4 ms·

Could you elaborate? What microsoft requirement?

jacquesm 4y ago
Highschools demand students buy a Windows laptop, preferably some overpriced piece of crap with a few applications pre-installed from their 'preferred partner' who also happens to be a Microsoft representative. It's way beyond despicable but I'm too tired to fight it so I've caved in and bought a Windows laptop for one of my kids to use for highschool. It disgusts me that Microsoft manages to extract a tax on every kid in highschool and that schools allow themselves to be used as a part of the marketing and sales arm of a multinational company.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I guess I wouldn’t mind so much if they came with Windows 7, instead of Windows “Telemetry” 10.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    Microsoft backported the telemetry to Windows 7 anyway.
lucb1e 4y ago
Tweakers podcast of last week I think (in Dutch so I might as well paraphrase it translated). The topic was chromebooks and how it's convenient and easy for a lot of schools > I went to buy a laptop for my son's new school last week. When I heard it was required, I was expecting some list of hardware requirements but no, the list I got had exactly one specification: Windows. Schools also do free advertising for Microsoft products, at least in all of the schools where I went to until ~5 years ago. At minimum once a year we were made aware of the fact that we could get Microsoft products like Office at steep discounts from their new online store which they were so proud of and thankful for. Benevolent microsoft letting us get used to their ecosystem for prices we could actually afford, but not free! Still gotta make that profit! Not sure why they didn't also advertise for libreoffice which, last I checked, is even cheaper and an even better protip (better compatibility if we would just not force each other to keep using the proprietary thing). I guess they just didn't feel like the libreoffice foundation was giving them free money the way that microsoft pretends to. It gets even more ironic if you realize that schools fall in the 'semi-government' category and thus it's legally required (not optional) to use open source software unless that's impossible, and if it's impossible then it needs to be documented why it's impossible. In practice, you can guess how much this law is followed. I never heard of any consequences for not following it. TL;DR: legally, there is the opposite of a microsoft requirement, except many schools require both Windows and Office in practice
- dijit 4y ago
  I'm still personally quite salty at the fact that anything I learned in School to do with Computers (in the 90s and 00's) was Microsoft based. I had a strong affinity for computers from an early age, but all education was focused on Microsoft Access, Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint If you could get any programming (only in College) it was Visual Basic 6 or VB.NET (with Access or MSSQL) There was no curriculum that wasn't a buy in to the microsoft ecosystem, even at the advanced levels. This is surely amazing for microsoft, entire generations of people trained exclusively on their platform.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
    What exactly were they supposed to teach you in 90s and 00s? I was a rebellious Linux-loving computer geek kid during these times, but OpenOffice was incomparably worse back then (and other programming environments weren't as accessible as VB6) - so I maintained a Windows VM for school, not because I had to (fuck that) but because the software was so much better.
    - dijit 4y ago
      If someone has an aptitude for computers and want to work with them then: 1) productivity suites are a poor fit generaly. 2) learning concepts over specific tools is always going to be a better investment. 3) I’m not sure there even was open office when I was learning. But there was lotus and co. // I’m mainly annoyed that they didn’t teach concepts around computers and instead focused on “Microsoft X” so my entire education was based on one company and what it was inflicting on the world. Everyone who graduates only knowing those tools is enormous pressure for companies to use those tools, or the burden of training from scratch is on the company.
      - EUROCARE 4y ago
        Yeah, I remember Lotus... And you seriously would've rather used that??? I prefer to keep torture out of schools. It was the other way around, at least where I live. Companies pressured schools to teach skills they actually need people to have - and that's MS Office, because even today nothing else comes close. And children with aptitude for computers, who don't need office suites but would like programming - that's less than 1%. If you want public schools, you're not going to have specialized teaching for small groups - nobody pays more for that.

Highschools demand students buy a Windows laptop, preferably some overpriced piece of crap with a few applications pre-installed from their 'preferred partner' who also happens to be a Microsoft representative. It's way beyond despicable but I'm too tired to fight it so I've caved in and bought a Windows laptop for one of my kids to use for highschool. It disgusts me that Microsoft manages to extract a tax on every kid in highschool and that schools allow themselves to be used as a part of the marketing and sales arm of a multinational company.

Aeolun 4y ago
I guess I wouldn’t mind so much if they came with Windows 7, instead of Windows “Telemetry” 10.
- ronsor 4y ago
  Microsoft backported the telemetry to Windows 7 anyway.

lucb1e 4y ago

Tweakers podcast of last week I think (in Dutch so I might as well paraphrase it translated). The topic was chromebooks and how it's convenient and easy for a lot of schools > I went to buy a laptop for my son's new school last week. When I heard it was required, I was expecting some list of hardware requirements but no, the list I got had exactly one specification: Windows. Schools also do free advertising for Microsoft products, at least in all of the schools where I went to until ~5 years ago. At minimum once a year we were made aware of the fact that we could get Microsoft products like Office at steep discounts from their new online store which they were so proud of and thankful for. Benevolent microsoft letting us get used to their ecosystem for prices we could actually afford, but not free! Still gotta make that profit! Not sure why they didn't also advertise for libreoffice which, last I checked, is even cheaper and an even better protip (better compatibility if we would just not force each other to keep using the proprietary thing). I guess they just didn't feel like the libreoffice foundation was giving them free money the way that microsoft pretends to. It gets even more ironic if you realize that schools fall in the 'semi-government' category and thus it's legally required (not optional) to use open source software unless that's impossible, and if it's impossible then it needs to be documented why it's impossible. In practice, you can guess how much this law is followed. I never heard of any consequences for not following it. TL;DR: legally, there is the opposite of a microsoft requirement, except many schools require both Windows and Office in practice

dijit 4y ago
I'm still personally quite salty at the fact that anything I learned in School to do with Computers (in the 90s and 00's) was Microsoft based. I had a strong affinity for computers from an early age, but all education was focused on Microsoft Access, Excel, Outlook, Word and Powerpoint If you could get any programming (only in College) it was Visual Basic 6 or VB.NET (with Access or MSSQL) There was no curriculum that wasn't a buy in to the microsoft ecosystem, even at the advanced levels. This is surely amazing for microsoft, entire generations of people trained exclusively on their platform.
- EUROCARE 4y ago
  What exactly were they supposed to teach you in 90s and 00s? I was a rebellious Linux-loving computer geek kid during these times, but OpenOffice was incomparably worse back then (and other programming environments weren't as accessible as VB6) - so I maintained a Windows VM for school, not because I had to (fuck that) but because the software was so much better.
  - dijit 4y ago
    If someone has an aptitude for computers and want to work with them then: 1) productivity suites are a poor fit generaly. 2) learning concepts over specific tools is always going to be a better investment. 3) I’m not sure there even was open office when I was learning. But there was lotus and co. // I’m mainly annoyed that they didn’t teach concepts around computers and instead focused on “Microsoft X” so my entire education was based on one company and what it was inflicting on the world. Everyone who graduates only knowing those tools is enormous pressure for companies to use those tools, or the burden of training from scratch is on the company.
    - EUROCARE 4y ago
      Yeah, I remember Lotus... And you seriously would've rather used that??? I prefer to keep torture out of schools. It was the other way around, at least where I live. Companies pressured schools to teach skills they actually need people to have - and that's MS Office, because even today nothing else comes close. And children with aptitude for computers, who don't need office suites but would like programming - that's less than 1%. If you want public schools, you're not going to have specialized teaching for small groups - nobody pays more for that.