Recently a fellow linguistics major bought herself a new Dell computer. It came with Windows [some version], but I convinced her not to get Microsoft Office or other software. My successful sales argument for this was that she can get the MS Office suite cheaper at our university bookstore with her student ID than from Dell. I also explained (very carefully, I thought) that she could ALSO install OOo for free, etc. I stressed that it was so much easier to do linguistics work with OOo because of support for IPA characters. I even burned a CD of the latest Windows version of OOo and gave it to her.
The computer finally arrived and she bought the whole MS Office from the bookstore and installed it. When I next saw her in class she said she tried the CD I gave her but "it wanted to install something and I stopped it because I was afraid to install something for fear it would mess up my new computer." OKI, the babe is too dumb to qualify as a graduate student, but there you are. I am wondering if a "live CD" (like the Linux live CDs) might be useful for people like this. They could run OOo from the CD without installing it. The CD would assure them that it was configured so it could not touch their hard disk. Or does such already exist and I am unaware of it? Or is this a dumb idea? Y'all have opinions about this? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
