Just Stepped off Again

Breathing life into an old laptop
Scalpel, please!
Life with Linux
I considered using a different distribution, but decided on Ubuntu again.

I continue to be intrigued with Open Source. In fact, for some reason (I’ve just blogged about it once), I’ve been asked to lead a round table discussion about OSS at the upcoming TechForum event in Chicago next week. I’m certainly going to have a lot of questions and plan to learn a lot. I guess that’s what a roundtable moderator is supposed to do.

Yesterday, I bought a 40gb hard drive for an old Sony VAIO laptop I used for presentations many years ago (two G4 Powerbooks ago). The machine has been in mothballs since my daughter finally got tired Of my having to reinstall Windows on the machine every three weeks. She insisted on using KaZaa, which insisted on flooding the 6gb hard disk with muck. That was at least three years ago.

Anyway, the drive worked (after reinstalling it twice — read my BIO, I’m not a techie), and the VAIO is not running Ubuntu, very slickly, I might add. I can’t figure out how to cut off the touch pad as a mouse clicker, but perhaps tonight. My plan is to use the old laptop in some of my presentations, to demonstrate the viability of OSS as a teaching and learning tool. My only problem is that the thing weighs about nine pounds.

Anyway, my point in writing this post is that I’m still using my G4 Powerbook to write it. There is no comparison. Open Source is very cool and a fantastic set of tools that might go a long way toward solving some pretty vexing problems that are critical to our future, that of getting contemporary tools and contemporary information into the hands of children who are being prepared for the future. I’ll continue to use and talk about OSS. But it’s not OSX and I remain a Mac Man!

I read an interesting line in Edutopia this morning, a quote from John Gage, vice president and chief researcher of Sun Microsystems’s Science Office. He said,

We’re in a knowledge economy, and we’ve known about that for years. But for some odd reason, we take it for granted. That’s fundamentally flawed.

Other countries see education as an investment, but we see it as a cost!

Our task should not be so much about finding a cost-efficient way to equip our children with contemporary information technologies. Instead, we should realize that equipping our children to learning for their future is worthy of investing in.

2 thoughts on “Just Stepped off Again”

  1. David,

    It is ironic that you are talking about Open Source and then saying that you still have your Apple Powerbook. Well you are then still running an open source based distribution. OSX is based on Free BSD and you can download Apples open source project at opendarwin.org. As for others using open source anyone that uses Google is using open source because Google runs on their own Linux distribution. Linux is great and Linux is something that helps solve the digital divide and a lot of other things that schools are facing. One thing that is great about Open Source is that is all about sharing. Just some thoughts.

    Tadge

  2. Tadge,

    Point taken. I think that something very interesting is going on with open source, something that is, for lack of a better way of saying it, — changing the rules. Microsoft can very logically argue against open sources. However, it can only base those arguments on assumptions that may no longer be in affect.

    This is going to be a very interesting thing to watch.

    Thanks again, from my Mac in my hotel.

    — dave —

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