Laptops will be cheaper than textbooks soon enough. So, if you believe in public education and getting the value for your money you will buy laptops instead of textbooks. If you want a free society, you will use free software.
Labs are typically a failure. Even when you have as many as one computer per 4 students, students end up with less than an hour a week on them. Laptops work better because they go everywhere with the student. Free laptops are cheaper too. That's all in the Indiana story, go check it out if you don't trust some random Slashdot user.
The goal should be to give one computer to each and every student and have a free network full of free information. China is not an excuse to avoid that. The economics of the result will be tremendous and dwarf the pety costs involved. It will create greater cultural wealth for everyone, greater oportunities and greater ability to exploit those oportunities.
Such goals can only be achieved in freedom. Indiana shows that free software is cheaper and a free network is also required for knowledge to really flow. Napster showed that we can have any piece of culture available for the trivial cost of allowing people to share. Wikipedia and the internet archive show that people are ready, willing and able to create works and share them without the "protection" of copyright.
Other M$ people claim that OOXML has a purpose, ActiveX is better than java, C# is "cross platform" and so on and so forth . How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes before you realize M$'s efforts at standardization are one lie after another?
... accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before... they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.
Do you think that people will fix bugs for a platform they have successfully avoided for decades? And not just one but multiple versions of bug fixing too? It takes time and effort to avoid Windows and Windows only hardware and most people end up resenting the exercise. Does anyone really think that Windows will be a "first class citizen" even if all of Perl was perfect on it? I understand M$ wants to have WAMP, but I don't know why anyone will waste their time fixing things for a non free OS that takes so long to set up in the first place. What single advantage does Windows have to offer anyone that would justify development effort?
It's all the crap they load. Anti-virus, M$ Word preloads and all that other crap Windoze people think they need and the malware they don't know about. I've seen W2K take 5 to 10 minutes and can believe that Vista is much worse. I know, it's hard to imagine when you run an OS that does not have to be booted for months, but that's life in the cubicle. Stupid and ugly.
Adobe's sins complement those of M$, not wash them away. You can run Gnash 64 bit today, but the real action is in video and HTML 5 has support for theora. Between that and SVG support, the old Flash pdf game is over. Why jump to non free shit like Silverblight when you can move to freedom with the rest of the world?
As for non free platform "cooperation", ask a Mac user how much good M$'s efforts to vend Office and IE to them did. Non free stuff isn't made to make money in a fair way, it's made to extort money by jerking around customers. M$ is playing the same old game they always have but their revenue model long gone. You are not just defending immoral behavior, you are defending immoral behavior that no longer pays.
I'm sure twitter would answer for himself but can't. It's not easy to answer questions when you can only post once or twice a day.
Asus sold hundreds of thousands of these things before M$ put their thumb on them. The original models did not have a Windows option and demand for such a thing has never been proved. Relative sales features have not been mentioned and won't mean much if they are. M$ got Asus to rig the hardware a year ago so that people would "chose" XP over GNU/Linux.
Where private interests collude to screw the public, government must intervene. Xandros should come out with anti-trust guns blazing over this, but "lie down and die" was probably part of their deal with M$. Remember, they too took M$'s infamous Novell patent deal. This will eventually kill both Asus and Xandros. It has already robbed us all of a good hardware/software combination. When you look there will be nothing but XP on the shelf which may or may not work with your choice of distribution.
I felt it too, a terrible feeling. It was if a billion users muscle memories were suddenly wrong and they screamed out in anguish. That was in addition to the usual format breaking.
Microsoft doesn't like FOSS, but even more they hate someone coming up with a file format that is better than theirs.
Now you know why they hate everyone.
I don't see that the demise of ISO would really be the demise of ODF. The issue is important enough that credibility will shift to any standards body that does a good job of maintaining ODF and ISO will sink like a stone.
Their whole reason for making M$XML was that is served a different, never well defined, purpose. If that's true, they have no business running ODF, unless the reason was to kill ODF.
Office 2007, no one likes the new interface and users are better off with OO.org now.
Zune, laughing stock of crappy music players and M$'s media efforts. They did all of that DRM foolishness for Zune? Ha ha. They fought ogg vorbis for this? What a waste.
Xbox, billions down the drain to place third behind Sony and Nintendo. Broke even for a quarter or two. Wait till the Red Ring of Death and ignighting power supply lawsuits get through with them.
M$ search. Can't break 10% of the market even when they pay people to use it.
Servers, losing to Apache and Google every day.
This list can go on and on because M$ is a huge company wasting lots of money. What's hard to find are unqualified successes - products that people actaually like and want. The failure of their new OS and Office should be crippling blows they can't hide with novel licensing schemes like "Assurance" programs for big dumb companies and "free downloads" at Universities that cost students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
Would you want your name on something you completely disagree with? Leaving with a loud public stink is the right thing to do when technical matters have been nerfed aside by asshats like M$. The next thing to do is form a proper standards body and protect it from shenanigans. You can't always keep others from doing evil things but you can always refuse to cooperate. ISO's leadership will not be able to ignore this for long.
As I recall, the problem with XEmacs was sloppy attribution which came back to haunt the project multiple times. It was difficult to distribute because much of the code was owned by people who challenged the code's freedom. These problems seem to have been solved.
In any case, it's hard to reconcile your praise of RMS's ACM Emacs brilliance with saying, "His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it."
The other stuff, "control freak" who directly owns all of GNU personally is pure malice and FUD. No one owns GPL'd software. Assigning it to the FSF simply gives the FSF the ability to fight on your behalf.
Adherence to standards is not "too good to be true" it's the way the vast majority of things actually work. M$ and IE are exceptions, not the rule, and they will go the way of all obstructive technology.
This device will never be used to solve a real crime. Cell phone companies already keep the required records for billing. This will simply allow TSA and other would be snoops to dig into people's private business. I had to laugh when I saw this:
The good news: the device should find wide acceptance by parents who want to monitor what their kids are doing with their phones, who they are talking to and text messaging, and where they are surfing. It could also be valuable in secure areas where employees need to be randomly monitored to insure that sensitive information is not compromised through the use of a cell phone as a memory device.
These will be the real users of this kind of device. Free software for cell phones can not arrive fast enough.
There are no levels of freedom in software, you either have software freedom or you don't and will suffer abuse like WGA. Microsoft may sell less annoying coppies of it's OS to companies through mechanisms like WSUS server, but you should see that as the extortion it is, "Pay us or we will make life hard." The benefits of software freedom have never more apparent than they are now.
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Laptops will be cheaper than textbooks soon enough. So, if you believe in public education and getting the value for your money you will buy laptops instead of textbooks. If you want a free society, you will use free software.
Labs are typically a failure. Even when you have as many as one computer per 4 students, students end up with less than an hour a week on them. Laptops work better because they go everywhere with the student. Free laptops are cheaper too. That's all in the Indiana story, go check it out if you don't trust some random Slashdot user.
The goal should be to give one computer to each and every student and have a free network full of free information. China is not an excuse to avoid that. The economics of the result will be tremendous and dwarf the pety costs involved. It will create greater cultural wealth for everyone, greater oportunities and greater ability to exploit those oportunities.
Such goals can only be achieved in freedom. Indiana shows that free software is cheaper and a free network is also required for knowledge to really flow. Napster showed that we can have any piece of culture available for the trivial cost of allowing people to share. Wikipedia and the internet archive show that people are ready, willing and able to create works and share them without the "protection" of copyright.
Other M$ people claim that OOXML has a purpose, ActiveX is better than java, C# is "cross platform" and so on and so forth . How many times do you have to have the wool pulled over your eyes before you realize M$'s efforts at standardization are one lie after another?
Do you think that people will fix bugs for a platform they have successfully avoided for decades? And not just one but multiple versions of bug fixing too? It takes time and effort to avoid Windows and Windows only hardware and most people end up resenting the exercise. Does anyone really think that Windows will be a "first class citizen" even if all of Perl was perfect on it? I understand M$ wants to have WAMP, but I don't know why anyone will waste their time fixing things for a non free OS that takes so long to set up in the first place. What single advantage does Windows have to offer anyone that would justify development effort?
You like RFID better than tatoos? I don't, let's not criminalize people with diseases with either.
Even such a private tatoo would be seen by the people you work with when you go to the bathroom.
It's all the crap they load. Anti-virus, M$ Word preloads and all that other crap Windoze people think they need and the malware they don't know about. I've seen W2K take 5 to 10 minutes and can believe that Vista is much worse. I know, it's hard to imagine when you run an OS that does not have to be booted for months, but that's life in the cubicle. Stupid and ugly.
Nasty, isn't it?
Adobe's sins complement those of M$, not wash them away. You can run Gnash 64 bit today, but the real action is in video and HTML 5 has support for theora. Between that and SVG support, the old Flash pdf game is over. Why jump to non free shit like Silverblight when you can move to freedom with the rest of the world?
As for non free platform "cooperation", ask a Mac user how much good M$'s efforts to vend Office and IE to them did. Non free stuff isn't made to make money in a fair way, it's made to extort money by jerking around customers. M$ is playing the same old game they always have but their revenue model long gone. You are not just defending immoral behavior, you are defending immoral behavior that no longer pays.
I'm sure twitter would answer for himself but can't. It's not easy to answer questions when you can only post once or twice a day.
Asus sold hundreds of thousands of these things before M$ put their thumb on them. The original models did not have a Windows option and demand for such a thing has never been proved. Relative sales features have not been mentioned and won't mean much if they are. M$ got Asus to rig the hardware a year ago so that people would "chose" XP over GNU/Linux.
Where private interests collude to screw the public, government must intervene. Xandros should come out with anti-trust guns blazing over this, but "lie down and die" was probably part of their deal with M$. Remember, they too took M$'s infamous Novell patent deal. This will eventually kill both Asus and Xandros. It has already robbed us all of a good hardware/software combination. When you look there will be nothing but XP on the shelf which may or may not work with your choice of distribution.
Only twitter could say "eat shit" three times in a post and be modded up for it.
Blogs shift power from broadcasters to individuals. Pull media empowers us all.
I felt it too, a terrible feeling. It was if a billion users muscle memories were suddenly wrong and they screamed out in anguish. That was in addition to the usual format breaking.
The concrete expression of that feeling is the increasing popularity of Open Office, Google Apps and ODF. Advertising and corruption is useless when the product pushed is broken.
Is this the method they patented?
Hiring freeze, debt, sinking like a stone. Last one out, cut off the light's oxygen.
Microsoft doesn't like FOSS, but even more they hate someone coming up with a file format that is better than theirs.
Now you know why they hate everyone.
I don't see that the demise of ISO would really be the demise of ODF. The issue is important enough that credibility will shift to any standards body that does a good job of maintaining ODF and ISO will sink like a stone.
Their whole reason for making M$XML was that is served a different, never well defined, purpose. If that's true, they have no business running ODF, unless the reason was to kill ODF.
This list can go on and on because M$ is a huge company wasting lots of money. What's hard to find are unqualified successes - products that people actaually like and want. The failure of their new OS and Office should be crippling blows they can't hide with novel licensing schemes like "Assurance" programs for big dumb companies and "free downloads" at Universities that cost students hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.
Would you want your name on something you completely disagree with? Leaving with a loud public stink is the right thing to do when technical matters have been nerfed aside by asshats like M$. The next thing to do is form a proper standards body and protect it from shenanigans. You can't always keep others from doing evil things but you can always refuse to cooperate. ISO's leadership will not be able to ignore this for long.
As I recall, the problem with XEmacs was sloppy attribution which came back to haunt the project multiple times. It was difficult to distribute because much of the code was owned by people who challenged the code's freedom. These problems seem to have been solved.
In any case, it's hard to reconcile your praise of RMS's ACM Emacs brilliance with saying, "His MO when writing code is to create a giant steaming pile of crap and then depend on others to fix the problems and maintain it."
The other stuff, "control freak" who directly owns all of GNU personally is pure malice and FUD. No one owns GPL'd software. Assigning it to the FSF simply gives the FSF the ability to fight on your behalf.
It's got to be cheaper than spending your life savings and retirment in a bubble.
An integral part of the photo, like Exif? Why didn't I think of that?
Perhaps they are patenting the GUI flip? No one has done that before, except a GUI for every OS years ago.
I know, it's a patent for a computer system that does all of the above! Brillian1.
Someone please end software patents.
Adherence to standards is not "too good to be true" it's the way the vast majority of things actually work. M$ and IE are exceptions, not the rule, and they will go the way of all obstructive technology.
This device will never be used to solve a real crime. Cell phone companies already keep the required records for billing. This will simply allow TSA and other would be snoops to dig into people's private business. I had to laugh when I saw this:
These will be the real users of this kind of device. Free software for cell phones can not arrive fast enough.
There are no levels of freedom in software, you either have software freedom or you don't and will suffer abuse like WGA. Microsoft may sell less annoying coppies of it's OS to companies through mechanisms like WSUS server, but you should see that as the extortion it is, "Pay us or we will make life hard." The benefits of software freedom have never more apparent than they are now.
Here is another way the deal is bad for everyone, spreading disinformation as if it came from the free software community or commercial Linux vendors.
The end game is to own free software. The original deal was so transparently bad that even sleeping antitrust courts will notice. We should imagine the second bribe is on equally crazy terms. Look at how they are trying to cover the bills and you see what they would like to have as a future business model when people realize that Windows provides no value. Yep, they openly call the coupons "royalty payments." That kind of language makes the GP look nice.