Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:40 AM, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote:
>
> Why? Forget Linux. Do Macs come with Word pre-installed (today)? How  
> much does an Office license cost (e.g., if one runs it in WINE)?
>

It's almost irrelevant. Most Macs come with an Apple Office suite  
(Pages, etc) which has little to no Hebrew support. MS/Office for the  
Mac supports Hebrew at a very basic level but it is expensive.   
However, there are so few Macs around that no one really cares about  
what they support.

In the world, the majority of UNIX systems are Macs. In the US around  
12% of the computers on desktops are Macs, and in Israel a few percent  
of them are Macs. With the high price of Macs here many parents just  
buy cheap PC's with Windows bundled and get the student/home version  
of office (Word and Execel but no Outlook (scheduling/email) and  
Access (database)) which can be found on sale for as low as 300 NIS  
for a three computer license.

Last year (2010 school year) a student organization was offering a  
netbook with Windows XP and Office included for 1200 NIS. This year,  
there were still some being sold for as little as 800 NIS at places  
like Machsani Chasmal.



> Another stupid question: why doesn't the school publish assignments  
> on the web? Should be much easier than to email them?


No, the teachers know how to email. They would have to hire a  
webmaster to post them and coordinate the postings.

Geoff.
-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(