On Friday 06 June 2003 16:25, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > Quoth [EMAIL PROTECTED] on Fri, Jun 06, 2003: > > I have a feeling that schools are a very important goal - see how Mac's > > survived for so long simply because they managed to take over the > > American schools section. > > Why are you so keen on taking over the world?
I'm not. I just see: 1. How microsoft uses copyright laws to its advantage (BSA and friends) but ignores them when it's convenient for them. 2. People get used to use microsoft at school and take it with them everywere else. Hurting microsoft there might let us get a foot in an important door. How do you think UNIX and related technologies found their ways to corporates? they were carried by students who got exposed to them at uni. And why do I care about this? Because this morning I couldn't setup sendsms because registring at Orange requires IE, which I don't have on my Linux desktop. I see this as one of the many end results of the chain which startted, among other things, by "ok, let's use Microsoft, what else is in the world?" at schools. > > > > > - They are teaching (badly, but that's outside our scope) to use > > > > software that (I hope) won't be used nearly as much much in the not > > > > too distant future (ie by the time people now in 7th grade graduate). > > > > > > You should teach *something*. Why is C taught in schools? Is it > > > the best programming language? Is it widely used? Well, yes, it > > > is, but will it be widely used in five years? > > > > As much as I'm into object-oriented programming these days, I remember > > C was expected to die a horrible death already over ten years ago and > > still it's here alive and kicking. > > *Of course* it's alive and kicking -- it's taught almost > everywhere. Chicken, meet egg. I don't agree to this reasoning. Pascal was also tought at many places (still is?) but it never took off as a mainstream application language. On the other hand Perl is almost never offered at university courses but somehow everyone knows about it and use it. Therefore I don't see correlation between "tought" and "used". > > > Not to start a flame war > > I'll start it with someone else instead, then. Good. I hate flame wars. > > > > What did I miss? Is OpenOffice the new Israeli standard? > > > > What about suggesting this to the ministry of education, as a matter of > > standardizing the silabus and the school's IT systems? > > I prefer troff with -mm macros. > > Serioiusly though, I don't have the "us vs. them" mentality on > this matter; I can't see why schools should teach MS Word, but I > can't see why they should teach OpenOffice either. If we want to > promote diversity, we should teach a little bit of everything. Good - so Microsoft is welcome to port their stuff to Linux :). Seriously - the "average person in the street" isn't aware about the alternatives. The "standard" costs the tax payers a lot of money and locks out the competition. This is what brought us to the current situation. Microsoft seems to DO have the "us vs. them" mentality, as you put it. They sort of setup the rules that way. Let's play them with what we have. > > Vadik. --Amos ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
