Hugo Awards nominations

The Hugo Awards nominations have been announced. Here are the nominations in three of the categories:

Best Novel

Learning the World – Ken MacLeod
A Feast for Crows – George R.R. Martin
Old Man’s War – John Scalzi
Accelerando – Charles Stross
Spin – Robert Charles Wilson

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Batman Begins
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Serenity
Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Battlestar Galactica: “Pegasus”
Doctor Who: “Dalek”
Doctor Who: “The Empty Child” & “The Doctor Dances”
Doctor Who: “Father’s Day”
Jack-Jack Attack
Lucas Back in Anger
Prix Victor Hugo Awards Ceremony (Opening Speech and Framing Sequences).

( Some thoughts... )

Wonderful, wonderful Open Source!

The other night wibbble and I were passing some time by discussing the relative merits of the OSes we use, he advocating the wonderfulness of MacOS and I proclaiming the superlative goodness of Linux. (It’s something which helps pass the time when you are installing software.)

It was interesting to come across this article in Akregator (the RSS feed software which comes with KDE) about the art professor who wiped MacOS X from his digital media lab’s Macs and replaced it with Ubuntu, a Linux distro.

I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver.

How did it work out?

The students’ reactions to all this was inspiring. They felt empowered by the quality of the software and their ability to upgrade, share, and customize it freely. They also appreciated the immense array of additional GNU/Linux multimedia software available to them. And I found it inspiring how many of the students took enthusiastic advantage of other applications, not only by installing software via Synaptic from the Ubuntu repositories of more than 16,000 packages, but in some case by compiling source code from elsewhere....

I found that Photoshop and the other proprietary software packages we had been using for years generally had more polished interfaces and more advanced features than the free software we chose. But the free software had more than enough of the core capabilities we needed in my classes, and also often featured desirable capabilities missing in the proprietary software.

The switch saved thousands of dollars in software upgrades. As a result I was able to dramatically lower the lab fee for each class, and require instead that the students purchase additional textbooks.

I’m not, BTW, knocking MacOS (whether X or earlier), which is a nicely designed OS (and X has a lot in common with Linux), but this does illustrate how useful open source software can be, without the enormous cost of some proprietary software, and that the transition need not be painful.