It's not about Apple or Microsoft or Samsung or Sony or anything to do with design or branding.
The one thing that will set a huge fire on wireless devices will be fast and very cheap networking. Hopefully WiFly will do it. But if not there's other possibilities. It's just a matter of time.
When it does arrive, say like 1Meg bidirectional for twenty bucks a month, everybody will have one and they'll just stream all of their media from their home PC.
But at that point the margins will be too low for either Apple or Microsoft. Instead, the handsets will probably have your telco's logo and be made by the zillion by Golden Gragon Ltd contract mega manufacturers, Shen Zhen China. They won't need more than a tiny bit of local storage since you'll keep everything at home. The rest of it wil just be a few chips and an antennae in a piece of plastic.
The best part is that they'll be all over India and Brazil and the Ukraine just as fast as they hit the US. Globalization isn't all bad.
IGTeRR0r is absolutely on the money.
Mental diagnostics are for one thing and one thing only --insurance claims.
The idea of categorizing people's pysches according to a neat taxonomy proposes a ridicuous presumption of objective analysis of subjectivity. If subjects were objects we could just save oursleve a ject if you catch my drift. Putting a label on a person doesn't mean shit. If you put a red T-shirt on someone what does that mean about that person? I'm pretty sure it means they're wearing a red T-shit. That's about it.
Now, if insurance companies only pay out to people who have red T-shirts put on them by their therapists, then a red T-shirt is damned important. But what the fuck does it mean? Nothing.
Yeah, well it's for sure that this is a massive topic and there is room for many different approaches.
I wasn't clear on the product you were referring to as I've never come across it. But I'm starting to pick it up. It's like a database of questions for books that you might commonly find in the library?
That's quite an idea. Again, I wasn't familiar with the product so I was just rambling on my own pet ideas. But I think I get it and that clearly would be a great place for a centralized database because the data is already centralized --in the library. So, yeah that does make sense to create a centralized database of questions to turn the library into a teaching tool. That's an awesome idea.
It's not that far from another one I was thinking of a few years ago when the bottom dropped out of the commercial market and I was getting interested in open source, that is creating a curriculum based on the patent database.
I think this is a hell of an idea. If I could get funding I would get on it in a big way. The patent database is meant to be there for the enhancement of knowldege but no schools I have ever heard of use it directly in their curricula. This is a great waste of a resource that is specifically there for the purpose of education.
So, your pet project could also lend itself to that direction.
We're definitely at the beginnings of some meaningful changes in education that will come from open source.
But I think you want to avoid trying to reinvent an entire category of media from the ground up. We're talking about something that already exists in a huge way.
The only thing that ties all these thousands of already existing very content rich applications that are already out there into the Microsoft platform is, in many cases anyway, the runtime.
Starting from scratch seems a bit overzealous when all it takes is the go-ahead from the higher-ups at Adobe to suddenly switch all these apps to native Linux. I believe the technical obstacles are minor since most of what these apps do is simply basic windows controls and button responses. As I mentioned, they're not applications as such as much as controlled presntations with mouse and keyboard interactivity. Not too fancy from an application programming perspective and yet often not quite simple enough to just be replaced by web pages.
I think it's an unfortunate fact that Macromedia's icon flow control programming model is really the ideal tool for putting control into the hands of the people in the field. This icon based development system was derived from early work on the Mac --hence Macromedia-- and it's much closer to what Alan Kay was thinking of when he coined the phrase Object Oriented programming. This is all quite unfortunate and rather ironic in that the best solution for education, where you would think Open Source is the perfect fit, is so good that it is still being tightly held decades after its initial development. It's really a terrible situation. The first tool in all of programming that should be open sourced will possibly be among the last.
However, I don't necessarily think the answer is to try and create an alternative system from the ground up because there's already a glut of educational media out there. I mean there's so much of it. This is another problem that I see in my own life. I mean my God, you've got to be insane to consider starting over. There's such an abundance that you can't give the stuff away half the time. This is because these tool companies sucker people into the goldmine mentality and eveyrboyd jumps on the bandwagon and creates a vast glut of crap. Some of it is brilliant and wonderful but there's already just an enormous excess of it. And the situation is not all that dire in terms of Linux implementaitons since Wine does already handle a lot of this stuff.
So, I think the simple economics, or lack therof, within the education market will lead to some of these tools getting Linux runtimes. It would be a very subtle thing in which nothing changes at all on the content level but it would just re-write the map at the OS level and certainly that seems like the best outcome to me becuase I've clearly got nothing against education software developers, hopefully even teachers themselves, trying to make a buck selling their well organized digital curriculm. What sucks is when they get tied into selling products that then tie school districts into Microsoft becuase of the tools they used.
Having droned on like this though --avoiding actually doing work-- I totally agree that things suck until the tools are open souce and the way to go is to create new tools. It would just be nice if the new tools could package existing projects. That's asking a lot though.
Anyhow, here's what I was thinking. Instead of building a database of testing content the more influential thing would be to build an open sourced icon flow control development environment so you could approach the situation exactly the same as it's done in closed source which is to push out the content to the field and concentrate on making useable tools. I'm thinking it could borrow some of the vector graphics and page transition code from Open Office Impress and use a subset of FreePascal for the scripting and perhaps some parts of Inkscape could provide some SVG controls that would be Flash like.
The graphics stuff would all be available in the properties of a page icon which would be in a pallette of controls. B
Let me clear up something that can be confusing because I've had people misunderstand how this system works before.
I'm not suggesting that all schools are necessarily filled with high-end Macromedia products although you can bet some certainly are. But generally speaking it's not quite that simple. In the education market, Macromedia is mainly a tools company. As an end user uou won't see necessarily realize that the product you are using was made with Macromedia tools unless you're paying attention to details.
It's like Intel produces a C complier, but you don't buy software products under the brand name Intel just because they were compiled under that compiler. It might be mentioned somwhere in the docs, but it's not front and center. A software company might compile a version of their software with the Intel compiler and sell it to you, but you wouldn't necessarily see the Intel logo on the software product. That's not a perfect analogy, but it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about when I say that Macromedia produces software authoring tools that produce the titles that might sound like Dr. Hoodle's Chemistry Fun Lab for 3rd Grade with Integrated Test Packs Verison 5.0. See, you'd never know that product was made with Marcromedia tools unless you read the fine print.
As far as this being an idealized view. Well, it's real. Admittedly, I have no firsthand experience of the market in Britain, but in the States this is very real. What happened was the former Industrial Arts curriculum --what they used to call "Shop Class"-- has been replaced by a kind of class called Technology in which the entire curriculum including testing, grading, teachers comments the works is all on networked computers running software built by content experts using Macromedia tools. Not every district in the US has completed the transition, but my understanding is that the current numbers are running about seventy percent nationwide. And obviously, as you pointed out, districts with money go first.
This is just the beginning and is all too real. The time to make that transition and get this stuff off of MS boxes and the NT network servers that come with it was five years ago. The hour is already quite late. But it's never too late.
That last bit there at the end was something I edited out earler. Nevermind that. Sucks to be me. It was a powerful ending and that blows the whole effect. Damn.
I think this is even more tricky than what you've pointed out.
The real trick is in the tools market. Educational software is a special class of software. It's very different from say engineering or scientific software. It's not like networking applications or graphics or text editors. Those are all software applications, but in the bbrave new world of edutainment you tend to think of the software in terms of "titles" or at least in subject matter categories because subject matter or content is the emphasis rather than usage or applicaton.
Most adults who don't have kids in school simply rely on their memories and think that computers in school are about teaching typing or perhaps even programming or maybe using the Net. Well, that' certainly can still be the case, but in the 90s, things changed and software pervaded education in a way that it never did before and a lot of people aren't aware of the extent to which that happened. In many schools entire curricula are computer based and a very small set of companies has a major chunk of that market.
The major tools providers in this market create tools for "non-programmers" because they're meant to be used by "content specialists" and specifically that means teachers. This class of development tool is not a popular one among open source enthusiasts particularly because they build their applications around runtime applications that are guaranteed to lock-in the products.
THis is the reason I have long insisted that education will ironically be the last bastion of closed source. It's a systemic issue with roots in the tools market.
The one thing that could change this sad situation is precisely the sort of thing being proposed here. That is, with a bit of encouragement of this sort, companies like Macromedia with an elephant's presence in educational software might be more likely to release Linux runtimes which would allow existing projects to be re-packaged as Linux native apps.
And, since Adobe has recently purchased Macromedia, perhaps such a change might be even more likely as Adobe proceeds to "enter new markets" as they have stated they plan to do.
Luckily, it's not that urgent either way because most of those eudcational apps built with Macromedia tools like Director and Authorware can already be run under Wine.
Then coming back to your point about "best tool for the job" it is really just about OS's rather than the apps since, with the help of Wine, the apps tend to work both ways. And with some pressure, a native Linux run-time could change those apps into native Linux apps at the click of a button as long as the original project files were saved and typically a big project gets archived.
So, it's really about what OS to use simply to hold the content. If you seriously think Windows is a better tool in this case then I would simply say that if it's my tax dollars you're dealing with, you're wrong.
or say text editors or , tends to be very heavy on repetitive GUI interaction with an emphasis on displaying multimedia content and creating easy-to-use interactions that make use of moving graphics and animations and the like. The goals of educational software are very different from most software applications.
Where was the problem? That's a great question. I've got an idea. How about if you call Microsoft support and ask them about it for me. Personally, it's no longer a concern for me.
No, I hooked the drive up as a slave with an existing drive as the master. The issue at that time was the need to transfer a very large uncompressed video in a very short period of time and at that time this seemed to be the convenient way to do it.
No doubt, there were other solutions available for that particular problem. That's not what got me so upset. It was the realization that I could no longer swap out a drive with a virus into a clean machine to do a scan. To me, that was the end of the usability of Windows.
This exact problem was what made me give up on XP and switch completely to Linux several years ago. I pulled a drive and wanted to get some data out of it and it required product activation to work. After going through that process, I formatted the drive and installed Debian and I haven't looked back since.
Starting with the article title itself this whole thread is swarmed with utter paranoia.
If anybody took the time to read the article, it did say that there is a two-way free translation service between traditional and simplified characters. And, if you noticed, it implied that the traditional character registry was going to be handled outside the mainland. Now, for the numerous people who have posted their credentials to understand the difference between traditional and simplified characters, how in the farthest extremes of the imagination can you call that lock-in?
I would really like to see an Authorware runtime for Linux. I never thought it would happen from Macromedia, but perhaps under this deal part of their "new markets" will include Linux. As has been noted, things are interesting with Reader 7.0 and it is a trend in the industry.
While somewhat tangentially related, it's worth noting that National Instruments finally came out with a Linux version of LabView. I see Authorware and Labview as cousins of sorts. It would be great if they were completely open source, but seeing them at least available for Linux is a great step.
There is nothing that "is good" all the time. Competition can be utterly destructive and completely out of place. Competition can also be good in a specific context. It's not a universal formula.
As a rule, when distributing scarce resources, compeition can be quite effective at lowering the cost of those resources. The problem with applying this model to bandwidth is that bandwidth does not grow scarcer over time. Quite to the contrary, bandwidth tends to expand exponentially. In this situation it's difficult to jsutify competition for a non-scarce resource. What happens is what we have today in American, an articifical scarcity is created in the name of the market. This is precisely the problem with a slogan like "Competition is Good."
Well here seems to be someone who knows a bit about geology and drilling in particular so let me pose a question and see if you might have the time to reply.
If these guys can drill a hole this deep in a mere three weeks and nearly hit the Earth's mantle, doesn't it seem that it should be possible to directly harness the abundant heat energy in these holes? I mean if you can make one in a few weeks it would seem you could make dozens, if not hundreds, in a year. There's got to be enormous heat if you're a thusand feet from the upper mantle and you're right next to vast reserves of cool water as well. This seems the ideal environment for a heat cycle engine.
While not identical, the situation seems somewhat similar to the question of why we don't harness the heat energy of volcanoes. The answer I've always gotten is that it's too difficult to control a volcano.
Certainly that's reasonable in the case of a volcano on land like Mt. Saint Hellens, but what about these mid-oceanic ridges just like where JOIDES is drilling here. In this case, it seems you can create a sort of controlled volcano. In fact, that seems to be what they're describing. Doesn't this seems like a fairly accessible source of thermal energy?
It's like a constant barrage of these articles about how --oh gosh businesses aren't satisfied with free software for XY and Z reasons and if those don't change then business will never use free software.
Well, uhm so what?
This more users argument is stupid. MS clearly disproves the theory that more users makes better software. Of course more coders seeing code should most certainly be helpful in numerous ways, but that's a completely different issue. More clueless users whining about what they don't like though? Who cares? Let them stay away in droves.
All the better as far as I'm concerned. Free software doesn't need business. This is the whole point of free software. Business is irrelevant. This is why MS is, in fact, a monopoly: free software is not competing with Microsoft because free software is free. You're not competing if you're not in the same market and free software is certainly not in MS's market.
Moreover, free software will inevitably drain that market, but observe that this is not the same as being in the market. It's more like an alternative to the market that demonstrates how ridiculous the whole metaphor of a market was for a product that had no physical existence and could be re-created more or less infinitely without costs worth tabulating.
Open Source is the awakening to the fact that software is too important to be shackled to arcane and inappropriate systems like markets which are effective only under conditions of scarcity. Open Source is the beginning of the real software of the future and its destiny is most certainly manifest. Geek hippies will rule the world!
So, when these businesses get broadsided by other businesses that do reduce their costs by using free and open software then this petty crap will no longer be an issue. It's just a matter of time.
Until then, what difference does it make other than being fodder for a pissing contest in the IT press. FOSS will be just fine with or without these businesses.
The problem with your rebuttal is that you assume that since they are separate entities, at least as far as the names and accounting departments go, service providers have absolutely no way to influence handset manufacturers. That is extremely naive.
I would go so far as to say that this is also uninformed. We recently saw a post here on Slashdot about a phone that Apple had developed which was shot down by the major service providers precisely because it would eat into the profits that they had promised their shareholders from the sales of ringtones and music downloads.
Promises are made by corporations to their shareholders at regular meetins in the form of business projections. When a company bases its growth projections on a product like ring tones they have established an informal contract which they will be punished for failing to fullfill. In turn, those companies are forced to take any measure possible to control handset manufactureres and ensure that they can, indeed capture those profits so that their stock don't suffer. This doesn't require the subscription to any conspiracy, it's simply the way business works.
I went and checked out the Foundation website and tuxLabs. While this is certainly a nice gesture, I'd like to share some of my own ideas about what would really be necessary for FOSS to have a big impact in education. It's not a minor issue. And, as a matter of fact, I believe that education is the last place we're going to see open source succeed. That's not to say that it won't succeed, but that it's not going to happen without some major developments taking place.
I understand Mr. Shuttleworth is focused on South Africa and perhaps just brigning computer labs to schools is still a major accomplishment in South Africa. But in other parts of the world entire curricula even in elementary schools are based around computers. Essentially, computer labs become the classrooms. This isn't some futuristic fantasy land although it might seem that way from a South African perspective; this kind of system already exists today. It's more than just a computer lab to learn typing and a few computer skills, entire curricula are computerized.
One of the things that makes these elaborate electronic classrooms possible is easy-to-use authoring systems so that content specialists AKA teachers are able to develop electronic content. This is precisely why education is the last place you're going to see open source succeed: the development tools in open source are hardly dumbed down. What passes for a RAD system in open source like KDevelop is hardly the kind of thing that you are going to see elementary school teachers putting to use to make a lesson plan and the fact is, those teachers, as opposed to experienced developers, are the people that you want to design the lessons because they have the direct knowledge of what will work for the students. More importantly, if those teachers are empowered to develop the computerized lessons themselves, they'll be able to adapt them in accordance with their experience in the field.
So, if Mr. Shuttleworth really wants to have a serious role in bringing open source to education I would suggest that there are various Courses of Action(sic) that could have far reaching consequences.
One extremely ambitious project would be to fund the creation of a completely new media presentation system for FOSS platforms along the lines of Macromedia Director. Perhaps some existing code from some open source SVG applications like Inkscape could be reused in this effort or even combined with something like Open Office Impress which already allows for transitions between slides. It's not a hell of a start, but it's something.
Ultimately, something along those lines is really essential if you want to put a dent in the entrenched monopoly position in the education market. It's not the kind of stuff that makes young ambitious coders drool with excitement but education is like that. The reality of it is painfully dull and not sexy at all which makes it a last choice for open source coders. Education is filled with ironies. It's all about learning and yet it requires everything to be dumbed down. In order for education to become more exciting, free, effective and open, someone is going to have to do some very unappealing and thankless work.
Anyway, if you're reading this Mr. Shuttleworth, I seriously would recommend you look at the development tools used to produce some of the sophisticated electronic classrooms in America today and, if you have the will, to devote some of your resources towards making something along those lines possible in an open source version.
Well, I went and checked out Mitfahrzentrale's German web site and I noticed that there seemed to be quite a few people on-line so that seems to be a fairly popular site using a little javascript to set the destinations. I didn't get too far into the details with it being in German but I guess it's just supported by banner ads.
So I went and checked out some of the other sites in their network. Unfortuanately the UK affiliate seemed to be out of the picture. I couldn't connect anyway.
Searcing Google for "car pool" in English I mostly got sites that were operating in Europe. There seems to be a little activity in the US. I know many campuses offer ride sharing services not so different from Mitfahrzentrale's service.
It seems like the ideal thing would be to combine a ride sharing service with a mobile phone so it could have a bit of spontaneity althogh spontaneity and security don't always work well together.
Hmm. I think there's got to be demand for this kind of basic service. You know it seems like you would get degree of security just by having a central database where the driver and the passenger just checked in even if they used anonymous identities.
Just having a place where both the driver and passenger could upload their self-created user ID and a location and the license number of the vehicle and recieve verification that both parties had sent matching information and be given a timestamp would be a big step over conventional hitchhiking. That would entail a minimal invasion of privacy and it would give the passenger a lot more safety although it wouldn't help the driver much.
Oddly, as I was writing this, an old guy came to my door and asked me for a ride to the nearest bus stop. Sort of a bizarre coincidence.
Thanks for the spelling tip. As for the tracking thing, well let's not jump to conclusions on this. It's a rather new idea although that would do better with nurturing than stomping. I'm sure other people have already thought about it and came to no workable conclusion. But the same could be said of used goods resales on the Net.
At first that idea floundered around a lot, eventually an eBay emerged. The helpful thing is to offer suggestions on how to get a good implementation. As you mention, an obtrusive tracking mechanism might not be a good way to go. But is there such a thing as less obtrusive and more otrusive invasions of privacy? Sure there are.
And what about Mitfahrzentrale? Does anybody know how that worked? What was their system? Did they have any problems that might be overcome with a Net based system? Any Germans out there with a more extensive knowledge about this?
What a radical, yet simple idea.
In fact, from my own experience hitching in Europe as a teen the idea of a database of rides for hitchikers is not new at all. I can't remember how it is acutally spelled or even pronounced, but Germany has, or at least had, a system called something like Mitzfrauzentrale where you simply walked into an office and made a reservation to share a ride with someone.
Now subtract the office part and substitute it with the Net and you've got a hell of an idea.
Hitching used to be so common in the seventies and it was never really that dangerous. It's just that Americans have become so paranoid since the eighties. Even in the eighties I used to hitch, but it's true many of the people I could get rides from were sketchy. It would be so cool to see it become popular again with a new degree of security built in. Just being able to ID the driver and the passenger to a certain degree would change the whole equation enormously. After all, why is a taxi safe? Basically the only difference is that you can ID the driver.
It's interesting to read such a suggestion. This is not a new idea as it happens.
The idea of finding patterns in novels and poetry on various levels which could be quantified mathematically was quite popular in the past. There was even a literary movement named after it. It was called Structuralism which produced some enormously complex analyses. It was very popular in Russia at the turn of the century. A man named Levi-Strauss was an early advocate of the movement to dissect literature in this manner and wrote a very well recieved essay on the topic using a poem by the French writer Baudelaire as an example.
Levi-Strauss's work was far from unusual for the time. He was closely attuned to others of a similar mindset, notably Saussure, who coined the name of a study called Semiotics which can be though of as the science of signs. Certainly some fodder for deep thought there and it can be quite entertaining to read some of their dilligent efforts in this exceedingly vague direction.
Over time, though, these methods of literary analysis created far more questions than answers and some people started raising questions about whether this might be a bunch of navel gazing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, but it didn't seem to going anywhere.
Eventually, a new generation of literary critics rebelled against Structuralism and a few of them even called themselved the Poststructuralists and they coined the term Postmodernism to mark a break from the modern era and the assumption that it was possible or even important to "understand" anything.
So, yes there's little doubt that it is possible to produce a sort of analysis in perl. The issue is what question would it answer and does that question matter to anyone?
But thanks for mentioning it.
The patent thing really sort of ticked me off being a student of the history of alternative building and a fan or mixing cement with all sorts of things. It just so happens that this idea of soaking fabric such as burlap in cement was, at one time, a very common building technique. It was so common that it had a trade name. It was referred to as "staff". Probably a derivation of "stiff" which it certainly is. I happen to have some planters made of just the stuff in the backyard and I built a small shed of it at one time.
Here's a bit of trivia that you can verify yourselves that should add a bit of authority to my contention that this is a well known and common practice. Do I sound like Jeff Albertson AKA Comic Book Guy or what? Well, what can I say, I was pissed. Patent . . fucking wankers.
Alright, on to the issue at hand.
If you've ever been to San Francisco, it is likely you might have checked out the Golden Gate Bridge and perhaps even went to the delightful little park filled with neo-classical architecture featuring the world-famous Palace of Fine Arts near the Exploratorium.
Well, if you have been to the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps you are aware that it is the remnant of what was a huge international exposition around the turn of the century to showcase the prosperity of western America. This exposition was called the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915.
The Expo was an enormous event and it involved the construction of what was at the time the largest wooden structures in history. And, in fact, the original Palace of Fine Arts was also built partially of wood. The columns which you now see rebuilt in steel reinforced concrete in the 60s were originally built of wood in the nineteen tens.
If you haven't seen it, this thing is a giant dome set atop columns about five stories high and covering several acres of land. It is huge.
Now aside from the columns which were made of wood and some other wooden reinforcing bits, the structure was built primarily of cement soaked burlap fiber or staff as it was known. Indeed, the Palace of Fine Arts was the largest structure ever built of staff, but again I emphasize that if you've seen it you would know that this is truly an enormous piece of architecture and a major monument of the city of San Francisco. This massive monument stood for over forty years built primarily of cloth soaked in cement.
Could you possibly come up with a more in-your-face example of prior art?
And now these boy geniuses are going to attempt to patent this well known and commonly practiced historical building technique in the year 2005?
Fuck. This is a fine example of what I see as the real bubble. It wasn't the Internet, it wasn't telecoms and it isn't IT or ICs or semis, it's something that encompasses all of these and more. Intellectual property is the real bubble. And it's still absolutely full of hot air. This is yet another fine example.
Yeah, decent character input is still a major issue for FOSS that most alphabetic language users just don't grasp because they've never tried it.
People see characters displayed in a browser and they assume there's no more issues left, but that's far from the case.
I think the key is definitely getting decent support in Debian and having that extended into LiveCDs like Knoppix.
I've been playing around trying to get an i18n environment set up on Knoppix 3.7 with this klik system that lets you add on the clunky but functional xcin character input system. Unfortunately, since the fonts are in/usr which remains read-only, it's not a quick fix yet. I have only begun to read up on the klik documentation to see how they get around installing stuff on read-only file systems, but the Klik debs browser website suggests that fonts don't work with it yet.
However, a decent LiveCD that did have it working would be soooo nice. That would do more to help Debian in China than anything. I am one hundred percent sure of that.
Now, I've used what does exist already in terms of Chinese LiveCDs and as far as I know that consists primarily of BV1AL and a few others. I went to go check the names and for some reason linux.nctu.edu.tw seemed to be down. But there's an assortment of them there that I have been using and distributing to people here in Taiwan for several years.
The problem is that none of them is really current. The Knoppix scene is going crazy with innovations to the point that every release brings radical new improvements and yet the Chinese enabled versions are all radically stripped down and outdated. BV1AL is the most functional in terms of the Chinese my experience, but the actual desktop is quite a throwback. I understand that there's the size of the fonts to consider, but I also understand that you can get a keychain USB drive that will add a lot of expandability space to a LiveCD distro at a price that will work in the Chinese market.
I say, this is where the attention needs to go. In fact, this is what I was up till dawn doing last night.
Well, Gigs of RAM isn't really all that cheap, so I think using Damn Small Linux to do the same thing is more impressive for most people because you can use what is available in the here and now. You can easily load DSL into RAM with 256Megs and sometimes it works with 128Megs, but you won't be able to add many other packages once you get it online.
However, and I'm currently typing on just such a system, it's not as fast as you'd hope. The reason is that LiveCDs use compression on the filesystems so you have that overhead preventing things from being as fast as it could be. But certainly as big RAM goes mainstream there is no doubt in my mind that the idea of running the whole system from RAM is inevitable. Like I say, I'm already there albeit using a compressed filesystem.
As for this unionfs thing. Is that completely unrelated to klik? That's a pretty cool development on Knoppix that has come a long way in a very short time. You can already install most Debian packages on Knopppix without a hard drive install using Klik. And even better, you can save the packages to hard drive or removeable media. So, you don't lose them at all when you change to another machine.
This totally rocks. I'm not sure if it's related to the unionfs thing, but it certainly deserves mention because it is hot shit.
Absolutely!
The article completely skipped the "Total" in Total Cost of Ownership. I mean it was a cute write up, but the MS tax is certainly not the total cost of going with closed source. If anything, it's the least significant factor.
The cost of the OS is nothing compared to applications. For a home user you can simply borrow them or whatever you want to call it, but in a corporate environment you need to account for everything on the machine. Using closed source even a machine that is only going to be used as a fancy typewriter is going to need Office. That alone is going to cost you almost as much as low end hardware these days, if not more.
Now if you're going to be connecting it to a network, well forget about it. Like the parent post mentions, there's just no comparison at that point. Once you plug that ethernet connection in, the Windows box is either going to cost you in downtime or you're going to be paying mega bucks for all your protection "services." That's where the total costs begin. Not end, but begin.
The article stopped far short from even the beggining of the total costs.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about Apple or Microsoft or Samsung or Sony or anything to do with design or branding.
The one thing that will set a huge fire on wireless devices will be fast and very cheap networking. Hopefully WiFly will do it. But if not there's other possibilities. It's just a matter of time.
When it does arrive, say like 1Meg bidirectional for twenty bucks a month, everybody will have one and they'll just stream all of their media from their home PC.
But at that point the margins will be too low for either Apple or Microsoft. Instead, the handsets will probably have your telco's logo and be made by the zillion by Golden Gragon Ltd contract mega manufacturers, Shen Zhen China. They won't need more than a tiny bit of local storage since you'll keep everything at home. The rest of it wil just be a few chips and an antennae in a piece of plastic.
The best part is that they'll be all over India and Brazil and the Ukraine just as fast as they hit the US. Globalization isn't all bad.
IGTeRR0r is absolutely on the money.
Mental diagnostics are for one thing and one thing only --insurance claims.
The idea of categorizing people's pysches according to a neat taxonomy proposes a ridicuous presumption of objective analysis of subjectivity. If subjects were objects we could just save oursleve a ject if you catch my drift. Putting a label on a person doesn't mean shit. If you put a red T-shirt on someone what does that mean about that person? I'm pretty sure it means they're wearing a red T-shit. That's about it.
Now, if insurance companies only pay out to people who have red T-shirts put on them by their therapists, then a red T-shirt is damned important. But what the fuck does it mean? Nothing.
Yeah, well it's for sure that this is a massive topic and there is room for many different approaches.
I wasn't clear on the product you were referring to as I've never come across it. But I'm starting to pick it up. It's like a database of questions for books that you might commonly find in the library?
That's quite an idea. Again, I wasn't familiar with the product so I was just rambling on my own pet ideas. But I think I get it and that clearly would be a great place for a centralized database because the data is already centralized --in the library. So, yeah that does make sense to create a centralized database of questions to turn the library into a teaching tool. That's an awesome idea.
It's not that far from another one I was thinking of a few years ago when the bottom dropped out of the commercial market and I was getting interested in open source, that is creating a curriculum based on the patent database.
I think this is a hell of an idea. If I could get funding I would get on it in a big way. The patent database is meant to be there for the enhancement of knowldege but no schools I have ever heard of use it directly in their curricula. This is a great waste of a resource that is specifically there for the purpose of education.
So, your pet project could also lend itself to that direction.
We're definitely at the beginnings of some meaningful changes in education that will come from open source.
But I think you want to avoid trying to reinvent an entire category of media from the ground up. We're talking about something that already exists in a huge way.
The only thing that ties all these thousands of already existing very content rich applications that are already out there into the Microsoft platform is, in many cases anyway, the runtime.
Starting from scratch seems a bit overzealous when all it takes is the go-ahead from the higher-ups at Adobe to suddenly switch all these apps to native Linux. I believe the technical obstacles are minor since most of what these apps do is simply basic windows controls and button responses. As I mentioned, they're not applications as such as much as controlled presntations with mouse and keyboard interactivity. Not too fancy from an application programming perspective and yet often not quite simple enough to just be replaced by web pages.
I think it's an unfortunate fact that Macromedia's icon flow control programming model is really the ideal tool for putting control into the hands of the people in the field. This icon based development system was derived from early work on the Mac --hence Macromedia-- and it's much closer to what Alan Kay was thinking of when he coined the phrase Object Oriented programming. This is all quite unfortunate and rather ironic in that the best solution for education, where you would think Open Source is the perfect fit, is so good that it is still being tightly held decades after its initial development. It's really a terrible situation. The first tool in all of programming that should be open sourced will possibly be among the last.
However, I don't necessarily think the answer is to try and create an alternative system from the ground up because there's already a glut of educational media out there. I mean there's so much of it. This is another problem that I see in my own life. I mean my God, you've got to be insane to consider starting over. There's such an abundance that you can't give the stuff away half the time. This is because these tool companies sucker people into the goldmine mentality and eveyrboyd jumps on the bandwagon and creates a vast glut of crap. Some of it is brilliant and wonderful but there's already just an enormous excess of it. And the situation is not all that dire in terms of Linux implementaitons since Wine does already handle a lot of this stuff.
So, I think the simple economics, or lack therof, within the education market will lead to some of these tools getting Linux runtimes. It would be a very subtle thing in which nothing changes at all on the content level but it would just re-write the map at the OS level and certainly that seems like the best outcome to me becuase I've clearly got nothing against education software developers, hopefully even teachers themselves, trying to make a buck selling their well organized digital curriculm. What sucks is when they get tied into selling products that then tie school districts into Microsoft becuase of the tools they used.
Having droned on like this though --avoiding actually doing work-- I totally agree that things suck until the tools are open souce and the way to go is to create new tools. It would just be nice if the new tools could package existing projects. That's asking a lot though.
Anyhow, here's what I was thinking. Instead of building a database of testing content the more influential thing would be to build an open sourced icon flow control development environment so you could approach the situation exactly the same as it's done in closed source which is to push out the content to the field and concentrate on making useable tools. I'm thinking it could borrow some of the vector graphics and page transition code from Open Office Impress and use a subset of FreePascal for the scripting and perhaps some parts of Inkscape could provide some SVG controls that would be Flash like.
The graphics stuff would all be available in the properties of a page icon which would be in a pallette of controls. B
Let me clear up something that can be confusing because I've had people misunderstand how this system works before.
I'm not suggesting that all schools are necessarily filled with high-end Macromedia products although you can bet some certainly are. But generally speaking it's not quite that simple. In the education market, Macromedia is mainly a tools company. As an end user uou won't see necessarily realize that the product you are using was made with Macromedia tools unless you're paying attention to details.
It's like Intel produces a C complier, but you don't buy software products under the brand name Intel just because they were compiled under that compiler. It might be mentioned somwhere in the docs, but it's not front and center. A software company might compile a version of their software with the Intel compiler and sell it to you, but you wouldn't necessarily see the Intel logo on the software product. That's not a perfect analogy, but it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about when I say that Macromedia produces software authoring tools that produce the titles that might sound like Dr. Hoodle's Chemistry Fun Lab for 3rd Grade with Integrated Test Packs Verison 5.0. See, you'd never know that product was made with Marcromedia tools unless you read the fine print.
As far as this being an idealized view. Well, it's real. Admittedly, I have no firsthand experience of the market in Britain, but in the States this is very real. What happened was the former Industrial Arts curriculum --what they used to call "Shop Class"-- has been replaced by a kind of class called Technology in which the entire curriculum including testing, grading, teachers comments the works is all on networked computers running software built by content experts using Macromedia tools. Not every district in the US has completed the transition, but my understanding is that the current numbers are running about seventy percent nationwide. And obviously, as you pointed out, districts with money go first.
This is just the beginning and is all too real. The time to make that transition and get this stuff off of MS boxes and the NT network servers that come with it was five years ago. The hour is already quite late. But it's never too late.
That last bit there at the end was something I edited out earler. Nevermind that. Sucks to be me. It was a powerful ending and that blows the whole effect. Damn.
I think this is even more tricky than what you've pointed out.
The real trick is in the tools market. Educational software is a special class of software. It's very different from say engineering or scientific software. It's not like networking applications or graphics or text editors. Those are all software applications, but in the bbrave new world of edutainment you tend to think of the software in terms of "titles" or at least in subject matter categories because subject matter or content is the emphasis rather than usage or applicaton.
Most adults who don't have kids in school simply rely on their memories and think that computers in school are about teaching typing or perhaps even programming or maybe using the Net. Well, that' certainly can still be the case, but in the 90s, things changed and software pervaded education in a way that it never did before and a lot of people aren't aware of the extent to which that happened. In many schools entire curricula are computer based and a very small set of companies has a major chunk of that market.
The major tools providers in this market create tools for "non-programmers" because they're meant to be used by "content specialists" and specifically that means teachers. This class of development tool is not a popular one among open source enthusiasts particularly because they build their applications around runtime applications that are guaranteed to lock-in the products.
THis is the reason I have long insisted that education will ironically be the last bastion of closed source. It's a systemic issue with roots in the tools market.
The one thing that could change this sad situation is precisely the sort of thing being proposed here. That is, with a bit of encouragement of this sort, companies like Macromedia with an elephant's presence in educational software might be more likely to release Linux runtimes which would allow existing projects to be re-packaged as Linux native apps.
And, since Adobe has recently purchased Macromedia, perhaps such a change might be even more likely as Adobe proceeds to "enter new markets" as they have stated they plan to do.
Luckily, it's not that urgent either way because most of those eudcational apps built with Macromedia tools like Director and Authorware can already be run under Wine.
Then coming back to your point about "best tool for the job" it is really just about OS's rather than the apps since, with the help of Wine, the apps tend to work both ways. And with some pressure, a native Linux run-time could change those apps into native Linux apps at the click of a button as long as the original project files were saved and typically a big project gets archived.
So, it's really about what OS to use simply to hold the content. If you seriously think Windows is a better tool in this case then I would simply say that if it's my tax dollars you're dealing with, you're wrong.
or say text editors or , tends to be very heavy on repetitive GUI interaction with an emphasis on displaying multimedia content and creating easy-to-use interactions that make use of moving graphics and animations and the like. The goals of educational software are very different from most software applications.
Where was the problem? That's a great question. I've got an idea. How about if you call Microsoft support and ask them about it for me. Personally, it's no longer a concern for me.
No, I hooked the drive up as a slave with an existing drive as the master. The issue at that time was the need to transfer a very large uncompressed video in a very short period of time and at that time this seemed to be the convenient way to do it.
No doubt, there were other solutions available for that particular problem. That's not what got me so upset. It was the realization that I could no longer swap out a drive with a virus into a clean machine to do a scan. To me, that was the end of the usability of Windows.
This exact problem was what made me give up on XP and switch completely to Linux several years ago. I pulled a drive and wanted to get some data out of it and it required product activation to work. After going through that process, I formatted the drive and installed Debian and I haven't looked back since.
Starting with the article title itself this whole thread is swarmed with utter paranoia.
If anybody took the time to read the article, it did say that there is a two-way free translation service between traditional and simplified characters. And, if you noticed, it implied that the traditional character registry was going to be handled outside the mainland. Now, for the numerous people who have posted their credentials to understand the difference between traditional and simplified characters, how in the farthest extremes of the imagination can you call that lock-in?
I would really like to see an Authorware runtime for Linux. I never thought it would happen from Macromedia, but perhaps under this deal part of their "new markets" will include Linux. As has been noted, things are interesting with Reader 7.0 and it is a trend in the industry.
While somewhat tangentially related, it's worth noting that National Instruments finally came out with a Linux version of LabView. I see Authorware and Labview as cousins of sorts. It would be great if they were completely open source, but seeing them at least available for Linux is a great step.
There is nothing that "is good" all the time. Competition can be utterly destructive and completely out of place. Competition can also be good in a specific context. It's not a universal formula.
As a rule, when distributing scarce resources, compeition can be quite effective at lowering the cost of those resources. The problem with applying this model to bandwidth is that bandwidth does not grow scarcer over time. Quite to the contrary, bandwidth tends to expand exponentially. In this situation it's difficult to jsutify competition for a non-scarce resource. What happens is what we have today in American, an articifical scarcity is created in the name of the market. This is precisely the problem with a slogan like "Competition is Good."
Well here seems to be someone who knows a bit about geology and drilling in particular so let me pose a question and see if you might have the time to reply.
If these guys can drill a hole this deep in a mere three weeks and nearly hit the Earth's mantle, doesn't it seem that it should be possible to directly harness the abundant heat energy in these holes? I mean if you can make one in a few weeks it would seem you could make dozens, if not hundreds, in a year. There's got to be enormous heat if you're a thusand feet from the upper mantle and you're right next to vast reserves of cool water as well. This seems the ideal environment for a heat cycle engine.
While not identical, the situation seems somewhat similar to the question of why we don't harness the heat energy of volcanoes. The answer I've always gotten is that it's too difficult to control a volcano.
Certainly that's reasonable in the case of a volcano on land like Mt. Saint Hellens, but what about these mid-oceanic ridges just like where JOIDES is drilling here. In this case, it seems you can create a sort of controlled volcano. In fact, that seems to be what they're describing. Doesn't this seems like a fairly accessible source of thermal energy?
It's like a constant barrage of these articles about how --oh gosh businesses aren't satisfied with free software for XY and Z reasons and if those don't change then business will never use free software.
Well, uhm so what?
This more users argument is stupid. MS clearly disproves the theory that more users makes better software. Of course more coders seeing code should most certainly be helpful in numerous ways, but that's a completely different issue. More clueless users whining about what they don't like though? Who cares? Let them stay away in droves.
All the better as far as I'm concerned. Free software doesn't need business. This is the whole point of free software. Business is irrelevant. This is why MS is, in fact, a monopoly: free software is not competing with Microsoft because free software is free. You're not competing if you're not in the same market and free software is certainly not in MS's market.
Moreover, free software will inevitably drain that market, but observe that this is not the same as being in the market. It's more like an alternative to the market that demonstrates how ridiculous the whole metaphor of a market was for a product that had no physical existence and could be re-created more or less infinitely without costs worth tabulating.
Open Source is the awakening to the fact that software is too important to be shackled to arcane and inappropriate systems like markets which are effective only under conditions of scarcity. Open Source is the beginning of the real software of the future and its destiny is most certainly manifest. Geek hippies will rule the world!
So, when these businesses get broadsided by other businesses that do reduce their costs by using free and open software then this petty crap will no longer be an issue. It's just a matter of time.
Until then, what difference does it make other than being fodder for a pissing contest in the IT press. FOSS will be just fine with or without these businesses.
The problem with your rebuttal is that you assume that since they are separate entities, at least as far as the names and accounting departments go, service providers have absolutely no way to influence handset manufacturers. That is extremely naive.
I would go so far as to say that this is also uninformed. We recently saw a post here on Slashdot about a phone that Apple had developed which was shot down by the major service providers precisely because it would eat into the profits that they had promised their shareholders from the sales of ringtones and music downloads.
Promises are made by corporations to their shareholders at regular meetins in the form of business projections. When a company bases its growth projections on a product like ring tones they have established an informal contract which they will be punished for failing to fullfill. In turn, those companies are forced to take any measure possible to control handset manufactureres and ensure that they can, indeed capture those profits so that their stock don't suffer. This doesn't require the subscription to any conspiracy, it's simply the way business works.
I went and checked out the Foundation website and tuxLabs. While this is certainly a nice gesture, I'd like to share some of my own ideas about what would really be necessary for FOSS to have a big impact in education. It's not a minor issue. And, as a matter of fact, I believe that education is the last place we're going to see open source succeed. That's not to say that it won't succeed, but that it's not going to happen without some major developments taking place.
I understand Mr. Shuttleworth is focused on South Africa and perhaps just brigning computer labs to schools is still a major accomplishment in South Africa. But in other parts of the world entire curricula even in elementary schools are based around computers. Essentially, computer labs become the classrooms. This isn't some futuristic fantasy land although it might seem that way from a South African perspective; this kind of system already exists today. It's more than just a computer lab to learn typing and a few computer skills, entire curricula are computerized.
One of the things that makes these elaborate electronic classrooms possible is easy-to-use authoring systems so that content specialists AKA teachers are able to develop electronic content. This is precisely why education is the last place you're going to see open source succeed: the development tools in open source are hardly dumbed down. What passes for a RAD system in open source like KDevelop is hardly the kind of thing that you are going to see elementary school teachers putting to use to make a lesson plan and the fact is, those teachers, as opposed to experienced developers, are the people that you want to design the lessons because they have the direct knowledge of what will work for the students. More importantly, if those teachers are empowered to develop the computerized lessons themselves, they'll be able to adapt them in accordance with their experience in the field.
So, if Mr. Shuttleworth really wants to have a serious role in bringing open source to education I would suggest that there are various Courses of Action(sic) that could have far reaching consequences.
One extremely ambitious project would be to fund the creation of a completely new media presentation system for FOSS platforms along the lines of Macromedia Director. Perhaps some existing code from some open source SVG applications like Inkscape could be reused in this effort or even combined with something like Open Office Impress which already allows for transitions between slides. It's not a hell of a start, but it's something.
Ultimately, something along those lines is really essential if you want to put a dent in the entrenched monopoly position in the education market. It's not the kind of stuff that makes young ambitious coders drool with excitement but education is like that. The reality of it is painfully dull and not sexy at all which makes it a last choice for open source coders. Education is filled with ironies. It's all about learning and yet it requires everything to be dumbed down. In order for education to become more exciting, free, effective and open, someone is going to have to do some very unappealing and thankless work.
Anyway, if you're reading this Mr. Shuttleworth, I seriously would recommend you look at the development tools used to produce some of the sophisticated electronic classrooms in America today and, if you have the will, to devote some of your resources towards making something along those lines possible in an open source version.
Well, I went and checked out Mitfahrzentrale's German web site and I noticed that there seemed to be quite a few people on-line so that seems to be a fairly popular site using a little javascript to set the destinations. I didn't get too far into the details with it being in German but I guess it's just supported by banner ads.
So I went and checked out some of the other sites in their network. Unfortuanately the UK affiliate seemed to be out of the picture. I couldn't connect anyway.
Searcing Google for "car pool" in English I mostly got sites that were operating in Europe. There seems to be a little activity in the US. I know many campuses offer ride sharing services not so different from Mitfahrzentrale's service.
It seems like the ideal thing would be to combine a ride sharing service with a mobile phone so it could have a bit of spontaneity althogh spontaneity and security don't always work well together.
Hmm. I think there's got to be demand for this kind of basic service. You know it seems like you would get degree of security just by having a central database where the driver and the passenger just checked in even if they used anonymous identities.
Just having a place where both the driver and passenger could upload their self-created user ID and a location and the license number of the vehicle and recieve verification that both parties had sent matching information and be given a timestamp would be a big step over conventional hitchhiking. That would entail a minimal invasion of privacy and it would give the passenger a lot more safety although it wouldn't help the driver much.
Oddly, as I was writing this, an old guy came to my door and asked me for a ride to the nearest bus stop. Sort of a bizarre coincidence.
Thanks for the spelling tip. As for the tracking thing, well let's not jump to conclusions on this. It's a rather new idea although that would do better with nurturing than stomping. I'm sure other people have already thought about it and came to no workable conclusion. But the same could be said of used goods resales on the Net.
At first that idea floundered around a lot, eventually an eBay emerged. The helpful thing is to offer suggestions on how to get a good implementation. As you mention, an obtrusive tracking mechanism might not be a good way to go. But is there such a thing as less obtrusive and more otrusive invasions of privacy? Sure there are.
And what about Mitfahrzentrale? Does anybody know how that worked? What was their system? Did they have any problems that might be overcome with a Net based system? Any Germans out there with a more extensive knowledge about this?
What a radical, yet simple idea.
In fact, from my own experience hitching in Europe as a teen the idea of a database of rides for hitchikers is not new at all. I can't remember how it is acutally spelled or even pronounced, but Germany has, or at least had, a system called something like Mitzfrauzentrale where you simply walked into an office and made a reservation to share a ride with someone.
Now subtract the office part and substitute it with the Net and you've got a hell of an idea.
Hitching used to be so common in the seventies and it was never really that dangerous. It's just that Americans have become so paranoid since the eighties. Even in the eighties I used to hitch, but it's true many of the people I could get rides from were sketchy. It would be so cool to see it become popular again with a new degree of security built in. Just being able to ID the driver and the passenger to a certain degree would change the whole equation enormously. After all, why is a taxi safe? Basically the only difference is that you can ID the driver.
It's interesting to read such a suggestion. This is not a new idea as it happens.
The idea of finding patterns in novels and poetry on various levels which could be quantified mathematically was quite popular in the past. There was even a literary movement named after it. It was called Structuralism which produced some enormously complex analyses. It was very popular in Russia at the turn of the century. A man named Levi-Strauss was an early advocate of the movement to dissect literature in this manner and wrote a very well recieved essay on the topic using a poem by the French writer Baudelaire as an example.
Levi-Strauss's work was far from unusual for the time. He was closely attuned to others of a similar mindset, notably Saussure, who coined the name of a study called Semiotics which can be though of as the science of signs. Certainly some fodder for deep thought there and it can be quite entertaining to read some of their dilligent efforts in this exceedingly vague direction.
Over time, though, these methods of literary analysis created far more questions than answers and some people started raising questions about whether this might be a bunch of navel gazing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, but it didn't seem to going anywhere.
Eventually, a new generation of literary critics rebelled against Structuralism and a few of them even called themselved the Poststructuralists and they coined the term Postmodernism to mark a break from the modern era and the assumption that it was possible or even important to "understand" anything.
So, yes there's little doubt that it is possible to produce a sort of analysis in perl. The issue is what question would it answer and does that question matter to anyone?
But thanks for mentioning it.
The patent thing really sort of ticked me off being a student of the history of alternative building and a fan or mixing cement with all sorts of things. It just so happens that this idea of soaking fabric such as burlap in cement was, at one time, a very common building technique. It was so common that it had a trade name. It was referred to as "staff". Probably a derivation of "stiff" which it certainly is. I happen to have some planters made of just the stuff in the backyard and I built a small shed of it at one time.
Here's a bit of trivia that you can verify yourselves that should add a bit of authority to my contention that this is a well known and common practice. Do I sound like Jeff Albertson AKA Comic Book Guy or what? Well, what can I say, I was pissed. Patent . . fucking wankers.
Alright, on to the issue at hand.
If you've ever been to San Francisco, it is likely you might have checked out the Golden Gate Bridge and perhaps even went to the delightful little park filled with neo-classical architecture featuring the world-famous Palace of Fine Arts near the Exploratorium.
Well, if you have been to the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps you are aware that it is the remnant of what was a huge international exposition around the turn of the century to showcase the prosperity of western America. This exposition was called the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915.
The Expo was an enormous event and it involved the construction of what was at the time the largest wooden structures in history. And, in fact, the original Palace of Fine Arts was also built partially of wood. The columns which you now see rebuilt in steel reinforced concrete in the 60s were originally built of wood in the nineteen tens.
If you haven't seen it, this thing is a giant dome set atop columns about five stories high and covering several acres of land. It is huge.
Now aside from the columns which were made of wood and some other wooden reinforcing bits, the structure was built primarily of cement soaked burlap fiber or staff as it was known. Indeed, the Palace of Fine Arts was the largest structure ever built of staff, but again I emphasize that if you've seen it you would know that this is truly an enormous piece of architecture and a major monument of the city of San Francisco. This massive monument stood for over forty years built primarily of cloth soaked in cement.
Could you possibly come up with a more in-your-face example of prior art?
And now these boy geniuses are going to attempt to patent this well known and commonly practiced historical building technique in the year 2005?
Fuck. This is a fine example of what I see as the real bubble. It wasn't the Internet, it wasn't telecoms and it isn't IT or ICs or semis, it's something that encompasses all of these and more. Intellectual property is the real bubble. And it's still absolutely full of hot air. This is yet another fine example.
Yeah, decent character input is still a major issue for FOSS that most alphabetic language users just don't grasp because they've never tried it. /usr which remains read-only, it's not a quick fix yet. I have only begun to read up on the klik documentation to see how they get around installing stuff on read-only file systems, but the Klik debs browser website suggests that fonts don't work with it yet.
People see characters displayed in a browser and they assume there's no more issues left, but that's far from the case.
I think the key is definitely getting decent support in Debian and having that extended into LiveCDs like Knoppix.
I've been playing around trying to get an i18n environment set up on Knoppix 3.7 with this klik system that lets you add on the clunky but functional xcin character input system. Unfortunately, since the fonts are in
However, a decent LiveCD that did have it working would be soooo nice. That would do more to help Debian in China than anything. I am one hundred percent sure of that.
Now, I've used what does exist already in terms of Chinese LiveCDs and as far as I know that consists primarily of BV1AL and a few others. I went to go check the names and for some reason linux.nctu.edu.tw seemed to be down. But there's an assortment of them there that I have been using and distributing to people here in Taiwan for several years.
The problem is that none of them is really current. The Knoppix scene is going crazy with innovations to the point that every release brings radical new improvements and yet the Chinese enabled versions are all radically stripped down and outdated. BV1AL is the most functional in terms of the Chinese my experience, but the actual desktop is quite a throwback. I understand that there's the size of the fonts to consider, but I also understand that you can get a keychain USB drive that will add a lot of expandability space to a LiveCD distro at a price that will work in the Chinese market.
I say, this is where the attention needs to go. In fact, this is what I was up till dawn doing last night.
Well, Gigs of RAM isn't really all that cheap, so I think using Damn Small Linux to do the same thing is more impressive for most people because you can use what is available in the here and now. You can easily load DSL into RAM with 256Megs and sometimes it works with 128Megs, but you won't be able to add many other packages once you get it online.
However, and I'm currently typing on just such a system, it's not as fast as you'd hope. The reason is that LiveCDs use compression on the filesystems so you have that overhead preventing things from being as fast as it could be. But certainly as big RAM goes mainstream there is no doubt in my mind that the idea of running the whole system from RAM is inevitable. Like I say, I'm already there albeit using a compressed filesystem.
As for this unionfs thing. Is that completely unrelated to klik? That's a pretty cool development on Knoppix that has come a long way in a very short time. You can already install most Debian packages on Knopppix without a hard drive install using Klik. And even better, you can save the packages to hard drive or removeable media. So, you don't lose them at all when you change to another machine.
This totally rocks. I'm not sure if it's related to the unionfs thing, but it certainly deserves mention because it is hot shit.
Absolutely!
The article completely skipped the "Total" in Total Cost of Ownership. I mean it was a cute write up, but the MS tax is certainly not the total cost of going with closed source. If anything, it's the least significant factor.
The cost of the OS is nothing compared to applications. For a home user you can simply borrow them or whatever you want to call it, but in a corporate environment you need to account for everything on the machine. Using closed source even a machine that is only going to be used as a fancy typewriter is going to need Office. That alone is going to cost you almost as much as low end hardware these days, if not more.
Now if you're going to be connecting it to a network, well forget about it. Like the parent post mentions, there's just no comparison at that point. Once you plug that ethernet connection in, the Windows box is either going to cost you in downtime or you're going to be paying mega bucks for all your protection "services." That's where the total costs begin. Not end, but begin.
The article stopped far short from even the beggining of the total costs.