RAVE/RANT
Moments ago, I received an E-mail from a colleague, to whom I initially
recommended LaTeX as the tool for creating a poster. He ignored my
suggestion. Here is his message:
,----[ Quote ]
| Attached is my latest poster. Could you bring it over to Washington
| with yours? This is the first poster I've had to do and I must admit that
| it's been a thoroughly miserable experience! I'm going to use LaTeX next
| time!
`----
Somebody else, who is "Microsoft's favourite client" (victim) wrote the
following this morning (in reference to my LaTeX version):
,----[ Quote ]
| The difficulty that you are having fitting things in and the difficulty
| I am going to have in helping you sort it out are indicative of how
| inappropriate LaTex is for this kind of task. For a poster one needs a
| layout tool, where you can control exactly what happens, rather than
| something that does the formatting for you. As I told you when we
| started this, most people use PowerPoint or similar for posters.
`----
Needless to mention, given the task of Web site development, he would also
argue that tossing objects onto the screen is the better approach. Everybody
in the Web community knows this to be a fallacy (reasons aside for brevity).
Speaking of which, check *this* out:
,----[ Frontpage Teaching ]
| I asked the teacher to direct me to a real website in the real world
| that he has developed. He told me his job is to teach, not create a site.
| I then asked if he could accurately describe the use of the [a href] tag
| and how to make it open in a new window. Total silence. I then asked if
| he knew what "CSS" stood for and its place in web design. Once again,
| silence. I asked what PHP is. I asked about asp and its purpose in web
| design. Still silence. I was sure he hung up on me, but I was wrong.
|
| After 10 seconds of stammering his way through the css question,
| he summarized his comments by telling me that CSS is a very specific
| programming language seldom seen in the real world. He admitted he was
| not familiar with asp and phc (that?s right, ph"c"). He feels that since
| it is seldom used, there is no reason to teach it to the students.
`----
Source: UseNet; mirror: http://blinkynet.net/comp/shame.html
Let this illustarte to you why/how Microsoft are dumbing down our society.
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