lloyd wrote:
I was surprised to get a written reply from the Education Minister to my
enquiries on this matter. I quote below, which may shed some light on
the Department's decisions.
"The NSW Dept of Education & Training manages .... and currently
installs, in parallel with Microsoft Office suite, Open Office on all
Technology for Learning computers and runs appropriate servers on a
Linux base. In sourcing applications all avenues are explored to
identify the most appropriate and cost effective solution, taking into
account platform migration costs and interoperability with current
systems. ..... During the procurement process, a range of operating
systems and applications was offered to meet the Department's
requirements, including solutions based on Apple, Linux and Microsoft
platforms. ... It was determined that a Microsoft based solution best
met the Department's needs, particularly with respect to multimedia
applications."
I'm sad to say that there is probably some truth in this. I recently started
messing with video, and ended up buying a Mac because video on Linux was simply
too difficult for the amount of time I have to spend on it.
Not that it can't be done, but Apple make it EASY to do. I want to do video
work, not system administration work.
Linux colour management simply isn't good enough. GIMP is fine, and I use it a
lot, but it's too restricted in the colour management area, and doesn't handle
16 bit.
Sound on Linux is patchy. There are too many times when I have to struggle to
make it do what I want it to do.
That doesn't mean things won't change in the future. It's not so long ago that
Gnome was a dog. Now it's my window manager of preference over MacOs or Windows.
L
On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 15:47 +1000, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
Adrian Chadd wrote:
On Mon, May 18, 2009, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
So, the school kids are being taught to develop content for four colour
industrial printing, rather than websites?
Personally, I would think that school kids and FOSS developers time is
better
spent improving tools and adding to content in the online world.
What really erks me, is that no doubt a PDF newsletters will be produced and
emailed around to be printed on home and school printers (no commercial
printer
in sight). - Tell me I'm wrong.
I'd rather they'd be taught the difference between the two, so hopefully
those who are smart enough to "get it" will have the oppertunity to.
Don't dumb stuff down. Kids are smarter than you'd think. And god knows
that FOSS developers could do with being exposed to stuff -outside-
of the cool+hip FOSS environment(s) today.
Far from limiting the kids chances, I was hoping for the opposite. There is far
too much PDF/proprietary and "Desktop" published content/designed for the
printed page, on the web and not enough open accessible (HTML) web content.
If the kids are going to be provided with education on all the different
formats, discussion about appropriate communication mediums etc, then fine but....
Comparison with RGB
Comparisons between RGB displays and CMYK prints can be difficult, since the
color reproduction technologies and properties are so different. A laser or
ink-jet printer prints in dots per inch (dpi) which is very different from a
computer screen, which displays graphics in pixels per inch (ppi). A computer
screen mixes shades of red, green, and blue to create color pictures. A CMYK
printer must compete with the many shades of RGB with only one shade each of
cyan, magenta and yellow, which it will mix using dithering, halftoning or some
other optical technique; this dithering produces a lower level of detail than
the printer's dpi suggests.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK>
It would also appear introducing CMYK images to the web adds further problems
... see the discussion here:
<http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.graphics.apps.photoshop/2006-03/msg00067.html>
Perhaps, in 12 months time we could do a survey and see how many kids laptops
have "the gimp" on them .... or whether the school websites are full of PDF
documents.
I know, I might be a lone voice here, but I see it as atonement for once
recommending standisation on MSOffice in 1989 because it was the most
userfriendly - at the time, it wasn't as good as ?? for footnotes, or as good as
?? for table of contents and Excel just couldn't handle the data that Lotus123
could.
On the other hand, I was never a fan of Lotus Notes...and it would seem that's
been given away now....
Welcome to OpenNTF.org
OpenNTF is devoted to enabling groups of individuals all over the world to
collaborate on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino applications and release them as open
source.
<http://www.openntf.org/Internal/home.nsf>
Marghanita
--
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202
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