Posted on 23/3/2004, 6:40 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
So Linux is the new-fangled word in Malaysia. Or would that be “affordable PC”, now with several companies getting into this, right after the PC Gemilang campaign/project was launched. We now have a “PC Mesti Beli” with an AMD XP 2200+, and a 60GB disk, and to cream it all off HP might want to join the bandwagon.
That’s 3 competing projects, all with Linux. The PC Mesti Beli one is coming with RH9 – which runs out of support this coming April – but its administered by the same company that did the Thai Linux roll-out, and there’s TimeDotCom helping with connectivity. HP wants to use TurboLinux (why?).
Chandra Devi thinks this is a piracy boost (in her article “Prospects of ‘Affordable PC’). I see Nan Phin comment that training is “crucial” and must be “affordable”.
Hardly affordable, when you see the MNCC offering an OSS101 Train the Trainer programmer for 5.5 days, at RM1,800. Bloody hell, some of those notes are mine. And in a couple of weeks, you don’t even need to spend RM1,800, as all this will be free.
Posted on 23/3/2004, 5:00 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Cynthia Peterson has a fairly well-written article titled: “Is Open Source Worth It?“, but what caught me as surprising is what Butt Wai Choon, the managing director of Microsoft Malaysia had to say about open source’s place in this world: “…There is always a place for OSS, and it’s within the academia.”
Is that why Microsoft is ramping its campaign so hard in academia to make sure that students stay far away from Linux? Is that why for USD$5 you can buy Windows XP in American universities? Or at Monash Australia, get XP and the .NET developer tools for free?
While the product of knowledge and talent isn’t free (it seems to be the case in the open source world to some degree), what talent is Microsoft Malaysia contributing to the betterment of Microsoft products? And while the government is supposed to remain neutral on platforms of choice, and this should be left to the people, do we have election campaigns which tell us which party is interested in software? No.
Sure, there are people that like what Microsoft do, but thats because they’re forced into it. Buy a PC, it comes with Windows preloaded. Wow. Do you have a choice but to like it, as an average end-user?
Posted on 22/3/2004, 3:25 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
It’s great to note – Apple’s got a new Spoken Interface utility, thats part of Universal Access. This is a screen-reader, that will be available in the next release of OS X for free; blind users might find buying Macs a lot better now!
A little blurb at diveintomark is rather useful, as there are links to the Apple developer docs. I’ve signed up to become a beta tester, and all this made me find a new interesting site: Macaccessibility.
Timely news all of this, as here we are now writing a DAISY Player, that will work on Windows, Linux, and hopefully OS X – though it might be X11 based, so I’ll start polishing up on my Cocoa skills. Ack, this probably means OpenOffice.org on OS X is not accessible as well.
Posted on 18/3/2004, 5:10 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
FNU #8 is out. In this issue, I cover the official release of Fedora Core 1 for AMD64 platforms, a new SELinux mailing list, many beginners tips, getting Fedora installed via a Promise SATA controller, and more. Congrats to aoliva with his new baby.
OK, I’m off, India here I come. Doesn’t help to read that an arriving tourist gets killed in Delhi.
Posted on 16/3/2004, 10:27 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
GNOME 2.6 release notes are what I’ve been doing for most of the day. We have quite a lot of modules I notice :)
Interesting GNOME Translation Statistics that have those cool graphs and what have you not. GNOME 2.6 release party is being planned, and it should be on the 24th of March. Maybe we can run one in Malaysia on the 25th of March, when there’s this AOSG thing happening at APIIT.
Posted on 15/3/2004, 10:09 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
OOo also now has a 64bit child workspace; I’m wishing to play with this sometime soon. Woes getting the latest 20040329 to build; sandbox was giving issues so I removed sandbox/unxmacxp.pro and that built. Had to install ANT (fink had ANT 1.5.1, which is too old). Build died when it came to rhino this time (so will probably debug this soon).
We’re looking for release names for OOo now. Today was also the day my IZ privileges disappeared, but they came back not long after writing to mh. Some heated discussion at authors@user-faq with regards to ooocommunity; I agreed to merge the uFAQ but only when it gets exported to the OOo site; I don’t support forks or anything silly like that. Least of all, keeping it at the DD server.
Need some OOo marketing material? That’s a good article. Otherwise, its interesting to note that HP tries out PC Gemilang-styled roll-out’s too. Cheap, Mandrake Linux based stuff.
