UK agency says Microsoft hurts student interests
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| henke54 May 13, 2008 5:11 AM EDT |
Quoting: By David Lawskyhttp://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINL135658672008... |
| phsolide May 13, 2008 5:34 AM EDT |
Someone's getting sloppy I guess. This used to be the kind of thing that MSFT could get suppressed, and pronto. I wonder what the deal is? |
| flufferbeer May 13, 2008 11:48 AM EDT |
Seems to me the obvious; namely that M$FT is putting serious $$$ discounts pressure on schools and academies to make sure Office retains mindshare.
Whatever the cost, even to make sure their side is heard through teacher$ and $chool admini$trator$ who are advi$ed to $tick up for M$FT --- "$" substitutions intentional!
M$FT can then also try to coax such schools and academies to discontinue use of the rival non-OOXML software. |
| vainrveenr May 13, 2008 2:57 PM EDT |
... and now this regarding Britain's agency for education and information technology, courtesy of the LXer Editor-in-Chief : 'Britain complains to EU about Microsoft file system', http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/102893/index.html |
| Bob_Robertson May 14, 2008 8:20 AM EDT |
What surprises me most is that there are still people who act surprised. |
| tracyanne May 15, 2008 1:48 AM EDT |
I'm in the process of upgrading a lady's laptop, an Acer Aspire3683WXMi with 512Meg of RAM 533MHz Front Side Bus 1MB L2 Cache and a 1.73 Gig Intel Pentium. It has an 80 Gig Hard drive. The machine has Windows Vista Home Basic pre installed, and the lady has been using it for a few weeks to a month. She had some problems with it, and I went round to her place to have a look, and sorted out her problem. In the process I demonstrated Mandriva Linux 2008.1, which is installed on a 6 year old Asus (1 Gig Intel M3 P3 cpu and 768 Meg of RAM, nothing like as well speced as even the the low speced machine this lady has). On this machine I have the Linux 3D desktop with the cube and some eye candy, not a lot, but what I have is fairly impressive. It was certainly impressive enough that this lady asked me to upgrade her Windows Vista Home Basic machine to Mandriva Linux So here I am preparing the way, first I need to back up all of her stuff, there not a lot, about 8.5 Gig, but that'd not the point. Using this machine, with Windows Vista Home Basic,feels glacially slow compared to even the 6 year old Asus, with Mandriva Linux 2008.1. In fact using this machine with Windows Vista Home Basic feels glacially slow when compared to running Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Live CD on the same machine, with the Linux 3D desktop enabled. Even running Mandriva Linux 2008.1 from the Live CD feels snappier and more responsive (most of the time - sometimes you have to wait for the CD, after all the laptop has only 512 Meg RAM) Even this short exposure to Windows Vista, leaves me wondering, why do people put up with this? |
| Sander_Marechal May 15, 2008 2:02 AM EDT |
Quoting:why do people put up with this? Because people are sheep. |
| rijelkentaurus May 15, 2008 5:25 AM EDT |
Quoting: Because people are sheep. That's a massive oversimplification, and that attitude does more harm than good (not trying to pick on you specifically, Sander, goodness knows I have voiced that opinion in the past myself). What TA did was to introduce this woman to Linux, and she jumped at the chance to use it instead of MS...and she was using MS because she didn't know. The words are not "the truth will set you free", but "you will know the truth and the truth will set you free". People have to know this stuff first, and the closest they get to an alternative to MS is Mac, most don't know anything about Linux. They go to a big box store to by a PC, and the people there push MS and everything else down their throats because they make money selling AV and cr@p to them...those stores are part of the protection racket surrounding Windows, why would they suggest Linux? Surely a lot of people are sheep, but most put up with this cr@p because they don't know they have an alternative. |
| jacog May 15, 2008 6:17 AM EDT |
I think the myth that Windows is necessarily more "user friendly" needs to be squelched. I keep seeing this used as arguments on forums by people who obviously don't know better. There are many areas where Linux desktops can improve it's user friendliness, but just recently I was forced to run Win XP for two days. I hadn't booted intot hat partition in ages, and I am pretty sure it was working when I last exited it - yet it had errors. I'll have to paraphrase here, but as soon as I tried to enable bridged networking, I got a popup with something along the lines of "Cannot enable bridged networking: An Error has occurred". this was not very helpful information, but fortunately there was a handy button labeled "Details >>" - I clicked, but then the "details" basically just repeated the fact that "an error has occurred" No kidding! My attempts to "repair" using the supplied feature also resulted in complaints about that phantom error. My eventual repair involved a complete reinstall - rawr! I am also running Mandriva 2008.1 KDE at the moment, and even though it has some odd problems, like our USB flash card reader not working anymore and not being able to drag and drop directories into the trashcan, it is overall a much better computing experience. |
| tuxchick May 15, 2008 7:13 AM EDT |
jacog, diagnosing and repairing windows is very easy. Reformat and reinstall for everything. Duh! :) |
| vainrveenr May 15, 2008 7:40 AM EDT |
Quoting:My attempts to "repair" using the supplied feature also resulted in complaints about that phantom error. My eventual repair involved a complete reinstall - rawr!.... and much better to use 'tar' within the latter ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(file_format) ) than Win 'rar' in the former ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR_(file_format) ). At least, no "rawr"in Mandriva ! :D |
| Sander_Marechal May 15, 2008 8:04 AM EDT |
Quoting:most put up with this cr@p because they don't know they have an alternative. My point exactly. People are sheep. They use what the neighbors use because uh, well... the neighbors use it. They don't look around and see what's out there. They're wearing blinds. |
| rijelkentaurus May 15, 2008 8:08 AM EDT |
Quoting: They use what the neighbors use because uh, well... the neighbors use it. Then it is up to us to be the Linux-using neighbors. |
| jdixon May 15, 2008 9:41 AM EDT |
> ...diagnosing and repairing windows is very easy. Reformat and reinstall for everything. Duh! Unfortunately very true. I have a problem here at work. A user's laptop will not install .msi files. The relevant error is "The Windows Installer service could not be accessed". Microsoft lists half a dozen possible fixes in a dozen or so kb articles spread across their support site. None of them worked. The only sure fix is a full reinstall. :( |
| techiem2 May 15, 2008 10:31 AM EDT |
Heh. I've got a Vista laptop right now waiting for me to get the restore discs from the owner. It was working fine until her brother borrowed it....lol Then it got a nice spyware/virus infection. I cleaned out everything I could find, but something in there screwed up the http stack. It's just plain weird. Networking is fine. The box can ping out. DNS requests from browsers go through, but no http requests never make it (I ran wireshark on it and never even SAW an http request). And I don't just mean IE is screwed up. I ran Firefox from my portableapps flash drive and it behaves exactly the same. Sends dns request then gives can't find page errors. Whatever got in screwed things up nicely. Lovely. Don't we all just LOVE trying to fix windows? |
| rijelkentaurus May 15, 2008 10:32 AM EDT |
But...but...but Vista is less prone to viruses and spyware!! You must be doing something wrong!! ;p |
| tuxchick May 15, 2008 10:34 AM EDT |
I think you have to purchase Windows Vista Ultimate Business Professional Enterprise Primo Super Deluxe edition to get the HTTP stack. |
| Sander_Marechal May 15, 2008 1:06 PM EDT |
Quoting:Then it is up to us to be the Linux-using neighbors. True :-) |
| tracyanne May 15, 2008 1:32 PM EDT |
Quoting:I think you have to purchase Windows Vista Ultimate Business Professional Enterprise Primo Super Deluxe edition to get the HTTP stack. How true, I'm developing ASP.NET web Applications on Win XP in my day job, and i have a need for some IIS functionality that is only available on the Server version. Which means I can't test the web app properly on my development machine, and I have to set it all up on a server to test it. This would never be a problem on Linux, and Microsoft claim they love developers. |
| jacog May 16, 2008 12:55 AM EDT |
Quoting:At least, no "rawr"in Mandriva ! :D Grawl!! |
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