Re: NHS privatisation + IT (was [Sheflug] Computing)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Alastair" == Alastair Donlon <adonlon [at] netsoc.ucd.ie> writes:

    Alastair> In particular, this is important for third world
    Alastair> countries,schools and cash stgrapped countries. Second
    Alastair> hand machines are worth practically nothing, because
    Alastair> Mr. Gates et al. have forced everybody into a two year
    Alastair> upgrade cycle by producing bloated software that will
    Alastair> only run on machines with a 1Thz processor and 4 billion
    Alastair> GBytes of RAM. We don't need to follow his lead.

But that's exactly rms's point of principle.  Anybody can unbloat the
software because the source is open.

The real problem is not that there's no supply of unbloated software.
There's plenty of unbloated software, and there would be more if
people saw it being used.

It's that there's no effective demand.  Third world countries?  Most
of them tax charity hardware at the border at list price plus bribe.
But for the Ministers, nothing less than the latest Intel paperweight
is allowed on their desks.  Schools?  Real computing scares the
instructors, let alone the schoolmasters, into browning their panties.
Keep those things out of here!  Give Etch-a-Sketch in 32-bit graphics-
accelerated color!  Cash strapped?  Poland recently handed a few
companies a tax bill for "charitable receipts" when they downloaded
Debian, using the price of "comparable" MSFT software to establish
value.

    Alastair> What we need is a _distinct_ speed/memory/diskspace
    Alastair> advantage over Winblows apps to make a significant
    Alastair> difference in the world.

We've got that.  That's why Apache and Emacs/vi and TeX have such
large shares of their respective markets.  No?

But people want bloatware in office apps.  Hardware is cheap; the
training and willingness to design a logical page layout, rather than
position every header by hand until it looks good, are very expensive.
That's why people like us can afford all these toys---we're well-paid
simply because we can write keyboard macros in Emacs and vi, and 99%
of the world can't.

People like knowing that their HTML is an impenetrable mess.  They
feel like they've got their money's worth when they look at the "HTML"
output from MS Wart.  The output from PSGML doesn't feel very good: "I
could write _that_ by hand, what am I paying for!"

As usually, you need to fix the people before you can give them
appropriate technology.

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