Re: Good news - UK government officially adopts ODF

Hi,

On 24 July 2014 09:48, nathaN P <[email protected]> wrote:

> Tom I am sorry that you take exception to my comment but I had a family
> member who has come home from Otago poly this week and the message she got
> from the computing class was - she needs to get a copy of Microsoft
> installed on her laptop - I saw red!


Sadly, in New Zealand, and especially in Dunedin, the overwhelming majority
of programming jobs are Microsoft based (most C#/.Net, from what I hear).
If a student wishes to use their personal laptop for class work (which
certainly used to be optional, _not_ a requirement for completing the
papers) then it's only reasonable that the Polytech advice is to install
windows & visual studio [1]. I'm sure a similar argument exists for some
other papers, but I don't have any first hand knowledge there, so I'll not
speculate...

While I desperately want the local job market to change, it's not fair to
criticise the Polytech for catering to the current market.


Cheers,

[1] Mono, and monodevelop are potential alternatives, but again, it's not
fair to ask the Polytech staff to support something that's several versions
behind the .Net library. It might be something to look into though...
-- 
Thomi Richards

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