[K12OSN] PD for staff (really OO)

Terrell Prude', Jr. microman at cmosnetworks.com
Wed Apr 21 14:20:01 UTC 2004


Oh, I agree, but we're definitely a Windows shop, decreed directly by 
the top brass.  They were almost eager to be the first to buy the 
Licensing 6.0 contract!  The developers have basically been ordered to 
code specifically to Windows.  All video clips that we make are in .WMV 
format, and on our Web site, it says that you must have Microsoft 
Windows, and furthermore, it actually explicitly says that Macintosh 
users will not be able to view the clips!

The managers don't want them to code new apps, or recode existing apps, 
for W3C standards, and the developers themselves feel that it is 
politically (and job-security-wise) inadvisable to code to W3C standards.

That said, if the developers could be moved to another platform, and I 
had the juice in the organization to enforce such a move (I don't, 
sadly), I sure wouldn't put them on Macs.  Three guesses as to which 
platform I'd have them on.  :-)

--TP

Petre Scheie wrote:

> How ironic, since one of the fundamental underpinnings in creating the 
> Web was the idea that the user shouldn't need to have a specific tool 
> for accessing documents.  A 'browser', which anyone could implement, 
> was all that was supposed to be necessary.  And if you code to W3C 
> standards, it doesn't really matter which browser a user has.
>
> I have little love for Macs, too proprietary for my tastes, but it 
> would probably be cheaper to move your handful of developers to Macs 
> than to move hundreds (thousands?) of users to PCs.
>
> Petre
>
> Terrell Prude', Jr. wrote:
>
>> SASIxp, in the case of my district.
>>
>> Also, we have certain Web apps that apparently depend on ActiveX (our 
>> development team uses Microsoft dev tools).  Thus, they run only on 
>> Internet Exploder.  This is apparently being done to "force" the Mac 
>> lovers, of which there are many in our schools, to move to Windows 
>> (our many thousands of Macs typically have Netscape, but not IE, 
>> installed).
>>
>> --TP
>>
>> Andrew Fournier wrote:
>>
>>> Mission critical? What win software is mission critical in a school?
>>> A. Fournier
>>> On Mon, 2004-04-19 at 13:16, Nakashima wrote:
>>>  
>>>
>>>> On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  
>>>>
>>>>> On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 05:00:58PM -0400, Barry Solof wrote:
>>>>>    
>>>>>
>>>>>> I *knew* somebody was going to suggest that!
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If only there were a way to magically replace all the doze apps 
>>>>>> in my
>>>>>> network overnight.  You bet I'd switch us over to ltsp.
>>>>>>       
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> This always makes me wonder, how did school IT deal with moving, say,
>>>>> from Apple II and the like, to Win3.1 or Mac, back when that 
>>>>> transition
>>>>> took place?
>>>>>
>>>>> -bill!
>>>>>     
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Technology systems were not as entrenched or mission critical back 
>>>> then,
>>>> so it was a less difficult transition.
>>>> --Peter
>>>






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