Old Fogies Grok Openness, OK?
The Telegraph is a bastion of, er, right-thinking people; it also has an age profile that is similarly to the right. So I was astonished to read this review of the dinky little Asus Eee PC (I want one, I want one), which says things like this:Asus has kept the cost down by using open-source software – it runs a Linux operating system rather than Windows, although future versions will be available with Windows; uses OpenOffice (oppenoffice.org) for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations; and has the excellent Firefox web browser for surfing the internet.
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Asus assures me that most peripherals, such as printers and iPods, will work fine, as long as you download the necessary Linux driver.
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At just over £200, people may be weighing it up against other options, such as an entry-level "normal" laptop, compromising an element of portability for additional computing functionality. Dell's laptops, for example, start at around £329 if you opt for one running the Linux Ubuntu operating system, or £399 for one running Windows.
In other words, it treats GNU/Linux, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and open source as, well, normal. If this kind of stuff is appearing in the Telegraph - and the retired colonels aren't choking on the kedgeree when they read it - we're truly making progress.
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5 comments:
or able seamen.p
Why the surprise?
I've read the Telegraph for a long time now, and wouldn't have associated it with old fogies, nor am I much surprised to see an article about the Eee Pc.
Which paper(or website) would you normally use for news?
Perhaps I'm showing my age, but the Telegraph has been famous for its age-challenged profile - and its efforts to rejuvenate it - for decades now. Maybe they succeeded...
For news I use either news.bbc.co.uk, or the aggregators like Google News (especially for foreign language news, for which it is unbeatable).
No, I believe I can just remember an ill-fated attempt of theirs to attract a younger audience...
Electronic Young Telegraph(EYT) which probably succeeded in getting me interested in computers if little else.
The only relevant google result I was able to find was from the creator of the basic games that were included on the Floppys/CDs...
http://www.mediakitchen.co.uk/about.htm
I'm enjoying your articles, it's hard to find people that understand Open Source or even basic thing such as why they should use one Internet browser over another.
Yes, I vaguely remember EYT.....
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