[plug] MS Curriculum at schools and TAFEs ...

[alan howard]

 hi all
yes i had simmilar experiences with central tafe were i did introduction to 
programming. the course initially was generic, using pseudocode, but then 
became a exercise in using vba in excell. not having used excell ( or any 
other spread sheet for that matter ) i found it very difficult. this unit was 
in the electronic engineering stream and apparantly i was meant to do there 
introduction to engineering software course first which was soley devoted to 
ms excell. i , personally would have thought , auto cad, protel, etc were 
engineering software, not excell.
also, of course, all lecture notes etc were in word formatt , and star office 
did a dummy spit at a few of them.
i ended up getting a pirate copy of ms oriface just so i could do the unit.
there intro to c programming was fairly simmilar , in that it required a 
borland c++ compiler. for some reason even my " good morning world " thing 
compliled using gcc didnt work on dos ( what a suprise).
i was accused of using "non standard software ", obvisouly tafe and others 
think ms is standard. i wonder how there graduates go when they encounter a 
computer running unix , such as is used in many large bussinnesses.
rgds
alan howard