Slashdot Mirror
68% of UK Universities and Colleges Use Firefox
An anonymous reader writes "mozillaZine is reporting that over two-thirds of British universities and colleges have installed Mozilla or Firefox on their campus computers. They cite an open source survey by OSS Watch that also shows rising support for Mozilla Thunderbird, Moodle and Octave, though a decline for OpenOffice and LaTeX. Predictably, all open source offerings are blown away by Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office's 100% deployment rates."
Right on. It's depressing to hear that LaTeX use is declining. I wrote my thesis using LaTeX and it was such an easy process once I learned the syntax. It was so nice not to have autoformat screwing things up all the time. Equations looked really good, too!
I can say this pretty emphatically that MS Office is exponentially better than the OSS equivalent, OpenOffice.
I migrated to OpenOffice in an attempt to make my PC software more legit, and man is it horrible. The interface is like the MS Office of 1994. They made the most innocuous things, like printing a standard A4 envelop, an effort in futility. After days of futzing with the built-in envelope template, altering my printer paper settings, and manually adjusting margins, I just gave up and googled for an answer. To my dismay, this was apparently a very common problem in OpenOffice. So I hunted, downloaded a template someone else had the patience that I didn't have made, and used it instead. I have it saved just in case.
This same task in MS Office? File > New > Envelope. Enter the addresses and print.
I'm a huge advocate of OSS, but in this case, OSS is light years behind.
And that's the problem right there. You have to learn, and read, the syntax yourself. That's a lot of work for just marking up documents, especially since Word or WordPerfect can do a decent job with a lot less of a learning curve.
LaTeX makes some sense if you are doing lots of documents professionally, but for someone who's likely to only write a handful of papers it's overkill. And if you are laying out lots of documents professionally, Quark or a competitor is probably worth the investment. The learning curve is about the same, and it has more cred outside the geek-world.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
It doesn't need to.
With websites which are built to work on IE using Active X, Flash, and people's indifference to standards and the like you get people using IE by default.
Once you're the de facto standard, other things get measured by how well they conform to your behaviour. You can be compliant with all of the standards in the world, but if you don't do the things people can do in IE, in the same manner, you're SOL.
Heck, I still have a few websites I need to bring up an IE to access much to my dismay. The rest of the time, Mozilla is my friend.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Moodle is a course management system. What a University would want with one of those, I don't know. Half of my lecturers never turned up on time and one simply photocopied the course textbook as notes and read from it during lectures. Even those I had some respect for (one was a Dr. Who fan) were hopelessly disorganized and seemed to prefer it that way.
Now, I am a little surprised they said more about LaTeX (which is in decline because the friggin' developers aren't developing! I've never seen people drag their feet so much) than they did about Open Groupware (an Open Source Exchange replacement that is very respectable), Beowulf/Mosix/OpenMosix/Kerrighn (which turns a barely-used lab into a giant supercomputer wihout stupid license modifications), or ReLaTe (an Open Source videoconferencing + whiteboard suite developed by the University College of London for remote teaching).
There is a LOT of aspects to Open Source I would love to know if/how the Universities are aware of. I happen to think LaTeX is superb and wish Firefox would parse the markup, but I don't think it's an area of Open Source that schools, colleges or Universities need to focus on. What I do want to know is what they ARE focussing on and what they DAMN WELL SHOULD focus on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The anonymous reader wrote:
But that isn't quite what the survey said. The OSS survery reads
One notable exception to this would be Internet Explorer deployment on any Macs. Internet Explorer was insecure and underdeveloped after the Puma version in Mac OS X v 10.1 went live. It was no longer bundled on new Macs or OS X install discs when Tiger shipped.
While a number of Microsoft products are obscenely widespread despite its quality and security flaws, it isn't 100% in use out there. I know it's not a really big deal, but perhaps a small ray of hope may keep some developers and users from pulling the trigger on a dark an lonely night.
Every conference and journal I have submitted to provides a LaTeX style which can be used to correctly typeset a paper with little effort. Some also provide word templates, although you can generally spot papers written in Word because the typsetting is inferior.
No one I have seen provides Quark templates.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You might try Portable Firefox. This doesn't require installation & is set to keep all needed files in a subdirectory. You could keep it on a USB stick, your roaming profile, some other network drive, or individual workstations.
Installed is better, but there is a work-around for some users (though certain workstations may be configured such to not allow unknown apps to be executed or allowed network access).
What on earth gave you that idea? United Kingdom != Great Britain
There's a reason why it's called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Great Britain = England, Wales, Scotland + outlying islands. United Kingdom = Great Britain + Northern Ireland. And the British Islands = United Kingdom + Crown Dependences (e.g Channel Islands, Isle of Man).
The word is 'viruses'. Not 'virii', and certainly not 'virri'.
Frontmotion produce an msi file that ca be roled out using active directory. File available here Features: * Active Directory deployable and upgradeable. * Desktop Icon and Shell integration similar to IE. * Set Default browser as an option (INSTALLLEVEL=1000) * Macromedia Flash plug-in preinstalled * Detect and upgrades non-MSI installs. * Can upgrade 3rd party MSI's from patpaul/MIT, Webheat.co.uk, and ZettaServe. * Able to properly perform uninstalls and restores system associations
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison