I am uploading and downloading there right now, because I have Vuze running. It is glorious to be one of the few that upload! And you just dare to disincentive me by reducing my ad-venture...ad-venure...uh, whatever thing that was!
I am 46 and the only games I play are New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart. I think it remains to be proven, that a computer game really needs a story beyond what Mario games have. It's all about flickering lights, controls, playability, rhytm, learning curve, balanced challenge... Just like sports is, except this is mental and finger candy, not physical! I want stories? I read books or go to movies!
I think "Teenage Kicks" by your band The Undertone is one of the best pop songs ever. I confess I have downloaded the best of The Undertones illegally. I also tried very hard to like your solo work (True, O'Neill brothers later stuff has also vanished from my playing lists).
I am a fan of yours, but I am going to download your stuff illegally and, mark my words: there is nothing you can do about it.
Liberals by definition want to be free to do whatever pleases them. Cleaning is not fun, so they don't do it. That's why they need a big government to help them, when they mess up their whole life.
In todays world most of the time in most places in most frequency bands there is no energy in the air, but it is still reserved for somebody. Even busy spots in city centers have a lot of radio energy only on limited bands in any given moment in time. There exists easily usable spectrum from 100 MHz to 5 Ghz. And it is trivial to pack more than one bit per Herz. The reason that we don't have gigabit radio communications is that a device certified to standard X can not use more than a tiny fraction of that sepctrum, even if the hundred bands reserved for other standards are idle at that spot in space and time.
AFAIK DSF will not suit this. But MS is active on advanced distributed file systems like Farsite http://research.microsoft.com/Farsite/faq.aspx Unfortunately is does not seem to be publicly available.
But why would anyone buy Internet connection from a company which limits access to high bandwith services? Soon as they try, there is going to be other ISPs stealing the market by selling free access. This is the market economy. They can try to set up cartel, but as economic history shows, cartels don't hold. Getting the regulators messing this will only cause harm in the short and long run.
And suppose some service providers really strain the network more than others. If the invisible hand of the market so desires, why not provide two kinds of services: cheap "Internet light" for those, who don't want to pay for infrastructure for high traffic services, and a more expensive "Internet heavy" with no restrictions. That makes pefects sense, if it turns out that there is demand for such a diversity.
Beware of socialism on the Internet. We did magnificently in creating the anarchistic Internet with non-legally binding co-operation with all parties, keep it that way. And remember, "the Internet treats cencorship [and other restrictions] like a broken network: it routes around it".
I am pretty sure the scientists at Black Mesa were discussing a danger of "resonance cascade" just before the tests with teir anomalous materials caused the dimensional outbreak... So we better leave this Cascade B stuff alone. The Freeman recovered us from the Cascade A, but we might not be so lucky this time. And what exactly caused the alternative future events in City 17?
Shouldn't it be AT&T's business and mine, what kind of service I buy from them if any? If they say they (or refuse to say) how they will throttle my torrents up or down, I will then decide if I buy the service. No politicians, lawyers, freaky cyberrights nerds need to bother.
You want politically controlled net services, you hate "big companies" and "cartel power"? Go to China, there the politician decide what the net looks like and how it works. And if China would pull the impossible and implement democracy and still keep the socialist, politically governed system, I doubt it would make much difference to what it is today. Market freedom is even more important than democracy. I'd rather have the first (like Singapore) than the second only (impossible actually), if I can't have both.
So deciding by the feeling in this thread the billion people who can not change their Exchange running corporations MUST not use Linux on their laptops? So much for the year 2007 as the year of the Linux laptop. It is more like "2007 - the year of the Linux for geeks independent of de facto corporate IT culture".
More seriously, we have people using Ubuntu in our company, and they are happy to use OWA with Firefox. Bigger problems with us are writing DL DVDs, Bluetooth and Nokia mobiles, bad Linux Skype, bad Linux Cisco VPN, problems with WEP and WPA, problems with PointSec hard disk encryption: all fancy new hw and and all non-FOSS integration is generally a pain, not only MS stuff.
I would love the "Over thirty department", if it would have games, that handle relevant modern day psychological and social problems and challenges. That have novel, deep insights into relationships with friends, bosses, parents, spouses, children. I would love games that handle realistic social and political problems in a non-trivial, perhaps thought-provoking ways. Games aware of academic philosohical tradition and debating the limits of our knowledge and the true nature of the world around us without worn-out clichés of pop culture. Games rooted in modern academic understanding of psychology, economics and science.
I would love a single game that is worth playing even if you need to choose between a) working more hours with good extra money, b) spending more time with your beloved kids/spouse, c) exercising/sports d) any other entertainment or e) playing games.
I would love just one game that is not a glorified, graphically decorated 3-D board game/puzzle/Pac-Man with almost non-existent emotional impact, except "I found the secret way/key/lever" or "I was fast/clever enough to manouver my opponent".
Just a note: I tested this again just right now with Sonera network here in Finland and I got very steady ~200 kbit/s with GPRS/EDGE and speeds varying form moment to moment from 150 kbit/s to 300 kbit/s with UMTS. So it is possible to have a good EDGE coverage. You just need not to overload or over-size your cells. About cost-benefit analysis of EDGE vs. UMTS, it is harder to say.
The beta is high quality. Suddenly I can watch a dozen channels of nearly TV quality content, which currently is strictly per-episode on-demand P2P streaming (more scalable not-on-demand P2P "multicast channel" type streaming will come only later). And there are ads, a business model and commercial TV programs (Fith Gear car shows and GONG anime being the best ones). Picture quality is surprisingly good, so is tolerance of bad connections. Compared to podcasting it is really fun to be able to access everything RIGHT NOW! In practice it beats Democracy every possible way. The content comes primarily from P2P to other clients, but Joost company has seeding "Long Tail Servers" to gurantee the availability of even the less popular streams.
Note that 3GPP rel. 7 standard will define "EDGE Evolution" which makes the EDGE speed 2-3 times faster. That's a good, cheap, and POWER SAVING alternative for a future iPhone model. Apple will of course still consider further upgraded models with GSM/UMTS path (W-CDMA and HSDPA/HSUPA) technologies, but they consume more battery and the results may vary.
I typically get about the same speed with EDGE and 3G, country wide here in Finland. The real speed depends on the network congestion. Anyway the capped limit in current UMTS phones (my Nokia N70) and networks (all the non-HSDPA UMTS networks I know, which is 90% of the UMTS world) is 384 kbit/s, so it is not much better than the max ~256 kbits/s of standard EDGE.
And the real life results with the HSDPA supporting new handsets and networks will vary. With bad coverage or congestion you will not benefit much of it. So even in the near future (~5 years), the difference between EDGE and UMTS versions will not be so big.
And before EDGE gets really old and undesirable, many things may happen and change the picture: Wimax, xMax, whatever radio; SIP, Skype, XMPP, whatever VoIP. VoIP changes the picture radically: you don't have to necessarily implement legacy technology (GSM/UMTS, CDMA/EVDO) anymore, because now any acccess point with any (radio) technology works with your VoIP.
Every VoIP system needs a PSTN gateway. So it doesn't matter, which standard you use. I can call every user of every VoIP standard with SkypeOut, through the PSTN gateways, as long as they support that. And anybody with a PSTN gateway can call me in my SkypeIn number. All systems need to provide similar means. SIP sucks, we don't need it for interoperability, which it provides in theory but not in practice.
PSTN/SS7/ISDN/PCM is the inter-operability standard, much like SMTP is for Internet mail. SIP, Skype, XMPP, whatever they are just like POP, IMAP, MS Exchange protocols, Lotus Notes mail standars: they only matter locally and do not need to be standard.
We can come up with better future standards or even fix SIP, but in the meantime Skype is far superior to anything else. In the end SIP or IAX2 or something can be used between the various inter-system gateways, but the clients do not need to be one standard only.
Of course, if openness is your religion, then you can not use Skype.
I have called a couple of people today with SkypeOut for international calls. I have chatted with individuals and on the company grpup chat. I am behind a firewall in a private address and so are all my buddies. All this is encrypted, except the POTS part of calls. I can immediately call 7 million of online Skype users. I have SkypeOut, SkypeIn (my GSM phone is in another country currently, I have transferred my calls to SkypeIn), I have Skype voice mail, I can send voice messages to any Skype users, I can send/receive SMS, and whatnot...
I also have Gizmo and X-lite and some other SIP clients installed, and Gizmo even allows free calls to many POTS phones. But for me these are worth testing only. I have trouble finding people's SIP addresses, if they have any, and then trouble making the clients call each other. I have trouble with firewalls and private addresses. There is no encryption. There is only a limited basic service. SIP sucks big time, and needs to be forgotten, before a million engineers waste their career on it. Come up with something better instead, if you want to have an open source competitor for Skype. Jabber, Jing, whatever, maybe they can have a try.
>Please tell me, are you being paid to write these things? Because if you are not, perhaps you should be. In some ways, your message >is quite well crafted, and links very nicely with the PR campaign being waged by the energy industry. If I were waging a publicity >campaign against action on global warming, I think it would be very effective to hire a few dozen full time employees to post >message to discussion boards like Slashdot. After all, these messages are read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I am flattered in a way. But I am more deeply saddened by the paranoia in here. No, I am not payed.
There is no perfect market with perfect information, and nobody claims so, certainly not us libertarians. It is evident, that big business means big interest for many people, but so does big government (which typically has much more money than any companies). Also big grass roots movements mean big personal interests for many people, if not financially then at least emotionally. Everybody is biased. So who do you trust?
We really have this thing called the scientific community. It does not matter so much what the media says, or what the man in the street thinks is common sense (Einstein once said: "common sense" is just 200 years old science). Scientific community largely (and hopefully) lives its own life independent of media. Even Monbiot in TFA is not claiming, that the conservative think-thanks would do or sponsor fake science, they just claim that they mispresent basically sound scientific research.
Read the meteorologists. The truth really is, that we can not forecast the weather, not for two weeks, and certainly not for years or centuries to come. There are lots of uncertainties in meteorological research. Maybe it is time to do something about the climate change, but we must watch the costs of the measures taken, while doing more research. If the Earth atmosphere would be in such a volatile balance, that some extra CO2 can crash it, life would not have sustained millions of years here. The atmosphere must have cross-stabilizing effects, which keep it tolerable when any one component of the system is changing.
It is quite cleat that the industrial revolution has increased the CO2 level in the air. It is suggested, but less clear, that the atmosphere is warming. It is even less clear, that the CO2 is warming the atmosphere. It is in no way clear, that the net effect of this warming will be negative. It is absolutely unclear, if there are any good measures that we can take to stop this potential man made harm. If there are some good measures, nobody has done any serious research about the time preference: whether we should invest money now to fight the warming, or whether we should invest ten times more after 50 years, when we know more. (With an interest rate of 5% these both choices cost the same in real value.)
It is very costly to limit CO2 output. This cost means worse living standards for billions of people, it means more human suffering. You can not just light-heartedly decide to enforce the Kioto protocols. It is a drastic measure. If man is acting as God when supposedly spoiling the atmosphere, men and women are also acting as Gods when they impose Kioto measures upons others, preventing them from raising out of their economical misery.
Well, there is always some sort of BASIC available. And it is good, because you can really build your system incrementally and interactively one line a time. Here are all the keystrokes you need. No editors, IDEs or compile cycles!
<Launch the BASIC interpreter from menu> 10 a=0 <Enter> 20 a=a+1 <Enter> 30 print a 40 IF a < 10 THEN GOTO 10 <Enter> <fix errors by retyping the line with its number>
A little different, arguably easier, arguably much more elegant would be to use Tcl:
<Launch Tclsh from menu> set a 0 <Enter> while {$a < 10} {incr a; puts $a} <Enter>
And if you want to do windows and graphics, there is NO OTHER WAY to teach modern GUI programming for 10 year old kids except Tk with wish. All other methods are 100 times more complex:
set a "button not clicked" entry.field_in_default_window -textvariable a pack.field_in_default_window button.button_under_it -text "Click here" -command {set a "you clicked"} pack.button
You can of course always use LOGO, but is arguably a "toy" language only, and the graphics is not much easier than tk, really.
Actually teaching Bash is not a bad option. And that, if anything, is very interactive, and very general purpose and real life stuff. And you can do endlessly fun stuff with test, expr and text manipulation tools.
The study says, that Linux endorsement by big players like governments and Microsoft rivals could allow Linux to win the final battle over MS. So it is NOT making a simple conclusion that Linux will remain playing the second fiddle. Read it, it is good, if you have any capability to understand some economics.
Slashdot Mirror
I am uploading and downloading there right now, because I have Vuze running. It is glorious to be one of the few that upload! And you just dare to disincentive me by reducing my ad-venture...ad-venure...uh, whatever thing that was!
http://www.ironsky.net/
(From the people who brought you Sky Wreck)
I am 46 and the only games I play are New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart. I think it remains to be proven, that a computer game really needs a story beyond what Mario games have. It's all about flickering lights, controls, playability, rhytm, learning curve, balanced challenge... Just like sports is, except this is mental and finger candy, not physical! I want stories? I read books or go to movies!
Dear Feargal,
I think "Teenage Kicks" by your band The Undertone is one of the best pop songs ever. I confess I have downloaded the best of The Undertones illegally. I also tried very hard to like your solo work (True, O'Neill brothers later stuff has also vanished from my playing lists).
I am a fan of yours, but I am going to download your stuff illegally and, mark my words: there is nothing you can do about it.
Liberals by definition want to be free to do whatever pleases them. Cleaning is not fun, so they don't do it. That's why they need a big government to help them, when they mess up their whole life.
In todays world most of the time in most places in most frequency bands there is no energy in the air, but it is still reserved for somebody. Even busy spots in city centers have a lot of radio energy only on limited bands in any given moment in time. There exists easily usable spectrum from 100 MHz to 5 Ghz. And it is trivial to pack more than one bit per Herz. The reason that we don't have gigabit radio communications is that a device certified to standard X can not use more than a tiny fraction of that sepctrum, even if the hundred bands reserved for other standards are idle at that spot in space and time.
"...is just a reiteration of a wheel"? So you prefer reinventing wheels?
Well the name is obviously a tribute, microsoftphobia aside.
AFAIK DSF will not suit this. But MS is active on advanced distributed file systems like Farsite http://research.microsoft.com/Farsite/faq.aspx Unfortunately is does not seem to be publicly available.
But why would anyone buy Internet connection from a company which limits access to high bandwith services? Soon as they try, there is going to be other ISPs stealing the market by selling free access. This is the market economy. They can try to set up cartel, but as economic history shows, cartels don't hold. Getting the regulators messing this will only cause harm in the short and long run.
And suppose some service providers really strain the network more than others. If the invisible hand of the market so desires, why not provide two kinds of services: cheap "Internet light" for those, who don't want to pay for infrastructure for high traffic services, and a more expensive "Internet heavy" with no restrictions. That makes pefects sense, if it turns out that there is demand for such a diversity.
Beware of socialism on the Internet. We did magnificently in creating the anarchistic Internet with non-legally binding co-operation with all parties, keep it that way. And remember, "the Internet treats cencorship [and other restrictions] like a broken network: it routes around it".
Oh shit. Writing this on Nokia N70 with T9 and Opera mini is a HUGE pain. So I accidentally put the whole message to the subject field ;-)
I am pretty sure the scientists at Black Mesa were discussing a danger of "resonance cascade" just before the tests with teir anomalous materials caused the dimensional outbreak... So we better leave this Cascade B stuff alone. The Freeman recovered us from the Cascade A, but we might not be so lucky this time. And what exactly caused the alternative future events in City 17?
http://www.sciammind.com/article.cfm?articleID=885 622AA-E7F2-99DF-3859D89E5980A4B2 My first link Googled by "smell quantum".
Shouldn't it be AT&T's business and mine, what kind of service I buy from them if any? If they say they (or refuse to say) how they will throttle my torrents up or down, I will then decide if I buy the service. No politicians, lawyers, freaky cyberrights nerds need to bother.
You want politically controlled net services, you hate "big companies" and "cartel power"? Go to China, there the politician decide what the net looks like and how it works. And if China would pull the impossible and implement democracy and still keep the socialist, politically governed system, I doubt it would make much difference to what it is today. Market freedom is even more important than democracy. I'd rather have the first (like Singapore) than the second only (impossible actually), if I can't have both.
So deciding by the feeling in this thread the billion people who can not change their Exchange running corporations MUST not use Linux on their laptops? So much for the year 2007 as the year of the Linux laptop. It is more like "2007 - the year of the Linux for geeks independent of de facto corporate IT culture".
More seriously, we have people using Ubuntu in our company, and they are happy to use OWA with Firefox. Bigger problems with us are writing DL DVDs, Bluetooth and Nokia mobiles, bad Linux Skype, bad Linux Cisco VPN, problems with WEP and WPA, problems with PointSec hard disk encryption: all fancy new hw and and all non-FOSS integration is generally a pain, not only MS stuff.
I would love the "Over thirty department", if it would have games, that handle relevant modern day psychological and social problems and challenges. That have novel, deep insights into relationships with friends, bosses, parents, spouses, children. I would love games that handle realistic social and political problems in a non-trivial, perhaps thought-provoking ways. Games aware of academic philosohical tradition and debating the limits of our knowledge and the true nature of the world around us without worn-out clichés of pop culture. Games rooted in modern academic understanding of psychology, economics and science.
I would love a single game that is worth playing even if you need to choose between a) working more hours with good extra money, b) spending more time with your beloved kids/spouse, c) exercising/sports d) any other entertainment or e) playing games.
I would love just one game that is not a glorified, graphically decorated 3-D board game/puzzle/Pac-Man with almost non-existent emotional impact, except "I found the secret way/key/lever" or "I was fast/clever enough to manouver my opponent".
Just a note: I tested this again just right now with Sonera network here in Finland and I got very steady ~200 kbit/s with GPRS/EDGE and speeds varying form moment to moment from 150 kbit/s to 300 kbit/s with UMTS. So it is possible to have a good EDGE coverage. You just need not to overload or over-size your cells. About cost-benefit analysis of EDGE vs. UMTS, it is harder to say.
The beta is high quality. Suddenly I can watch a dozen channels of nearly TV quality content, which currently is strictly per-episode on-demand P2P streaming (more scalable not-on-demand P2P "multicast channel" type streaming will come only later). And there are ads, a business model and commercial TV programs (Fith Gear car shows and GONG anime being the best ones). Picture quality is surprisingly good, so is tolerance of bad connections. Compared to podcasting it is really fun to be able to access everything RIGHT NOW! In practice it beats Democracy every possible way. The content comes primarily from P2P to other clients, but Joost company has seeding "Long Tail Servers" to gurantee the availability of even the less popular streams.
Note that 3GPP rel. 7 standard will define "EDGE Evolution" which makes the EDGE speed 2-3 times faster. That's a good, cheap, and POWER SAVING alternative for a future iPhone model. Apple will of course still consider further upgraded models with GSM/UMTS path (W-CDMA and HSDPA/HSUPA) technologies, but they consume more battery and the results may vary.
I typically get about the same speed with EDGE and 3G, country wide here in Finland. The real speed depends on the network congestion. Anyway the capped limit in current UMTS phones (my Nokia N70) and networks (all the non-HSDPA UMTS networks I know, which is 90% of the UMTS world) is 384 kbit/s, so it is not much better than the max ~256 kbits/s of standard EDGE.
And the real life results with the HSDPA supporting new handsets and networks will vary. With bad coverage or congestion you will not benefit much of it. So even in the near future (~5 years), the difference between EDGE and UMTS versions will not be so big.
And before EDGE gets really old and undesirable, many things may happen and change the picture: Wimax, xMax, whatever radio; SIP, Skype, XMPP, whatever VoIP. VoIP changes the picture radically: you don't have to necessarily implement legacy technology (GSM/UMTS, CDMA/EVDO) anymore, because now any acccess point with any (radio) technology works with your VoIP.
Every VoIP system needs a PSTN gateway. So it doesn't matter, which standard you use. I can call every user of every VoIP standard with SkypeOut, through the PSTN gateways, as long as they support that. And anybody with a PSTN gateway can call me in my SkypeIn number. All systems need to provide similar means. SIP sucks, we don't need it for interoperability, which it provides in theory but not in practice.
PSTN/SS7/ISDN/PCM is the inter-operability standard, much like SMTP is for Internet mail. SIP, Skype, XMPP, whatever they are just like POP, IMAP, MS Exchange protocols, Lotus Notes mail standars: they only matter locally and do not need to be standard.
We can come up with better future standards or even fix SIP, but in the meantime Skype is far superior to anything else. In the end SIP or IAX2 or something can be used between the various inter-system gateways, but the clients do not need to be one standard only.
Of course, if openness is your religion, then you can not use Skype.
I have called a couple of people today with SkypeOut for international calls. I have chatted with individuals and on the company grpup chat. I am behind a firewall in a private address and so are all my buddies. All this is encrypted, except the POTS part of calls. I can immediately call 7 million of online Skype users. I have SkypeOut, SkypeIn (my GSM phone is in another country currently, I have transferred my calls to SkypeIn), I have Skype voice mail, I can send voice messages to any Skype users, I can send/receive SMS, and whatnot...
I also have Gizmo and X-lite and some other SIP clients installed, and Gizmo even allows free calls to many POTS phones. But for me these are worth testing only. I have trouble finding people's SIP addresses, if they have any, and then trouble making the clients call each other. I have trouble with firewalls and private addresses. There is no encryption. There is only a limited basic service. SIP sucks big time, and needs to be forgotten, before a million engineers waste their career on it. Come up with something better instead, if you want to have an open source competitor for Skype. Jabber, Jing, whatever, maybe they can have a try.
>Please tell me, are you being paid to write these things? Because if you are not, perhaps you should be. In some ways, your message >is quite well crafted, and links very nicely with the PR campaign being waged by the energy industry. If I were waging a publicity >campaign against action on global warming, I think it would be very effective to hire a few dozen full time employees to post >message to discussion boards like Slashdot. After all, these messages are read by tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
I am flattered in a way. But I am more deeply saddened by the paranoia in here. No, I am not payed.
There is no perfect market with perfect information, and nobody claims so, certainly not us libertarians. It is evident, that big business means big interest for many people, but so does big government (which typically has much more money than any companies). Also big grass roots movements mean big personal interests for many people, if not financially then at least emotionally. Everybody is biased. So who do you trust?
We really have this thing called the scientific community. It does not matter so much what the media says, or what the man in the street thinks is common sense (Einstein once said: "common sense" is just 200 years old science). Scientific community largely (and hopefully) lives its own life independent of media. Even Monbiot in TFA is not claiming, that the conservative think-thanks would do or sponsor fake science, they just claim that they mispresent basically sound scientific research.
Read the meteorologists. The truth really is, that we can not forecast the weather, not for two weeks, and certainly not for years or centuries to come. There are lots of uncertainties in meteorological research. Maybe it is time to do something about the climate change, but we must watch the costs of the measures taken, while doing more research. If the Earth atmosphere would be in such a volatile balance, that some extra CO2 can crash it, life would not have sustained millions of years here. The atmosphere must have cross-stabilizing effects, which keep it tolerable when any one component of the system is changing.
It is quite cleat that the industrial revolution has increased the CO2 level in the air.
It is suggested, but less clear, that the atmosphere is warming.
It is even less clear, that the CO2 is warming the atmosphere.
It is in no way clear, that the net effect of this warming will be negative.
It is absolutely unclear, if there are any good measures that we can take to stop this potential man made harm.
If there are some good measures, nobody has done any serious research about the time preference: whether we should invest money now to fight the warming, or whether we should invest ten times more after 50 years, when we know more. (With an interest rate of 5% these both choices cost the same in real value.)
It is very costly to limit CO2 output. This cost means worse living standards for billions of people, it means more human suffering. You can not just light-heartedly decide to enforce the Kioto protocols. It is a drastic measure. If man is acting as God when supposedly spoiling the atmosphere, men and women are also acting as Gods when they impose Kioto measures upons others, preventing them from raising out of their economical misery.
Well, there is always some sort of BASIC available. And it is good, because you can really build your system incrementally and interactively one line a time. Here are all the keystrokes you need. No editors, IDEs or compile cycles!
.field_in_default_window -textvariable a .field_in_default_window .button_under_it -text "Click here" -command {set a "you clicked"} .button
<Launch the BASIC interpreter from menu>
10 a=0 <Enter>
20 a=a+1 <Enter>
30 print a
40 IF a < 10 THEN GOTO 10 <Enter>
<fix errors by retyping the line with its number>
A little different, arguably easier, arguably much more elegant would be to use Tcl:
<Launch Tclsh from menu>
set a 0 <Enter>
while {$a < 10} {incr a; puts $a} <Enter>
And if you want to do windows and graphics, there is NO OTHER WAY to teach modern GUI programming for 10 year old kids except Tk with wish. All other methods are 100 times more complex:
set a "button not clicked"
entry
pack
button
pack
You can of course always use LOGO, but is arguably a "toy" language only, and the graphics is not much easier than tk, really.
Actually teaching Bash is not a bad option. And that, if anything, is very interactive, and very general purpose and real life stuff. And you can do endlessly fun stuff with test, expr and text manipulation tools.
The study says, that Linux endorsement by big players like governments and Microsoft rivals could allow Linux to win the final battle over MS. So it is NOT making a simple conclusion that Linux will remain playing the second fiddle. Read it, it is good, if you have any capability to understand some economics.