They should have released a 2GB model for 149$ as well. Maybe they will before the mini hits Europe in April.
Oh, and they REALLY should add a rounded "ice" model. Sort of like... an iPod, but smaller. Because I'm not particularly fond of the gold/pink/shit ones.
Here, in Belgium, we also face a growing use of e-voting in cities.
What's the result?
Older people getting some "help" from the IT staff, at the loss of the secrecy of their vote, various crashes due to the complexity of the system and - most importantly - elimination of the public scrunity of the counting, again left to the "supervision" of the federal IT staff.
The complexity and closed nature of this system is bad for our democracy so we proposed another, simpler solution (in discussion at our senate):
Goes like this:
Keep our proven paper voting system (big red mark in a circle left to the candidate's name) and couple it with a fast optical counting system so that we can have paper trails AND almost-complete results by the evening news.
Our government alreay has this type of machines for the mail and knows how to use them efficiently.
Au contraire, Connectix sold (for Mac OS 8, IIRC) a version of VPC with Red Hat. It wasn't particularly fast, but it supported most of RH features well.
Since I migrated my Mac to Debian a while ago, that red box joined my oldies collection, next to some BeOS T-Shirts.
A point is made here.
GNU/Linux distributions should look and feel differently than Windows or other proprietary OSes, not radically but still enough to avoid the kind frustration that I've seen when people expect graphically equivalent desktops like GNOME or KDE to behave like Windows. They will never be perfect replacements for it, nor should they be.
Interestingly, I've seen much more success when demonstrating window managers like Fluxbox. People immediately fall for their simplicity. They just love to have one simple, well organized desktop menu and no annoying icons or toolbars to push around. No nonsense user interface is what they like. They even tell me afterwards than Windows desktop is a mess compared to them!
I hope that these lightweight WMs will gain grounds in the future, because frankly even if their libraries have become essential parts of many applications, GNOME and KDE do not look or feel like the right desktops for GNU/Linux (IMHO). Something about the UN!X philosophy of having one small and efficient tool for the job makes me (and a surprising amount of novices) more comfortable without them.
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At least, Beagle wreckage won't profit them much.
They should have released a 2GB model for 149$ as well.
Maybe they will before the mini hits Europe in April.
Oh, and they REALLY should add a rounded "ice" model. Sort of like... an iPod, but smaller. Because I'm not particularly fond of the gold/pink/shit ones.
Here, in Belgium, we also face a growing use of e-voting in cities.
What's the result?
Older people getting some "help" from the IT staff, at the loss of the secrecy of their vote, various crashes due to the complexity of the system and - most importantly - elimination of the public scrunity of the counting, again left to the "supervision" of the federal IT staff.
The complexity and closed nature of this system is bad for our democracy so we proposed another, simpler solution (in discussion at our senate):
Goes like this:
Keep our proven paper voting system (big red mark in a circle left to the candidate's name) and couple it with a fast optical counting system so that we can have paper trails AND almost-complete results by the evening news.
Our government alreay has this type of machines for the mail and knows how to use them efficiently.
I guess the US too.
Au contraire, Connectix sold (for Mac OS 8, IIRC) a version of VPC with Red Hat. It wasn't particularly fast, but it supported most of RH features well.
Since I migrated my Mac to Debian a while ago, that red box joined my oldies collection, next to some BeOS T-Shirts.
A point is made here. GNU/Linux distributions should look and feel differently than Windows or other proprietary OSes, not radically but still enough to avoid the kind frustration that I've seen when people expect graphically equivalent desktops like GNOME or KDE to behave like Windows. They will never be perfect replacements for it, nor should they be. Interestingly, I've seen much more success when demonstrating window managers like Fluxbox. People immediately fall for their simplicity. They just love to have one simple, well organized desktop menu and no annoying icons or toolbars to push around. No nonsense user interface is what they like. They even tell me afterwards than Windows desktop is a mess compared to them! I hope that these lightweight WMs will gain grounds in the future, because frankly even if their libraries have become essential parts of many applications, GNOME and KDE do not look or feel like the right desktops for GNU/Linux (IMHO). Something about the UN!X philosophy of having one small and efficient tool for the job makes me (and a surprising amount of novices) more comfortable without them.