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Britain Advises Against Vista, Office 2007 for Schools
An anonymous reader writes "The British government's educational IT authority has issued a report advising schools in the country not to upgrade their classroom or office systems to Windows Vista or Office 2007. According to this InformationWeek story, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency says costs for Vista and Office 2007 'are significant and the benefits remain unclear.' Instead, Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org."
The head of IT at my sons school (here in the UK) recently told me of their irritation at being told they had to use Microsoft only software for their network and teaching. The result was a network that was a nightmare to keep secure (you try and keeping hundreds of enthusiastic kids from finding ways round microsoft security), and poor quality teaching tools. Had he had his way there would be a linux sever running the network and email, XP classroom machines (not linux just yet), openoffice, and python in the programming classes.
As it is they have windows server, Exchange, MSoffice, Dreamweaver (after a successful revolt against frontpage), and VB.
I've started teaching my kid myself....
BTW here is the report in glorious PDF:
http://learningandskills.becta.org.uk/download.cfm?resID=35275
My little Linux and tech blog
"Becta is advising British schools to take a long look at Linux and open source suites like OpenOffice.org." I'm sure they will take a look at Linux and promptly forget about it as soon as they realize that they would have to fire their existing Windows-only IT staff and/or hire new staff to support it. After that they will take a long look at their agreement with Microsoft and realize that just ditching MS Office will not help either since their current volume license agreement is a package that includes Office too.
In order to *really* save money you have to go for the full monty and almost completely ditch all Microsoft products, which requires a talented IT staff. My experience with K-12 Education IT is that most IT staffs in this category can't make this work.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Not to mention, and sorry for taking this further off-topic, deep-fried mars bars and deep-fried pizzas. Us Scots know how make scary food. My personal favourite, from a recent visit to Edinburgh, vegetarian haggis samosas (from a baked potato shop at the top of Cockburn St, if anyone is curious).
Thor, the very first US ballistic missile system, was deployed between 1959 and 1963 from bases in the UK. These were the days before intercontinental ballistic missiles. The missiles were controlled by the UK but the warheads were controlled by the US. A dual-key system was in place that required both UK and US authorisation to launch.
However, the situation has changed since the 1960s. The UK still leans heavily on the US for its nuclear capability, and today it uses Trident missiles which are shared with the USA in a common pool. However, the warheads on British subs are designed and built in the UK, and the UK has the ability to use its nuclear weapons completely independently of the US. The USA has not always been completely comfortable with that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Trident_system http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E2054A40-7833-48EF-991C-7F48E05B2C9D/0/nuclear190705.pdf