> 1) MS give schools a MASSIVE discount on software costs
Did i mention cost? And why do you think they do that?
> 2) MS Office is an excellent office productivity suite, market leading in fact
the quality of the 'productivity suite' is not in dispute, however I feel somewhat uneasy that the focus of a lot of these parts of the curriculum is based largely around teaching kids which buttons they need to click to do certain things, rather than giving them some insight into what it is they are actually doing and why. Any office app is simple enough to pick up if you understand the basics of how they work.
For example, My housemate, as I said in an earlier post, is a teacher. She has a basic working knowledge of MSO, and is teaching kids stuff like "how to open a template for a letter", "how to create a table", "how to use a spellchecker", etc... Which is fine, but looking through her lesson plans I spotted several instructions along the lines of "select the paragraph, and pick 'Arial' from the fonts list".. Now, ability to set various styles for different parts of your document is a pretty basic feature in most word processors, however this isn't being taught, in favour of explaining how to build tables in MSWord.
> 3) Just because someone learns MS OFfice, this doesn't mean that they can't use this knowledge against another office suite. (I use Lotus Notes at work, it doesn't mean that I would need training to be able to write an email in Outlook / Eudora etc)
I completely agree, although it depends entirely on how they are taught.
> 4) Using OSS software is not free, it may be free to own, but it costs to keep any software running.
I didn't say they should be using OSS, all I am saying is that I feel uncomfortable that teachers trained only in MSO are teaching only MSO with no regard to applying the knowledge to other applications
> 5) Many schools in the UK use Apple rather than MS
That's no bad thing, although MSO is still available for Macs.
> 6) If you think that an employer is not going to need to train someone anyway at the point where they start work you are sadly mistaken.
Of course they will, and I believe that th narrow-minded teaching of specific applications in schools is partially responsible for this fact
The problem I have is that instead of teaching kids how word processors (and spreadsheets, desktop publishing apps, etc, etc) work, and how to produce the layout they want, etc, they are teaching kids which buttons and menu items to click in MSOffice to do certain things. I am simply questioning the value of having a teacher who has learnt only MSOffice teaching kids how to do things a specific way in that particular application...
> I don't get your pint
no-one's having MY pint, it's mine, aaaall mine!
Personally, I find it sickening that schools (here in the UK at least) are teaching lessons as what amount to "Microsoft Office Classes"... My housemate is a teacher, she has little knowledge past the standard MSOffice skills an average office worker would pick up, yet she's planning lessons and teaching these kids. IMHO there needs to be a definite line between teaching kids how a word processor works, and teaching kids "MS Word 2000" or whatever...
What happens to all these kids when they finally get jobs? their employer has to either spend more money training them, or shell out for the latest microsoft product that they are vaguely familar with...
We did just that after discovering one of the developers was running seti on all the colocated windows servers (well.. actually it was a little vb app producing a dialog box that just said 'please contact this number', and a big seti logo) Next time he VNC'd in.. haha.. I had to leave the room as he picked up the phone looking all smug...
Me, I'll buy one, in fact i was looking for the thinkgeek link before i'd actually read the article;)
I think it's decent enough idea. Hey, at least it's a vaguely interesting reason to own a particular plant
the domain can *still* go to netster. Remember if netster want to catch people, they need to actually register the domains (and be responsible for whatever legal implications that may have). this way, verisign are getting a shitload of traffic, for free, bypassing the legal problems, and breaking functionality of the dns system. Look at it from a user's point of view, if you hit a typo domain, you might want some kinda page that offers you google style spelling correction in your browser.. but do you want a similar thing in your mail system?... The point is that it's simple enough to provide the functionality you seem to think is so great in the web browser (in fact MS have already done so).. so why break the dns system if it's not purely an attempt to make money?
your BROWSER should do that, or possibly a proxy.. not the fucking DNS system. But now they've broken that functionality, as *all* domains now exist.
What the fuck is wrong with *YOU*?
No, because they sell shitty hardware that breaks regularly. So if you actually need to get some work done with any degree of reliability you have to take one of their ludicrously expensive on-site warranties.
If you'd spent any time developing for these browsers you'd know that they all render differently, despite being in standards mode. Opera's problem is it mimics the bugs in IE, but doesn't do it perfectly. And I for one can't be bothered to edit my code to keep an annoying commercial browser like Opera happy.
Opera annoys me, Instead of going for standards compliance, they've sought to emulate every little IE bug, and even to present itself as IE in order to fool stupid webdesigners that try to refuse connection to browsers other than IE. It's not helping anyone, it's bug-emulation isn't perfect which creates it's own problems. I find Mozilla Firebird a much better, and standards compliant alternative.
yeah yeah, it was 175 (or 174 depends on which exchange you are at), still works in some places... that was lots of fun at school (the payphone was an extension of a phone in the office)
but try dialling this: 1707070, it goes to an engineers menu (complete with the annoyingly plummy BT-voice talking comically quickly!) and gives you several options...
if you select 'FastTest' and replace the handset, it will ring you back and tell you how far away you are in Km from the nearest exchange! the ADSL engineer told me that (because somehow we got ADSL installed and we're over 7Km away, I love BT)
also, after making lots of tea for the NTL CaTV engineer, he showed me the engineers menu on my cable digibox (take out the smartcardthing, unplug the box, plug back in and hold the up and down buttons on the front, then put the card back in when the blue screen appears)
there is loads of info in there, the IP address of your CaTV box, the amount of credit that NTL will give you.... plus loads more....
yeah but surely if two surfaces were *perfectly* smooth and inelastic there would be no friction; therefore if you assume they had a degree of friction ("roughness at the atomic level"?).... hang on.... was thinking about modelling roughness as a zig-zag-like meshing of surface and friction itself as the force required to push the object over the zig-zag surface, but the sides would be friction-less, therefore (now i'm rambling, sorry) what if you were to assume that the friction is equal to the force required to push the object through the zig-zag 'peaks' meaning you were actually measuring the amount of material destroyed from each surface... right... i'll come back when i've thought that through
Slashdot Mirror
> 1) MS give schools a MASSIVE discount on software costs
Did i mention cost?
And why do you think they do that?
> 2) MS Office is an excellent office productivity suite, market leading in fact
the quality of the 'productivity suite' is not in dispute, however I feel somewhat uneasy that the focus of a lot of these parts of the curriculum is based largely around teaching kids which buttons they need to click to do certain things, rather than giving them some insight into what it is they are actually doing and why. Any office app is simple enough to pick up if you understand the basics of how they work.
For example, My housemate, as I said in an earlier post, is a teacher. She has a basic working knowledge of MSO, and is teaching kids stuff like "how to open a template for a letter", "how to create a table", "how to use a spellchecker", etc... Which is fine, but looking through her lesson plans I spotted several instructions along the lines of "select the paragraph, and pick 'Arial' from the fonts list".. Now, ability to set various styles for different parts of your document is a pretty basic feature in most word processors, however this isn't being taught, in favour of explaining how to build tables in MSWord.
> 3) Just because someone learns MS OFfice, this doesn't mean that they can't use this knowledge against another office suite. (I use Lotus Notes at work, it doesn't mean that I would need training to be able to write an email in Outlook / Eudora etc)
I completely agree, although it depends entirely on how they are taught.
> 4) Using OSS software is not free, it may be free to own, but it costs to keep any software running.
I didn't say they should be using OSS, all I am saying is that I feel uncomfortable that teachers trained only in MSO are teaching only MSO with no regard to applying the knowledge to other applications
> 5) Many schools in the UK use Apple rather than MS
That's no bad thing, although MSO is still available for Macs.
> 6) If you think that an employer is not going to need to train someone anyway at the point where they start work you are sadly mistaken.
Of course they will, and I believe that th narrow-minded teaching of specific applications in schools is partially responsible for this fact
The problem I have is that instead of teaching kids how word processors (and spreadsheets, desktop publishing apps, etc, etc) work, and how to produce the layout they want, etc, they are teaching kids which buttons and menu items to click in MSOffice to do certain things. I am simply questioning the value of having a teacher who has learnt only MSOffice teaching kids how to do things a specific way in that particular application...
> I don't get your pint
no-one's having MY pint, it's mine, aaaall mine!
Personally, I find it sickening that schools (here in the UK at least) are teaching lessons as what amount to "Microsoft Office Classes"... My housemate is a teacher, she has little knowledge past the standard MSOffice skills an average office worker would pick up, yet she's planning lessons and teaching these kids.
IMHO there needs to be a definite line between teaching kids how a word processor works, and teaching kids "MS Word 2000" or whatever...
What happens to all these kids when they finally get jobs? their employer has to either spend more money training them, or shell out for the latest microsoft product that they are vaguely familar with...
We did just that after discovering one of the developers was running seti on all the colocated windows servers (well.. actually it was a little vb app producing a dialog box that just said 'please contact this number', and a big seti logo) Next time he VNC'd in.. haha.. I had to leave the room as he picked up the phone looking all smug...
Me, I'll buy one, in fact i was looking for the thinkgeek link before i'd actually read the article ;)
I think it's decent enough idea. Hey, at least it's a vaguely interesting reason to own a particular plant
the domain can *still* go to netster. Remember if netster want to catch people, they need to actually register the domains (and be responsible for whatever legal implications that may have). this way, verisign are getting a shitload of traffic, for free, bypassing the legal problems, and breaking functionality of the dns system. Look at it from a user's point of view, if you hit a typo domain, you might want some kinda page that offers you google style spelling correction in your browser.. but do you want a similar thing in your mail system? ... The point is that it's simple enough to provide the functionality you seem to think is so great in the web browser (in fact MS have already done so).. so why break the dns system if it's not purely an attempt to make money?
http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/D/dogfood.html
your BROWSER should do that, or possibly a proxy.. not the fucking DNS system. But now they've broken that functionality, as *all* domains now exist. What the fuck is wrong with *YOU*?
No, because they sell shitty hardware that breaks regularly. So if you actually need to get some work done with any degree of reliability you have to take one of their ludicrously expensive on-site warranties.
dude an airliner is one great big faraday cage..
Well what's generally accepted as "Linux" these days is actually correctly referred to as GNU/Linux.
If you'd spent any time developing for these browsers you'd know that they all render differently, despite being in standards mode. Opera's problem is it mimics the bugs in IE, but doesn't do it perfectly. And I for one can't be bothered to edit my code to keep an annoying commercial browser like Opera happy.
Because Blair can't afford to pay him off?
Opera annoys me, Instead of going for standards compliance, they've sought to emulate every little IE bug, and even to present itself as IE in order to fool stupid webdesigners that try to refuse connection to browsers other than IE. It's not helping anyone, it's bug-emulation isn't perfect which creates it's own problems. I find Mozilla Firebird a much better, and standards compliant alternative.
yeah yeah, it was 175 (or 174 depends on which exchange you are at), still works in some places... that was lots of fun at school (the payphone was an extension of a phone in the office) but try dialling this: 1707070, it goes to an engineers menu (complete with the annoyingly plummy BT-voice talking comically quickly!) and gives you several options... if you select 'FastTest' and replace the handset, it will ring you back and tell you how far away you are in Km from the nearest exchange! the ADSL engineer told me that (because somehow we got ADSL installed and we're over 7Km away, I love BT) also, after making lots of tea for the NTL CaTV engineer, he showed me the engineers menu on my cable digibox (take out the smartcardthing, unplug the box, plug back in and hold the up and down buttons on the front, then put the card back in when the blue screen appears) there is loads of info in there, the IP address of your CaTV box, the amount of credit that NTL will give you.... plus loads more....
yeah but surely if two surfaces were *perfectly* smooth and inelastic there would be no friction; therefore if you assume they had a degree of friction ("roughness at the atomic level"?).... hang on.... was thinking about modelling roughness as a zig-zag-like meshing of surface and friction itself as the force required to push the object over the zig-zag surface, but the sides would be friction-less, therefore (now i'm rambling, sorry) what if you were to assume that the friction is equal to the force required to push the object through the zig-zag 'peaks' meaning you were actually measuring the amount of material destroyed from each surface... right... i'll come back when i've thought that through