Congress should not use funds to help support software that it not free/open source.
Congress funds whatever it believes constituents want or need. The primary value of educational software is in what it teaches. If closed source achieves that end, so be it. The world doesn't revolve around the geek.
helping Microsoft expand its monopoly is bad for the world. Its bad for the industry. The amount of money and control that Microsoft exercises because of its monopoly has ruined the ISO, destroyed companies, and kept back innovation in the marketplace.
Spare me.
In 1980 the 5 MB Winchester hard disk drive would have set you back about $2000.
In 2008 the 1 GB USB keychain drive is a corporate giveaway that costs $5 each in purchases of 1000.
The Geek builds his Linux PC using commodity parts designed for the mass market Windows platform. Apple builds the Mac out of commodity parts designed for the Windows platform.
The XO laptop is barely out of the gate before its commercial competitors are on its heels. It doesn't matter how "innovative" your tech is. What matters is how fast it become mass market.
The fast track is the Windows implementation. The Windows driver.
This is part of what CNET has had to say in the past about PC Tools:
Spyware Doctor 5 suffers from software glitches; failed to identify or remove a test Trojan horse; returned a high number of false positive or extremely low-risk resultsPC Tools Spyware Doctor 2007
Microsoft is not alone in its skepticism of PC Tools' report.
Dennis Kudin, CTO of Ukraine-based Information Security Center Ltd., also dismissed PC Tools' findings in a Windows Live Spaces blog post. The malware counted in such studies often isn't a real threat, he said. The issue is serious threats, malware that runs at the system kernel level and requires administrative privileges.
"Most Windows 2000 users work as administrators by default, so they are vulnerable to any kind of threats. In Windows Vista this vital problem is solved by UAC technology. So Vista is definitely much more secure than Windows 2000 and I don't understand PC Tools' attempt to overthrow this axiom by far-fetched conclusions in their survey." Microsoft Refutes Windows Vista Vulnerability Report [May 13]
the EEE is a great machine and we already know that ASUS can not dare put Linux on there other machines.
The EEE isn't a bare bones PC nor is it a Linux only PC. ASUS hasn't the confidence to go Linux only even in this market segment.
Yes, this is a different market, but I don't think manufacturers are as afraid of MS as they used to be.
It isn't fear, it's love - of money and sales.
The OLPC had 600,000 confirmed sales in 2007. 80,000 went to the Linux Geek in Buy One-Give One. promotion. In 2008 Windows and MS Office will be an XO option.
Granted, they're not geniuses (look at the whole Vista boondoggle)
There are about 200 or so Linux distributions. The problem for Microsoft is much the same: how to best to serve many distinct market segments without fragmenting completely.
The point is, Windows comes preinstalled on every computer and it is something people use as a result. They aren't using linux because they aren't the type to go and try to install it. Even MacOS X wouldn't be used by people if they had to install it. So if somebody installs it and sets it up for them to use, they can happily use it without problems (specific software needs aside, of course).
The OEM system install has been the gold standard for the non-technical end user for damn near thirty years. You unpack the box. You connect the cables and you are good to go.
People don't want to be dependent on a geek who may not be around when they need help. What they want is the toll free number, the extended warranty, the in-home service contract.
When the geek says: "I have my parents running Linux. It's great!"
His audience is thinking: "My god. I'm going to need an engineering grad - some snot-nosed SOB on-call to keep this thing afloat."
You could have asked whether CP/M was ready for the desktop:
However, CP/M's concept of separate user areas for files on the same disk was never ported to MS-DOS. Since MS-DOS had access to more memory (as few IBM PCs were sold with less than 64 KB of memory, while CP/M had to run in 16 KB if necessary), more commands were built in to the command-line user interface logic, making MS-DOS somewhat faster and easier to use on floppy-based computers.
There has never been any great mystery behind Microsoft's success on the desktop:
Its focus had always been on the non-technical end user.
The balance between what he wants and what he can afford. The core hardware requirements will be midline at introduction and priced at entry level a year or so later:
Lenovo 3000 Notebook PC Vista Premium, 14" Wide Screen Display, DVD Burner, Intel Dual Core, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, Integrated Webcam, WiFi, Firewire, etc., etc. $650 after mail-in rebate.
Why did Negroponte decide to go with Windows, at $3/license no less, when Steve Jobs offered OS X for free? Negroponte claimed he wanted an open platform. Why the change of heart? What the hell is going on?
The OLPC laptop hasn't been selling in anything like the numbers the idealists expected.
The price just keeps edging skyward.
Meanwhile, the designer of OLPC's display has moved on to greener pastures. In a year or two, perhaps three, the XO's hardware will be out-gunned by every budget laptop on the planet.
If you are shopping for a dynamo and solar powered radio, your choices now extend far beyond the Freeplay.
Given enough time, the precision manufacturer in Asia will beat you on tech and beat you on price
- even with an OEM Windows install.
It is very, very, hard to stay ahead in this game.
The OEM doesn't have to design for the fantasy of local production and service. The manual assembly and repair of an out-sized clockwork mechanism. That sort of thing.
He can sell his product in any market he chooses to enter. The case doesn't have to lime green.
[and given the trendy designer colors of the latest mass-market Dell laptops, that should stand as the most naive and short-lived anti-theft device ever conceived by the mind of man.]
Most importantly, he doesn't have to conform to a constructivist philosophy of education or the geek's ideology of free and open source.
What place these have in the primary grades, how well they serve the student in the higher grades and in vocational training, are decisions he can leave to the education minister.
Which, from the minister's point of view, is where they belong.
If he wants Squeak, he can have Squeak. If he wants Coding4Fun he can have Coding4Fun. If he has doubts about Sugar, if he thinks that understanding the Windows GUI and MS Office are marketable skills, he has an alternative.
The geek forgets that arguments about lock-in can cut both ways.
Apple's worldwide share of the PC market was 3% in late 2007 - and probably closer to 2% when OSX was being offered to OLPC for free. In the third world the visibility of the Mac can be as close to zero as makes no difference.
The pragmatic choice, if you went for the proprietary OS, was always Windows.
The problem with child pornography is that it's too easy to frame someone for.
Bull. I will take the odds that any arrest for child pornography in your home town for the last ten years recovered thousands if not tens of thousands of photos. That the defendants' behavior was reckless and self-destructive past all belief.
What percentage of people who possess child porn actually paid for it, thus supporting the child-pr0n industry?
What the hell difference does it make?
You are an addict. You will be paying for your fix down the road
A businessman from Espanola will spend another six months in jail for possession of child pornography.
Lawrence Bouillon, who was arrested in February, pleaded guilty and was sentenced Thursday in Sudbury court.
Assistant Crown attorney Kara Vakiparta says police searched the 44-year-old man's computer and found 16,092 photos and 1,006 videos depicting children as young as two years old in sexual poses.
Vakiparta says one image showed a baby, while another showed an adult having sexual intercourse with a girl identified as being between seven and nine years old.Six more months in jail for man who downloaded child pornography
So it's the image that would be illegal as well as the act.
It is not thought crime to change the image of a child into something pornographic. A doctored photograph would be legitimate grounds for civil and criminal action under many other circumstances. Why not this?
OLPC has not been selling in the numbers its proponents predicted. It has not been able to hold the line on price. That opened the door to competitors like the Intel Classmate.
Technical innovations like the XO display would not remain an OLPC exclusive for very long.
OLPC's market is the education minister. In the third world, a market an inch wide and a mile deep. His first concern will be the XO's place and performance in the elementary grades.
In the expectation that something magical is going to happen if you simply expose the source code of an OS or an application in a grade school classroom.
His second concern will be how well the laptop prepares students for higher education or vocational training. He might easily be forgiven for thinking that Windows and Office are marketable skills.
There is absolutely no way of knowing.
Many people have their user-agent say they're using IE on Windows even if they're using Linux, bacsue dimwits still code their pages to not display if you're not using IE... So web site metrics can't be reliable either.
Does the geek really believe that changes in the user agent are statistically significant?
How many users know the agent exists?
How many would be comfortable making a change?
There is no intelligible reason for the agent to claim that it is running on Vista when it is not running on Vista.
nice: that's a pretty reasonable project to look at for a comparison
OLPC's market is the education minister.
The Lifeline Radio was designed for direct distribution to children at risk: street kids in danger from their own government, young boys and girls orphaned by AIDS and abruptly cast in a new role as heads of households.
Shortwave coverage means that the teacher's voice cannot be silenced by the warlord or the Taliban.
The Lifeline Radio program has none of the FOSS Utopian gloss of the OLPC.
It's purpose is simply to keep these desperately isolated and vulnerable children alive. To give them a chance to learn and to grow in a world in which they seem to have no place.
Microsoft is fighting a battle against becoming irrelevant.
A battle Mircrosoft seems to be winning:
Microsoft said sales of Office 2008, which launched in January, are nearly three times what the company saw with the launch of Office 2004. The suite is selling faster than any version in 19 years.Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years
[May 13]
Nowhere is the gap between philosophical acceptance and actual adoption clearer than on the desktop where -- despite critical praise of recent Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and the backing of Sun for the OpenOffice productivity suite -- Linux has still failed in its mission to supplant incumbent Microsoft and its Windows-Office dominance.
Early Linux-fuelled enthusiasm wouldn't have predicted the apathy the market has shown for the far lower-cost solutions offered by the open-source community. In late 2002, a Giga report projected that "the arrival of attractively priced competing office suites combined with dissatisfaction with current Microsoft licensing plans will create upwards of a five percent market share loss" for Microsoft.
Betting against Microsoft in any industry has always been a bad idea. In a March Forrester presentation, Giga's optimism proved misplaced: "The lack of a viable, enterprise-ready alternative to Microsoft Office -- particularly an alternative to Outlook -- will keep Microsoft firmly planted in the enterprise for the foreseeable future."
Ditto the desktop, where Windows continues to reign supreme. In 2004, IDC predicted that growing Linux adoption would push the operating system from three percent market share to seven percent by 2008. Even those figures paled compared to the predictions of Siemens Business Systems, which in 2003 predicted that Linux would have captured 20 percent of the enterprise desktop market by 2008.
It is now 2008, and Windows is still the dominant operating system; if anything, Mac OS X has supplanted Linux as the alternative desktop of choice. Linux is out there, but erratically: it runs, for example, on ASUS's popular Eee mini-notebook PC and in March was chosen by IBM for low-cost PCs to be shipped to customers in Eastern Europe. Despite a few isolated purchases, however, desktop PC purchases are still all about Windows. Linux: Who got it right, who got it very wrong? [May 15]
The cost of developing it aside, what is the problem with having the ideas "presented in an entirely new graphical paradigm," when you're giving the machines to communities in which the per capita rate of computer ownership is practically nil?
When the Freeplay Foundation designed the Lifeline Radio they chose not to re-invent the wheel.
Instead focusing on the design of a rugged multiband portable - in appearance and operation a radio like any other. Building on the infrastructure and experience of eighty years of educational broadcasting.
It was and is a project that would rank zero for ideological or political correctness. But the radios are out there and the program is on track and on budget.
It ain't free if you have to buy a computer to use it. It ain't free if you have to pay for internet service to use it. It ain't free if you have to buy food to get the energy to walk to the library to use it.
So what have you proven here?
That the only free view of the cosmos is by the naked eye?
Slashdot Mirror
Congress funds whatever it believes constituents want or need. The primary value of educational software is in what it teaches. If closed source achieves that end, so be it. The world doesn't revolve around the geek.
Spare me.
In 1980 the 5 MB Winchester hard disk drive would have set you back about $2000.
In 2008 the 1 GB USB keychain drive is a corporate giveaway that costs $5 each in purchases of 1000.
The Geek builds his Linux PC using commodity parts designed for the mass market Windows platform. Apple builds the Mac out of commodity parts designed for the Windows platform.
The XO laptop is barely out of the gate before its commercial competitors are on its heels. It doesn't matter how "innovative" your tech is. What matters is how fast it become mass market.
The fast track is the Windows implementation. The Windows driver.
iTunes and the iPod are proof enough of that.
In 2008 it still possible to ignite a flamewsr over whether "Linux is ready for the desktop."
Turn the clock back to 1998, 1995, 1991.
What are the alternatives?
DR DOS isn't in the picture until the tag end of the DOS years.
IBM proved entirely capable of taking OS/2 out of contention in the mass consumer market without any help from anyone.
Spyware Doctor 5 suffers from software glitches; failed to identify or remove a test Trojan horse; returned a high number of false positive or extremely low-risk results PC Tools Spyware Doctor 2007
Microsoft is not alone in its skepticism of PC Tools' report.
Dennis Kudin, CTO of Ukraine-based Information Security Center Ltd., also dismissed PC Tools' findings in a Windows Live Spaces blog post. The malware counted in such studies often isn't a real threat, he said. The issue is serious threats, malware that runs at the system kernel level and requires administrative privileges.
"Most Windows 2000 users work as administrators by default, so they are vulnerable to any kind of threats. In Windows Vista this vital problem is solved by UAC technology. So Vista is definitely much more secure than Windows 2000 and I don't understand PC Tools' attempt to overthrow this axiom by far-fetched conclusions in their survey." Microsoft Refutes Windows Vista Vulnerability Report [May 13]
The EEE isn't a bare bones PC nor is it a Linux only PC. ASUS hasn't the confidence to go Linux only even in this market segment.
Yes, this is a different market, but I don't think manufacturers are as afraid of MS as they used to be.
It isn't fear, it's love - of money and sales.
The OLPC had 600,000 confirmed sales in 2007. 80,000 went to the Linux Geek in Buy One-Give One. promotion. In 2008 Windows and MS Office will be an XO option.
The bare-bones PC is for the enthusiast or the IT pro.
It does not sell as a mass market retail product in sufficient numbers to keep you in business.
If their licensing with Microsoft prevents that, then maybe they'll consider another operating system
Not bloody likely.
Not when Windows has 93% of the world market and the bundle of hardware and software which is the Mac has 6% of what remains.
ASUS is not in the business of shooting itself in the foot.
There are about 200 or so Linux distributions. The problem for Microsoft is much the same: how to best to serve many distinct market segments without fragmenting completely.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard for the non-technical end user for damn near thirty years. You unpack the box. You connect the cables and you are good to go.
People don't want to be dependent on a geek who may not be around when they need help. What they want is the toll free number, the extended warranty, the in-home service contract.
When the geek says: "I have my parents running Linux. It's great!"
His audience is thinking: "My god. I'm going to need an engineering grad - some snot-nosed SOB on-call to keep this thing afloat."
one suspects a good deal more than the geek is willing to admit. how else do you explain the world-wide dominance of the Windows OS?
This line - or something very much like it - is woven into every Linux "conversion" story posted on Slashdot.
Meanwhile, a billion users worldwide somehow manage to run Windows without the free technical support of a resident geek.
You could have asked whether CP/M was ready for the desktop:
However, CP/M's concept of separate user areas for files on the same disk was never ported to MS-DOS. Since MS-DOS had access to more memory (as few IBM PCs were sold with less than 64 KB of memory, while CP/M had to run in 16 KB if necessary), more commands were built in to the command-line user interface logic, making MS-DOS somewhat faster and easier to use on floppy-based computers.
There has never been any great mystery behind Microsoft's success on the desktop:
Its focus had always been on the non-technical end user.
The balance between what he wants and what he can afford. The core hardware requirements will be midline at introduction and priced at entry level a year or so later:
Lenovo 3000 Notebook PC
Vista Premium, 14" Wide Screen Display, DVD Burner, Intel Dual Core, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HDD, Integrated Webcam, WiFi, Firewire, etc., etc.
$650 after mail-in rebate.
Let's be honest here. The back list of titles available for the Windows OS is enormous. Under all software licenses.
The OLPC laptop hasn't been selling in anything like the numbers the idealists expected.
The price just keeps edging skyward.
Meanwhile, the designer of OLPC's display has moved on to greener pastures. In a year or two, perhaps three, the XO's hardware will be out-gunned by every budget laptop on the planet.
The Intel Classmate is already in its second generation.
If you are shopping for a dynamo and solar powered radio, your choices now extend far beyond the Freeplay.
Given enough time, the precision manufacturer in Asia will beat you on tech and beat you on price
- even with an OEM Windows install.
It is very, very, hard to stay ahead in this game.
The OEM doesn't have to design for the fantasy of local production and service. The manual assembly and repair of an out-sized clockwork mechanism. That sort of thing.
He can sell his product in any market he chooses to enter. The case doesn't have to lime green.
[and given the trendy designer colors of the latest mass-market Dell laptops, that should stand as the most naive and short-lived anti-theft device ever conceived by the mind of man.]
Most importantly, he doesn't have to conform to a constructivist philosophy of education or the geek's ideology of free and open source.
What place these have in the primary grades, how well they serve the student in the higher grades and in vocational training, are decisions he can leave to the education minister.
Which, from the minister's point of view, is where they belong.
If he wants Squeak, he can have Squeak. If he wants Coding4Fun he can have Coding4Fun. If he has doubts about Sugar, if he thinks that understanding the Windows GUI and MS Office are marketable skills, he has an alternative.
The geek forgets that arguments about lock-in can cut both ways.
Apple's worldwide share of the PC market was 3% in late 2007 - and probably closer to 2% when OSX was being offered to OLPC for free. In the third world the visibility of the Mac can be as close to zero as makes no difference.
The pragmatic choice, if you went for the proprietary OS, was always Windows.
Bull. I will take the odds that any arrest for child pornography in your home town for the last ten years recovered thousands if not tens of thousands of photos. That the defendants' behavior was reckless and self-destructive past all belief.
What the hell difference does it make?
You are an addict. You will be paying for your fix down the road
A businessman from Espanola will spend another six months in jail for possession of child pornography.
Lawrence Bouillon, who was arrested in February, pleaded guilty and was sentenced Thursday in Sudbury court.
Assistant Crown attorney Kara Vakiparta says police searched the 44-year-old man's computer and found 16,092 photos and 1,006 videos depicting children as young as two years old in sexual poses.
Vakiparta says one image showed a baby, while another showed an adult having sexual intercourse with a girl identified as being between seven and nine years old. Six more months in jail for man who downloaded child pornography
The geek deals in urban legends.
I prefer a show of facts.
Names, dates, and places. The charges for which these men were convicted. The prisons where they are serving time.
It is not thought crime to change the image of a child into something pornographic. A doctored photograph would be legitimate grounds for civil and criminal action under many other circumstances. Why not this?
Technical innovations like the XO display would not remain an OLPC exclusive for very long.
OLPC's market is the education minister. In the third world, a market an inch wide and a mile deep. His first concern will be the XO's place and performance in the elementary grades.
He may be skeptical of constructionism.
In the expectation that something magical is going to happen if you simply expose the source code of an OS or an application in a grade school classroom.
His second concern will be how well the laptop prepares students for higher education or vocational training. He might easily be forgiven for thinking that Windows and Office are marketable skills.
Many people have their user-agent say they're using IE on Windows even if they're using Linux, bacsue dimwits still code their pages to not display if you're not using IE... So web site metrics can't be reliable either.
Does the geek really believe that changes in the user agent are statistically significant?
How many users know the agent exists?
How many would be comfortable making a change?
There is no intelligible reason for the agent to claim that it is running on Vista when it is not running on Vista.
OS Platform Stats [April 2008]
How then to explain why Vista shows a 9% share in the W3Schools stats - up from 0% in January 07 - and Linux 4% - up from 2% in March 03?
The Net Applications are far less charitable:
Operating System Market Share [Versions], Top Operating System Share Trend
You have to explain why the numbers and trend lines for OSX look about right while Linux struggles to gain a 1% share.
This argument would be more persuasive if traffic on the P2P nets wasn't dominated by titles less than one year old.
OLPC's market is the education minister.
The Lifeline Radio was designed for direct distribution to children at risk: street kids in danger from their own government, young boys and girls orphaned by AIDS and abruptly cast in a new role as heads of households.
Shortwave coverage means that the teacher's voice cannot be silenced by the warlord or the Taliban.
The Lifeline Radio program has none of the FOSS Utopian gloss of the OLPC.
It's purpose is simply to keep these desperately isolated and vulnerable children alive. To give them a chance to learn and to grow in a world in which they seem to have no place.
A battle Mircrosoft seems to be winning:
Microsoft said sales of Office 2008, which launched in January, are nearly three times what the company saw with the launch of Office 2004. The suite is selling faster than any version in 19 years. Sales Of Office For Mac Highest In Nearly 20 Years [May 13]
Nowhere is the gap between philosophical acceptance and actual adoption clearer than on the desktop where -- despite critical praise of recent Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and the backing of Sun for the OpenOffice productivity suite -- Linux has still failed in its mission to supplant incumbent Microsoft and its Windows-Office dominance.
Early Linux-fuelled enthusiasm wouldn't have predicted the apathy the market has shown for the far lower-cost solutions offered by the open-source community. In late 2002, a Giga report projected that "the arrival of attractively priced competing office suites combined with dissatisfaction with current Microsoft licensing plans will create upwards of a five percent market share loss" for Microsoft.
Betting against Microsoft in any industry has always been a bad idea. In a March Forrester presentation, Giga's optimism proved misplaced: "The lack of a viable, enterprise-ready alternative to Microsoft Office -- particularly an alternative to Outlook -- will keep Microsoft firmly planted in the enterprise for the foreseeable future."
Ditto the desktop, where Windows continues to reign supreme. In 2004, IDC predicted that growing Linux adoption would push the operating system from three percent market share to seven percent by 2008. Even those figures paled compared to the predictions of Siemens Business Systems, which in 2003 predicted that Linux would have captured 20 percent of the enterprise desktop market by 2008.
It is now 2008, and Windows is still the dominant operating system; if anything, Mac OS X has supplanted Linux as the alternative desktop of choice. Linux is out there, but erratically: it runs, for example, on ASUS's popular Eee mini-notebook PC and in March was chosen by IBM for low-cost PCs to be shipped to customers in Eastern Europe. Despite a few isolated purchases, however, desktop PC purchases are still all about Windows. Linux: Who got it right, who got it very wrong? [May 15]
When the Freeplay Foundation designed the Lifeline Radio they chose not to re-invent the wheel.
Instead focusing on the design of a rugged multiband portable - in appearance and operation a radio like any other. Building on the infrastructure and experience of eighty years of educational broadcasting.
It was and is a project that would rank zero for ideological or political correctness. But the radios are out there and the program is on track and on budget.
Why not try using the program before posting your "review."
So what have you proven here?
That the only free view of the cosmos is by the naked eye?