Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy 265
Glyn Moody writes "Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty, and — inevitably — Microsoft has agreed to a 'special price' for Windows XP used in Russian schools."
In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Informative)
Free software costs too much? Really?
Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Interesting)
Retraining is also hard. Schools (at least in America) generally have a large amount of dead weight. Teachers long past their prime who teach boring classes who are apathetic towards students but who have been tenured and can't be fired without having to fight through the unions. These teachers have no desire to get a new keyboard, let alone an entirely new OS or new ways of doing things. In fact I'm sure a lot of them would rather have paper grades and typewriters. So when the price is $20,000 to switch to Linux $50,000 to upgrade Windows or just $0 to do absolutely nothing, many schools choose the free option especially in lower grades.
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Most folks here talk about "Oh, Linux is free!" but sorry, that's bullshit. Yeah the OS may be free, but you ever priced a Linux Guru?
I'm feeling my years. My grandmother has quite a few of them on me. It took me an hour to install her Linux over a year ago, and it still works fine. Nothing bad happened. I showed her how to install software and now she's got quite a lot of it. One of these days she's going to ask me to debug her wget scripts. Grandma never did learn to drive but she can MySpace like nobody's business.
Where I'm at Linux geeks are more common than the other kind so they're not expensive. Your mileage may vary.
Windows admins are cheap
Not always, but sometimes, you do get what you pay for. The problem with Windows admins is that you also need a LOT of them. Just techs to clean malware and fix twitchy software is >1% of headcount for some large organizations. IMHO most Windows admins see the internal workings of the machine as a "black box" and they are neither able to nor interested in understanding the lower level of activity that drives the magic blinky lights. Linux geeks are a different breed indeed.
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If all they want to do is run a browser and possibly Open Office, anyone should be fine with Linux... but what if you, say, want to install new hardware? How about a printer? New WiFi card/dongle? Oooooh, how about one of those nifty wireless WAN thingamajiggies?
Or how about clicking the "Update to latest release" button? Tried that yesterday on a Virtualbox VM of Ubuntu 9.04, and after an hour of downloading and installing crap, the VM rebooted and got stuck in an endless loop of flashing text - I'm having
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...then such a person is going to run into problems unless they are their own guru.
There is simply no avoiding this.
They will inevitably plug in a printer into Windows before they've installed the driver. They won't notice the red tape or fully realize what it means.
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That may well be true - however, the fact of the matter is that most of my hardware has problems functioning under Linux. MS may be the big bad wolf here, but they have hardware vendor support, which makes life as a consumer much easier...
I just don't see Grandma picking out her next printer based on whether or not there are working Linux drivers available...
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So when the salesman tells her that the Canon that's on sale for 20% less is even better and will make her photos look "super-duper-realistic", you're fucked.
I'm not buying it...
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Are you serious? Or just jerking my chain?
Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): Dual Monitor support on a 7800GTX, pretty much anything other than USB on my Thinkpad (no proper scrolling, horribly malfunctioning power management, flaky WiFi, flaky HDMI support, FireWire not working at all), my USB audio interface, my WinMo phone (OK, might be unfair to count that one :P). Sure, these things can be made to work, with an hour's worth of t
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You have to spend hours getting windows to work with hardware too unless you get an oem disc which is specifically tailored for the machine you're using... Sometimes that involves registry tweaks by hand (which is even worse than editing commented config files)..
On windows you also have to spend hours installing applications, whereas a modern linux distro will automate that process too.
Whenever i've been setting up machines at work, i've been able to get a linux install to a usable state much quicker than p
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): [list of stuff].
Either you're skilled at picking dodgy hardware, or unlucky, or perhaps you tackled things the wrong way.
Linux and free software are great, but if you're not willing to invest gobs of time to make it actually work, it's not worth it...
Curiously, it's never been an issue for me, and I don't restrict my hardware choices. I also don't regard myself as a Linux guru or expert.
Caldera OpenLinux worked fine on my Dell XPS T450 at home starting about 10 or 11 years ago, and supported all of its hardware, including thinwire ethernet LAN card, 33k modem internet, ATI Rage Pro graphics, HP Deskjet (maybe the HP 720) and HP scanner (I forget which model). This system was finally retired about 4 years ago, although its peripherals were donated to a local school before that.
About 4½ years ago, the beta of Ubuntu Breezy worked immediately and configured all of the hardware on my Sony laptop (which is now 6 years old and running Karmic flawlessly). The wireless LAN, wired LAN, bluetooth, 1920x1200 screen, wireless mouse, etc. were all configured automatically and worked correctly. The HP 4100c scanner and HP PhotoSmart 1218P printer both worked immediately over USB. The only thing I had to add manually was support for the stupid Sony media keys. Before Breezy, this laptop ran SuSE, which admittedly needed more manual setup.
More recently, 64bit Karmic is installed and working on our two no-name desktops, each with core 2 quad, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, ATI4890 with dual screens, wireless keyboard+mouse, Logitech joystick, Wacom graphics tablet, and external speakers. Karmic 32 bit is also on our 5-year-old Dell GX260 with nVidia 9600GT (not used much nowadays, apart from web). The only manual configuration needed for the three desktops was selecting the binblob video driver via the Ubuntu GUI. All four systems had to be told about the network resources (HP7410 printer+scanner, Synology DS207 server, SMC2804 router/firewall) and each other's NFS exports, of course.
I use Windows systems at work; actually I have used Windows since v1, the MS-DOS Executive. In my experience, the investment of non-expert time to get a given functionality on comparable hardware was about the same on successive versions of Ubuntu and on contemporary versions of Windows (2000 or XP). Your experience seems to have been different.
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Hmmm, I can't remember the last time I had to edit the registry to get hardware working properly in Windows... I also refuse to use OEM "recovery discs", because they install so much crapware.
It's just a matter of finding the correct drivers - you don't need to config or tweak very much, because in Windows there's hardly anything you CAN tweak in this regard... if the driver doesn't work, install a different one. Not exactly ideal, either, but drivers not working at all on Windows isn't exactly common these
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Interesting... maybe I really am just unlucky :P
Obviously there are a lot of cases in which the user has no problems at all, and all the drivers are installed automatically without a hitch, leading to a fully functional system with no setup at all - but what about the cases where it doesn't work? All I've gotten for answers so far are, "Well, it worked on my setups," or things along the lines of, "You're a shill!" (see the first AC reply :D)...
There just doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all recipe for sol
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Boring cheap wireless card in my new PC "just works" with vista but I've spent more hours than I really should trying to get it to work in unbuntu to no avail so I have to string a cable across the house when I want to use the net with linux.
I like linux, I like the philosophy, I just know damned well that it has more issues than a girl who starts sobbing for no apparent reason after a few beers.
Now the bright side of linux is that it tells you when something is wrong, it tells you even when nothing is wron
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Admins aren't cheap, lackeys are. You don't need a lot of admins, you probably need a few lackeys to deal with users.
Admins aren't the people dealing with users, those are basic tech support people. Admins automate to the point that they can cover a LOT of administration by themselves.
This applies to any OS, Windows, Linux , or whatever. if you need a lot of 'admins' then you don't have admins.
Example: National cable company, 7 admins with 24 hour coverage, for 3 million subscribers, for every system th
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, Microsoft is moving *more* stuff to the CLI. Look at Exchange 2007; half the management tasks can *only* be carried out from the Powershell management interface and it looks like they're headed the same way with most of the new versions of their core apps (including Server core, obviously).
Not that it's a bad thing (I love Powershell, having been stuck with VBScript for automating Windows admin tasks for years).
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> "Linux is free if your time is worthless"
Why try to make that Linux specific? It's more like, all desktop computers require maintenance. In my experience, Windows computers need more of it. Presumably, the IT guy would not be calling you when he hit a Windows bug he couldn't handle? Well, then the situation is clear, and requires no Linux bashing to justify. He only wanted Windows, and was willing to pay for the licenses. Done.
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This guy was such an old fossil he wanted to know where to input the DOS commands
Yes, because a DOS-box is *so* far removed from a bash terminal, there's simply no comparison.
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I have seen both sides of this fence. My conclusion is that this depends on the area of the country.
Here in Austin, there are plenty of top notch Linux, BSD, AIX, Solaris, OS X, and Windows administrators. So, if I were handed the plans for a school computer lab, depending on the concepts being learned, Linux would be just as good as Windows, because the school can always find someone at UT (University of Texas) who is versed in Linux, and can keep their systems running once my task is done.
But, in other
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For me it's simple, teach people how to protect themselves.
But probably it's just me and the old "use common sense" doctrine.
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WTF?
When did you last use Linux?
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I don't know about the GP, but I've never done any command line or text file management of the Debian box I'm typing this on (up about a year now). Until I read your post I hadn't thought about at all but yeah, things have changed quite a bit in the last few years. I still wget on the command line and edit files by hand for programming projects, but for system admin? Not any more. I can't remember how long it's been.
Now, to config a server to give some options to a thousand netbooted clients whether to
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Well, I use Ubuntu server everyday and its default install doesn't even come with a graphical UI. So I use the CLI for pretty much all administration. For some boxes I'll throw on webmin, for Oracle I'll connect to a remote X-server, usually my laptop but there is a lot of cli there too. Make no mistake, we're talking about administration here and in the administration you expect to use a CLI if you're working with Linux.
There are those of us that appreciate the simplicity of running a few shell scripts fo
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Informative)
Right Click the network manager icon in the top tool bar.
Select EDIT Connections
Select DSL (assuming that's the type of connection your using PPPOE for, but it should work regardless)
Click Add
Enter username and password and any other settings required.
Connect
???
Profit!
Seriously dude I just bridged my DSL Modem and connected using the native PPPOE client in Ubuntu. No command line needed.
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Right click NetworkManager (it's on the Menubar), select "Edit Connections", click the "DSL" tab, then the "Add" button. Follow the prompts for your service provider's settings.
I'm amazed you're being modded "Insightful" for being wrong. I guess it shows just how much Slashdot has been infested with Microsoft evangelists.
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Honestly, I run Mint and Ubuntu and I rarely drop to the CLI unless I just want to get something done faster. The GUI is capable of pretty much everything I've needed to do in the past 2-3 years.
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Every single major Linux distribution I have used in the past 5 years can be completely configured from X-Windows. And with UNIX variants, once configured, they stay configured unless someone messes with them, some outside factor (router changed its IP), or hardware changes/failures affect the box.
I am an old UNIX person, so I prefer popping an xterm (or even better, control-alt-shift-F2 for a console TTY) and editing files or using curses based utilities. However, these days, you don't have to know the i
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Yes, virtually everything these days can be done from a graphical frontend if you so desire, unix has the (false) reputation that you need to use the cli because often the cli is better, and when a clueless user asks an experienced user for help, the experienced user will naturally use the cli.
One of the biggest problems these days however, is clueless users running systems... They have no real experience, no in depth knowledge, have no idea whats going on underneath and only have a surface understanding of
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Free software doesn't mean no costs. It just means cheaper, and usually only in long term. You have installation, training, support, cost of porting existing applications and data, etc.
TCO for Windows involves the risk of 17 years in a siberian prison [russiankafe.com].
TCO for Linux involves asking some people to work an hour late one day a week for a few months.
Plugging that into my ROI calculator gives a time to recover investment of... 1.2 milliseconds.
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Part of the costs they are looking at is to train everyone to use it. Like it or not, not everyone can just dive right into an OS. For most folks on /. it's easy, but for someone who's intimidated by a PC, not so much. They also have costs invested in current software that will have to be replaced, be that with OSS, or with some pay solution. It takes time (people hours) to replace software, and then time to train on the new software in addition to the OS training.
Last but not least, you have to have a supp
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:4, Interesting)
I've said this before in this thread so I'll cut you some slack and refer to my other posts. In Soviet Russia manpower is cheap. It's a very top-down management system. People are so resourceful that some of them don't just build their own schools from raw trees, they have to go out and earn the scratch to buy the tools to do so with manual labor or barter. This doesn't just apply to schools - in some ways their space program works the same way. It's terrible to think about what an engineer will do to actually get to perform some engineering. The whole ROI thing does not work in Russia. If people protest that they need Windows it's because they have been paid to do so or incentivised to do so by other people who have been paid to motivate them to protest, and even in that they accept some risk. In most cases these folks are glad to have books, heat, one computer per classroom and a classroom to teach in. This is nothing close to a free market economy. They achieve great things with these constraints because they are well motivated (inspired) and because they hope to bring about progress. On average, they're also bright because being stupid is in their system more fatal than it is in ours and in this case Darwin wins.
Urban Russia is not like this but Russia is vast and Urban Russia is but a small fraction of the schools and those few are even more politically (and unoficially) motivated.
Russians are very adaptable and resourceful in ways you cannot imagine. The difficulty in switching software systems is absolutely nothing to them. It's background noise. Compared to the difficulties of their normal lives outside of teaching it's not worth considering. Some teachers have not been paid their salaries for years and eke by on donations from the families of their students or in barter where they develop value above and beyond their official duties.
Russia is a very different place than you are used to. So no, overcoming the objections you mount are so trivial to them as to not be worth consideration.
OSS is great, but it is rarely free for non-personal use.
Ok now you're just plain lying. There are some OSS solutions that are not also free, but they're so rare and limited as to be unworthy of consideration. How desperate must you be to lie about the plainly obvious? In FOSS not only can the average user download an operating system and 50,000 useful applications for every endeavor, they can do with it what they will whether it's personal or government or corporate use, without the risk of years in a Siberian prison that Microsoft solutions provide. They can install it on a billion machines and the only restriction is that if they make changes and share them outside their organization they have to include the source code. If they build on BSD they don't even have that problem as they can even sell their innovations for a profit and not share the source code. This may sound harsh to you but as an alternative to using your spare time to turn trees into homes for favored Russians who have cash, it's a slam dunk. The fact that Linux runs well on the legacy hardware they're faced with is just a bonus.
It is very un-Russian to complain unless you are motivated to complain by some promised money. Where is this money coming from?
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You seem to think I am saying they will somehow pay for the OSS itself. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying there are other costs associated with switching an operating system outside of the OSS itself.
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Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, I've reviewed my posts from your reply to the top of the thread and nowhere did I say it was Microsoft's fault. It is an observed fact. It is, and to Russians to whom the blame belongs is irrelevant. They can choose to use free software or they can choose the risk. Microsoft has backed off some for now and so the risk is less, but eventually the risk will return because the software is not free and their Russian channel can never be reliably honest. In the Russian language corrupt government provisioning is so assumed that the reverse must be made explicit. I believe Chinese languages are similarly cynical. The safe choice is to be free forever. Free contains no risk.
If you want to fix the blame on Microsoft for not dropping the suit after finding out that the affected individual was in no way to blame for the piracy, that's on you. I didn't say that.
As to Microsoft's ROI, well, I don't know what to say here. Given the current state of free [ubuntu.com] I can see how they must struggle to prove where they add value - especially when dealing with the malware ecosystem [secureworks.com] mounted against them which at some accounts is larger than the Windows market itself. I'm sure it's hard to deliver on this nine year old commitment [microsoft.com] when you can't even get your network software geeks to check their inputs [softpedia.com] on the most basic service they provide or even read the licenses of the software they publish [theregister.co.uk].
You should probably check the corkboard on the way out of the blog center. I think there's a note there about me. Take your stuff with you when you go or you might not see it again.
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Free software costs too much? Really?
If it works out of the box it is not too much, but maybe they have to localise the software into Russian. Given the differences between the languages, that might not be a trivial task. I don't know what software they need - it might include education apps that are not part of any standard distro.
As others have said, there is also the cost of training, both of the teachers who have to use the computers and the IT departments who must administer them.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual. Also, most Russians are quite adaptable and resourceful - by necessity as they've been more challenged than we have in the west. Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs, and they had to do manual labor to get the tools to work the logs. I'm not kidding. After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch. In short these are not typically your inner-city career button pushers. The ability of Russians to endure travails without complaint that would wreck our average American polar explorer is legendary - they're almost British in this way.
Localization is trivial. I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used. It's just Cryllic alphabet, keywords and fonts anyway. It's not like it's got some fancy top-to-bottom or right-to-left glyph sequence or anything. Lots of Russians use Linux by choice and I'm sure lots of them have figured this out. This isn't Windows: localization has been part of the standard GNU project template for many years.
If they're complaining that they can't do it then it's because they've been paid handsomely to make such a complaint. Otherwise they wouldn't be Russian. Now, who would pay them to do that? And why is anybody listening?
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This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual.
This is simply false. It may hold true for Moscow and a few other large cities (though even then I'm not sure), but most of the country is definitely not multilingual, English or otherwise. There's simply no point in learning it, and whatever schools give you is really basic, and is quickly forgotten for the lack of practice.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:5, Informative)
Russia is a very large country that has a far richer history than the US. A good Russian church has more years of history than our country has.
I am Russian, not American, and I grew up in what we call "province" (i.e. not in a big city). I speak from personal experience, so don't throw WP links at me, especially when they're so out of context. Sure, there is a bunch of local languages - they're about as relevant in Russia as Native Indian languages are in the U.S. Aside from that, everyone speaks Russian, and most people belonging to minority nations don't speak anything but Russian as well (with exception of Caucasus republics, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan).
And schools? Yes, they do teach English there, in theory. In practice maybe 1 out of 5 people taught that way will know English well enough, say, a year after school, to actually read a random English text of moderate complexity. Spoken English is even worse, especially understanding it.
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So ... about on par with the US?
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:4, Informative)
Ok. I've got a real person onsite with with real needs. I'm happy to have an opportunity to help, as I'm sure many other slashdotters would be. How can we help you? Really.
I'm not "on site" anymore - almost a year in Canada now, and while I do not know where I'll settle down eventually, one thing I know for sure is that I'm not planning to return.
How can you help someone else there? In the large scheme of things, money and other donations can be handy locally in some very remote (and consequently backwards) locations, but on the whole lack of funds is not the issue. This isn't to say that Russia is rich, but it's not quite a third-world country, either. Schools mostly have computers (if outdated), and software to run of them (if pirated), for example.
The real problem is the present socio-political system, and more precisely, the corruption that it generates and protects. You can pour as much money as you have into that bottomless pit - most of it will end up in the pockets of people who run the show (and have much more than enough already). That system is what strangles middle class - it's very hard to run a small business there, because bigger fish will always seek to swallow the smaller ones, and they have plenty of money to bribe the bureaucrats with. Tiny middle class means lower wages for working class (they can only go to big business to work, and their negotiating power is consequently diminished), wrecked economy, and government which is the mix of the worst of oligarchic kleptocracy and tyranny of the majority.
The story in TFA is, to some extent, a case of that - the project may have been started to reap the true advantages of FLOSS in education, but in the end, it always devolves to a cash grab by corrupt government officials and their privileged businessmen friends. Large parts of money were almost certainly wasted like that - it's called "otkat" in Russian, and it's when a government official in charge of a public tender for a particular project will select a more expensive option, because the company backing that option will pay a percentage of its profit directly into his pocket.
By the way, It's also why proprietary will likely win in the end - there is more money to spend there, and therefore "otkat" is larger.
What you, or anyone else outside the country, can do to help that, I truly do not know. The change has to come from within, but I do not see it coming - rather the opposite, things have only been getting worse in the last decade, and seemingly with the silent consent of the majority. Which is part of the reason why I'm out.
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That system is what strangles middle class - it's very hard to run a small business there, because bigger fish will always seek to swallow the smaller ones, and they have plenty of money to bribe the bureaucrats with.
I guess, you didn't get the memo -- in US "middle class" means "all people between about 150% and 2000% average income", in Russia "middle class" means "people who generate income from property but can't manipulate the market through their property".
I can assure you, small businesses in US are thoroughly fucked in all areas where it is possible to run a big business. "Middle class" mostly consists of professionals and middle managers in big businesses.
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This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual.
That sounds like a poor answer for a government mandated, national standard for software. "Sorry, but we couldn't come up with a system in our own language." A great loss for national pride! As an Australian, I know that there would be an uproar if our government tried to foist a software standard for schools which used American English, let alone another language.
Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs ... After that experience figuring out Linux should be a cinch.
Someone from a thousand years ago could build a school from logs, but that doesn't mean to say that they could understand Linux either.
I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used.
That is wh
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This is going to shock you but written English is quite common in Russia and most Russians are multilingual
In the primary grades?
In outland cities and towns or just in Moscow?
Localization is trivial. I believe Russian interface is supported in every Linux variant I've ever used
Only a geek could think that localization of software is trivial because he has solved - or thinks he has solved - the problem in the UI.
Some of these teachers built their own schools from raw logs, and they had to do manual labor
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your little busted arse network at home is not indicative of how a nation wide system roll out occurs ok?
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Ok, stop for a second and re-read what you wrote, but this time pretend you're not someone who is knowledgeable about computers.
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Somebody needs to explain some things to these folks. It's not that hard: you install LTSP on a server, all the clients boot to the network. Install all the software you want on the server. If instead of (or in addition to) thin client/shared desktop you want an image on the desktop you configure the PXE server to dish an installer image.
Ok, stop for a second and re-read what you wrote, but this time pretend you're not someone who is knowledgeable about computers.
Yeah, you're right. Some translation is needed:
You have installed LTSP [edubuntu.org] recently, haven't you?
Special pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, we don't know whether the government was playing politics, or was honest in their intentions. Either way, it's fair to characterise Microsoft's moves as good business for them, but problematic for everyone else.
By problematic, I'd use the analogy of a loan shark giving you a special rate on a new load to get you past the missed interest payment you missed on your last unpaid loan. Sure it resolves the crisis, but the underlying problems and high costs remain.
And speaking of underlying problems and h
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Re:Special pricing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Free (Score:5, Funny)
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"The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991"
Technically, but I bet on Putin bringing it back more than I'd bet on a feeble few believers in democracy succeeding against the entire history of the Russian people. That's almost as tall an order as teaching Muslims that secular freedom is good for anything but overthrowing governments which practice it.
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That's almost as tall an order as teaching Muslims that secular freedom is good for anything but overthrowing governments which practice it.
LOL, if not so true. effin brilliant statement. I will use in the future. Would have moded you up but just HAD to make an "in soviet russia" wisecrack.
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In Soviet Russia, joke misses you!
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Someone come take this guy's geek credentials away.
Donations? (Score:5, Insightful)
It almost smells like sabotage. I imagine MS wouldn't directly do it, but instead pay people to "keep an eye on the project" with a lot of wink-wink. I wonder if there's not a way to donate to the cause?
Where can I send disks? (Score:2)
So where can I send disks? I'm sure if everybody at the Slashdot community burns at least one disk then we should be able to make up the difference.
Anybody have a list of software which we can download and burn? And the address to send it to?
Y
Re:Where can I send disks? (Score:5, Funny)
You're trying to offer DDOS (Disk Delivery Overseas Service) to Russia?
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But in Soviet Russia they DDOS you.
Costs (Score:2, Interesting)
FOSS should seriously be cheaper to roll out than XP. Windows would have to reduce the price to near nothing... Does this say something sad about the usability of FOSS?
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BTW, whoever modded me troll. It was a question, Sorry for wanting to improve FOSS, way to take criticism jackass.
Low'ing price in face of competition not a "trick" (Score:4, Insightful)
Moody says:
Finally, Microsoft has been up to its old tricks of offering special deals for its software
How is that a "trick"? Isn't that what competition is supposed to do--cause vendors to lower price?
Re:Low'ing price in face of competition not a "tri (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't like AC posts? Then you should raise your comment threshold, rather than arguing ad hominem.
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Maybe yes, maybe no.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing [wikipedia.org]
Predatory pricing is a great example of competition at work.
PS. Can I get some of those windows licenses at that price?
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You have to understand, slashdot isn't pro-Linux. Its anti-The Man. And at the moment The Man is Microsoft. Once Microsoft becomes an underdog people will sing its praises as they hate on whoever The Man is of the day.
We need free books first (Score:4, Insightful)
My theory is that computers can do books better than books do books. We can have multimedia experiences yes, but we're so new at knowing how they help people learn, we don't need to consider them at first. We need to do books, and link a course together by the books people need to tackle to get through them. We can have videos that train people like lectures. We can have LOTS of redudandant passive learning eventually. We can even have live tutors through live chat and email. There is a definite revolution in education looming at the horizon, and I hope that I'm not the only one who sees it because I'm horrendous at being able to accomplish big projects on my own, with no funding.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean something like wikibooks?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikibooks.org]
We need free books? Well, no... (Score:2)
Sorry, but you are being really naive. There are two reasons free books are a silly idea:
1. Anyone with any motivation at all can already learn whatever they want on the Internet. The information is not neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations, but it's all fundamentally there.
2. Putting information neatly in order, with careful examples and consistent explanations (i.e., writing a textbook) is a lot of work. Writing a textbook from scratch, in a field where you are an expert,
Re: (Score:2)
For some subjects a book from 1979 is as good as a book from today. This applies especially to mathematics, but also, in the lower grades, to sciences like biology and chemistry. Languages don't change fast enough to warrant a new book more than once every few decades. As for how do I propose that we get people to write free books, look at Wikipedia. It's free and the quality is about the same as Britannica (and it covers far more topics)
I'll Take Overhead for 600 Alex (Score:3, Insightful)
Trebek: This state failed to consider the cost of changing software and training users.
Yakov Smirnoff: What is free market Russia?
Get the hackers involved (Score:4, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia, spam funds school!
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This one was insightful 5 years ago, but nowadays there is broadband outside of Moscow.
i see a pattern... (Score:4, Insightful)
i get the feeling its not just microsoft being "clever" in always offering highly discounted versions as a last resort to prevent a free software takeover. it is also governments who cleverly threat to switch to free software (back up by some actual action), on which microsoft drastically cuts price.
i think the same about china for instance. they wanted to put the whole government and education system on their red flag linux. microsoft now gives them windows+office for a couple of euros (or even less i forgot) per machine.
so i suspect free software is used as a threat in order to make microsoft cut its prices. is that a problem? i think it contributes to free software's growth in the end -- but it is surely not as beneficent as the free software actually being used to run on computers.
Jeopardy (Score:2)
"Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy"
What sort of jeopardy does a Russian School have to be in to qualify to receive free software? Like academic jeopardy or financial jeopardy? Sounds like a good idea to me! ;)
Fix Once, Run anywhere, anyone? (Score:2)
Why are these Russian computer programmers not making applications to fill the gaps. If there is a bug, why not just fix it? Its Russia, they have tremendous talent for coders. Just commit some coders to fixing bugs, then submit them back upstream to the application distributor. If I can file bug reports, so can they, but I never see them actually do it.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that PayPal doesn't work in Russia, they've got their own online payment systems (WebMoney, Yandex Money and so on). While you can convert from PayPal to the Russian online payment systems, the fees are outrageous (about 30%).
Solaris time! (Score:2, Interesting)
If the problem with deploying Linux is not having enough trained professionals, why not go with Solaris? OpenSolaris is free, and Sun offers training for it. Don't know if they have russian solaris training, though. Or they could go through multiple other training sources that are available for Linux. No matter how you put it, paying for windows, no matter how low your discount is, doesn't make sense. For chrissakes - if everyone in Russia were running Linux, wouldn't that get rid of the training problems?
Microsoft's competitive behavior (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really.. it's not robust competition from MS. It's a special temporary deal to try to dissuade them from going to free sw.
Once they're using MS sw, they'll be locked in pretty quickly and can't switch, the price will shoot right back up immediately.
Actually I suspect things are going very well. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Actually I suspect things are going very well. (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.
No, computer users win, too.
I've just recently largely gone back to XP from a combination of using Arch Linux, and FreeBSD since May. Every time I try and use Linux long term, I inevitably end up going back to Windows, purely due to the amount of sheer misery it causes me. Why?
a) The "community." This is the single biggest issue. As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful, myopic, delusional, generally vile human beings on the face of the planet. Stallman's cult, and the people defending it, gets really old after a while. The persistent, ongoing hatred of Microsoft is also as pathetic as it is toxic, especially when it mostly consists of arguments which were relevant in 1999, but really aren't now at all.
The icing on the cake here, is the scenario where the FSF's boosters refuse to accept the fact that the only basis for their belief system is pure, raw Stallmanite mind control. The FSF's perspective isn't based on anything logical, or anything that the neurotypical population remotely cares about.
b) Stability. I bet you'd never expect the time to come when a Microsoft OS could claim to be better than Linux in this department, did you? The time has come. PulseAudio (as but one example) is a disaster, and I also had other programs (such as Xine) crashing under Linux when they didn't under FreeBSD.
c) The need to endlessly screw around with things in order to get them to work. This isn't exactly the same as the stability argument above, but it's close. I realised a couple of days ago, that with Linux or FreeBSD, there's an instinctive expectation with me, for something to crash once or twice, and for me to have to tweak it somehow, before it will work without a problem. In Windows, that is never the case. Everything just works.
Those are the three areas where Linux needs fixing. The cult, the lack of stability, and the need for gratuitous over-configuration. Of the three, the cult is the only one which I fear actually isn't fixable at all.
Free Software For The Windows OS (Score:3, Interesting)
Last year, we discussed here a Russian plan to install free software in all its schools. Seems things aren't going so well. Funds for the project have been cut back, some of the free software discs already sent out were faulty
There is more to FOSS than Linux.
One of the great strengths of the Windows platform is that it has always been licence-agnostic.
The system never frets or complains when you try to install an app that doesn't meet Microsoft's standards of political correctness.
The Linux distro can make you jump through a hoop or two or three before you get to that closed source app or binary driver.
Windows does like to see a signature.
Which makes perfect sense when you realize that there are thousands of independent Windows "repositories" with names like Download.com.
OLPC ran into trouble because of its "all or nothing" attidude.
The education minister was expected to buy into its bundle of hardware, software, and constructivist philosophy of education without any inconvenient doubts or questions.
When the minister took his business elsewhere there was suddenly room in OLPC for XP and MS Office.
The moral of the story being that it isn't always wise to try to take all the apple in one bite.
You can successfully introduce FOSS into the Russian classroom without trying to replace the whole of the existing Windows infrastructure at the same time.
The competition might even force you to look more closely at the quality of your open source product.
It's really simple. (Score:2)
Russia is a country where "money talks", and it talks in ways people in the west are not used to. And, Microsoft has a lot of it.
Corrupt officials get the cream and the people get the creampie.
Free Windows SW is cheap marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In theory, you may think you're right.
In practice - by the time these kids get into management, it's unlikely that anything will even be similar. I grew up on BBC Micros, BBC BASIC and a CP/M word processor in school - and I'm only 30. The entire face of computing changes on a regular basis (e.g. the whole Internet thing becoming popular).
Additionally, you go with whatever makes business sense. If MS makes business sense to you, go with it. If not, then don't. It's quite simple. There are no end of di
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How else can you beat free software?
By ignoring costs for retraining on the new OS, retraining on the new applications, headache costs when the specialized educational/academic/back office software doesn't run on Linux, and so forth?
Re:Special price (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed costs for retraining somehow are never an issue when changing from eg., MS Office 2003 to 2007, or XP to Win7, but are showstoppers when open source software is involved.
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The problem with this is that due to the exclusivity of linux, linux training is also exclusive, and thus costs are high. If linux marketshare would be 90% or more, the prices for linux support and training will most likely be on par (cost wise) with that of Windows, r better.
That's a largely ignored factor. Throwing linux at a whole nation's education system is the best way to cure the dependency on proprietary tie-in, but the hurdle might be high. The problem is that linux isn't gaining market share even