[plug] Linux laptops

[Gavin Chester]

On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 19:41 +0800, Senectus . wrote:
> exciting if true, but I see this as a ploy to get MS to drop their
> pricing...

Yes, if it were only true ... and if it were only happening in WA education. 

I'll give you an extreme example of how blinkered DET's syadmins are:

I'm just coming to the end of my secondary teacher training and 
tried to complete my placement application (nomination
of school at which I want to teach) using DET's online system. But to do
it I was forced to use a windoze PC to compete the process! Where's the
employment equity in that? 

Before I reached that desperate point, I tried running IE under wine,
and also konqueror doing it's very good job of masquerading its identity
as IE on XP, but the web interface at DET kept saying words to the
effect that "your operating system is not compatible". Hell, it was just
a standard asp form system with a few boxes to tick, but they set it up
so that you have to use MS! BTW: I think from memory that even firefox
on MS worked, so it was rejecting the operating system, not the browser.

Gavin.