2010 July 28 archive at Robert Pogson

Archive for July 28th, 2010

Austria Gets FLOSS in Education

Published by Robert Pogson July 28th, 2010 in Linux in Education and technology. 1 Comment

“Schwarzinger finds that schools in Austria are increasingly turning to OpenOffice. The Austrian ministry of Education is supporting this move, paying the schools 10 Euro for every PC that uses this suite of open source office productivity tools.” Wow! and a bunch of schools are using GNU/Linux.

Lower costs, flexibility, and support for open standards would be my guess as to the causes. The one barrier mentioned is that IT workers are still more familiar with that other OS but these moves indicate that is changing. I like the fact that the government is actually paying schools to use OpenOffice.org. The advantage to the government is that they will have future citizens and employees familiar with OpenOffice.org and since the government pays for licensing that other OS and its Office suite, this saves them money. Say that other Office costs the government $50 per PC. By bribing the schools to use OpenOffice.org $10 the government saves $40 per PC not getting Office and increases the proportion of schools using OpenOffice.org. The schools actually get an income to cover the trivial cost of installing OpenOffice.org so they have some slush for their IT programme or whatever is their priority for spending. That’s brilliant.

- Robert Pogson

Candace Hoeppner

Published by Robert Pogson July 28th, 2010 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

Candace Hoeppner has done a lot of work to see that the registration of long-guns ends in Canada and she still is working hard to see that a couple of votes in the House of Commons approve her private member’s bill, C-391. She had a good interview about the process. As usual, keep in touch with your MP to support the bill. She says a number of NDP and possibly one Liberal are likely to vote for the bill but the Liberal leadership is asking all Liberals to oppose the bill. We shall see in September whether the bill goes to the Senate this year.

- Robert Pogson

The Dell Dance

Published by Robert Pogson July 28th, 2010 in technology. 4 Comments

Yes, Dell has shipped a lot of GNU/Linux but, no, they don’t make it easy.

Google finds five hits for “site:dell.ca ubuntu”, some of which are dead and the “choose OS” thingie does not list ubuntu.

Google finds 37000 hits for “site:dell.com ubuntu”.

Does that make sense to anybody? Is Dell a global corporation with the corporate knowledge that GNU/Linux does well in and outside the USA? Does Dell actually know how to sell stuff? Imagine a car dealer with “Keep Out” signs all around the lot. Image a fish monger with huge signs saying “Our fish stink!”. That’s what Dell is doing with Ubuntu and GNU/Linux.

- Robert Pogson

Tablets

Published by Robert Pogson July 28th, 2010 in technology. 8 Comments

To me tablets are pills I swallow from time to time or the thingies the UPS drivers have me “sign” on.

This is July, 2010 and in this Year of ARM, the tablets are coming. KMART will sell some. This is a new price-point, too, $150. That makes them affordable by most KMART customers and they should move a lot. I guess KMART never got the memo they should not give shelf-space to GNU/Linux…

This second half of 2010 should be quite hot for such devices. The manufacturer, Augen, makes all kinds of consumer gadgets and is not a “partner” of M$ and so in uninhibited by taxes and exclusive dealing with M$. Their retail partners may be uninhibited too. KMART sells products from M$, too, but may not have gotten the message. Interestingly Augen and KMART push Android and not ARM. Perhaps it is the year of Android, too.

I have been predicting such moves for months. ARMed OEMs will spring out of the woodwork pushing all kinds of ARMed thingies and selling them everywhere at much lower prices than Wintel can compete. By the end of the year normal PCs should be shipping with ARM and GNU/Linux. This is more than a month before school starts. Expect a big sales push now and just before Christmas in North America and Europe. Expect a big sales push in the rest of the world for the next year… Expect M$’s “partners” to be clamouring to get on the ARM/GNU/Linux bandwagon within the year. They will not put up with M$’s drag much longer.

- Robert Pogson