Daily Archives: Thursday, April 16, 2015

  • Election special: Labour love hard work

    Ed Miliband
    Vote Labour, get a lifetime of hard labour?
    Political language relies to a great extent on clichés. Two of the most over-used terms of recent times is “hard work” and “hard working“, with the latter usually attached to the noun families and implying that the childless in society are incapable of arduous slogging.

    With some free time on my hands this morning, I spent a leisurely hour going through the main UK party manifestos (excluding regional parties such as Plaid Cymru, the SNP and the Northern Ireland parties) for the forthcoming general election looking for instances of “hard work“. The results for each manifesto are shown below.

    1st: Labour 5
    2nd: Conservatives 3
    3rd: Liberal Democrats & UKIP 1 each
    5th Green Party 0

    Both my parents were unskilled manual workers who left school at the age of 14 and worked all their lives. Indeed my father once told me that on his last day of schooling, he went to school in the morning, left at midday and went straight to work for a local farmer as an agricultural labourer in the afternoon.

    I remember the physical effect that hard work had on their bodies. Both were prematurely aged long before the official retirement age. My father died at the relatively young age of 67, whilst my mother, who although she lived to be nearly 82, was disabled from her mid-50s onwards by a debilitating stroke. I therefore do not regard hard work as such as the same great virtue as the closeted and cosseted inhabitants of the Westminster Village, who’ve probably never done a hard day’s physical graft in their lives.

  • Hungarian universities adopt ODF

    Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF).

    Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students.

    ODF logoIn addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 copies of EuroOffice, a free and open source office suite developed especially for the Hungarian market, but based on both major free and open source suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. EuroOffice is available in 2 versions – free and professional – for both Windows and Linux. It can also be installed in 7 languages – English (US variant), German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Hungarian – which MultiRáció claims are the native languages of 85% of the EU’s population.

    The Hungarian government decided to promote the use of both EuroOffice and ODF in schools and universities in 2014. MultiRáció’s senior software developer Kázmér Koleszár described these initiatives as “an important policy change”, given that the country’s public sector had been reliant on MS Office for the preceding 15 years.

    MultiRáció is actively involved in the ODF specification, being a member of OASIS, a non-profit consortium promoting the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society.