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On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 22:26 +0000, Simon Waters wrote: > Interestingly better educated fathers are one of the significant factors > identified in females taking up careers in engineering. My daughter (13) has just worked her socks off and got into the Science "top set". She wants to be a surgeon (I do have degrees - Physics and Education). We have amusements comparing XP based computing and GL based. She loves supertux!! I tried to download a wadge of stuff drom edutainment and games only to havew the configuration of solfege and timidity (from memory) fail. I think there were also conflicting requirements in some of the supertux games. So she "smirked" and said something disparaging. Now that she can also play dvd's she has 2 reasons to use my laptop and my desktop when I am not using one of them. Progress of a sort. Otherwise she resists and grabs her mother's computer. Sharon has used the Gimp - I downloaded the latest version which has much better image cropping and very useful blurring to "improve" weak pictures, which she likes, though she has not tried anything with contrast etc. She is starting to use FF. Now 4 on demand and BBC ... The 4oD message! Apparently I need XP, IE 5.5+ and WMP 10 or 11. I wonder why no-one is put off by the page on what to do if it doesn't work. I can play Flash at least. On a different note, Classicfm wants me to use Mplayer. > So probably we > should be encouraging our daughters to experiment with software. > (Although I think genetics is a better career choice - knowing they > could write software or build a computer if they wanted to won't hurt a > child's development). I am sure we could start a campaign for schools - with a GL computer and the right downloads they could start programming now. The statistics are horrifying regarding young people and FSW creation over the years. I am sure that's where we should start. There should at least be use of OOo so as to stop piracy - that could be a useful argument for both schools and parents - with ODF coming somewhere lower down as a reason. Cost could be an argument for students. -- james kilty http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html