J
Joe
Jim said:What annoys me is that our local education authority, since moving to
PCs from Archimedes networks, have time and again stated that they'll be
embracing open sourse platforms and applications. YET my son's teachers
ALL INSIST that any work typed up or otherwise done on a PC be formatted
in native Microsoft Office. I've had a go at the teachers and the board
of governors about this, stating for the record that I will deliberately
NOT allow my children to use Microsoft Office, that any work they do
WILL NOT TOUCH Microsoft Office, that any work they do will be saved in
open formats such as [X]HTML, rich text, png graphics, SHN or FLAC
audio, and divx+AC3 video. No way in hell my boys are suffering the same
as me at school; that is, locked into a single proprietery format that
nobody in the Real World[TM] uses (in my case it was Acorn). Open
formats last forever, proprietery formats last the lifetime of the
company who hold the patent.
I see your point, though I don't think it is a good example here. After
seven years with an Arc, I moved to Windows 95. I hadn't even seen Win 3
at that point, I met it later. I'm quite sure I had an easier migration
to Win 95 than Win 3 users did. RiscOS was comparable to Win 95 in
operation, and far ahead of Win 3 in most areas.
People said at the time that children should be taught on the industry
standard OS, not some one-source oddity. But I remember saying that when
the children left school, in three or five or ten years, the industry
standard wasn't going to be Windows 3, or more likely in most schools,
DOS and Quarterdeck. On the whole, it wasn't.
I'm still waiting for Windows (or Linux!) applications to show me the
printable area of documents. Even Arthur did that, in 1988, pre-RiscOS.
And it took me a long time to get used to Word's limitations after
Impression. Remind me again, which open source WPs were running on
affordable hardware in 1990?