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Battle For Open Standards In Dutch Public Education
In his first accepted submission, pjstevns writes "The heat is on! With the rising use of online systems for school administration the battle for open and accessible solutions is here, now. Parents are forced to buy 'proper' operating systems from your favorite Redmond based supplier — just to be able to access their children's grades, or participate in classes. A petition addressed at parliament for proper implementation of the open-standards guidelines put forward by the Dutch government itself is buzzing around the Netherlands. Comply or Explain!"
It seems like a major supplier of education software in the Netherlands has written essential software in Silverlight that all students must use, claiming "...Magister is truly multiplatform because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux," despite it more or less being non-functional with Moonlight.
MS is now #3 (soon to be #4 after google). Won't someone please think of the poor underdog?
So much about .Net cross-platform.
At least with Java you have to go out of your way to create platform dependency (like hard-coding path separator as "\", and not querying it from the System object), or use 3rd party non-portable libraries with JNI bindings.
Hell, they would have faired better even if they just used some Adobe Air based solution.
Or just use ASP.Net and no Silverlight. They just choose the worst possible solution for a public facing portal.
Money circulates under the table, as always.
But it never hurts to let the people over "there" (wherever there is) know that people over here (wherever here is) are aware of their dependence on things that are fundamentally not dependable.
(Are you under the power of gold^H^H^H^H power?)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I find it wonderful that people are striving for what must seem like 'little' freedoms. I've recently come around to the idea that these small cracks become the gaping, festering ulcers of our society when left unchecked. OS
For making such a stupid decision to move away from Open Standards. If you want stuff to work on the Internet use open standards, simple as that.
Why should users have to go to a desktop computer with a specific OS in order to utilise the system? Maybe it should be made fit for purpose for the modern age.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Its cheaper to write software for a single platform than write cross platform software. Besides on the desktop most open source GUI applications are buggy as hell. X.org crashes routinely on me. Who is going to hire people to give them tech support?
It will probably be difficult to act against a private company that chooses to support only the biggest player in their commercial software offering, but I think it is good that they also argue against the heavily subsidized Microsoft software in the educational market.
Giving away software to students only to make them buy it at full price later when they work in a company is like handing out crack in the schoolyard to make the kids addicted to it, then offering it to them at full price.
I work for a major Linux distro in the education field. Around the world. Most decision-makers are actively bribed by Microsoft.
They shower Windows and Office licenses on schools and entire countries in exchange for brains.
Microsoft know what they are doing : *This*, the education market, is their bread and butter. They are extremely aggressive about that, just mention "education" to a Microsoft executive and observe his reaction.
pX
Please hit them with a clue-bat at info@schoolmaster.nl. This page on their website requires silverlight as well: http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Foldermateriaal/Magisterboek/tabid/615/language/nl-NL/Default.aspx If you try installing the plug ins, you'll be redirected to the moonlight plugin. Which won't install because it is "not compatible with firefox 6". So in other words, it won't work on Linux. I wonder why am I not in the least bit surprised?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Slashdot is fun. It reports news which basically doesn't exist. This is just some guy who is on an anti-Microsoft bender and wants to somehow make his ideology meaningful in a world which doesn't really give a shit (if the low Linux uptake has anything to go by).
His rant is way too emotional for something that the politicians and most parents won't even understand. I mean, everyone uses Windows right? It's installed on all computers, and if you point at a random computer user, it's probably 99% likely they use Windows or have at least one Windows machine in the house. This is slight hyperbole of course, but it's enough to bet money on most of the time.
Now I'm not saying there isn't value in a open and multi-platform way to distribute information. It's just that this guy overblows the matter. The number of people who would be affected by the requirement for Silverlight is probably going to be EXTREMELY minor. Should those people be penalized? Of course not. But they also made the decision to make life more difficult for themselves by going against the grain and choosing to use something other than Windows (an OS pre-installed on virtually all computers you can buy, so having to buy it yourself is unnecessary).
In other words, if you don't want to use Windows, be aware that you'll be treated like a second-class citizen and it's extremely hard to convince non-geeks (general public as well as politicians) that there's any issue at stake here. Heck, maybe this is part of the reason why people are scared off from using Linux - they see all these posts about "battles" and "fights" that just aren't faced if you use something more mainstream. One could argue that some fights are worth fighting for, but if so... a small petition from a bunch of geeks with too much emotion and too little tact is likely to not do a damn thing.
A wise post, I will now stay on the beaten path, do as I am told by my betters and take it up the arse like you have been doing all your life.
Sheep.
Please mark me as a foe, I can't mark you because there is no option for mindless twit.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Whoever modded this "insightful" is an idiot. Commentor freely admits he has not read TFA. The software is not just a dumb html page. Its a bit more complicated.
http://www.schoolmaster.nl/Portals/0/Schoolmaster%202007/Screenshots/Magister/magister_breedbeeld_big.jpg
The problem here is as usual open source zealots assume that because they don't like microsoft nobody should like them or their technologies. Even if a company freely chose to use microsoft technology they must be bashed and called evil for doing so.
Why not just use C++/Qt and recompile for each platform? Seriously, unless you are being naughty and using platform specific code, Qt is platform agnostic. All that would be required is a simple recompile and you could have a Windows, Linux and Mac OSX (OSX seems to be overlooked here). An additional bonus that you get a binary out which seems to be there preference as bytecode is easier to reverse engineer.
However, if they go with something else, I insist they go with .Net compiled as MSIL or Java as they are not architecture specific (and way easier to reverse engineer!) :D
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
If you are making something that everybody needs to see, you use HTML5 or you fail. It is that simple. The whole fucking point of the Web is to be the one platform that is universal.
Tell the bozo developer to go to w3.org not microsoft.com. And tell him computing is centered in Silicon Valley, motherfucker, not Washington.
A quick google gives me the following numbers:
iPad: about 10 million units sold first half 2011. So make that 20-25 million for the year. The total tablet market may reach something like 30 million this year.
PC's: about 350 million units sold in 2010.
iPad and other tablets may get all the press, but generic PC units outsell tablets by more than 10 to 1, and those generic PCs again come >90% with Windows pre-installed. No idea what you've been smoking but your statement is clearly nonsensical. You can stop trolling now. If you have something the world in general has to see, Windows is still a pretty good bet.
But then, you did rush to the barriers with excuses aplenty and not too much evidence of an actual original thought.
FYI, the issue is that a public body has made a decision to disenfranchise a minority of its users by going with a Silverlight-based system. And here was the world + dog thinking that public bodies should not be doing that sort of thing.
An ipad is alot of things, a PC it is not.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
If the school system provided a terminal server for the 10% of desktop users that opt for Operating Systems which do not natively support "Silverlight" to access the school web sites this would be a non-issue. RDP clients are plentiful and work fine on nearly all platforms. Even iPads.
Ken
It's pretty much dead in Microsoft's eyes. Maybe they'll get it right when they have to redo it in a few years because silverlight doesn't exist anywhere.
Wow, I didn't realize that HTML5 was so universal it is supported by all browsers, on all platforms.
Ken
iPad is the best-selling PC in the world for over a year now, and there is no Silverlight there.
I'm a PC, and I object to being compared to an iPad.
(+1, Disagree)
Was to give Microsoft an excuse so they could proclaim that their systems followed standards and were cross-platform. Of course in reality, the standards are always only possible if you're using Windows, otherwise you get only partial functionality, which means it's not really a standard.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.