Linux beats MS-Windows in India

The penguin wins on security & price, which are two points in which MS would have to be swimming strenuously uphill to hope to match.

This mentions the Indian state of Kerala’s decision to fly with the penguin:

Running a Windows desktop PC has become increasingly annoying for users who must cope with spyware, adware, viruses, security patches, upgrades, crashes, reboots.

...and their education minister went on to say...

We have decided that we will use only free software for computer education in Kerala schools. We have implemented the Linux platform in high schools; it will be implemented in other schools step by step.

Another excellent micro-quote:

Kerala is following the footsteps of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Goa, West Bengal, and Delhi, who are also in the thick of bringing Linux to schools.

That’s a fair chunk of India named there, already.

I wonder if/when Australia will wake up and follow?

Comments

Anonymous said…

You sliced out the bit where Richard Stallman has visited very frequently over 5 years and obviously worked on the government very hard also. He in fact has adopted this Indian state to focus on. I am not saying it is good or bad but this was not an independant decision nor one done in isolation.

Pity Linus and Richard have very different views on GPL 3 and Lunix being licensed under it

05 September, 2006 05:28

Leon RJ Brooks said…

One wonders about influence on the status in places like Redmond (Washington).

06 September, 2006 21:47

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

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Plantagenet Penguinista

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