Hi Steve,
Welcome. I too am new to this group and have attended a grand total of two meetings - and one of those was in a pub). Here's a quick bio of me (for those who have a couple of minutes of their lives to waste): I'm a retired advisory teacher for ICT in Cambridgeshire schools so my use of computers has all been educational. We started with BBC computers (built by Acorn) in the 80s, although we also had a couple of Apple Macs running Windows with a mouse. Black and white screen but damned fine they were. The IT Inspector bought a monitor capable of 16 million colours to use with one of them which amused us at the time. We went on to Archimedes which ran a full windows GUI and were really pretty good machines. A RISC processor and an operating system on ROM meant you never got cluttered up with system folders full of dead dlls etc. But Acorn shot themselves in the foot by not bringing in hard discs so we ran on floppies when PCs had gone hard disc. They had to because the OS was held on disc but people saw that you didn't have to keep swapping floppies so the Acorns were seen as fiddly (justly so). Then education funding was devolved to schools and all the parents who had been saying "why aren't you teaching them DOS because that's what they'll use when they leave school?" insisted that schools bought "Industry Standard" machines. These were for children from 5 to 11 years old for whom DOS was clearly ideal (not). What they needed then and need now is good software designed for children. At the time, Acorns had good graphics, good sound and a wealth of good software, often written by teachers. PCs had an 80 character scrolling text screen, no sound and rubbish graphics. Also practically zero software suitable for very young children. Who says parents know best? But they had the purse strings and education went PC. Fortunately three things happened at the same time and since then Windows in education has been fine. One is that manufacturers like RM produced PCs with sound and graphics (the world of industry was also introducing graphics for presentation etc at that time too so PCs were growing up at last). Secondly, Microsoft limped into the world of WIMP with version 3 of the GUI. And thirdly, all the educational software houses versioned their software across to run on PCs. The rest is history, except that although Acorn died, Apple didn't and Linux kept beavering away on the fringes. I can't help feeling that this is the year that Linux might go mainstream. Vista is such a disaster that even the hackers apparently aren't bothering to copy it and I'm told Microsoft is rushing Windows 7 through in order to either kill off XP (they only support two OSs) or to let Vista haters (= everyone) move on). In this environment Linux is gaining a foothold and Ubuntu with its support is gaining in popularity. I have to say that my knowledge of Linux is practically zero so I'm just here to learn. If you want to know anything about education, ask me. If you want to know anything about Linux, ask anyone else! Brian _____ From: peterboro-boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:peterboro-boun...@mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Steve Harker Sent: 19 February 2009 17:10 To: peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk Subject: [Peterboro] Hi There Hi, I have just joined this list. Though I do not currently live in Peterborough I am hoping to move there soon (Currently house hunting). A little about me: I work in IT for a solicitors firm in London. All day I have to deal with Windows PCs. I have been using Linux in one form or another on and off for over 10 years now! I currently have: Asus Laptop with Fedora 10 on it Asus WL700Ge with OpenWRT Kamikaze on it AMD64 PC running Fedora core 5 (will be upgraded when I get it out of storage. Steve No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.0.237 / Virus Database: 270.11.1/1960 - Release Date: 02/19/09 10:48:00
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