Saturday 17 March 2007
The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization
Is it just my imagination or is there a lot of negativity and despondency going about in just about every aspect of Western Life. Not the physical poverty that is so endemic in the third world but a poverty of soul?
Saturday 10 March 2007
If you had to chose and learn a set of applications and tools on a computer which ones would you chose?
I'm putting forward this list as a discussion point but at the same time advocating them for universal use particularly in education throughout the world.
I've set some criteria that I believe are important for it brings us back to the underlying purpose of computer systems, that is to be tools to extent human capabilities not to be money magnets for hardware and software companies who are lead by and employ people who either never knew ( a sad observation on the state of education and credentialization ) or ignore key issues such as usability, functionality, purpose, value for money, ethics and a host of other factors. Users should not be concerned over CPUs, chipsets, or other internals of computer systems neither should they select an operating system as their key choice.
It is what I want to do with a computer that should dictate operating system and hardware factors. I propse that the applications that users should learn should be independent of platform issues.
The office user is best served by insisting on using:
The developer should maximise their productivity and product dispersion by using:
VIM Full featured editor
EMAC Yet another full featured editor
NVU WYSIWYG HTML tool
GNU lots of ported software & bash for all platforms.
and other cross-platform tools
With these we could all save time, effort, money and share a lot.
I've set some criteria that I believe are important for it brings us back to the underlying purpose of computer systems, that is to be tools to extent human capabilities not to be money magnets for hardware and software companies who are lead by and employ people who either never knew ( a sad observation on the state of education and credentialization ) or ignore key issues such as usability, functionality, purpose, value for money, ethics and a host of other factors. Users should not be concerned over CPUs, chipsets, or other internals of computer systems neither should they select an operating system as their key choice.
It is what I want to do with a computer that should dictate operating system and hardware factors. I propse that the applications that users should learn should be independent of platform issues.
The office user is best served by insisting on using:
- Open Office
- Full featured word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and vector drawing tool.
- The Gimp
- Full featured graphics package
- NVU
- WYSIWYG HTML tool
- Scribus
- Desktop Publishing System
- Firefox
- The web browser
- Thunderbird
- Email client
- Audacity
- Sound Engineering
- MoinMoin
- Personal Wiki
The developer should maximise their productivity and product dispersion by using:
and other cross-platform tools
With these we could all save time, effort, money and share a lot.
Friday 23 February 2007
This has been a very long time coming.
I've been toying with the idea of creating an online college specializing in this computing and computer related for some time. I've seen so much indifferent teaching and learning materials for computing it is no wonder that people have been put off. I feel now's the time to make a comeback. What do you think?
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