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Re:Response to EFF complaint about student data privacy by cbhl on Friday December 04, 2015 @04:50AM (#10675458)
My university was interesting; you could get a computer degree with the Engineering department or with the Math/CS department, and their IT policies were polar opposites. Engineering was 99% Windows/MATLAB/Visual Studio/you name it. CS was 99% Linux/GCC/CUPS/etc.

If you were on the wrong platform you had a hell of a time submitting assignments. (CS students on Windows found their C programs would run fine on their laptops but would crash in the CS environment because of compiler and C std lib differences. Engineering students on Linux found that they couldn't open the .docx files to submit lab reports without destroying the mandatory formatting in the tables.)

Re:Response to EFF complaint about student data privacy by psykovsky on Friday December 04, 2015 @05:45AM (#10675591)
So, supposedly educated young persons couldn't even "Save as..." and choose a free format when saving the documents? That's not a software problem...
Re:Response to EFF complaint about student data privacy by detaro on Friday December 04, 2015 @06:04AM (#10675640)
And having a copy in a free format helps with submitting a correctly formatted .docx how?
Re:Response to EFF complaint about student data privacy by psykovsky on Friday December 04, 2015 @07:08PM (#10680107)
They[0] should be saving the documents in a free format, despite the closed source software. Office supports .odf files or some other free format, does it not?

[0] By "they" I mean the persons who created the documents, not the ones who try to edit them using Gnu/Linux...