Posts by Mademoiselle Jones

Palm launches £399 Treo Pro

iPhone 3G

I'll have my iPhone 3G any day, thanks, not something costing four times the price and running a crappy OS.

Brit violinist does a Radiohead

@ryan, morley and marco

I agree.

Microsoft pleads ignorance on 'one interweb per child' pork barrel

Enlightened schools...

The trouble is, as several people have pointed out, that Microsoft offer good deals to schools, and schools are often tied into contracts involving Microsoft products. My husband is a school sysadmin and a Mac user at home, and is fighting to keep the Vista "upgrades" well away from the computers. It would be difficult to re-train all the IT teaching staff and network administration team on Linux: one of the teaching staff can't cope with OpenOffice, never mind Linux. The other constraint, re: switching to Mac, is that the hardware is proprietary and expensive. Not many schools, with the possible exception of private schools, can afford to completely replace all their hardware. Education budgets at the moment are extremely tight.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere. My 7-year-old son's school runs a combined Mac and Windows system, with a few Linux PCs for the more advanced kids. J has been using Linux at home for a long time and is more familiar with it than with Windows. The school is gradually switching over to a completely Linux-based system so that the children grow up with IT skills and not Windows skills. Again, the only problem is re-training adults to use a new system, but the kids take to it very easily. If the PCs are only to be used by kids who are able to adjust to a new OS very easily, then what's the point of worrying about it?