It seems that British schools are about to start churning out dirty hippie communists.


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but isn't open source used to train hackers!!!!
No, it's sole use is for creating whale huggers.


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this doesn't actually change anything, schools can use open source if they wish to do so, nothing stopping them.
Yes there is: expertise. IT Expertise, in the US public school system at least, is spread VERY thin. Often, one will find students doing admin work instead of the normal government employee. In some schools, the IT coordinator is a volunteer with very little if any IT knowledge, let alone formal IT training. Unfortunately, though, in public education IT is one of the first departments to go when the "funding" "dries up".
All administrators (principals and SIs) really just want something that is going to work all the time with no one having to mess with it and will meet their budget.
As somebody that supports commercial software developed for the educational sector and as a personal fan of Open Source I have one thing to say... Not a fcuking chance. The thick tw@ts I deal with can hardly cope with installing SQL Express and restoring a backup. Just the other day I had to tell a customer they had no option but to loose the last 3 years worth of data as they had not once backed up the system!
Besides MS has been doing a fantastic job of getting everybody in educational software onboard as a Gold Partner, helping them to make their code so ultimately platform independant that you could no longer port it even if you had to.
good thing they didn't lose their data, that would have really sucked.
I hate it when my data gets loose.
I just hate.... Now where is Jef? [/old joke]
Three years?
Ouch.
You would think they would at LEAST have something liek a RAID 5 server setup for Idiot Protection...
I guess this was all stored on one persons machine?
BTW, Open Source OS might be better if only for a few things. You can lock it down pretty well when you are done, and it won't easily start growing things you never intended it to have just through normal usage and updates.
Windows just keeps getting hairier and hairier every time I open it!
Other numpty moves of note:
The man that demanded we send somebody on site as his book count was wrong. On a remote session I find that he deleted all 32,000 books from his Library system. (They were hiding in our version of the Recycle bin)
The customer that proudly told me that it was the 4th time she had asked the same question today. My answer: 'Didn't you think to write down the answer after the second time?'. My manager actually backed me up on that one!
The tech that refused to answer my question as he had answered that one over 4 months previously to a different member of staff... because nobody ever updates or changes a config setting now do they?
I kid you not I still have customers in the UK education system backing up to 12 floppy disks every night. I sent them a free pen drive... they don't have USB!! Wages in public sector jobs are lower than in industy, what the hell do they expect for peanuts?? It's telling that the best tech's I deal with tend to be at the international schools.
Right here...
I've got to say, that may be the single most common mistake, and certainly the one I've seen the most over the last two months... Lose vs. Loose.
Guilty. [EDIT] Well, it "losing" I have trouble with. . . always want to type the two 'o's. Also its and it's, but I think I finally figured out a mnemonic to help. But I have an excuse: am I dyslexic when it comes to writing and typing. You dango pedants[/EDIT]
it's = it is
its = ?
edit: its' tits (if the group was composed only of women...right?)
I just try to remember it's is the contraction.
Its / it's is a tricky one because usually you add an apostophe to a possessive, and this is the exception. It's easy to get confused with punctuation, as it has its quirks.
The lose / loose one is a common error on the gaming forums - I guess it's down to poor phonetics teaching at school, because the two words are pronounced differently!
Down here the your / you're error is still the most common. Again, I think people get confused because they remember that possessives have an apostophe so type "you're" when they mean "your". I don't know how people get it wrong the other way around though - if you're contracting "you are", then clearly there should be an apostrophe replacing the removed letters. It would be you'r' (and even that's silly because why replace a single letter?)
Edited to correct the bold tags.
hangs head in shame due to the your/you're scandal.
One is left scratching one's head as to why replacing a single letter would be silly.


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I tend to scratch my arse, from an IQ point of view it makes no difference.
A lot of the grammatical and spelling errors occur from a stream-of-consciousness kind of postulation on the net.
People type too fast.
A lot is also from foreign posters (English /= 1st) or school kids dat think dat itz all wt teh flowz!
Others are just typing juxtapositions where you get a quick-type-swap. "Teh", "Taht" being common ones (guilty).
Whatever. It only bothers me when one of two things happens.
1. When someone tries to post like they were trying to pimp out their page on MySpace/Facebook.
2. They were trying to be smart and discredit someone elses position and end up making eggregious errors in several areas while doing so. ("Your so dumb" etc etc).
>shrug<
Itz de int3rn3tz.
yours hers his its theirs
Here's a question: the proper way to pluralize a letter. When I was a younger, it seemed P's and Q's; however, I think last I read is that format is deprecated and I don't remember the substitute. Ps and Qs seems wrong. I've been trying out 'P's and 'Q's.
| dwellman wrote : yours hers his its theirs |
Indeed. I guess you don't add the apostrophe if it's an impersonal pronoun. I've never been taught it (I've just picked up what is right and wrong) but that would appear to be the case?
| dwellman wrote : Here's a question: the proper way to pluralize a letter. When I was a younger, it seemed P's and Q's; however, I think last I read is that format is deprecated and I don't remember the substitute. Ps and Qs seems wrong. I've been trying out 'P's and 'Q's. |
Same question applies to abbreviations; e.g. what is the plural of ETA?
"Their ETAs were 5 hours apart"
or
"Their ETA's were 5 hours apart"
I don't know the 'official' rule, but (personally) I think adding the apostrophe is potentially confusing (there is no contraction or possession) and is superfluous. As long as you capitalise the abbreviation, then it is clear that it is a plural of an abbreviation.
anyway it was discussed not to long ago to get rid of the apostrophe because no one know how to use it properly, they considered getting rid of it because you can tell what the word means through the context of the paragraph.
I've gleaned a few interesting tidbits about 'its', in that it appears a realtively new addition to English-- 17th century or so-- and that its posessive pronoun and posesive adjective state (along with 'his') is the same.
British education is safe. We have a Llama!
| Flakes wrote : anyway it was discussed not to long ago to get rid of the apostrophe because no one know how to use it properly, they considered getting rid of it because you can tell what the word means through the context of the paragraph. |
That makes about as much sense as dropping the driving test because 80% of the cnuts on the road can't use a roundabout properly.
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ye, like taking the inside lane and going straight on, wtf is that about.
sh!t Tom....
You guys were screwed back in 2006 when the RAF hired the american fukc up corporation EDS to handle its pay system.

Ahh.. be careful because there are a lot of them now where that is actually the correct way to go. There are two that I cross frequently that are actually marked out as left lane for first two exits. Confuses the crap out of people from out of town.
nah, simple two lane roundabout, one exit to the left, one straight on and i have seen a few people try to squeeze into the one exit from two lanes whilst i am in the middle on my bike, ffs what are they thinking.
| dwellman wrote : yours hers his its theirs
|
When have you ever minded your P's and Q's?
Fact!
When the opportunity to mow down a cyclist presents itself, lane discipline is often a necessary and acceptable casualty.


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AV has local roundabouts for local people.[/The League of Gentlemen]


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Intersections all over Chattanooga are being replaces with roundabouts. . . luckily in not so high trafficked areas, but still. . .
And another thing: traffic? Trafficked? Explain that!
Laughter, Slaughter, explain that.


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Right after someone explains 'parkway' and 'driveway'.
| dwellman wrote : Guilty. [EDIT] Well, it "losing" I have trouble with. . . always want to type the two 'o's. Also its and it's, but I think I finally figured out a mnemonic to help. But I have an excuse: am I dyslexic when it comes to writing and typing. You dango pedants[/EDIT] |
FAIL.
At the end of the day you parkaway your car. In the morning you drivaway your car. Now, you were saying?


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Speaking of lose vs. loose, one of my friends always tries to insult me by saying that I'm a looser for following the Cubs (he's a Cards fan).
I explained it to him with something along the lines of: Does it make you lose control when we say how much looser your mom is now that we are all hitting it?
I think he meant that you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway...
| JustPlainJef wrote : FAIL. |
Denied.
'It' is not a confusion of its and it's. 'It' is merely an error of ommission.
Parkway? Please forgive me, I speak ENGLISH.


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What ever you need to tell yourself that helps you sleep at night. . . . . . . . . . . . .
...*chants*...
..."I have a big knob"...
..."I have a big knob"...
I sleep fine at night, it's the afternoons I'm having trouble with.


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Nevermind
...*slaps dwellman*...
That's blasphemy, right there.
I guess deliveries were behind, then.
You said behind.
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