[plug] Linux ideology (was: EduBDO/SIGfest)

[Denis Brown]

At 11:24 27/05/2003 +0800, James wrote:
>In message <5.1.0.14.2.20030527100940.02b5dec0 at cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
>on Tue, May 27, 2003 at 10:35:33AM +0800, Denis Brown wrote:
> > To make this more on-Linux-topic, the above, Kalzium especially, is
>
>Australian advocates may have to consider localisation and accuracy when
>it comes to educational tools. I know nothing about KDE Edutainment, but
>if it were to be demonstrated as an educational resource in Australia
>then surely it needs to be available in Australian English (spelling and
>grammar) and use international standardised units (for example).

Good point, yes.

>Obviously this is something for which commercial Windows application
>developers have spent considerable resources. A specialised tool (such
>as Kalzium) surely needs to be accurate in its areas of speciality (as
>opposed to an encylopaedia, which may have vary amounts of detail and
>accuracy).

Agreed... methinks the developer(s) would benefit from your input :-)


>It concerns me that a good product may be written 'only for KDE' (I
>don't know if that is how it really is, but it sounds like it) because
>that ties it to a particular window desktop -- and isn't that one of the
>things that's philosophically wrong with proprietary locked-in systems?

My omission... I ought to have pointed out that while the application is 
presented as part of the KDE suite, the source *is* open.  One of the FAQ's 
asks about a Windows port.  The answer in summary is that the source is 
available, it runs with the TrollTech Qt library (which is available for 
Windows) and therefore the author sees no reason why such a port should not 
be possible.

>It would be nice to know that the 'back end' logic and data for
>education tools were actually in a shared resource, because then there
>would be fewer separate lots of code and data to develop, and people
>could happily access those resources using whatever desktop (or command
>line) they wished.

Hear, hear. (Or should that be "here, here"?)

>  I realise that KDE may currently have a "competitive
>egde" because no one might bother to extract the data from Kalzium and
>make it available under Windows. But they should be able to do such a
>thing, since it is free software, isn't it?

As above, yes it is.

>  Therefore, surely the
>advantage of having educational tools available with Linux is not that
>those tools are anything proprietary or unique, but that they are
>available in combination with Linux's other advantages. Therefore, they
>need to demonstrate essential competitive as educational tools.

I think we're in agreement on that :-)   Indeed it (non-proprietary) is 
probably the preeminent "selling" point.


>On the topic of accuracy, one of the screenshots at
><http://edu.kde.org/kalzium/screenshots.php>
>contains the following information:
>
>"A mol is a certain quantity of a material. 1 mol of a material contains
>accurately 6.022x10^23 particles of this material. The number
>6.022x10^23 is chosen as the number of objects, because an element
>having the same weight in grams as its atomic weight contains this many
>atoms."
>
>Maybe that is an American definition, because the definition of an SI
>mole (which is what seems to be used in Australian schools and
>universities) would be different. More like:
>
>"The mole is a unit that quantifies the presence of fundamental
>particles of matter (such as atoms or molecules). One mole (1mol) of a
>substance consists of approximately 6.022x10^23 particles (Avogadro's
>number). The mole is convenient because the mass of one mole of an
>element (its molar mass) is equal to its relative atomic mass."

I dips me lid!   If this information was present in an accessible back-end 
data base then such localisations would be comparatively easy.

Regards,
Denis