There's a classification system for patents... anyone who has applied for a patent in the same class as somebody else in the field probably has expertise to judge the other one and anyone who's applied in the same class/subclass almost certainly has that expertise.
Personally, I think the peer review idea is a very good one. Too sensible for the Feds to implement, of course.
What I'm not happy about (other than any pro-Fortune 500 gimmes weighted against the individual inventer) is that I'm going to have to shitcan the copy of "How to Patent" I just spent $40 on in a few months.
In the case of a Mac, one can consider its workings a miracle if one doesn't know any better. In the case of Windows, it's a miracle when it works.
As for me, I'm leaving my options open and putting off a Mac purchase until I find out whether or not a set of hacks will appear making the x86 OSX run properly on a generic x86 whitebox... in which case, I plan to cough up $100 or whatever for a legit copy of OSX.
Since I'm running Linux (with Windows in emulation), it isn't like there's anything compelling about doing a platform switch right now.
Irrelevant to this discussion. Algae biomass doesn't waste resources on creating leaves, stalks, roots, flowers, etc. that a conventional plant needs, so it converts solar energy plus nutrients into oil a great deal more efficiently than canola, soy, or any other conventional plant can.
It also takes a great deal less energy in terms of farm equipment to grow. Algae is pumped to harvest through pipes and channels, farm crops require farm machinery that has to move itself to the crops.
With respect to electric cars, just how ecofriendly are currently available batteries?
Try getting some information not from the *AA organizations before posting on slashdot.
or at least get some better talking points.
Consumer technology industries dwarf the Hollywood content cartel both in number of people employed and in sales.
If Hollywood were to disappear in a meteor strike tomorrow, Southern California and maybe NYC would be hit very, very hard. Though IMHO, American TV/cable would recover with mostly American made live/series content within a year or so. And we'd find out just how unimportant the Hollywood content cartel really is.
Personally, Dan Glickman's "nuclear option" [NO MORE HOLLYWOOD BROADCAST CONTENT] doesn't worry me in the least and wouldn't even if I took it seriously. Which I don't, someone else pointed out that one has to separate advertisements with something if anybody's going to watch them.
If the technology industries at risk from Hollywood disappeared, we're ALL screwed. Numbers for all industry groupings in the press release below are not complete, but what's there counts up to about $750B and 1.2M employees.
quote ==================
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is the leading trade association serving the communications and information technology industry, with proven strengths in market development, trade shows, domestic and international advocacy, standards development and enabling e-business. Through its worldwide activities, the association facilitates business development opportunities and a competitive market environment. The association provides a market-focused forum for its more than 1,100 member companies that manufacture or supply the products and services used in global communications. TIA represents the communications sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA). Visit us at http://www.tiaonline.org./
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) represents companies that lead the consumer electronics industry in the development, manufacturing, and distribution of audio, video, mobile electronics, communications, information technology, multimedia and accessory products, as well as related services, which are sold through consumer channels. More than 1,000 member companies generate more than $80 billion in annual factory sales and employ tens of thousands of Americans. For more information CEA and the consumer electronics industry, please visit us at www.ce.org.
The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) represents 29 of the worlds leading providers of information technology products and services, including computer, networking, data storage, communications, and Internet equipment, software, and services. In 2000, ITI member companies employed more than one million people in the United States and exceeded $668 billion in worldwide revenues.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is the nations largest industrial trade association. The NAM represents 14,000 members (including 10,000 small and mid-sized companies) and 350 member associations serving manufacturers and employees in every industrial sector and all 50 states.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is the leading voice for the semiconductor industry and has represented U.S.-based manufacturers since 1977. SIA member companies comprise more than 90 percent of U.S.-based semiconductor production. Collectively, the chip industry employs a domestic workforce of 284,000 people. More information about the SIA can be found at www.sia-online.org.
============= end quote
I'm very much inclined to go with the poster who said there is no compelling reason why the populace or government should help them. Not at the expense of all the rest of us.
Switching from windows would make it more difficult to watch music videos and other commercialized content at work
Were you planning to disable automatic installation as well or just lock down root access? If you have yum or apt-get or urpmi, installing media apps really isn't a big deal if you know which apps to install in what order.
I'm running Xine, mplayer, Flash, and Realplayer, and the multimedia file I can't open is a rarity. Though I have yet to manage to get VideoLAN to play anything back.
Your fellow workers can learn how to run multimedia here.
The people you're talking about aren't going to bd downloading OO and installing it themselves.
It's the Windows power users who are going to have the confidence to give OO a try or are going to be asked to put it on their friends' machines, and they are no more likely to lack a copy of WinZip on the desktop than they are likely to be running without AV and a firewall.
So what you're telling us is that OO's usable from at least an installation and out-of-the-box standpoint for Windows, but could use some minor tweaks in packaging and menu item placement.
About what I've expected, I've never had occasion to try OO in Windows, my first exposure was the default install in FC2.
If an OO document is prepared for use in an OO environment, problems are really, really unlikely by definition. This is as true for a school district as for a corporation.
If your company prepares press releases intended for reading by a general population of journalists, the final editing really needs to be done on boxes running MS Office.
The school district administration machines using XP/MS Office are probably preparing documents for state / Federal agencies using MS Office, very possibly for the forms, Office macros.
The basic rule to save money and get functionality... inward focused boxes, i.e. boxes from which the great majority of docs prepared will stay in-house on OO (well, I prefer Textmaker) and outward focused boxes on MS Office.
So everybody wins except MS, which is selling a handful of workstation seats where they were selling thousands.
There's an easier way than that. Take a hose that's connected to a faucet. Put the other end in the pool or spa down to the bottom. Turn on the faucet and run it until water's coming out at the spa end.
Disconnect the hose from the faucet and put that end of the hose wherever you want it to drain, it just has to be lower than the spa end.
Let's say that the entire platter of DVD-Rs is a single compressed archive volume spanned across all the individual DVDs so that one major disk defect on any DVD means that the whole set is trashed. So... if one drops the backup set off the 4th floor, breaking or cracking a single disk as a result would produce the effects that guy describes.
But setting something up that way indicates gross incompetence on the part of whoever's STUPID idea this was.
Personally, I like and recommend dar because dar compresses individual files within a dar archive file so that if there's a disk defect in any individual file in a backup set, ONE file is affected, and one might even recover that file.
The NIST publication "Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs - A Guide for Librarians and Archivists" says CD-R has the soft acrylic layer under the label, data layer, and polycarbonate layer and DVDs have a polycarbonate layer on both sides with the data layer sandwiched inbetween.
This is why CD-Rs are much more fragile than DVD-Rs.
I tried restoring from tape to a new system once using a 400Mb Travan drive... the result wouldn't boot.
Second try was a couple of years later with a Sony Superstation... something in the tape formatting went bad and the restore after a hard drive crash went haywire. I count myself very lucky that I only lost about 5% of my files.
BTW, I ALWAYS use read-after-write verification with tape and it always passed. For all the good it did me.
Why should I take your word for it that I should repeat the same mistake of depending on tape backup a THIRD time?
I've got a HP 20G 8mm tape drive... which I've never even bothered to power up.
I back up 3x a week to a drive mirror via rsync and monthly to a stack of DVD-Rs. I never lose sleep over the chance of losing data. Can you say the same?
That's CD-R... DVDs have outside plastic layers on both sides.
No, DVDs are no more invulnerable to gross physical abuse than tapes are to stray magnetic fields. Though tapes aren't exactly immune to gross physical abuse. Step on a tape cartridge, are you 100% sure of getting all your data back afterwards?
That's why one stores them in jewel cases.
The advantage of 50 cent media is that redundancy is a lot cheaper to manage. What are the chances of TWO backup sets in different physical locations getting smashed?
Personally, I use a mirror drive on a mobile rack and DVD-R for on/offsite archiving. While I have many concerns, losing my data isn't one of them.
While Internet Explorer is overly integrated into the operating system, the fact that your computer can access the internet means that your OS is on the internet too. Just that doing so with IE is believed to be more dangerious.
You just stated the reason why everyone qualified to have an opinion not on the MS payroll directly or indirectly believes using IE to be more dangerous.
Back when I was using Windows as a primary OS, the second thing I did after installing it was to use 98lite to remove IE completely from the OS. The first, of course, was zapping Active Desktop.
when the computer-illiterate are permitted to make decisions involving technology.
How many Linux distros have gpg installed by default? Should we automatically be suspected as criminals?
How many PCs don't some form of encryption? Crypto includes browsers that support SSL... necessary for e-commerce. I'm sure that at least some of the judges have PCs and browsers. Should search warrants be obtained on this basis and their computers be checked for kiddie porn?
With respect to crypto, I personally use it to keep proprietary technology and business discussions private and to digitally sign documents. I also plan to continue to do so even if it makes Minnesota judges think I must be a criminal of some sort.
The court decision is... contemptible, but to be expected, it's from the same kind of ignorant people who voted the DMCA into law.
The most charitable thing I can say is that a great many people's brains shut down immediately if the subject of child pornography comes up, and speculating as to why would. . . be very impolite.
Major League Baseball Inc. closed up all its US minor league teams and told America "We'd like to hire American athletes, but nobody seems to want to get involved in sports anymore?
Major US corporations can't ship all their entry-level science and technology gigs off to Bangalore and expect Americans to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get degrees in fields, find that the top 5% get hired and the other 95% get to start their new careers at McDonald's or Walmart with tens of thousands of dollars in debt their co-workers don't have.
If American corporations want to hire Americans for tech positions, all it would take is for a group of them to get together as a group and say to high school students, "Sign up with our group, keep a GPA of x.xx or better in one of these degree fields, and you'll have a job waiting from one of us when you've got a degree, and your agreement with us will be an enforceable contract".
The sysadmins running the server hosting the website signup would wish they'd only gotten slashdotted. (An OC-48 bandwidth pipe would be a good start...)
To get kids to get involved with science and tech programs, that's also about what it'll take. Even high school kids know that vague promises of a great future for kids who go into sci-tech fields from CEOs mean exactly nothing, and it's they who in general are going to have to pay for their educations.
If America's CEOs aren't ready to do this, they can stop their whining.
If they really want Americans to go into science and technical fields, they can damned well put their own money into hiring some.
The advice I have for kids who have a true bent for science and technology? Start country shopping NOW, and as soon as you've decided, look into getting your education there, look into internship programs in that country, and of course, learn the language of the country of your choice, and good luck.
The problem is religious fundamentalism vs secularism.
Ever actually read your Bible? Go through the Old Testament and you'll find plenty of religious injunctions to kill infidels and anybody else who interferes with the operation of the theocratic monoarchy run by a priesthood which is presented as the ideal form of government.
The "kill the infidel" program is one the average Christian pays very little attention to. He's too busy having a life to worry about it.
Look up "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists" for what real Bible-believers believe in. Then, you can do a bit more research and find out about the "Council on National Policy" (CNP) and their connection to the inner circles of the GOP, but that's another post and another topic.
The hard core among these people are the ones who blow up abortion clinics and provide other evidence of violent insanity.
Secularized Muslims are no problem. They go to mosque, go home, go to work, and are too busy living their lives to go out to try to blow up the world in the name of Allah.
The hard core among these people... get the idea?
Fundamentalists are the problem, not the specific excuses for religious or ideological insanity any given fundamentalist uses. They have more in common with each other than they have with rhe rest of us.
As to your overall ignorance of world history, that's not a problem I can clear up in a single slashdot post, there are plenty of good books, go study some.
Random windows software -> prepackaged windows emulator (wine?)
Word documents -> openoffice works find with these, crossover office could be packaged with the system
Check their websites. They'll only work on a very specific and very small subset of Windows apps, the odds that WINE or Crossover will run a random Windows software app suck.
I looked at them when I was looking for a Windows emulator that would give me access to all the Windows apps that either have no Linux equivalents, none that don't suck, or in the case of Eudora, would take an inordinate amount of work to port gigabytes of mail files to a Linux mail client. For me. . . no Eudora, no PaintShopPro. . . no CorelDraw . ..no deal.
That's why I'm running Win4Lin and an actual copy of Windows on top of Fedora Core 2... so I can get access to all my legacy apps. It is NOT free, but it DOES work.
your consultant practice isn't in website development.
Italicizing quotes = good.
Italicizing whole post = WTF?
Getting that sort of thing right is really helpful when you're trying to make points on a technical forum. Especially when your points aren't very good ones.
Kids who don't plan to go into IT or science/technology careers need to learn how GUI interfaces are used and how office (small o) applications work.
That way, if a kid sits down at on a Linux box, a Mac, a Solaris box running Open Office, a thin client running some office suite nobody around here's ever heard of, or a version of Windows two revs later than the one your people inadequately taught him to work with at the most minimal level, or WordPerfect 15 beta or Textmaker, that kid will be functional and productive instead of wondering why none of the keyboard shortcuts you want to teach her work as expected.
The process of getting a student to the point of saying "this is a computer and I can use it" is called computer EDUCATION. You're offering computer training in a very specific environment with a shrinking market share. Conflate them as you will, they aren't the same thing.
Education prepares students for future challenges. You are publically supporting the training of young people on a Windows XP that'll be legacy in a year or so.
The Windows monopoly is crumbling, whether educators want to admit it or not.
2 years ago, I was writing 100% Windows how-to pieces and reviews for publication. Now, I'm selling 100% Linux and doubt I'll ever sell another Windows piece for the remainder of my writing career, though I have no idea which non-Windows OS I'll be using 5 years from now.
The world is moving on. Where to? I don't know, and I currently do tech journalism for a living. Do you claim to know more than I do about what business will be running in 5 years? Shouldn't education be moving on with the rest of the world? Do you support teaching classes in buggy whip manufacture and how to stuff printed circuit boards by hand as well?
Governments and major corporations are voting with their feet against Microsoft tax. If you want to prepare kids for a world that's disappearing, tell us you're doing it because that's what you're comfortable with, or tell us that's all teachers know, or tell us that MS is subsidizing the school in some way and you fear losing the subsidy, but don't tell us you're doing either the students or future employers any favor.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think the peer review idea is a very good one. Too sensible for the Feds to implement, of course.
Go to the US Patent and Trademark Office site and poke around.
What I'm not happy about (other than any pro-Fortune 500 gimmes weighted against the individual inventer) is that I'm going to have to shitcan the copy of "How to Patent" I just spent $40 on in a few months.
and as good a reason to wait as any.
As for me, I'm leaving my options open and putting off a Mac purchase until I find out whether or not a set of hacks will appear making the x86 OSX run properly on a generic x86 whitebox... in which case, I plan to cough up $100 or whatever for a legit copy of OSX.
Since I'm running Linux (with Windows in emulation), it isn't like there's anything compelling about doing a platform switch right now.
I'd be happy to buy a $1 x86 version of OSX... or even a $50 version.
Irrelevant to this discussion. Algae biomass doesn't waste resources on creating leaves, stalks, roots, flowers, etc. that a conventional plant needs, so it converts solar energy plus nutrients into oil a great deal more efficiently than canola, soy, or any other conventional plant can.
It also takes a great deal less energy in terms of farm equipment to grow. Algae is pumped to harvest through pipes and channels, farm crops require farm machinery that has to move itself to the crops.
With respect to electric cars, just how ecofriendly are currently available batteries?
or at least get some better talking points.
Consumer technology industries dwarf the Hollywood content cartel both in number of people employed and in sales.
If Hollywood were to disappear in a meteor strike tomorrow, Southern California and maybe NYC would be hit very, very hard. Though IMHO, American TV/cable would recover with mostly American made live/series content within a year or so. And we'd find out just how unimportant the Hollywood content cartel really is.
Personally, Dan Glickman's "nuclear option" [NO MORE HOLLYWOOD BROADCAST CONTENT] doesn't worry me in the least and wouldn't even if I took it seriously. Which I don't, someone else pointed out that one has to separate advertisements with something if anybody's going to watch them.
If the technology industries at risk from Hollywood disappeared, we're ALL screwed. Numbers for all industry groupings in the press release below are not complete, but what's there counts up to about $750B and 1.2M employees.
A brief google produced:
quote ==================
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is the leading trade association serving the communications and information technology industry, with proven strengths in market development, trade shows, domestic and international advocacy, standards development and enabling e-business. Through its worldwide activities, the association facilitates business development opportunities and a competitive market environment. The association provides a market-focused forum for its more than 1,100 member companies that manufacture or supply the products and services used in global communications. TIA represents the communications sector of the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA). Visit us at http://www.tiaonline.org./
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) represents companies that lead the consumer electronics industry in the development, manufacturing, and distribution of audio, video, mobile electronics, communications, information technology, multimedia and accessory products, as well as related services, which are sold through consumer channels. More than 1,000 member companies generate more than $80 billion in annual factory sales and employ tens of thousands of Americans. For more information CEA and the consumer electronics industry, please visit us at www.ce.org.
The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) represents 29 of the worlds leading providers of information technology products and services, including computer, networking, data storage, communications, and Internet equipment, software, and services. In 2000, ITI member companies employed more than one million people in the United States and exceeded $668 billion in worldwide revenues.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is the nations largest industrial trade association. The NAM represents 14,000 members (including 10,000 small and mid-sized companies) and 350 member associations serving manufacturers and employees in every industrial sector and all 50 states.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) is the leading voice for the semiconductor industry and has represented U.S.-based manufacturers since 1977. SIA member companies comprise more than 90 percent of U.S.-based semiconductor production. Collectively, the chip industry employs a domestic workforce of 284,000 people. More information about the SIA can be found at www.sia-online.org.
============= end quote
I'm very much inclined to go with the poster who said there is no compelling reason why the populace or government should help them. Not at the expense of all the rest of us.
Switching from windows would make it more difficult to watch music videos and other commercialized content at work Were you planning to disable automatic installation as well or just lock down root access? If you have yum or apt-get or urpmi, installing media apps really isn't a big deal if you know which apps to install in what order. I'm running Xine, mplayer, Flash, and Realplayer, and the multimedia file I can't open is a rarity. Though I have yet to manage to get VideoLAN to play anything back. Your fellow workers can learn how to run multimedia here.
It's the Windows power users who are going to have the confidence to give OO a try or are going to be asked to put it on their friends' machines, and they are no more likely to lack a copy of WinZip on the desktop than they are likely to be running without AV and a firewall.
So what you're telling us is that OO's usable from at least an installation and out-of-the-box standpoint for Windows, but could use some minor tweaks in packaging and menu item placement.
About what I've expected, I've never had occasion to try OO in Windows, my first exposure was the default install in FC2.
If an OO document is prepared for use in an OO environment, problems are really, really unlikely by definition. This is as true for a school district as for a corporation. If your company prepares press releases intended for reading by a general population of journalists, the final editing really needs to be done on boxes running MS Office. The school district administration machines using XP/MS Office are probably preparing documents for state / Federal agencies using MS Office, very possibly for the forms, Office macros. The basic rule to save money and get functionality... inward focused boxes, i.e. boxes from which the great majority of docs prepared will stay in-house on OO (well, I prefer Textmaker) and outward focused boxes on MS Office. So everybody wins except MS, which is selling a handful of workstation seats where they were selling thousands.
I run my Windows legacy apps on it via Win4Lin on my Fedora Core 2 install and practically never have any trouble with it.
Disconnect the hose from the faucet and put that end of the hose wherever you want it to drain, it just has to be lower than the spa end.
Works rather well.
Great idea. You posted to your LJ about it yet?
But setting something up that way indicates gross incompetence on the part of whoever's STUPID idea this was.
Personally, I like and recommend dar because dar compresses individual files within a dar archive file so that if there's a disk defect in any individual file in a backup set, ONE file is affected, and one might even recover that file.
This is why CD-Rs are much more fragile than DVD-Rs.
Second try was a couple of years later with a Sony Superstation... something in the tape formatting went bad and the restore after a hard drive crash went haywire. I count myself very lucky that I only lost about 5% of my files.
BTW, I ALWAYS use read-after-write verification with tape and it always passed. For all the good it did me.
Why should I take your word for it that I should repeat the same mistake of depending on tape backup a THIRD time?
I've got a HP 20G 8mm tape drive... which I've never even bothered to power up.
I back up 3x a week to a drive mirror via rsync and monthly to a stack of DVD-Rs. I never lose sleep over the chance of losing data. Can you say the same?
No, DVDs are no more invulnerable to gross physical abuse than tapes are to stray magnetic fields. Though tapes aren't exactly immune to gross physical abuse. Step on a tape cartridge, are you 100% sure of getting all your data back afterwards?
That's why one stores them in jewel cases.
The advantage of 50 cent media is that redundancy is a lot cheaper to manage. What are the chances of TWO backup sets in different physical locations getting smashed?
Personally, I use a mirror drive on a mobile rack and DVD-R for on/offsite archiving. While I have many concerns, losing my data isn't one of them.
You just stated the reason why everyone qualified to have an opinion not on the MS payroll directly or indirectly believes using IE to be more dangerous. Back when I was using Windows as a primary OS, the second thing I did after installing it was to use 98lite to remove IE completely from the OS. The first, of course, was zapping Active Desktop.
How many Linux distros have gpg installed by default? Should we automatically be suspected as criminals?
How many PCs don't some form of encryption? Crypto includes browsers that support SSL... necessary for e-commerce. I'm sure that at least some of the judges have PCs and browsers. Should search warrants be obtained on this basis and their computers be checked for kiddie porn?
With respect to crypto, I personally use it to keep proprietary technology and business discussions private and to digitally sign documents. I also plan to continue to do so even if it makes Minnesota judges think I must be a criminal of some sort.
The court decision is... contemptible, but to be expected, it's from the same kind of ignorant people who voted the DMCA into law.
The most charitable thing I can say is that a great many people's brains shut down immediately if the subject of child pornography comes up, and speculating as to why would. . . be very impolite.
The nature of his, er, patent doesn't exactly argue for his being the world's foremost computer genius.
Major US corporations can't ship all their entry-level science and technology gigs off to Bangalore and expect Americans to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get degrees in fields, find that the top 5% get hired and the other 95% get to start their new careers at McDonald's or Walmart with tens of thousands of dollars in debt their co-workers don't have.
If American corporations want to hire Americans for tech positions, all it would take is for a group of them to get together as a group and say to high school students, "Sign up with our group, keep a GPA of x.xx or better in one of these degree fields, and you'll have a job waiting from one of us when you've got a degree, and your agreement with us will be an enforceable contract".
The sysadmins running the server hosting the website signup would wish they'd only gotten slashdotted. (An OC-48 bandwidth pipe would be a good start...)
To get kids to get involved with science and tech programs, that's also about what it'll take. Even high school kids know that vague promises of a great future for kids who go into sci-tech fields from CEOs mean exactly nothing, and it's they who in general are going to have to pay for their educations.
If America's CEOs aren't ready to do this, they can stop their whining.
If they really want Americans to go into science and technical fields, they can damned well put their own money into hiring some.
The advice I have for kids who have a true bent for science and technology? Start country shopping NOW, and as soon as you've decided, look into getting your education there, look into internship programs in that country, and of course, learn the language of the country of your choice, and good luck.
Ever actually read your Bible? Go through the Old Testament and you'll find plenty of religious injunctions to kill infidels and anybody else who interferes with the operation of the theocratic monoarchy run by a priesthood which is presented as the ideal form of government.
The "kill the infidel" program is one the average Christian pays very little attention to. He's too busy having a life to worry about it.
Look up "Dominionists" or "Christian Reconstructionists" for what real Bible-believers believe in. Then, you can do a bit more research and find out about the "Council on National Policy" (CNP) and their connection to the inner circles of the GOP, but that's another post and another topic.
The hard core among these people are the ones who blow up abortion clinics and provide other evidence of violent insanity.
Secularized Muslims are no problem. They go to mosque, go home, go to work, and are too busy living their lives to go out to try to blow up the world in the name of Allah.
The hard core among these people ... get the idea?
Fundamentalists are the problem, not the specific excuses for religious or ideological insanity any given fundamentalist uses. They have more in common with each other than they have with rhe rest of us.
As to your overall ignorance of world history, that's not a problem I can clear up in a single slashdot post, there are plenty of good books, go study some.
Total compliance, everybody happy.
Random windows software -> prepackaged windows emulator (wine?)
Word documents -> openoffice works find with these, crossover office could be packaged with the system
Check their websites. They'll only work on a very specific and very small subset of Windows apps, the odds that WINE or Crossover will run a random Windows software app suck.
I looked at them when I was looking for a Windows emulator that would give me access to all the Windows apps that either have no Linux equivalents, none that don't suck, or in the case of Eudora, would take an inordinate amount of work to port gigabytes of mail files to a Linux mail client. For me. . . no Eudora, no PaintShopPro. . . no CorelDraw . . .no deal.
That's why I'm running Win4Lin and an actual copy of Windows on top of Fedora Core 2... so I can get access to all my legacy apps. It is NOT free, but it DOES work.
Italicizing quotes = good.
Italicizing whole post = WTF?
Getting that sort of thing right is really helpful when you're trying to make points on a technical forum. Especially when your points aren't very good ones.
Kids who don't plan to go into IT or science/technology careers need to learn how GUI interfaces are used and how office (small o) applications work.
That way, if a kid sits down at on a Linux box, a Mac, a Solaris box running Open Office, a thin client running some office suite nobody around here's ever heard of, or a version of Windows two revs later than the one your people inadequately taught him to work with at the most minimal level, or WordPerfect 15 beta or Textmaker, that kid will be functional and productive instead of wondering why none of the keyboard shortcuts you want to teach her work as expected.
The process of getting a student to the point of saying "this is a computer and I can use it" is called computer EDUCATION. You're offering computer training in a very specific environment with a shrinking market share. Conflate them as you will, they aren't the same thing.
Education prepares students for future challenges. You are publically supporting the training of young people on a Windows XP that'll be legacy in a year or so.
The Windows monopoly is crumbling, whether educators want to admit it or not.
2 years ago, I was writing 100% Windows how-to pieces and reviews for publication. Now, I'm selling 100% Linux and doubt I'll ever sell another Windows piece for the remainder of my writing career, though I have no idea which non-Windows OS I'll be using 5 years from now.
The world is moving on. Where to? I don't know, and I currently do tech journalism for a living. Do you claim to know more than I do about what business will be running in 5 years? Shouldn't education be moving on with the rest of the world? Do you support teaching classes in buggy whip manufacture and how to stuff printed circuit boards by hand as well?
Governments and major corporations are voting with their feet against Microsoft tax. If you want to prepare kids for a world that's disappearing, tell us you're doing it because that's what you're comfortable with, or tell us that's all teachers know, or tell us that MS is subsidizing the school in some way and you fear losing the subsidy, but don't tell us you're doing either the students or future employers any favor.