Re: [tlug] Running without Gnome/KDE/xfce/whatever. (was: Ubuntu 16.04-LTS Japanese Text Input)

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 4:47 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
>  > Yes...well, the LUGs in Hong Kong tend to use Chinese as language of
>  > communication -- something I'm not very good at.  Of course, if a
>  > non-Chinese speaker walked in, they'd probably be kind enough to
>  > switch to English, but that makes you feel you ought to leave.
>
> Surely they have nomikais?  Buy some drinks to lessen your guilt
> feelings.  Also, you don't have to go every time, but you do want to
> bring a liberal supply of business cards, and a list of the problems
> you wish somebody competent would take a look at. ;-)  Remember, the
> point is to meet people, not necessarily to learn stuff.  Start by
> introducing yourself to the organizers and letting them know that if
> somebody wants to practice English (or any other languages you know
> ;-) you're happy to help, but you're there for the people and will
> deal with Chinese as you have to.  Learning something (a bit of
> Chinese? I wish I had time to study Chinese and Korean!) would be
> icing on the cake as the saying goes.


Excellent advice -- thank you!

I have to admit that it's great that TLUG uses English.  Given there
are similar Japanese-language groups in the Kanto area, having a
choice is great.  Of course, Kanto has a much bigger population than
Hong Kong's 7 million, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised.


>  > At least one in HK seems to use Windows for most of the
>  > undergraduate curriculum...I was a bit surprised...
>
> "curriculum" == "CS curriculum", or undergrads in general?  Windows


CS curriculum...


> programming remains a key to employability for programmers everywhere,
> I think.  So universities with a vo-tech orientation for a lot of
> their undergrads will use a lot of Windows.  And general business IT
> is built on Office and IE ... (and Google Docs, which does its best to
> convince you that it's Office...).  An absolute must for anybody who's
> going to get a job outside of server admin or cloud development.  So,
> we're kinda stuck with Windows in education for the foreseeable
> future, I think.


Yes, I think so.  I had an unfortunate experience with a vendor before
where they were trying to convince us that their development [of a
web-based platform] should be done using a Microsoft environment.  (It
mattered to us because we would have to pay for the hosting server and
OS.)  Heaps of reasons, including how recent undergraduates are not
learning Linux/Unix, was thrown at us.  (So, their reason was correct,
but for just one university in HK.)  They also said Linux problems
would take "months" to solve whereas Microsoft ones took "days".

After repeatedly asking, we finally got to the root of the issue.
They had paid an annual fee to be a part of the some Microsoft network
(I think it is the Microsoft Developer Network, but I don't really
remember the name).  They can ask programming questions and get some
kind of Microsoft support.  With Linux programming support...well,
it's really just up to search engines and forums.

Of course, I wasn't all too happy about this.  The main reason was
that they weren't honest from the start about this partnership with
Microsoft.  And, for the customer, paying licenses for Windows,
Microsoft SQL Server, etc. is a lot of money.

Anyway....sorry for digressing, but as much as this is TLUG, I *do*
use Windows from time-to-time (especially when I just want to give up
with drivers :-P).  But, it is discouraging to see even CS
undergraduates are not getting some level of Unix-based programming
experience.

Ray