Hard News: Brown bigots etc.
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Counts on this topic so far.
God botherers 25
Computer geeks 20I wonder how many of the people posting are in both camps?
Not many (perhaps any) comments from females either....looks RB's identified a means by which to get (approx) half the population to opt out.
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Oh yes, totally forgot what I was going to post.
Russell, did you deliberately mean to illustrate a similarity between Brian Tamaki's strategy and Microsoft's? -
The resulting .docs are near-idiotproof.
So, they can nearly be opened by idiots?Hey, if I can open them, anyone can : )
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I was bought up Christian, chose to leave, but still have respect for those I'd call 'genuine' Christians. Mr Tamaki doesn't earn any of my respect. And also appears to have just a few theological issues, if I remember my Bible correctly...
As far as open-source goes, I've taught computing for four, going on five years, and worked Helpdesk for about the same length of time (go jobs that pay your way through uni). I really can't imagine open-source being ready for the business environment any time soon, and that goes for teachers too.
I can switch between most linux/windows/mac platforms as a user without difficulty, and I can admin well enough not to destroy them.
I'd say it's only in the last year or so that the Ubuntus have been desktop-for-idiots ready, and even then, I'd want someone computer-savvy around to handhold during the inevitable "where have all my documents gone??! the computer is broken!"
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Hi Rich
Yes, and we could require that everyone learn to replace a piston before they learn to drive, or milk a cow before they learn to make tea.
Hmmm point taken, although back when cars were less reliable we pretty much did teach children how to fix them.
I guess my thinking was that with the continued expansion of computers into our lives, the ability to understand how software works might well become as much a part of life as say keyboard skills are now. Or not. Maybe it's OK if most folks never know why their program stops working and the only person they know to ask is IT support.
Some technologies become reliable enough that no-one needs to know how to fix them, some technologies become so complex that no-one needs to know how to fix them, but some technologies integrate into everything we do at a level where some understanding is needed.
The ability to do internet searches for knowledge I think is becoming such a technology. Does that mean we need to understand how to write software to thrive in the future? To some degree I think the answer to that is yes. Or at least close enough to yes to makeme want to see children learn how to "play" with programs.
cheers
Bart -
Danyl, you weren't at the GOVIS conference by any chance?
No - I work in a biology department and mostly go to biology and biotech related conferences.
Just wondering because they showed that youTube vid at it.
Jon: "Not many (perhaps any) comments from females either"
How do you know who is a woman here? On the internet nobody knows your a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a dog.
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See, unless someone is a complete vandal, there is really no reason why a MS environment needs to be like that. It's easy enough to stay trouble free if you want to. I'd say it's no more trouble than my Linux desktop tbh.
I'm with Paul. We have three Macs and a PC for the kids' gaming, and the PC has been more grief than the other three put together.
The thing I love about Linux is that any application or device that exists out there can be retooled, re-engineered and downright pimped with a wealth of features that I may have never known I needed, until I started using them. That is the power of open source.
That was one of the things that made MacOS X work - a big stock of mature, stable Unix applications that were a fairly simple (I presume) port to the Mac. You can love Unix without ever seeing the command line ...
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I guess my thinking was that with the continued expansion of computers into our lives, the ability to understand how software works might well become as much a part of life as say keyboard skills are now.
The problem with that is the old saw, that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There's a huge learning curve required between "Hello World" and "ability to debug Open Office".
(The former I can do in several languages, and I'd imagine so can a lot of kids in my generation. The latter, not so much.)
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Not many (perhaps any) comments from females either....looks RB's identified a means by which to get (approx) half the population to opt out.
a) I've been having the 'Bish Tamaki is a moron' discussion so often the last few days I'm all worn down in the indignation stakes
b) If I wanted to discuss open source and various programming idiocies I'd sit down at my dinner table.
I did, however, sit down last year when my kids' school decided to make everyone sing the national anthem at school assemblies and go through the lyrics. To my surprise, I didn't find anything in there that the large contingent of Muslim immigrants would find really alienating. That whole 'bonds of love, at thy feet' thing takes on a whole new light if you're picturing a sort of pagan Horned God type deity too. That's the sort of mental picture one needs to drag one's sorry arse through yet another school assembly.
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Great! Let's kick up Civ IV and see how well it runs!
Good point. I suppose most households care as much about the operating system on their computers as they do about the embedded software in their microwave or video recorder, as long as it works, most of the time. When it doesn't, you call in a "repair man"
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But there's a reason why we don't have any kind of analogue to the Shankill Road or the Kuta Beach bombings or Kosovo in our history books. And I'd argue that's in large part due to the fact that we never quite took the turn into sectarian politics or sectarian violence and terrorism.
And to take my turn in the queue of pedants...the 2002 bomb was not on Kuta Beach, rather it was on Jalan Legian, some 2km or so away from the waves. And i don't think it was one attack that could be in fairness be described as sectarian. Whilst the reasoning behind the bombers' thinking remains cloudy, the best evidence seems to suggest a two pronged logic. Firstly there was the obvious strike against the west, post 9/11, and in particular Australia who was then lining up to go into Iraq. The surviving bombers have given this, several times, as their primary rationale. Secondly, there was a blowback against the inescapable notion that amongst Australia's successful exports to the rest of the world was Kings Cross. The area around JL Legian that was demolished was, even to my eyes, tainted with years of High Street, offensively, and drunkenly sleazy, with one bar having a no Indonesians apart from staff and hookers policy. And it goes on, last Saturday night I drove past the memorial and it was covered in drunken, shirtless goons holding Bintangs.
You could perhaps apply the sectarian word to the Ambon and Poso bloodshed, a long long way from here, but even then the Western media has tended to use an easy answer to the question why, ignoring the reality of the political, economic factors and outside fermentation of these to advantage.
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looks RB's identified a means by which to get (approx) half the population to opt out.
If that doesn't work he could always run TV ads for PA based around girls in bikinis.
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I have an aging iBook (a cool white one) and have installed NeoOffice for everyday word processing. I use MS Office at work, but I didn't think it was worth paying for at home. (I do find it a bit slow, but then, this is a 600Mhz G3 machine, so assume that isn't a software problem.)
Short version: It works fine.
It would not be a big deal to use it in schools.
As someone pointed out, if you are transferring documents where formatting is very important between NeoOffice and MS Office, then you will probably lose some detail. In my experience the OpenOffice spreadsheet works very well (I have noticed some oddities when making huge pivot tables, but I think that would be beyond most school applications).
I have Firefox installed, but I prefer Safari. We regularly use three sites that don't work with Safari, so for a school I'd recommend Firefox.
Anyway, I can't really imagine what people would see as lacking in NeoOffice. I can imagine the whole "doesn't save in Word format by default" issue will confuse people, but I can remember training up perfectly computer-illiterate people to sort this out during the great WordPerfect-to-MS-Works migrations of the nineties.
Gordon
Disclaimer: My other computer runs Debian. (In fact, my iBook used to run Debian.)
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Mahal, "There's a huge learning curve required between "Hello World" and "ability to debug Open Office"."
Not in MS Visual C++ there isn't. But that's not one of the good things about it ;-). But yeah, the real barrier to debugging open source stuff is "why the hell would I want to?". Fortunately there are millions of nerds who have the strangest desire to show you the answer. Get them to do it. It's a lot easier than getting anyone at MS to lift a finger.
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If that doesn't work he could always run TV ads for PA based around girls in bikinis.
If he could get the girls from the Tui brewery? Phwoah.
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Emma,
"That whole 'bonds of love, at thy feet' thing takes on a whole new light if you're picturing a sort of pagan Horned God type deity too. That's the sort of mental picture one needs to drag one's sorry arse through yet another school assembly."
So *that's* what the girls were thinking about in assembly! I was just thinking about the girls.
You win the prize for the scariest sounding dinner table. I think I'd rather say Grace than discuss OSS, agnostic though I am.
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Fortunately there are millions of nerds who have the strangest desire to show you the answer.
Totally agreed - I have a couple of mates who work for open-source organizations. I even did a bit of Moodle programming at one point, and I'm far from a good programmer.
I don't think there's much chance of that becoming the mainstream, though - most users want the technology to just work. (Getting folks to do the simplest troubleshooting steps via Helpdesk is like pulling hens' teeth, I swear.)
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Cultural cringe doesn't get much worse than listening to our anthem in English - I vote we just switch over to the Maori version wholesale. It's much cooler, esp when sung overseas.
Say, what is 'Pacifics Triple Star' anyway?
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You win the prize for the scariest sounding dinner table. I think I'd rather say Grace than discuss OSS, agnostic though I am.
It's about the only dinner conversation I get that doesn't involve the phrase 'hit points'.
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Say, what is 'Pacifics Triple Star' anyway?
North, South and Stewart
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So i've installed NeoOffice now, to play with it. Any traps for young players that i should look out for?
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Hi Emma
Sorry to hear about your dinner table discussions.
I didn't find anything in there that the large contingent of Muslim immigrants would find really alienating.
But if you happen to believe there is no god then the whole anthem becomes a bit much - and the Maori version of it even more so.
For me the anthem can be consdiered inclusive of most religious folks, but what about non-religious folks?
cheers
Bart -
sorry to drag this thread in a different direction but when I heard about those stupid bloody Burger King ads being taken off air I was over the moon!
I felt just like the Mensa group who took over Springfield in that Simpsons episode with Stephen Hawking. Take that ya hicks!
The illuminati are in your BSA raising your denominator. (spelt correctly on purpose)
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North, South and Stewart
Stuart? Screw them! I'm singing 'guard Pacific's double star' from here on in.
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But there's a reason why we don't have any kind of analogue to the Shankill Road or the Kuta Beach bombings or Kosovo in our history books.
My wife's grandmother's father used to tell her tales of his dad taking him to the Auckland Domain so that he could be properly educated in taking a cudgel to the heathens. I can't recall whether the heathens in question were Protestants or Catholics, but happily the boy failed to be inculcated with religious fervour, and neither did many other children of immigrants in our little country. Probably influenced by the desire to leave that shit in the old country.
(I worked with a Serbian bloke a few years ago who told me he'd come to New Zealand with his family in the 1990s to live somewhere boring.)
One of the saving graces of New Zealand as a nation is that we just don't care about religion that much. I actually think Clark has opened a rather bad can of worms with this conference on that front.
If that doesn't work he could always run TV ads for PA based around girls in bikinis.
I hear there are women who are rather fond of looking at other women in bikinis.
The former I can do in several languages
LOLCODE? http://lolcode.com/
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