January 2007 - Posts
Becta have published a report, aimed at the pre-University Sector, heavily advising against early deployment of Windows Vista and Office 2007.
The report can be found here:
publications.becta.org.uk/download.cfm?resID=28199
Their reasons are that it will be expensive in terms of hardware upgrades/work/licenses and won't add any important new functionality. The report also notes that the operating system itself is not that critical as most work happens at the browser/application level, and that other Office applications (detailed in the report) also offer adequate functionality.
It must be pointed out that this report is aimed at the school sector, and one of their key requirements is consistency across all schools. However the report does make interesting reading, and does match some of my previous reservations about Vista. I'm not saying XP can't be improved - in many ways it is deeply flawed (bad security model, inefficient processing, 'just about' good enough user interface etc). Going back to XP after my Mac broke at home was a painful experience. It's just that it is an upgrade that we could live without, and maybe smaller, incremental improvements would be better.
We'll upgrade though, as will everyone else, and it's nothing to do with technical/rational user requirements. Microsoft control the deployment of operating systems to new PCs. New PCs will have Vista. In most peoples' eyes then, PCs that don't have Vista will be seen as out-of-date, and there is no worse crime in IT than to be seen providing old/out-of-date equipment and services.
I guess most people who are vaguely interested in technology won't have been able to miss the hype of the Apple iPhone - if not here are the details:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
Apple have pitched is as a combination of three products, a phone, and iPod, and a mobile broadband device.
The first and third make perfect sense to me, but combining a phone and an iPod? OK, a basic phone built into a iPod might be useful for the times I forget my phone (sadly I never forget my iPod) but combining them together for everyday use seems a little odd. Let me explain why.
I use my iPod to escape, to relax, to hide from the world for a few moments.
A mobile phone is one of the things I'm listening to my iPod to escape from - a source of interruption and instruction from the real world (I guess people do phone with good news, but that doesn't seem to be the case for me, the calls are usually because I need to do something!).
Combining these two conflicting functions together just seems wrong...
I thought I'd pass this one on in case anyone is interested - a free Welsh language office software suite called Agored has just been released.
It's based on OpenOffice.org, which has been developed as a free, open source equivalent to Microsoft Office. I've had a quick look, and it looks very good. It's a straight forward button press to switch between English and Welsh, and can open/export Word and Excel files.
As far as I can see it is only available for Windows at the moment.
I'm not a Welsh speaker, so I can't comment on the quality of the translation, or how good the spell checker is - post a comment if you know!
If you want to give it a try it can be download here:
http://agored.com/index_html_en