Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

zdnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#11

Post by copperx »

thecount122195 wrote: post #7
nesky wrote: post #4

I'd be interested to know what they're proposing as an alternative? LibreOffice?

Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.

For people who don't want to learn a new language to typeset something, LyX is out there and is fantastic and covers most use cases of a word processor (except it doesn't have mail merge).

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#12

Post by jplayer01 »

mcny wrote: post #3
hyperman1 wrote: post #2

I always wonder if it is legal for doktors to use microsoft software: In my country, the medical secret is absolute, which means giving or taking medical data to anybody not strictly needing it is a crime. So if a medical program crashes and telemetry picks up medical data in a dump, the doktor commits a crime, as does any microsoft employee reading that dump. I guess the only reason the court doesn't do anything, is…

I don't know. I've long argued possession of data should never be a crime, even if the data contains evidence of crimes including crimes committed on human children. To say a Microsoft employee who sees medical data is committing a crime would probably make me a hypocrite. I think there should be some accountability but that should be at the top of an organization, not (just) the foot soldiers.

I'd say one of the problems is that often, the heads of an organization are almost never held to account. This is particularly the case when it comes to American companies, as we've seen in the case of Zuckerberg. Maybe if the front line felt the pain in some way, there'd be more pressure to change the internal culture. I don't see any easy solutions here, unfortunately, while companies make insane amounts of money off of violating our privacy and our right to control our own data.

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#13

Post by thecount122195 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #8
thecount122195 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.

It would definitely be a good preparation for academic life after school. Personally I wish I had learned it at school time. How much better and nicer could my notes have been, knowing how to make a really well document, in contrast to loose sheets of paper flying around and being discarded after the school year. Granted, some people are good at taking clean notes and bringing them into order. At school time I was no…

I find its excellent for article writing, but note writing not so much the semi coding style doesen't lend itself well to free form writing at least for me. I'm in engineering grad school and writing equations from board to free hand notes is much easier for me than writing to a program. Though I have some friends who prefer using computers and some of the note taking programs you can use with a stylus and tablet are excellent.

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#14

Post by jsiepkes »

jplayer01 wrote: post #10

Funny, meanwhile in my state the schools are moving to Microsoft. Unfortunately, skepticism of Microsoft and other American companies isn't as widespread as it should be here in Germany.

Compared to your next door neighbour (the Netherlands) privacy awareness is a big thing in Germany. Or at least that is the perception I get...

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#15

Post by zelphirkalt »

thecount122195 wrote: post #13
zelphirkalt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would definitely be a good preparation for academic life after school. Personally I wish I had learned it at school time. How much better and nicer could my notes have been, knowing how to make a really well document, in contrast to loose sheets of paper flying around and being discarded after the school year. Granted, some people are good at taking clean notes and bringing them into order. At school time I was no…

I find its excellent for article writing, but note writing not so much the semi coding style doesen't lend itself well to free form writing at least for me. I'm in engineering grad school and writing equations from board to free hand notes is much easier for me than writing to a program. Though I have some friends who prefer using computers and some of the note taking programs you can use with a stylus and tablet are…

A professor (taught mathematics) of mine once said, that "it needs to go through the hand at least once" and I used to think of that being an annoying attitude, but now I am more or less sure he was right.

Taking notes by hand is probably often a good idea. But you can still afterwards make them very clean in a document, also thinking about them again while doing that, so there is also a bit of additional learning in that activity.

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#16

Post by piotrkubisa »

thecount122195 wrote: post #7
nesky wrote: post #4

I'd be interested to know what they're proposing as an alternative? LibreOffice?

Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.

I think the lack of spreadsheet-based software is more problematic than just Word, because it's hard to replace it with any good alternative.

Also, I do use LaTeX (and derivatives) in almost in any case when I need to compose some document - it really helps to automatize many trivial things that were tiresome to do in MSO Word. However I know at least few people who tried LaTeX and just told me "Yuck!". I tried to recognize what is unique selling point, and all of those people told me it lacked the WYSIWYG mode and that they do not want to learn some language, so also ignore the LaTeX meta-code [0]. I feel I can't objectively say how steep learning curve is, because I just got used to declarative paradigm. LaTeX is not perfect, but I guess my requirements were different than my friends had, but I can't find an answer what really makes Word better than let's say LaTeX, LibreOffice/OpenOffice or other software in the same category? What leads us to decision to use Word not other software to let's say write thesis in it?

[0] As copperx mentioned, there is already LyX but it is far from being popular application.

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#17

Post by thecount122195 »

piotrkubisa wrote: post #16
thecount122195 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.

I think the lack of spreadsheet-based software is more problematic than just Word, because it's hard to replace it with any good alternative. Also, I do use LaTeX (and derivatives) in almost in any case when I need to compose some document - it really helps to automatize many trivial things that were tiresome to do in MSO Word. However I know at least few people who tried LaTeX and just told me "Yuck!". I tried to re…

I haven't found a good replacement for Excel, maybe its because I learned all my shortcuts in it and anytime I go to something else it just feels "off". I would say the learning curve wasn't to bad for short documents or non-technical stuff I would say word has the edge because its east to just open a new document and type away. For my thesis I chose to use LaTeX because anytime I would try to insert a figure or a table into word it would destroy the whole pages formatting , and equations in word are just awful to format. I saw a picture once that showed exactly how I feel about LaTeX's difficulty I'll see if I can find it.

edit: here it is http://blog.adnanmasood.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mikte...

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#18

Post by jplayer01 »

jsiepkes wrote: post #14
jplayer01 wrote: post #10

Funny, meanwhile in my state the schools are moving to Microsoft. Unfortunately, skepticism of Microsoft and other American companies isn't as widespread as it should be here in Germany.

Compared to your next door neighbour (the Netherlands) privacy awareness is a big thing in Germany. Or at least that is the perception I get...

It's tough. Our laws are stricter than many other countries. But the vast majority of people I know or have interacted with just don't think it's a big deal. The whole "I have nothing to hide" perspective. Maybe it's an age thing. I don't know. I'll point out some creepy privacy violation and I usually get a "So?"

Re: Microsoft Office 365: Banned in German schools over privacy fears

#19

Post by corin_ »

hyperman1 wrote: post #2

I always wonder if it is legal for doktors to use microsoft software: In my country, the medical secret is absolute, which means giving or taking medical data to anybody not strictly needing it is a crime. So if a medical program crashes and telemetry picks up medical data in a dump, the doktor commits a crime, as does any microsoft employee reading that dump. I guess the only reason the court doesn't do anything, is…

> as does any microsoft employee reading that dump.

Is it illegal to accidentally receive medical data, if there's no evidence that Microsoft (or whomever) hasn't asked for it or specifically marketed themselves as being compliant with medical data laws (not that I know whether or not they have made that claim in various jurisdictions)?

Post reply on HN