Devoid of Anything Useful

At this juncture, I must take special care.

It could be a ploy by the school. If it is so, I encourage them to go that way, and evidence does show that we are headed in the right direction.

But if this is going to be a Snape Killed Dumbledore sort of double-crossing, I don't really want it.

The current situation from what I understand is that:
1) As part of the FutureSchool@HCI initiative, Microsoft has pumped in quite a bit (relative to their current market value) of money and thus we saw those banners from them "[Congratulating] Hwa Chong Institution on becoming a FutureSchool".
2) Because of that, we are restricted to use only their products when dealing with "over the table" work. Whether it is enforced by law or by contract, it does not matter.
3) They have to keep Comp Lab 5 a secret, or at least not publicize that it has OSS on it.
4) Not just MS Office, but our servers are running IIS.

If these are my "observations", I produce 2 theories

A) The school is intending to walk into doom.
It is ignorantly accepting such sponsorship, Lab 5 is merely a bug they are too lazy to swat, and future document formats will be restricted to doc, xls and ppt

B) The school is planning to use this as a slingshot
It will first show acceptance; but internally there are already systems put into place such that even if Microsoft suddenly revokes all our school's licenses for no apparent reason, we will be back up and running on alternate systems with little panic. Minimal money from them is put into spending on licences, we are using it for external development.

Evidence supporting A:
Most of the thing that the school runs are currently MS based, like the Comp Labs (even 5 has XP installed) and the servers. It would be too much of a hassle to turn back after such infrastructure has been put into place. Lab 5's presence is also shrinking, being demoted into a lowly extra classroom, and when the comps are used for normal lessons they run on XP. The only occasions where the OSS will be used is EC3 training and the PHP MySOL course.

Evidence supporting B:
Lab 5 is still there. Teachers are starting to implement external systems like Ning, Wetpaint, Facebook and Moodle. Such cloud computing is generally OS independent. The servers run IIS, but are starting to show an OSS style of handling things.

So, if they are really going to do a LeeKY (first accepting the communist radicals then throwing them out eventually), I applaud that; just that I may not be there for long enough to see it. Even if they want to take path A, it would be at most for another 4 years. The Government is already looking into replacing their infrastructure anyway.

And I would still submit my homework in pdf unless I would be penalized if I do so otherwise.

The place that started it: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

It appears I have been doing it without realizing.

Oh, and I managed to find some cool stuff, like FreeShells and other cool vpn shit.