That must be warehouse dependant I guess. Even Dartford doesn't have the full range that you see in store.
I have heard of that - might investigate further. But does it suffer from the "packed in store half of the items are missing" syndrome - especially for orders where the pick is say late afternoon after all the store vistors have cleaned out the shelves and the next delivery hasn't come yet?
Seemed to be the problem with Sainsburys...
My house, my laptop, my network - end of. When they can pay for and set up their own MS Windows OS they can. If they get too many trojans/zombies/virus, I will cut their network connection off until they learn :)
In the meantime, they get what they are given.
It's all about educating them in the ways of the light - darkness will find it's own way to advertise itself - having used at least one other system, they will be in a position of knowledge to make an informed choice.
No it isn't. If the school expect stuff to run on *my* systems, it is up to them to provide material in open and/or supported formats. I'll make the effort to support as many formats as I can but if it is totally MS only, forget it.
It's not exactly an insoluable problem. If they can't work here, the kids can stay at school and use their computers. I am not paying for and wasting time maintaining sub rate OSes which risk filling my networks with crap just to keep them happy. Again, end of.
No - because I buy oil that meets the standard required by my engine. There are several suppliers of each standard - I have a choice.
If someone offered me free reliable electricity I'd fecking take it. Wouldn't you? Even more so if the paying suppliers had erratic suplly full of spikes and brown outs which knackered my equipment (spot on analogy BTW).
Everyone offers me "standard electricity at 230V/50Hz nominal" so it all works and I buy the cheapest.
You are missing the point - I expect schools to work with material that supports open standards or has viewers for a variety of systems so I get a choice of systems to run it on.
Don't forget MAC only families - same issues as linux or *BSD.
The paying is a secondary aspect - but since I have no other reason to pay MS money, why should I start now just because the school has a bent website or ships me some unfathomable file format?
At least most of the .doc and .xls stuff works OK with LibreOffice, but if it doesn't, words will be had - particularly as the fix is trivial and free for them (save as older format).
You can stop now...
Mine likes the BSD daemon. All I have to do now is find a nice picture of one, machine gunning a penguin!
Younger son has both Windows and BSD. He mainly uses Windows just for iTunes...
Not really - I depend on my laptop for work. It is new and not cheap. They are 5 and 7 years old. The matter would be different if they were at secondary school needing to do "serious" work.
My son has a long history of not being careful with electronics (he is little, it is expected) and I usually need my laptop in the evenings so it's availablity is limited anyway. SWMBO's laptop is work owned so they cannot touch that either by orders of her work.
When they are at secondary school I will probably buy them proper systems (or better, get them to make some out of parts).
For now, I am not willing to spend a lot of money on something which is essentially a toy. Luckily I have 2 rather broken[1] but functional ancient laptops that will do and will just about run xubuntu well (they would choke on Windows 7 and even XP would slow one down, the other is an eeePC so is very limited).
[1] Dead batteries, shot trackpads, hinges about to fail - but viable on a desk plugged into the wall with a little travel mouse plugged in.The point I'm making is do you expect really poor families to shell out for primary school age kids?
I'm sorry if you find this offensive, but I am equally annoyed by the assumption all households are tooled up for such provisions at primary school age.
Cheers
Tim
Mine does too (East Kent rather than deepest Sussex here!)
We got the £99 yearly pass which means delivery is otherwise free (min spend £40 but that's easy) at any time (bar a few Christmas days I think). We generally have a delivery early evening (probably before you're home, Tim...it only takes we 10 mins to get home from work (smug)).
There was a newspaper a few years ago that gave 10 GCSE A pass students an O level paper. They all failed as the syllabus had changed so much that the CGSE puplis had not coverered what was in the O level papers.
It does seem that an A pass is now just a minimum requirement and you are right, it does not sort the wheat from the chaff.
My girlfriends lads teacher has asked that I do not help with his maths as "maths is not taught like that anymore".
Ooh - that is interesting... Will check.
I'm home at 5:30-6pm most days these days - hehe :)
But I am also on the 6:40am train :(
What time does the 6:40am train actually leave in practice?
Surprising, 6:40am on a bright dry warm[1] morning.
It usually gets fecked up somewhere in south London if it is going to go wrong.
[1] If any of those conditions are not true, all bets are off of course - the snow last winter shut our entire line down for 2 seperate ful weeks and the rest of the time it ran like crap.
It's probably gone up now - not to mention the VAT rise. But still a good deal. We do well out of Amazon Prime too!
That's late for me...although it does depend. I can work from home quite a bit, like today.
We're up by then anyway...kids need to get the 7.35am to school...!
I spent a few years tutoring and demonstrating degree level stuff at uni, when doing my post-grad stuff. The difference in ability between when I started the course myself, an when I stopped demonstrating 8 years later was amazing. I had to teach a group of radiology students what the gradient of a line graph was, how to calculate it and what it actually meant. These students had at least a good gcse grade, if not a level, in maths and where doing a scientific degree. the grades these days are a useless way of determining ability, which is a real shame. As are the results of letting thousands of people leave the education system thinking they're very intelligent when they are only average. Cue disappointment at best, a wasted lifetime at worst.
God help this miserable country :(
Offensive, nah. I just don't think it's good to dig your heels in over an OS, which is how it comes across. You could pick up my XP machine on EBay for less than £100, but it does everything I need, so it's hardly expensive to conform (which IME is strangely important to kids).
My grandkids are in a Mac household, yet they seem remarkably well adjusted :-)
Hi Stuart,
Oddly, it *is* meant to come across like that :)
I've had enough experience of MS to make a very overt decision to dig my heels in hard on this.
3 reasons:1) I don't want to maintain a crap OS (which has been my experience when I have had to deal with it professionally). I'm a linux specialist and know very little about the deep internals of Windows now.
2) It's good for the kids' souls to get used to something other that what the schools will shove at them. I do not want them to conform to the "MS is the only option" by default, that afflicts so many.3) I want to give them a system that integrates cleanly with my servers and they cannot break (trivially anyway).
Like I say, if they want MS Windows, they can pay for it (IIRC they can get a serious educational discount anyway but it will still hurt), install it (with some oversight and guidance from me) and when it breaks (it will), they can fix it or reinstall it. At least then, they will have a holistic view of the damn thing.
But I bet you a fiver that as soon as money is mentioned, Linux or *BSD will suddenly seem very attractive. Daughter's already seen my initial install of Xubuntu and likes the look of it. I just need to do the systems integration (NFS, Kerberos) so she'll be working off a backed up fileserver, then it's hers for as long as it lives.
I do have some work to do on the email side (not that she needs that yet) but I want to fix her account as a moderated list where I'm the moderator for all new material. I can gradually whitelist her friends then - but that's a job for a couple of years down the line.
I also need to fix the firewall at the border to block as much crap as possible (with this probably:
These are the things I am better spending my time on than fixing ditsy crap OSes.
Right now, it will be money that has to be spent again in a few years. Rather wait until they need a proper system then let them build it from parts - they'll learn more than they do from the wibbly execises they get now!
Good for them. Not that I'm an Apple fan, but at least it breaks the notion that "there can only be one!"
Cheers
Tim
Good. It's a huge pity that more people aren't prepared to do the same. I have no children, so schools aren't an issue, but I always complain whenever people send me MS documents - they should use an open format.
Very strange. My older kids were taught this well before GCSEs.
Toilets?
Hmm sorry can't help.
I have had OpenOffice a couple of years back work fine on XP but maybe something went bad in the transition to LibreOffice - maybe try an older version of OpenOffice - should be knocking around on a mirror somewhere (maybe
Maybe here?
They are under no obligation to support every format just so the odd odd person can use it.
Same old arguments.. I have been running windows on the internet since 98 was new and have never got a virus yet. Sure anyone can be really stupid and install a trojan but they can do that on any OS.
But a false analogy though.
I expect schools to use what's best for the job.
Probably not, Mac software tends to work OK with windows files.
OK.
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