). While I could certainly live without them, it would really suck to lose them. That's not really much of an issue, though, since we're talking less than 1G of fairly static data, so a CD-R and a bank safe-deposit box, rotated once a month, is more than sufficient for my needs.
I've certainly lost plenty of stuff in the past that I still wish I had, though. I collect interesting quotes, of which I've lost a few substantial text files, for example. Again, though, that's something I could totally live without, and had I thought about it at the time I would have just backed them up to my homepage space.
Although I don't have any serious need for backups, I can see how other people might. I'm not a person who tends to collect stuff, and I don't place a high value on the data I do collect.
BSD vs. AT&T Unix compatibility issues
Those were 2 distinct and competing groups. You might as well say that MS-DOS and DR-DOS had compatability problems, it would be equally true, and equally relevant to my question. One was free to choose between BSD and ATT, which were concurrent products. This has absolutely nothing to do with backwards compatability.
the OSF compatibility issues
I don't know anything about that, so I won't comment on it.
in Linux the switch to glibc5 was a major backwards compatibility breaker.
And what, exactly, was stopping anyone from fixing those incompatabilities?
Office 11 will have an XML format available, but the default will still be .doc.
You make some good points, but here's my response:
How many years old is UNIX?
I'm unaware of any significant functional breaks during the evolution of UNIX. As far as I can tell there haven't been any, or if there has been it was on the order of the transition from DOS to NT; minor breaks here and there, but on the whole, compatability is maintained.
And new Windows users don't say exactly the same things?
If you're going to criticize Linux, you could at least come up with something that doesn't apply equally to every single OS on the planet.
There is no such thing as an intuitive interface. A famous computer guy once said that the only intuitive interface is the nipple; he was wrong. Both mother and child have to learn how to nurse, as he would have found out had he actually consulted with someone who knew something about breastfeeding.
What is my point? That nothing is intuitive, only familiar. Anyone who moves to a different OS and expects things to be exactly the same is an idiot. And honestly, once you look at the actual reasoning, the average Linux distro arranges things far more sensably that Windows does. It just seems stupid and backwards at first because it's unfamiliar.
Actually, the GPL specifically says that you can charge for the source, but you can't charge more than the actual cost of physical transfer. So, Binaries $1, Source $1M would be a violation of the GPL, but Binaries $1M, Source $1 is perfectly acceptable.
I was going to post exactly this, but not as well written. Thank you for saving me the embarasment of trying to articulate these arguements myself.
In other words: Well Put!
Around 2 years ago I got a job at a small engineering company that did custom industrial automation. When I was hired I was employee number 6, and the CEO/Sales/Chief Engineer/Head Machinist/General Manager's (yeah, one guy did all that) computer was also the fileserver. While I was there the company grew, and they hired a Chief Engineer, a Head Machinist, and a General Manager. The General Manager (correctly) decided that we should have a fileserver that wasn't doubling as a workstation, and immediately started talking about dropping a few grand on a Dell box and Novell.
/. recently, I probably would have been right and employed. Yeah, it's pointless for you to keep hearing that Linux is cheaper because you already know that, so don't read them. As for me, every one of these articles is another thing I can stuff in my ammo box for the next time I get asked that question. What's obvious to you and I is anything but to the average manager.
Being the closest thing the company had to an IT guy, I pointed out that we had an old CAD workstation in the back room that was pretty much useless as a CAD box now, but we could slap a decent sized hard drive in it and a barebones Linux/Samba install on it and call it a fileserver, and that would probably serve our needs just fine. I gave him a brief rundown on what Linux is and why it wouldn't cost us anything, and his response was "Who else is using this Linux thing?"
I didn't have a single example I could point him to, so he brought in some consultants who drew up a nice several thousand dollar plan to rewire the whole network and buy a big fancy server and a real router and switches...
Yeah, Mandrake had a page full of testimonials, but they were all from small companies no one had ever heard of, and so they were useless to me. Certainly there was nothing newsworthy, which was unfortunately what I needed.
I won in the end by going over his head to the CFO (the CEOs wife), and she immediately liked the sound of a couple hundred dollars v. several thousand, so I got the go-ahead, and that discarded CAD box has been serving faithfully ever since. (Of course, when lay-offs became necessary, I was also the first one called aside by said GM, but that's the price you pay for being right sometimes)
Anyway, if I'd had some examples like the ones that are getting posted on
IRC is a terrible place to ask questions. USENET is much better. I've found comp.os.linux to be especially good.
Really, about the best thing I can say about IRC is that it drew the trolls and the really rude people out of USENET.
Even if Office is the best productivity suite available, is it so much better that it is worth the extra cost of the software and the O/S needed to run it?
Not to people who have no need for the alleged additional functionality that Office provides. I have yet to encounter a task that I could do with Office that can't do just as well, and often more easily, with OpenOffice and Mozilla.
If that is true for me, a person who is very familiar with MS products, then I think it is certainly true for someone from the backwaters of India who has little, if any, experience with computers at all.
That might be a danger if Linux were actually crap.
I think the point you are ignoring is that in the 70s and 80s the vast majority of goods imported from Japan (and China, Taiwan, Korea, etc) were, in fact, poor quality, cheaply made, CRAP! Similarly, that goods of poor quality were refered to as "K-Mart Kuality" was a direct result of the fact that K-Mart sold low quality crap! These stereotypes, and the phrases/epithets they spawned, didn't just appear out of nowhere. In the majority of cases they were simple statements of fact.
Also, I think calling KDE a "Windows clone" is absurd. While there are some basic similarities, those similarities are generally also shared with other GUIs such as Aqua, namely general default placement of toolbars and desktop icons, and the placement of basic window controls. The actual function, and functionality, of the two environments is quite different.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that while Linux may lack visual polish, it is quite often functionally superior to Windows. I think it is much more likely that we will be hearing "damned Microsoft crap!" (especially since I hear that regularly right now, and have never heard anyone say "cheap Linux crap!").
Two things:
1) You're an idiot
2) You don't know what the hell you're talking about
Let me explain:
Counter-Strike and StarCraft both run just fine under WINE, and have done so for years (I personally know people who were playing CS under Wine over 2 years ago). Unreal Tournament doesn't need to run on WINE since both UT and UT2003 have native support for Linux (Although, for the record, I know people who were playing UT under WINE, again, over 2 years ago).
Since this is easily verifiable fact, it is quite clear that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
having the governor officially reject capitalism is a good step for socialism.
While this statement is technically true, it has absolutely nothing to do with the situation at hand. The issue is not one of Capitalism v. Socialism, but rather one of government accountability and transparancy. These two issues are completely different and distinct, and only an idiot who doesn't know what the hell they're talking about would get them confused.
Though some of the official stuff, as well as the more family-oriented shops may change to Linux, the vast majority of cyber cafes will still be running pirated games under a pirated Windows.
That may be true in the large cities, which actually have economies which are able to support privately owned cybercafes, but India is a very big place, and the vast majority of it does not fit that description.
I think it's better to reduce peopless dependency on Windows only apps first.
Step one is to stop providing them with pirated MS Office CDs. As long as Joe Consumer isn't actually paying for it, he'll see very little reason to try anything else. You may think you're Stickin' it to the Man when you give away pirated MS software, but you're not. You're actually helping MS expand and maintain their monopoly, which is far more valuable to them than the actual cash they lost on the sale.
Step two is to present viable Open Source alternatives, which basically means OpenOffice and Mozilla for most people.
When the majority of apps they use are available for Linux, switching is a non-issue. At most they'll have to get used to a new menu structure, but having multiple desktops should more than make up for that.
Many of the poor parts of India are kept poor by their lack of information access. For example, they are unable to obtain information about the going price for rice, so a distributer can come in and buy their rice very cheap, and the farmers don't even know they're getting screwed. When they can get a decent price for their rice, then maybe they will have enough money to start taking care of things like clean running water on their own. Giving handouts and taking care of peoples problems for them is always a second rate solution. Self-sufficiency has to be the goal of any program designed to help the impoverished, and increasingly, even in third world countries, self sufficiency is dependent on education.
They can do everything email clients can do, without spam.
There are already a small number of spamers working IM effectively, and it could get as bad as e-mail at any time.
The funny thing is, I ditched IM a couple of years ago because I was getting way too much spam, and what I did get that wasn't spam was 12 year old korean girls who wanted to talk about the weather and thought I was cool just because I live in CA, which is pretty much the same as spam for a 23 year old college student.
Do you find information on how to build a nuclear device in your library?
Yes, actually, my high school library in fact.
The real question, though, is: Does the government need to be prodded into action through public release of their vulnerabilities before they think about nuclear safety and security?
The fact is, MS has known about this hole since October 4th, and this exploit was publicly available on hacker boards before then. MS decided it wasn't really a security vulnerability, so obviously the released exploit isn't really a problem, right?
Face it, MS deserved this black eye. They've had ample time, and have chosen not to respond. No one else has been harmed by this, because the exploit was already available in the wild.
Incidentally, these are all signs of bad programs for adults, too.
Which is exactly why I say "kid friendly" is a straw man. Designing a good interface for a kid really just means designing a good interface for a human, with the erroniously added requirement for cartoonish graphics.
children think VERY linearly
Regular conversations with my 2 year old daughter have convinced me otherwise. Linear thinking is learned behavior, and a little casual people watching at the local strip mall should be enough to convince you that not everyone learns it. Even something as simple as cause and effect is learned, and often has to be pointed out.
GUI is too simple, very usual, and very limited.
Most GUIs are not simple, they are very cluttered, and children (at least the inexperienced ones) and the elderly tend to get lost in them, overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of information presented to them.
Also, for my daughter, a GUI is not usual. She is not a computer user in any sense; she rarely pays attention to it at all, and when she does happen to look she's as likely to see a console as a GUI since I prefer the console for most things. There is nothing unusual about CLI for her. She can't read, so she's not going to get anything more out of CLI than GUI, probably much less, in fact. At least with a GUI there are somewhat meaningful pictures. In CLI, there is only text, and she only knows maybe half of the alphabet.
I agree about GUIs being limited, though.
Anyway, a while back I was talking about computer interfaces with an older woman (50ish) who was in my Network Operating Systems class. She had been using computers for about the same amount of time as my mom, who finally upgraded from her 1928 Underwood almost 3 years ago. She very much disliked GUIs, because they're so busy and gaudy that it's hard to find what she's looking for, kind of like trying to find your way out of a casino. The CLI, though, is quiet and focused, and therefore much easier for her to function in.
I have to say, that completely changed the way I thought about human-computer interaction, and really clarified why I have always liked CLI. I strongly suspect that it plays a large part in why children might be drawn to it as well.
I have to agree.
My first computer was a TRS-80 with a broken cartridge slot,a BASIC programming manual, and 2 game cartridges (which I couldn't use, because the cartridge slot was broken, but I could dream about how much fun I would have when I was finally able to recreate those games on my own, in BASIC. Talk about naive!)
I might have gone farther with it at the time if I'd had any way to save my work, other than writing it out by hand and typing it in again next time I turned the machine on. Man, did that suck!
I have to say, though, that since then every computer I've used has seemed ludicrously simple!
Make sure you're seen in front of them running some really slick and attractive WM. With lots of shiney customizable things that can be tinkered with.
I think the current definition of "slick and attractive" is not what you want. I've found that simple and uncluttered is much more attractive to kids.
My daughter (2.5 years) pretty much ignores the computer most of the time, but when she does pay attention to it, it's generally at a time when I'm doing something uncluttered such as playing a fullscreen game, watching a DVD, or hacking C in vi. Strangely, she seems most interesting in CLI apps. I could probably amuse her for hours by bringing up man pages and letting her identify the letters she recognizes.
Anyway, you make some excellent points, just don't be too sure that the slick and shiny will win out. All manner of slick electronic toys come and go every year. Almost every little kid has a basic stuffed animal of some kind, and they're generally very attached to it, but how many kids do you know that have a Teddy Ruxpin, or one of those dolls where the hair grows or changes color with hot water? Of the kids that you have ever known that had one, how many actually cared about it for more than a couple of months?
Young kids don't understand the value of a dollar nor the importance of freedom and until they do it's silly to force it on them.
Young kids understand what they are given the opportunity to learn. My 2-year-old knows what money is, and she knows that we have to buy things before we can take them out of the store. She knows where to put the item on the checkers counter, and at which point she will be able to handle the item again. That these things are bought with money shouldn't be difficult for her to understand, and if she hasn't figured it out already it's only because I prefer to be cashless.
Likewise, any kid that has been grounded or put in time-out knows the value of freedom. Relating it to software may not be a simple thing, but they already understand the basic concepts.
The whole "kid friendly software" thing is a straw-man. How many of us had kid friendly software when we were kids? Even the games I loved and played all the time would be considered kid hostile by todays standards, and yet I, a kid, had no problem using them.
Retraining is an adult issue, not a kid issue. Kids adapt quickly and easily, they have to; the bulk of their first 20 years is largely training and retraining.
The fact is that your kids are far more adaptable than you are, and will have far less problems making the transition. As far as technical advice on how to do it, here are my suggestions:
WINE: If all of your kids games ran fine on Win98, dedicate a Gig or so to a Win98 install to point WINE at, that should take care of most of the compatability issues. The last time I set up WINE it gave me the option to make copies of the important Windows bits for its own use, that way you don't have to worry about your Windows install being corrupted by anything other than itself. A single Windows install, accesible over a network should be sufficient for anyones WINE needs.
CDs: The real problem here is autorun, which Linux basically doesn't do, and for very good reasons (there may be a way to make it work, but I'm unaware of it). However, it's not that difficult to make an icon that will automount the CD and run the app. If your 3 year old can play the game at all, then s/he can learn to click on an icon. A clean dismount at the end could be problematic, though.
Lock-ups: My personal experience has been that if you use one of the "bulkier" GUIs (like KDE), you will not get more effective stability than you currently have with Windows. I recommend something lightweight. Not only is, say, WindowMaker a lot more stable than KDE, it's also a lot simpler. It might be radically different from the Windows interface, but that may be a good thing. I switched from KDE to WindowMaker a few months ago, and I've found that with proper attention to setup, the easy things (launching Mozilla, OpenOffice, or whatever) can be made incredibly easy, and the really hard things are still possible via easy access to XTerm. Any Linux graphical environment will offer that kind of flexibility, and KDE and GNOME apps will still run just fine if you aren't actively running their prefered envirnment, so long as you have it installed.
Also, no OS will make you safe from 3-year-old caused lockups. If there is any way for you to, say, open another terminal and recover from a command line, your 3-year-old will discover it and lock that up, too. This is just a fact of life that you'll have to learn to live with, at least until the kid gets older and learns not to thrash about on the keyboard.
And finally, my response to all the social conformity advocates telling you to stick with Windows: Would you be as critical if he were swithing to a Mac? Why should switching to Linux be viewed any differently?