BUCHAREST, October 4, 2014
"Romania’s political and business class has been rocked by a bribery scandal involving a state deal with Microsoft, which incriminates nine former ministers ahead of a crunch presidential election in November."
http://newseurope.me/2014/10/04/romanian-political-class-rocked-microsoft-bribe-scandal/
More surprises:
- There is a Microsoft education!
The "Microsoft Education Video " http://www.youtube.com/watch?foo=bar&v=TuKTiN5jQQo
http://www.microsoft.com/education/ (Read "See how 98% of schools use Microsoft technology")
- And yet, the "European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too [after U.S.]"
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/10/15/1235229/microsoft-facebook-declare-european-kids-clueless-about-coding-too
- There is a Microsoft education!
The "Microsoft Education Video " http://www.youtube.com/watch?foo=bar&v=TuKTiN5jQQo
http://www.microsoft.com/education/ (Read "See how 98% of schools use Microsoft technology")
- And yet, the "European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too [after U.S.]"
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/10/15/1235229/microsoft-facebook-declare-european-kids-clueless-about-coding-too
Hi Visvanath,
M$, Facebook, Google, et al. are very good at marketing, PR, and making money. They're absolutely clueless about child developmental psychology. Do they actually expect 7 year-olds to perform the extremely abstract and complex reasoning necessary to write computer code? If anyone still thinks this is a good idea, please read Piaget, Vygotsky, or any respectable evidence-based child developmental psychology literature.
Seymour Papert et al at MIT designed a simplified language and software platform (Logo) to make computing accessible to children. It's very far removed from mainstream programming languages. There are now hundreds of versions of Logo, e.g. http://logo.codeplex.com/
Also, code.org and the like have only been around for a few months. It takes around 10-15 years to see the effects of changes in educational policies (doesn't seem to stop one-term politicians pretending to be experts and tinkering with it though). We'll find out how well it's working if they can sustain code.org, etc. until at least 2024.
M$ must be getting desperate by now.
The EU has already made ODF (LibreOffice and Open Office) it's preferred standard format for documents. M$ Office doesn't support this but they might have to. The other thing is that multiple govt. agencies, municipalities, and even whole countries (e.g. Iceland) are switching over to Linux desktops which don't support M$ Office at all and come with Abiword, LibreOffice, or OpenOffice pre-installed. LibreOffice and Open Office can read and write M$ Office documents so there's little incentive to buy licences for M$ Office and install Wine on Linux so that you can run it.
I reckon M$ Office's days in the world outside the USA are numbered.
*WRITER Sadly, I'm not quite there yet with Writer. I have a few glitches. But the ecosystem of support is growing. See for example this: http://joelmadero.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/libreoffice-for-lawyers/
IMO What has happened is the "I need to have this as my workflow" leading to clarity and focus of the help and future development. It's not just "lets create this new functionality" that is so subtle few people actually need/use it.
Another challenge is the UI.
- http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/31778/when-will-libreoffice-have-a-ribbon-ui-as-in-ms-office-2007-2013/
- http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/31/are-there-any-plans-for-a-new-interface-gui/
*DRAW But, Draw, is really really cool. And some great functionality to challenge Visio.
*IMPRESS What I'd like now is an Impress plugin to record voice + PPT slides directly to MP4. This is Built in to PPT 2013.
-Derek
If it's a specific layout, e.g. legal brief or APA/MLA style paper, there's already templates available. Even if they're only in .doc format, you can still use them in LibreOffice, at least.
PPT? Why not use the Moodle Book module? I think it tends to make presentations better, i.e. less animated text and transitions so you have fewer distractions from concentrating on the actual content (PPT features make presentations worse, not better). If you want to embed MP3 audio easily there are repository plugins and filters to do that. Linux has all kinds of desktop, webcam, and mic recording tools too.
I think we're (very slowly) emerging from the M$ era. Most things are still referenced to M$ software products and there's a kind of functional fixedness ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness ) - or is it the Law of the Instrument? ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument ) - whereby people want to reproduce the way they do it in M$ with other tools, no matter how difficult, awkward, cumbersome, incompatible, and inappropriate it may be.
There is a point in PowerPoint after all:
"In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker would have to host a website that contains a specially crafted Microsoft Office file, such as a PowerPoint file, that is used in an attempt to exploit this vulnerability."
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/3010060
(found in, where else (?), http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/1349229/windows-0-day-exploited-in-ongoing-attacks )
"In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker would have to host a website that contains a specially crafted Microsoft Office file, such as a PowerPoint file, that is used in an attempt to exploit this vulnerability."
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/security/3010060
(found in, where else (?), http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/10/22/1349229/windows-0-day-exploited-in-ongoing-attacks )
Amazing... This video is not available
Well... http://toogl.es/#/view/jnmw5qU4upg
LOL! He seemed more zombied than the zombies themselves!
But how do we cast out the demons without casting out the computer's soul with them? Do Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android come with demons pre-installed, as Saint Ignutius claims, or do they become possessed by malware and bugs after contact with evil spirits through the ether? Where does the computer's soul reside? Can a computer's soul be transferred from one computer to another or does it become another being, i.e. a separate and distinct duplicate?
Computer theology anyone?
Talking of alternatives to pointless PowerPoint Prezi http://prezi.com/ is perhaps the most known. According to the local newspaper Microsoft itself has second thoughts about PP and pushing Sway: "Sway is an app for expressing your ideas in an entirely new way, across your devices. Our vision video shows the direction Sway is heading in, and joining Preview is how you can help shape that future". https://sway.com.