Microsoft vs. Northwest Schools Part III

SymphonicMan writes: "As previously discussed on Slashdot, Microsoft threatened an audit for the 24 largest school districts in the Northwest. Now it appears they may be backing down, according to Steve Duin, the Oregonian columnist who orginally brought this to all of our attention in April. Not only that, he writes that Portland Public Schools is opening 16 Linux computer labs across the districts, at half the cost of a Microsoft-equipped lab. Looks like this might be more than just a PR victory for open source. I'm a senior in one of the districts (Beaverton) included in the audit, and our staff is still going crazy trying to comply. But with districts across Oregon facing major budget shortfalls due to the poor economy, removing the pressure of this audit would be very welcome."

Comments

Nice...but what about Windows compatibility?

[David_Bloom]

I wonder if those kids could figure out how to save their StarOffice documents in Office format and vice-versa...I'm not sure about Linux in schools (with the big exception of MacOS X)

Re:Think that's bad?

[markmoss]

And you'd be quite surprised just how many "big" stories don't get picked up by the local media.

Not any more. When I was going to school in Stillwater, OK, about 1983, the feds arrested the entire county road commission for taking bribes, along with most of the road commissioners and contractors in the state. The local newspaper printed nothing about it - note that their office is within a block of the county offices, so it would have been hard not to notice the G-men descending on the place. Nor had it printed anything about various other crooked politicians getting caught, as long as they were conservative - or flat out reactionary - Republicans.

The story was big enough nationally that the Doonesbury comic strips were based on it for several weeks. The college newspaper, which usually didn't do any _news_ reporting beyond the football games, decided they had to run a real news article explaining what the hell Doonesbury was about. And then the town newspaper finally decided to start running the stories - dumped unedited from the AP lines.

Re:History

[56ker]

Actually that was because the British had only a few thousand troops on the entire continent. Most of the British Empire was won with foreign troops anyway. How else do you think a country with a few million people would take over Australia, Canada, India etc?

Re:History

[56ker]

How is this off-topic when the parent post is:

During the American Revolutionary war, the British consistantly believed that the colonies were full of loyalist supporters. When they found far fewer loyalists than they hoped for, they hired indians to fight for them. Suddenly, the large number of people in the middle swung over to support ... the rebels. Oops. ???

Re:Funny statistics

[56ker]

I meant the amount of troops they had when war broke out - of course they sent reinforcements from Europe but they took months to get there. That's why they needed to draft extra soldiers from America. Really they were just asking for a war by leaving so few troops there.