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Microsoft and the U.S. School System
4/3PI*R^3 has the dubious honor of being the first of dozens of submissions: "Salon has a story on how Microsoft is bullying cash strapped school districts into purchasing "compliant" licenses for Microsoft software. Best quote from the story concerning financial problems of education and the added burden that Microsft is placing on them: "It's kind of like AIDS in Africa and the drug companies," Kowalski says. "Can anyone expect a dying person to be concerned about the drug companies' profits?"" It seems silly to bitch about this - work at getting schools to use Free and free software instead.
Or at the very least, some apostrophes, and perhaps a Shift key.
Apparently the moderator was one of the students you talk about. Your troll got modded insightful!
Math has changed tremendously in the past 100 years (although very basic math remains mostly unchanged). English is a constantly evolving language (read something from the turn of the century if you don't think so), HOW many "major events" did we have in the last 100 years? Are you sure you really want kids using 100 year old textbooks?
I do love the use of random quotes, the unattributed sources (a poll even!), and the call back to the "good old days." What a masterful troll, I salute you.
Pbthhhhhhhht!
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Who the hell would report a teacher for putting Office on 5 computers? Does the BSA have a reward system in place for tips or what?
I must strongly and completely disagree with the last three words. Don't even say 'end of story': it's utterly historically incorrect, misleading, conclusionary and just plain wrong.
I suggest 'for now' or 'at the moment'.
My opinion would be different if there were evidence of some of the bully tactics I've seen MS pull at other places, such that the teachers didn't have a choice but to use Office. But the article never mentioned any of these tactics being used in this case.
If the schoolteachers want to cut the costs, stop using overpriced software like Office.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Microsoft has been found guilty of breaking the law in federal court. These schools are a slam-dunk nolo contendere for breaking copyright law.
Even steven, eh? Take from the public, give back to the public? Sounds great to me...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Having worked in technology in a Public School District, and now in a Private School. It's not that easy to shift your OS even if it's free in a School District.
Why?
Training at the Administrative level. Most district's admin staff and school administration don't get any time off like teachers do. It would be *very* hard to train them. It's hard enough to get them used to Windows 9x or NT. The shift to KDE or Gnome would be very difficult to pull off and not lose alot of productivity.
Then at the State level, there are files that have both platform and program requirements. The people at the State Education department arn't going to accept files not done on Windows.
Microsoft pushed administration into a corner by cutting deals with the State, and now they know they have the power to dictate terms.
Yep.
Until Linux runs Reader Rabbit and all those other annoying K-3 applications with the annoying beeps and tones...Linux will not have a place in the classroom.
Now I know there are schools using it, but we need to dumb it down some for the K-12s where the technology staff is overworked and underpaid. In my public school job, there were 3 of us to support 1600 computers across 8 locations.
I've noticed with all of these license stories that Microsoft doesn't ask people to remove their software, only pony up the money to become compliant. I wonder if they will accept someone removing their software as compliance, or if there's something more nefarious at work here (i.e. If you've used our software illegally, you have no choice but to pay the licensing fees to correct this situation). I wonder if people realize they have that option at all.
thanks. But sorry, I haven't a clue where to find such a breakdown (other than, "check google")
hawk
>have been most of the Ph.D. students have been Asian or European.
Yep, and they come *here* to get the degrees, while relatively few americans leave to get one . . . hmm, there might be a reason for that . . .
The better graduate programs are primarily (but not entirely) here. On average, the foreign students *are* better than the american students--but this is comparing the graduate student base from the entire US population to the cream of the crop from abroad.
Also, look at the ratios. The U.S. has what, 5% of the world's population? Yet we have far more than 1 in 20 of the graduate students in top programs. At 10%, we're *over*-represented, not under represented
>I
>sometimes think that the only reason USA hasn't become a third world
>country is the amazing number of bright minds they import from the
>rest of the world.
a) It would be impossible for the U.S. to become third world--it's not a wealth/development issue. U.S./Europe/US-sphere is 1st world. Soviet Union and it's sphere is second world. Then there's the third world, not drawn in by either.
b) we're running a hell of a racket, here
>They don't seem to produce many of their own.
>Of course, this is in science and technology only. Maybe USA produce
>the worlds finest doctors and lawyers.
Yes, and the finest physcians, too (who tend to style themselve "Doctor" for having an M.D., a degree which lacks the most fundamental element of a doctoral degree, the contribution to knowledge . .
hawk, a real doctor, not an M.D.
> for it, I doubt it will happen.
I took a 90% pay cut from what I would have made the next year as a lawyer, and it was woth evgery penny . . .
hawk, who's still down 50% as a professor
>for Windows, but I believe the Mac versions of Word and Excel were at 3.
way, way, off.
Word 3 is somewhere around '86; I had it on an office machine in '87. Word 5.1 is late '92 or '93, and excel 4 along with it. These were also the last good products to come out of MS; I bought both of them.
Word for Windows 2.0 was a half- baked port of 5.1.
Then along came Word 6.0, so bad that they had to put 5.1 back on the product list. I kept using old macs to continue using 5.1 until I found lyx . . .
hawk, who owned several macs
> a piece of MS software that is still in wide use after 15 years?
uhh, word, maybe? Perhaps excel? Flight simulator? BASIC? (OK, that's stretching it
Other than Bob, can you name a microsoft product that's gone *out* of use?
Besides, real men use vi.
hawk
>can be done just as easily with Emacs as with Word (and Emacs ha been
>in use much longer than Word has).
Wait a minute, aren't those two names for the same executable? You know, that bloated editor that tries to do absolutely everything and requires 115% of the resources of any shipping computer?
More seriously, the major advantage that Word has over Word Star is footnotes. The tables are usefull, too, in some applications, and the spell checker is better at suggesting alternatives (now; it used to be worse). The rest is pretty myuch eye-candy.
hawk
It irritates me to no end to have Microsoft use their company name and "philanthropy" in the same sentence. Going after an anonymous tip (can we say disgruntled employee?) the BSA and MS are all over a school district that is running $200 million in the hole. So MICROSOFT, being the PHILANTHROPISTS they are, have donated $20,000 to help Philly become compliant. Ok, here's $20,000 so we don't sue you for $1.5-$3 million? Not only are they running $200 million over budget, Philly School District might _not be able to pay_ its 27,000 workforce? If free software isn't implemented soon, or Apple (or SOMEONE) doesn't step up to the plate, Philly is just plain doomed. While copying copyrighted software is admittedly wrong and illegal, it is perfectly clear that Microsoft and philanthropy do NOT belong together. This is nothing new. There are plenty of bigger fish in the sea, but to further cripple a SCHOOL DISTRICT is down right despicable. -mj
Actually, homeschooling generally provides better education for any economic class, and also tends to have better moral education, too. I don't know about getting rid of public education, but it's not the only way kids learn.
Engineering and the Ultimate
You wouldn't care to support a family on $50,000? Do you spend money like water? I have a family, a house, and two cars, with my only debts being on the house, and I managed on $30,000. That also included a major medical disaster for the year. I have friends who get by (with more kids) on much less.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Actually, as a nation, we are all imports. I think it's amazing how far we've come, considering America started out as just being a mix of people that no other country wanted.
Engineering and the Ultimate
1) Schools are not a business, they are a public service
2) We are not saying that we are going to be giving things to schools, we are saying that with free software, we can charge full price for hardware and support, and still come out _way_ ahead of everyone else. Especially when you use thin terminals.
Engineering and the Ultimate
I think the problem is that teachers, by nature, want to share. They understand that information is freely sharable. Therefore, things like "licenses" to use instructions (which is what a program is) is absurd. I don't think they give it a second thought, because giving and sharing is part of who they are.
Engineering and the Ultimate
It does, technically. The problem is, you either let BSA come in and do an audit, or you let them come back with a warrant and the police, and instead of just doing an audit, they will take _all_ your computers and do it for you. The only difference is that the search warrant requires a witnesses to sign sworn statements about illicit behavior.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Not really. It runs some things well, but not a generic out-of-the-box program. It runs best if (a) you installed the program under Windows, and (b) you have the Windows DLLs installed somewhere. It's getting better, but still not there.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Actually, it's perfectly legal for students to photocopy large sections of books and entire articles for use at home. In this way, multiple copies _are_ being used at once.
Engineering and the Ultimate
1) Consistancy
2) Predictability
3) Simplicity
4) Standardization "
Funny, those are the problems I have with MS stuff.
Maybe it's just computers in general that aren't ready for prime-time.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Either that or the other suggested remedy (M$ opens up and publishes ALL file formats and changes BEFORE the software that runs those changes is put on retail) will be pushed as part of the consent decree. Its the same sort of thing that the DoJ got for IBM back in the 60s...
--
You know, you gotta get up real early if you want to get outta bed... (Groucho Marx)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Easy fix - instead of making them depend on the training leeches (Like the people that teach IIS Administration for $500/day/person), give them an free resource - volunteer your time to come in and teach a group of teachers about something that you know about.
They can probably even find kids in their highschools that can teach the classes, but make the effort volunteer your time - think of the long term effect you'll have - Linux in the schools. No more MS/BSA audits.
Call your local schoolboard and ask how to go about volunteering your time. Do it now, you know you want to!!
If insufficient people complain about Microsoft's insensitive behaviour, it will raise more ABM (Anything But Microsoft) feeling and consequently result in more people using ABM, which in the long term is IMHO a good outcome. Of course, a similar effect resulted if they tried to complain through MSN Messenger recently... (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm now at the ripe old age of 24. I have used the following operating systems as my primary desktop: Commodore 64's bizarre combination of a disk-drive based OS and basic interpreter shell, two CP/M systems, a couple of different versions of MS-DOS with a variety of DOS shells, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 95, Debian 1.3 with WindowMaker, Debian 2.0 and Enlightenment, through to Debian unstable with a fairly stock Sawfish/GNOME desktop. That's not to mention the time at various educational institutions on, variously, an Apple II, an Amiga, Macs, VT100 terminals attached to Solaris and Digital Unix servers (with varying collections of GNU tools installed), SGI Indys, various NT boxen . . .
Yes, I'm probably an extreme case (not by /. reader standards, but certainly by the standards of the general public), but the point is that training people at school for a system that "they'll be using later in life" is just not possible. At school, people should be learning general principles which they can then apply to the systems they come across in the future. Linux, being particularly flexible and transparent, is potentially an excellent way to teach some basic ideas about computing, ones that Windows derivatives go out of their way to hide.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I've told this story here before, but I'll tell it again.
Simply put, educators don't want Linux any more than the leader of, say, MSNBC does.
Once, a while ago, I volunteered my time and about a half-dozen old 386's. Rather, I should say, I tried to, because no one wanted them. "They need to be Pentium II's", they would say (not even the standard at the time! Most people still had plain-jane P5's!). "They need to run Word. We're teaching job skills here". I tried to say, learning to use a computer is much more than selecting text and printing. No dice. I eventually junked the machines because no one would take them, and spent my now free time doing nothing.
The point is - and I do have one - is that encouraging Free Software is important, sure, but its going to fall on dead ears. People want Word. People know what Word is. People at large are not interested in the ethics of software. Most of them don't want to see MS broken up.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Just wondering.
Not that MS pays taxes anyway, as I understand it, but would having inflated losses due to piracy be a deductable expense?
Also, doesn't microsoft's "philanthropy" foundations give copies of Microsoft to schools (thus extending their monopoly and training a whole new generation of Microsoft-dependent users) and make annoucnements to the media that they have given away "millions" to education (which they can also write off)?
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Without simplicity, products are destined for failure. Great concepts are often complex concepts packaged in simple packaging. Why would a teacher unfamiliar with your product choose "K-12LTSP v.1.0" over "Microsoft Windows"? If you don't choose a name that you can build recognition with your products will be simply unrecognizeable (and thus unsold).
Okay, how about Debian Jr. for a name then?
Jay (=
I have a Linux system, so I use pdf2ps and ghostview. They could use the Acrobat Reader or something else if they don't want to install Linux. I could of course use StarOffice, but this seems to work just as well.
You could also use acroread 4.0, or xpdf, or konqueror, or ghostscript. All work great for reading PDF files under GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There is definitely no shortage of readers for reading PDFs, nor of word processors capable of writing PDFS (staroffice, applix to name just two).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Linux/Open Software in schools is a grand and awesome idea. On paper it looks great, and in a presentation it will make anything else look downright expensive. Except: What IS/IT people they have will fight it tooth an nail as they are usually MS drones, the CS teacher (Who is a MS preacher), some other teacher that knows a little bit about networking, students (and the faculty dont trust them), or volunteers from the professional community which are MS zombies with the letters MCSE tattooed on their brain.
Over the course of one summer, an entire schools IT can be converted to linux, the administrators trained, the teachers trained, and in full swing as if nothing has changed.... But it wont happen.
The volunteer Computer professional will rant and pout like a 3 year old, demanding it be NT/2000 (or worse XP).. The teacher that knows sometinhg will be scared because he has never touched anything but Windows 95/98, and the CS teacher will kick and scream that he cant teach kids on anything but microsoft... Complaining that you cant program or teach without a GUI based lanuage.
until we get someone to mandate the changes to schools it wont happen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Oh come on, that's a little melodramatic, don't you think? I did just fine in school with zero multimedia presentations, and in the past kids have done fine in school without even electricity or running water. If those kids future is so closely tied to the availability of cheap multimedia authoring tools, then we've already got much bigger problems.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Computers are needed in schools, but they aren't the reason that public education is often poor and why the public education system is frequently tottering on bankruptcy.
The big reason that public schools have such problems is that school has ceased to be about education. It's become more and more of a welfare delivery system. Each new welfare program installed in schools under the guise of helping Johnny read needs staff people, administrators, office space and tons of other overhead that should rightfully go towards books, teachers, and facilities. And don't get me started on the massive subsidies provided to school sports, which were once a good use of gym equipment after school that have become almost entities unto themselves.
The reason most school systems started being about welfare delivery is that they realized that if Dick and Jane haven't been eating, they don't learn. What they fail to realize is that bringing everyone up to the same socioecnomic level as the high-achieving middle class white students means solving a LOT of social problems, which takes a lot of resources, and the pool of resources the public is willing to assign to education is limited.
Schools need to stop trying to solve all the socioeconmic problems. It's not to say the socioeconomic problems aren't worth solving, but the education field is the wrong place to solve them. Educating the people first may actually solve more problems in the long run because you're producing people who are capable of integrating more fully into the economy and society.
Math has changed tremendously in the past 100 years (although very basic math remains mostly unchanged).
OK, math has changed. I'm sure the field of mathematics as an academic pursuit has changed, and it probably has had a major impact on science, engineering and fields for whom statistics plays a major role.
But how much of the math that even well-educated people actually know and use in everyday life has changed in the past 100 years? Most educated professionals who aren't in a math-intensive field seldom use much beyond very basic algebra. Have significant new digits in Pi changed much? Are there bold new techniques for solving for X?
Even in the calculus classes I took in college school, much of the "soft" education about the subject involved guys like Newton, Leibniz and other people who were long-dead. We never learned about significant advances in calculus in the past 100 years (although I don't doubt there were at least a few), let alone the past 10 or 20 years.
I'm sure math has changed, but I'm willing to bet that most of the math taught in high school hasn't changed meaningfully in the past 25 years and only trivially in the past 50. Academic math in colleges has probably changed dramatically, but that's largely meaningless for most high school students.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
...quoted in the article who said, Oh, yeah, we violated Microsoft's copyright, but we're a poor school district, blah blah blah. I'm no libertarian, but there's a difference between setting aside private-property rights for the public good (e.g., Brazil's cheap AIDS drugs) and putting an altruistic spin on one's individual violations of the law (this case).
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
As they start reaching their limits they'll get more deperate. They'll do things like this which, despite bad PR, keeps up the cash inflows. Their new licensing scheme for XP is further evidence that they are desperate to milk every last drop of revenue they can. Also make note of the fact that the release cycles for their products have been getting shorter and providing less significant enhancements. It went from Office 97 to Office 2000 to XP being released in 2001. It went from NT which was released how long ago to Windows 2000 to now, within a year, Windows XP.
Also notice how Microsoft is trying to leverage their control of the desktop to expand into other areas rapidly, trying to keep revenues increasing. X-box to get into the consumer entertainment market. Smart Tags to extend their power back to their media properties.
I just get the sense that Microsoft is a high performance engine that's been redlined for just a little too long. Sure the government will probably settle the anti-trust case but a resultant barrage of private lawsuits is going to at least distract them if not outright hurt them. Add to this slowly growing interest by corporations in using open source software. The odds are stacking against them fast.
Microsoft is desperately flailing around to find ways to keep itself growing. They'll hide their desperation in well developed PR campaigns and certainly the more paranoid amongst open source supporters will make their apparent position seem that much more powerful. But in the end, unless they learn how to survive as a more methodical and slow growing corporation they are going to be in trouble very soon.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I'd venture that you don't need application software. /Samba/Gimp/Abiword/ MySQL boxes for specific tasks or general hacking. Get the school to donate the use of a couple of analog phone lines for use after hours for dial-in access to email and the kids user space. Get every parent/student/teacher set up as a user. Get the High School computer club to be administrators. Form a Linux club and donate some time to it.
I think what would really get kids jazzed is to see their *own* work, not Carmen Sandiego or Rug Rats or whatever passes for educational software.
Buy a cheap scanner for the school. Get it to work on a Linux box. Set up Apache.
I'm sure kids and parents alike would much rather see scans of crayon drawings and digital photos of the Christmas Pageant than anything from any of the 'educational software' companies.
Give each kid directions on how to log in or FTP in and how to chmod the files in ~/public_html so that they can show off *their* work. Work with them and make it easier
What kind of box would you need? (My webserver is a PII that I *Found in the Trash*.)
Get a couple of boxes donated and set them up as Linux/ Apache
Someone mentioned that their school district holds "Windows Night" once a month. Um, so just hold "Linux Night" once a month. Take a CD Burner and a stack of blank discs and burn copies of Redhat or Debian or Mozilla. Show people how to install them. Encourage them to bring an old PC to set them up on. Provide donuts and coffee
Find out what your school district spends on software licenses - I'm sure the school's budget is public record - Let people know how much of that could be saved. Did they spend $2,000 on licenses for MS Access? Did they know that MySQL is *free* and also runs on Windows and the apps they develop could probably be written as a CGI app using perl or PHP?
Promote your Linux night as a way for parents and teachers and students to learn the basics, whatever you consider that to be, (be it KDE or Gnome and StarOffice or Bash and pine and Pico.)
The way to get Linux into homes and offices is to promote it as a "Second Box" solution. If they have a PC, they probably have a copy of Windows and a license. Don't compete with that - Get Linux on the second PC, the kid's PC, the print server, whatever. That's the benefit of MSBloat - The copy of Office that comes with the box they bought recently will run like a slug on the box from 2 years ago. Linux will make better use of the resources that they probably have. Your office getting rid of some Pentium 133's Grab a couple, set them up with a workable linux configuration and give 'em away to people who are interested.
Most of all, let your kids' teachers know that you want your kids learning Python, not PowerPoint, Ansi C, not Excel macros.
I think that this recent wave of MS/BSA crackdowns is the best thing that could happen. Remind people that a MS Office CD is a lot like a credit card. Use it and it's going to cost you $500 a pop. If you manage to avoid getting caught, you are a thief.
I think licenses should be strictly enforced at schools and businesses. Once you buy the software and install it, the install CD should be locked up in the school's safe - (The liability is just too high.) Does the school leave its credit cards lying around for the convenience of the teachers? No way, that would be madness.
How is this any different?
OK, I should stop ranting...
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
It is a privelege bestowed by law, for which the constitution explicitly allows but does not grant outright.
I understand where you are coming from, but you worded your post quite badly. If the EULA has been agreed to by the school districts, then Microsoft certainly has the right to enforce those contracts. This is a much different thing than the privilege of copyright.
(whether the EULA counts as a valid contract is another matter)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think the whole situation is funny. One monopoly is charging high prices to another :-)
Microsoft has about a 90-95% market share. Public schools have about a 95-98% market share.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
> Top 6 reasons to have computers in schools:
I suspect the real reason we have them is that they make more socially acceptable babysitters than televisions do.
It is not at all obvious (to me) that a computer teaches (say) how to multiply integers any better or more cost effectively than (say) flashcards do.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The reason you see a lot of non US people doing Ph.D's in America is because the division of the subject between different levels is different. You get a broader, less detail undergraduate degree and make up for it with a 5 year Ph.D that includes sitting courses. In the UK (where i'm from) the undergrad degrees take the subject further but are narrower, and then you do a 3 year Ph.D comprising of just (more or less) research.
The upshot of this is that for the best education you can get, a good degree in the UK or somewhere similar, followed by a US style Ph.D seems to be very popular.
-- "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
What I personally like is the guy who was installing Office so that people could read Word documents. I guess he never heard of the freely available Word Viewer program which is available on Microsoft's website.
What a great attitude these people have. "Gee, I fucked up by installing illegal copies of software - damn Microsoft sucks!"
The anti-trust case has certainly proved otherwise. Both the original court case, and the appeal concluded that MS has a monopoly, and that they abused it.
Thus, my statement is not exactly without merit.
I have often thought U.S. schools don't focus enough on computers. I remember there was one computer lab in the school I taught at briefly in Opelika, Alabama. Students were allowed time there to work on class projects and what not. These were old IBM PS/2 boxen that were so out of date it was pathetic. Not to mention the fact that programs like "Carmen San Diego" and "Oregon Trail" were long considered excellent ways of incorporating computers in the classroom. How wrong could taht be? All that does is use new technology to teach the same thing a book or movie can. Pretty much in the same fashon too!
If school systems are honest about teaching computer use in schoool, teach students how to use tools such as search engines and newsgroups to find information for reports. Use programs like powerpoint (or Star Office/KOffice/whatever Gonme's calling it's office app today) to add multimedia to their reports. Better yet, partner with someone like Macromedia and/or Adobe to use flash annimations on web pages designed through GoLive or Dreamweaver (after learning HTML programming by hand of course). Get copies of "Learning Perl" or some of Laura Lemay's "21 Days" series. Teach kids how computers are used in the world. Teach them why they're useful and how they work. Teaching the standard Microsoft line will not allow students to see how applications work in anything beyond a superficial standpoint (a diagram in a book). It will also more than likely produce more people who expect an AOL-ized or M$-ized version of computing -- simplicity to the point of absurdity. Don't get me wrong, computing for Joe User should be pain free, but wouldn't things be great if Joe User could remember something from high school computer class like, "if your password's not working, check the CAPS Lock key!"?
Microsoft is not necessarily needed for all of this. For programming-based classes (which should be limited to basic web programming (HTML, with intro to JavaScript, DHTML, and possibly XML), Perl and C to cover the basics). Anything from Linux to one fo the BSDs would work fine. Schools could arrange a deal with local vendors to sponsor computer purchases through fund matching programs and what not. Imagine how far universities could go with CS programs if most incoming freshmen already knew all this information.
I know more and more students are learning this stuff on their own these days, but why can't schools look to expand their computer learning beyond learning Office apps and playing outdated and useless geography and history games with little to no interactivity. I realize most people qualified to teach this stuff can make lots more money than a school system can offer, but when you think about it, lots of teachers could make more money doing something else too! It's not about money so much as it's about how passionate someone is about his cause. In this case, I'm asking how passionate people are about teaching school kids about computers and programming rather than how to use one OS and a handful of marginally useful applications.
/Sig/
I work for a very large educational publishers in the US in the education software division (they call it New Media). I can't recommend any software because I honestly don't know of any that runs under any Linux distribution. But I can tell why you will be hard pressed to find any. It's the same in the schools as it is in business. Educational software publishers put out their software for Windows and usually the Mac. The schools buy Windows or Mac because that's what the software requires. The publisher looks at what their customers have and say, "We need to make sure our future software works on Windows and Mac" and the cycle begins again.
Linux is apparently making some in roads, though. A few months ago, my manager came to me asking about supporting Linux. I asked which one. Apparently he didn't understand that there are flavors of Linux. Since then, we've determined that Flash 5 would be advantageous to develop in since we're pretty experienced in Macromedia tools and Flash 5 seems to have wide support, including open source plugins. But I still can't see us doing a CD-ROM distribution for Red Hat, Mandrake, Yellow Dog, etc. It would take forever to QA and the software is typically done as incentive to buy the textbooks, not as way to make money. Even so, we think it might be worth focusing on Red Hat, since it seems to be the most user friendly distribution and K12LTSP is supporting it.
-Jennifer
English, Math, Social Studies change all the time. New ideas, formualas, and ways to teach math are available all the time. English is constantantly evolving. And we're learning more about the past than we every thought we would, this has lead to a re-interpretation of everything. It happens all the time. Part of this change involves actually getting kids exposed to computers and showing the right and wrong ways to use them. Computers are part of the "basics". Things have changed even in Kansas. Failure to realize that in the modern society is a failure of education.
Investing in children costs money, and the money just isn't there.There is a teacher shortage, but that is directly due to teacher salary. There simply is no money for anything. The government would rather give ill concevied tax uts to everyone instead of paying for education. When the government is ready to really, really invest in education, and pay teachers a reasonable wage then, things will begin to change. Till then , we're stuck on the same cycle of not enough money.
I doubt though that American Kids are the DUMBEST in the world. That seems a little drastic. We do score lower on test, but that is because we test everyone and not just those who'd pass the test. We end up with the same or more numbers of phds and master students per capita.
For once, Microsoft is completely right, and the the schools are on the wrong side. Before you tag this message as troll or flamebait, let me explain.
Microsoft sells their product under certain conditions, one of them being, that you may not install them more than once. These conditions are silly, used to harass the user etc., nevertheless they are what one must accept to use the programs.
If a school or teacher wants to use MS-Office, they need to get a legal copy. The facts that schools have no money to buy the licenses, are in a poor neighborhood, don't want to spend the money or perform very important service for the community gives them no right to override those conditions.
Basically, the school has only three ways of resolving the problem:
- Asking Microsoft to donate some licenses or give at least huge rebates and hope they'll get it. This may work where Microsoft sees a benefit, but it also may not work.
- Getting the money to buy full licenses. This shouldn't be a problem in any civilised country that value the education of its youth. Something is really wrong in a country, where schools don't get enough money to do their job.
- Using cheaper or free products. There are great freely usable programs out there for most tasks a teacher will ever need. I really loved the line about there being no replacement for outlook available. As if Microsoft inventend email.
All three ways are reasonable courses to take for the schools and the involved teachers. There is no reason for breaking silly licenses. If they choose to do it anyway and have the bad luck of being caught at it, they get what they deserve and I don't have any sympathy for them.
My mistake. I have nothing against the BSD licenses at all (I use OpenBSD for my mail server).
What I should have said was "free of per-user/per-use/per-seat" fees. I want to be able to install the software on any number of educational systems without additional cost.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
What really torques me off about the situation is that as soon as the pharmacutical lobby complained, our "liberal" vice-president Gore was threatening to impose sanctions on South Africa if they allowed the manufacture of generic AIDS drugs.
Of course, back when South Africa had apartheid, imposing sacntions would have been "premature" and "counterproductive". Immoral bastards, the lot of them.
- bridgette
You're thinking of college. We need to acknowledge that there are two distinct tracks in HS. Those who will be continuing their education and those who won't. Concepts can be useful to those who are continuing on, but some students NEED to learn skills. And you may know that if someone knows one word processor, they can likely figure out another, but does the hiring authority for an entry level job know this? Maybe not. A lot of folks might shrug off someone who has no MS experience for someone who does.
Everyone needs to learn the concepts. Reading, writing and arithmatic (and critical thinking and problem solving) are important for functioning as an adult in society, regardless of your job/profession.
And among the students who won't go on to college, it is not clear cut that they will be using an expensive office suite at their crappy, low paying jobs. Off the top of my head I've seen telemarketers, data entry folks, random hospital clerical staff, clerical staff at the DMV and other municipal offices, bank tellers and customer service reps all using various proprietary systems. And of course, the construction workers, waitresses, sweater folders, plumbers, assembly line workers and orderlies don't seem to be using any computers at all.
In fact, the only jobs I've seen specifically requiring MS office experience are secritarial positions, but now that the bubble burst, I imagine the HS grads will once again get stiff competition from the people who can't get a better job with their English BA (hey, remeber the 80's).
On the other hand, the HS grad may benefit from knowing how to use free software to set up the $499 computer they got on sale at Best Buy, since they can't afford to buy and upgrade software that cost half as much as thier computer.
- bridgette
This is partially because students/teachers will want the school computers to be behave in a very similar way (if not identically) to their home machines.
How many people have even 10 machines networked together in their homes? How many people have networks with thousands of users in their homes? On a home machine the person sitting in front of a machine being able to install any software they like is a feature. On a machine on any network it's a disaster waiting to happen. Let children use it and you won't have to wait too long for the disater.
This leads to the greater problem that virtually none of the people in k-12 schools, public or private, are capable of handling a unix variant (and even windows in many cases).
The point is they don't have to. On a unix type system the users can just use. The person who administers the system need not be anywhere near they could be anywhere on the Earth's surface (above it.)
How long did you think that Linux box was going to last in a school environment before the kids hit the reset switch several times too often?
There are at least 3 Linux filesystems which are a lot tougher than FAT or NTFS. Also you don't need to even have a hard disk in the machine (try that with any version of Windows later than 3.11).
This is the thing I've never understood: reading the copyright law, I remember that it specifically says that making copies of a copyrighted work is allowed for educational purposes.
There is also the issue of making copies for "personal use". Which has an interesting side to it when you have corporate entities being "people". e.g. is a school a "person"?
Promoting the Free Software agenda should not be done at the expense of others. Schools have a responsibility to give students some real world skills that they can use, not to enlighten or indoctrinate.
If avoiding this is important then best not use proprietary software....
I believe there is room for free software in schools, but certainly not that they should ignore the software that is in 90% of the desktops out there.
But what will be the current software in 5-10 years? In order to even attempt this you need a time machine.
After all the typical school PC hardware costs like ten times the school licenses (licenses to school are _alot_ cheaper than business licenses) of the microsoft software that they install on them.
Only true for utterly top of the line hardware. On more realistic purchases Microsoft software can easily be 25% of the price. That's before you even consider third party "educational software".
Putting open source software on school PCs isn't going to help them. Bear in mind the kinds of people using these computers aren't going to be Perl gurus, or even web developers.
Not are they going to be Windows Wizards, but that dosn't stop Windows being pushed.
They're going to be office workers, shop clerks etc. They're not exactly going to need to know about daemons and stacks,
But they do need to know about scandisk, registry, etc. Let alone that if a program crashes it is likely to dump registers and stack frame as "more info".
Windows is a system which expects end user administration
but they will need to know Microsoft products, as these will look better on a resume/CV than StarOffice or some other home-cooked tiny suite.
Or it might be as useful as putting "Mafia" down...
children LOVE to learn, tinker, explore... Why would they not learn anything under Linux/BSD/etc?
Rather you they can tinker without simply ending up with a heap of "broken glass".
With school children and Windows its a matter of when rather than if they will break it. Though some of the staff are just as bad.
Instead, it's depriving them of getting to grips with Windows and Office which they will need later on when they apply for jobs.
Of course we know that Microsoft will continue to exist... Also that knowing todays versions of Windows and Office will help much with those in 5-10 years time... What's to say that Microsoft won't go the same way as Digital Research or even Pan Am.
Beyond that, the specifics of what they are taught about how to use MS-Office XP in 9th grade will be obsolete by the time they finish High School or college and the company they work for is using Office XP+2 or XP+4.
Assuming even that Microsoft still exists. The timescale we are talking is a very long time in computers.
The only thing that is going to make them the least bit proficient is going to be an understanding of the basic concepts of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. And they can get that from free software just as easily, and much more cheaply.
Also it's quite possible to have a real educational version of a free software workdprocessor/spreadsheet/etc. Which has all the bells and whistles taken out. So as not to confuse the student (or more likely the teacher.)
but most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use Linux, or other non-windows os's.
And they know how to use MS Windows? They'd probably be better off with a unix type system, because then someone else can do the system administration tasks which are beyond them. The fundermental problem with Windows is it's end user administration paradigm. Which whilst useful for home machines is an utter diaster everywhere else.
The applications and operating systems have yet to come to the point where "joe Elementary School Teacher" would be able to use it effectivly, much les instruct others on how to use it.
In which case what they really want is an Acorn A3000 (diskless machine, starts up in seconds, lightweight and simple to use applications), but LTSP might be a suitable subsitute.
Imagine a large school district -- Philadephia, New York, LA -- announced that, due to the cost of licenses of MS products, they were standardizing on Debian (or pick your favorite distribution) with StarOffice, Gimp, and Mozilla for the 15,000 computers in all of their schools and administrative offices. Approximatly, 16 hours later a fleet of helecopters from Redmond would swoop down and drop crates of MS products compliments of the Gates foundation
Not sure if that would really help them. Problem with Windows stuff is that it tends to expect to be installed on every machine individually (with XP making this even worst). Drive imaging software helps, so long as you have lots of similar hardware, but it's difficult to get Windows to work in an "install once, run everywhere". LTSP does this automatically and it's trivial even with "Sun style" workstation setups.
Whilst some business environments may have a situation of issuing a computer to one person school networks simply don't work that way at all. Schools would also much prefer proper site licencing than per machine setups, if they must use "payware" software.
Older teachers may be "computer illiterate", but they would at least be familiar with AOL and probably Word. We changed browsers from IE to Netscape a while ago and you should have heard the uproar.
;).
The uproar from the teachers or the students?
That is just a simple app level change. Linux in the classroom == a very hard fight indeed
Why should it be any harder than changing to Microsoft XP?
That IMHO is the heart of the issue, changing to Linux would be "difficult", but the Microsoft annual model change (which means an awful lot of work for the sysadmin) is ok...
Most of it that I've seen is not quite ready for prime time; in particular, undergraduates who grew up in a Microsoft-saturated market seem to have difficulty with that abstruse notion called "portability".
The other problem is they need to make the software lightweight. i.e written for a 50MHz 16M machine, rather than a 1GHZ 256M machine. Schools cannot afford to be always buying the latest and greatest hardware.
I have boxen that won't run Win95 with Novell Client 32 without thrashing. There is no way Wine would be able to run the software, even though much of it is probably Win3.1 software recompiled.
They will probably work fine with LTSP, even if you have to buy new hardware for the server that is still less than a roomfull of even the most basic new machines.
PDF files are usually even wronger than MSWord - they capture the printed output of a file while losing the structure and editability, so any work put into creating a PDF form is pretty much lost.
.DOC files are sent as an alternative to a letter or fax. Thus the recipient editing them isn't really wanted in the first place. .DOC attachment, which definitly won't contain text they didn't want to send. (Though this can also happen with PDF.)
A great proportion of the time
Also most people don't know how to send a "clean"
One of the 'harder' questions (we have people with degrees fail to explain what linked-lists are) is to describe what a DFA is and for what it is used.
A nice tricky question, considering "DFA" is ambiguious in this context. The answer could be "analysis of data flow" or "dosn't work (but sounds better)".
Jonathan Moran
Oink, Oink!!
You would be sorry not to hire me. I have the initiative to learn such things, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten through the CS cirriculum; I would have failed out my first semester. I hold an advantage over CS students that had things clearly explained to them and who had little hassle in making it through the program... people learn from mistakes and struggle, not through breezing by four years of college.
Regardless, posting on Slashdot is a wonderful way for me to see that computer professionals assume that only people who are technically curious about EVERYTHING with computers belong in the industry. I've learned many technical things in college on my own, it's just that I never got around to exploring Solaris as a tool for anything else other than programming my class assignments. And I do know UNIX to an extent, except that I don't know everything relating to UNIX. Solaris isn't a very user-friendly OR publicly available operating system, and the environment in which I had access to it was restrictive. I never said I didn't WANT to learn it or that I never tried. I just never tried as hard to learn it as I tried to learn, for example, Macromedia Flash - that doesn't mean I lack initiative.
The smiley is a nice touch too. It shows that you grin arrogantly at those who aren't the kind of programming GOD you think you are. That's okay, though; please post your name so I know not to apply to any jobs where I might have to deal with your rudeness and egotism.
I'm not saying to mislead them, in fact I agree that it is necessary to try to educate as to what the term "Free Software" means. I just don't think anyone will get past the term free.
In fact I've found that most people lock up if their original assumptions are challenged. These aren't just moral or philosophical assumptions, but even technical ones. I once tried to explain the concept of using the gears on a mountain bike to someone. She had it in her head that you pushed the lever on one side to go faster, and the lever on the other to go slower. No amount of explanation or demonstration could convince her otherwise. It was almost as if I were watching a buggy Operating System encounter a problem and reboot itself.
One of the major problems with using the term "Free Software" in the business worldn is that people don't get past the term free. Here is close to the exact conversation I had once with a business major:
Me: (talking about linux) Free Software means free as in speech, not as in beer. This means that you can use it, copy it, and sell it if you want.
Business Major: Free! You mean nobody makes any money on it?
Me: No, it't talking about freedom, not price. You can make all the money you want on it. You just can't stop others from doing the same.
Business Major: How do they make any money if they have to give it away for free?
An educator will have the same tendency. You can talk, explain, scream, demonstrate, and whatever else you can think of to impart clue, and most will still insist on not understanding. When this happens, I see nothing morally wrong with utilizing that to our ends.
With business, we changed the name to get rid of the problems associated with the term free, why not do the reverse with education?
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
If you know StarOffice I bet you can do the job in Word/Excel as well. If you are only able to look into a book with picturea and then click on a similar picture on a toolbar in order to accomplish a task, then you should not use a computer in the first place.
Most teachers in elementary schools haven't a clue how to use windows effectively.
As long as you give them a desktop and a start-menu like object (or even something better), and easy access to word processors, spreadsheets, and maybe a few other programs, and make printing painless, there will be no problems, regardless of OS.
Linux + Gnome/KDE + StarOffice + MSO Converters + Wine could EASILY replace Windows, the trick is getting our foot in the door.
The attempt at helping the teachers to read their documents was misguided. For a start a teacher should know better than installing one copy of office on multiple computers. There's a simple solution by using staroffice, but that's not the point.
My main point is: by installing office on the computers of one school the problem is only solved for that school. For other schools, still lacking versions of office, the problem has become worse: they now get even more frustrating worddocuments. Instead the teachers should turn their frustration on the originators of that damn Worddocuments and tell them to send the documents in different formats. Especially if the documents originate from some public organisation they should get the point over, that not everyone has access to word, to view, let alone edit, their documents.
The way to handle proprietary and restrictive standards is to make the originator of the content aware of the problem and make it his problem, not to go along with it as far as installing unlicensed software. But that only works if more than a hanful of people act that way. By letting themselves be forced to do Microsofts bidding (by installing the software and thus making it their own problem) the teachers only provide a bad example.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
What kind of fucking moron would actually believe that schools pirating windows software is like an epidemic that is wiping out an entire population of people? This is probably the stupidest comparison I've ever heard! From what I hear Microsoft donates thousands of copies of its software to schools anyway, maybe if the schools in question didn't start out by using illegal copies, they could have avoided all this problem. Or, perhaps they could have used one of those free operating systems AND software that are talked about so much. But, comparing AIDS to software piracy is just fucking idiotic!!
--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
The bottom line is, no matter how much MS OS's suck, not matter how much they charge or overchage for the software and applications, no matter how much we hate it - until "Ready to Read with Pooh" and about a zillion other education software titles can run on Linux - Windows will own the school systems, and Windows will own the parents. People buy computers for the applications they run, and 99.9% of the useful educational software runs on Windows or Mac, almost none of it runs on *nix.
I can't really see BSD / Linux, etc being used by the general non-CS public in an educational setting. Sure it might be good for educational / managerial utilities (databases, calanders, to-do, etc). Even using it as a simple web-browser in the class-room / library (on slower machines). The problem is that it still doesn't cut the mustard for office apps. I'd venture to say that 99% of students don't have a Linux-running-Office supporting OS environment at home, and administering this would be a nightmare. Most people are going to use MS Word these days, and that's what you'll need sitting somewhere on school-grounds.
It might be possible to reduce the number of Windows machines through the infiltration of Linux, but then you'd have to have UNIX administrators. Sure the acting IS staff (typically a single guy) could learn it, but can a given school justify sending these poor-overworked people to UNIX training when they're only going to provide marginal utility for the school? I discourage schools from out-sourcing such administration to student groups for several reasons.
-Michael
-Michael
Yeah, it sounds like a great marketing strategy, but you don't need to market when you've already got the market cornered. Microsoft doesn't have to worry about informed college graduates influencing their PHB's to buy Microsoft products. It looks like Microsoft is just trying to scrape up every last penny possible.
This whole situation makes me sick! There are many school districts out there that can hardly pull together enough money to buy books, let alone have to worry about software licenses. You would think that Microsoft would be donating the software then writing it off their taxes, which would be a much less draconian way to get their money. Is it all about greed now? I wonder if any schools in Redmond are being targeted?
Linux is certainly easier to use than the Apple II-e and II-gs that our school system used *exclusively* in the 80's and early 90's. Don't give me this shit about how linux wont be used in the future. Im certainly not seeing Apple IIe anywhere in industry. You go to school to learn, not to build a resume. You might as well learn how to be self-sufficient, and not reliant on $199 software from The Man.
Linux is certainly easier to use than the Apple II-e and II-gs that our school system used *exclusively* in the 80's and early 90's. Don't give me this shit about how linux is hard to use. You go to school to learn. You might as well learn how to be self-sufficient, and not reliant on $199 software from The Man.
As always, there is a big difference between hardware and software. If people could copy food, chairs, ... they would do it. Your remark is thus pointless.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Methinks you didn't use computers as a kid. My school used Icons (from Unisys, remember them?). A less standard interface is hard to imagine, but I seem to have come out fine.
Yeah, I might not want to subject kids to the terror that is emacs, but I would have no problems plunking one in front of a UNIX machine running KDE (I can't speak to Gnome - I don't use it). If schools are willing to use Windows 3.1, they should be willing to use either major desktop environment. Quite frankly, I'd consider KDE far less "hostile".
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
The above-60 crowd is a major negative force for school moneys. They vote down anything that smells like a tax increase, and what do they care, they're not going to benefit from better schools. Their kids HAVE kids, so let the mommies and daddies pay for it, and leave granny's checkbook out of it.
The property owners (that is, real estate like houses and ranches) vote down anything that would raise property taxes, too. Down with urban growth! Down with sprawl! Blah blah.
Are property owners and sextagenarians likely to care about these issues of schools and "free" software? No. Can the rest of us overcome that? Yeah, but don't count on it.
[
I can understand students pirating software individually (I did it plenty of times in college), but having someone at the school district do it is stupid. The guy said he was running AppleWorks, but they were having a problem translating Office docs. Well, I've had no problems opening Office documents in AppleWorks using the included DataViz translators. For more complicated work, it may choke, but in my experience, very few people do complicated Office documents -- how many times do you see someone doing a multiple column, multisectional document with embedding tables and whatnot? And I don't see them doing something like this at a school. So I think he must be rationalizing the fact that he didn't know very much about importing/exporting documents in AppleWorks, and that cost the school district $300,000 in fines.
The big problem with this is too often schools "want to use what businesses use", as if the school is nothing but a trade school. Of course this is ridiculous. By the time some first grader gets into the workforce, everyone will be using something wildly different anyway. It's more important for kids to learn how computers work or how to learn about what a computer can do for them, rather than be trained to use a specific application.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Just look at OS's five years ago compared to today's OS'. Five years ago, we had Windows 95 and Mac OS 7 on school computers. Today we have Windows XP and Mac OS X -- radically different, though most of the basic concepts remained.
Where was MS Office at 5 years ago? I don't recall the version number for Windows, but I believe the Mac versions of Word and Excel were at 3. Completely different from Office XP and Mac Office 2001, though again the basic concepts are there.
No, it's far, far more important that children learn concepts of computing that they will be able to adapt to whatever OS they use. And if they plan on going into an IT field, then it would benefit them to start playing around with a more challenging OS (like Linux) at an earlier age. But for most people, just about any modern platform will do.
You're absolutely right. I was thinking the same thing. IBM did the same thing with mainframes. They provided them to universities at a huge discount and software was free, if I recall correctly. In return, students got free time on IBM mainframes and when they went off to look for jobs, they (and I) were getting jobs writing software for IBM mainframes.
Of course, I've been away from the mainframe world for years now, but it definitely helped IBM. If Microsoft is smart, they'll provide software at greatly reduced prices or even free to educational institutions. It encourages young people to use their software. They should do this for the same reason that they always released the Windows SDK for free. I began programming for the Windows SDK and the fact that it was free, certainly encouraged me to write Windows software.
I'd even be willing to convert or implement a small application as a demo (though not necessarily for free:-)).
Get involved, get your LUG involved.
illegitimii non ingravare
Write it. Its weader wabbit, not wocket science.
illegitimii non ingravare
The point of the article is that schools are doing just that, moving to open source.
Does anyone else see this as an enormous opportunity for advocacy? Get off your tookus and get involved in moving schools onto OSS. You have skills they need. And where is the argument about the difficulty of our chosen tools when Dad comes home from a hard day managing his department's MS determined upgrade schedule and finds out his grade-schooler is using GNU/Linux/BSD et. al.
Who's bitching!?
illegitimii non ingravare
Guys, when was the last time you were in a public school system? Money is tight for all of them. I have never seen a public school with an unlimited budget. Just because the guy is complaining about finances being tight doesn't make any difference for what he did. He could have installed star office because that opens MS Office documents last time I checked and it's free. He didn't "have" to go installing office on a few dozen computers in a school system. Both businesses and the government know better than to install a single copy on multiple computers. It's in the damn license agreement for God's sake. If they want to buy microsoft products, they should follow the contract or use something else. Sure it would be cheaper to use open source, but face it. How many high school teachers have you heard of that use linux on a regular basis? Not too many from what I remember. They should have the teachers learn right along with the students how to use a free OS that way they can re use those older pentium computers instead of throwing them away for p3's or p4's like they are now. It's rediculous that they can't just take an hour out of their lives to learn something new that would save the school a lot of money. I mean come on, Linux isn't that hard to learn especially since they would be learning X instead of the command prompt. Ditch these netware using, public school IT biatches, and get a few students to help out to set up a linux network, that way the software is free and there would be less problems. But as far as exploitation goes, that's a whole other rant
Especially with the latest round of Microsoft software debacles of licensing and bundling.
We need to prevent Microsoft from having its cake and eating it too; charging schools licensing fees and having our school system raising generations of kids (read: future consumers) on Microsoft software, just like Disney and McDonalds are doing.
Free software needs to have the advocacy in education. There needs to be people (something perhaps, like FSF for Education) whose focus is to provide free software and awareness and training for schools and it needs to be at such a scale as to convince educational systems around the country (U.S.) that it is worth investigating into and investing in. They need to know that this "free software thing" isn't going to go away soon and that teaching kids about it will not mean that they cannot function in the workforces of tomorrow.
I think perhaps some of the large Linux houses should (if they didn't already) invest more into programs for educators.
Also, I was under the impression that Windows does come with a programme to produce pdfs. You have to pay for Acrobat Exchange to do that (or use any number of free, but shit, programmes that are available).
I believe that this kind of advocacy will just put people off Linux (Manager type - "No no no, we can't have that in our company, it doesn't even do Word documents or excel documents.)
Being forced to use MS Word makes me pray for death.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
I have boxen that won't run Win95 with Novell Client 32 without thrashing. There is no way Wine would be able to run the software, even though much of it is probably Win3.1 software recompiled.
I have no problem paying for the education of any kids I might have. I don't expect you to pay for my kids' education and I don't think I should have to pay for your kids' education.
So what you are saying is only those children whose parents can afford to send them to school have the right to an education. I have news for you friend, that IS Elitist. A policy such as this would set back the U.S. 100 years in a single generation, simply because half the population would never learn to read. Would you seriously want to live in a nation of burger flippers ? Our education system may not be fantastic, but it at least provides the opprotunity to learn, which would not be there under your system and a great many intellegent children would never reach thier potential or even have the chance to reach thier potential, and that is just wrong.
Jesus died for sombodies sins, but not mine.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
When confronted with the options of:
- Re-train all new personnel AND pay for the software
- Use Free Software
what will be easier for a company to choose?Given the choice between Dragnet and Henry Thoreau, I know who I trust.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
--The situation is clear: Any OS will teach computer skills; typing, word processing, web based research, email, programming.
--But your average teacher may be deficient in computer skills or "married" to Windows b/c that is all they've ever used (this happens with Macphiles as well.) Subsequently you can not drop *nix boxen in the classroom and expect them to be used.
--"Login?" "Why doesn't escape work?" "This isn't like the on we have at home." "Where's Start?" "I use Internet Explorer." "chown?" "su root?" "Where's the Recycle Bin?" "Network Neighbohood?" "mount - t smbfs -o...?"
--Teachers NEED to feel comfortable. Chances are they are at a disadvantage anyway. A seventh Grade student may already be a l337 h4x0r or at least know enough networking to set up a UT server behind their backs. Teachers probably won't be comfortable using some free *nix box they've never touched before. And let's face it you average Education Major is not going to be real comfortble at University hanging around all the l337 CS students trying to take Linux 101.
--SO the problm starts in the board meeting where the school decides what OS to get... "Well the Dell's COME WITH Windows ME." Sold.
---
This
Just because school districts are needy does not justify their violation of licenses. That they have other alternatives to piracy (such as installing GNU/Linux or talking to Microsoft themselves) makes me feel even less pity for them. Hungry people are not justified in robbing the shelves of Safeway, and neither are the teachers of this cash-starved district justified in "sharing" their Microsoft software.
Reader Rabbit for Linux, or whatever is required, sounds like great senior-level projects for college CS students. I'm sure some university would just love the public PR it could generate from it's students "giving back to the community" by creating educational programs of various types. Just an idea.
All the more reason why every school district in the country shouldn't be paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to Microsoft for their soon-to-be-annualized software subscriptions! That money could be used to - gasp - pay good teachers what they're worth.
Exactly! The article made me want to fucking scream. Phili paid nearly five-million dollars in fines, anti-piracy employees, buying compliant software. If I was a Philadephia taxpayer I'd be pissed.
I'm willing to be that for $5 million, RedHat would be willing to put together a standardized installation CD set that had linux plus KDE (or GNOME), an email program, a browser, StarOffice, the GNU compilers, GIMP, etc. etc. etc.) that would be intuitive to install and would run on a Pentium 133, 32 mb, 20 gb hd. The school district would never have to pay licensing fees again!
Instead some moronic, non-technical, middle-management administrators lack the foresight to escape their current cycle of doom. My sypathy is definitly not with the administration of that school distict (though I do feel sorry for the students and the teachers).
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Does anyone know of a school that actually uses Free Software? I know that back when I was in high school all we used was NT and Mac OS. Why? Because that's what the teachers knew. Even the teachers that tought computer classes only knew Windows. No school district is going to use a system that only the students are capable of using with any skill. Also, no district is going to pay for teachers to go learn computer skills. The vast majority of teachers are not there to know computers. They are there to teach and don't have the time to learn something new. The education about Free Software has to occur while the teachers are still learning...in college. Get the colleges and universities to promote this in their classrooms. Then the districts must attract these new teachers. But because teachers are so underpaid (at least in the US) anyone with any computer skills is probably going to go for a higher paying job. So these school districts need to raise teacher salaries. But they can't because they can't afford it (and buying MS licenses isn't helping). It's a horribly vicious cycle. The solution? RAISE TAXES!!! (got your attention, didn't I?) Then the schools will have more money to attract technology-savvy teachers and you, the Slashdot reader, will have your Free Software in public schools.
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I think that comparing copying software to robbery committed at sea (piracy) is very tasteless as well. However, the BSA and the huge software companies have made it common usage. When I think of a pirate, I envision a guy with an eyepatch and a parrot on his shoulder, not a teacher who installs MS Office on more than 1 computer. The language has been twisted by these companies to give a bad image to people who copy software. In my mind, calling these people pirates is analogous to calling people who run red lights rapists. If I was a large entity and used this terminology all the time, it would twist the meaning of the word and may fall into common usage, just as piracy has now. I don't think using unlicensed software is the right thing to do, but I am angry at the way the language has been manipulated to make it seem like a worse crime than it is.
Enigma
Enigma
Schools teach two types of computer courses.
One, teaches application use.
"This is the keyboard, this is the mouse. This is how you start Word. This is how you save your document. This is how you print."
the Second, teaches programming.
"This is how you tell the turtle to move forward 20, right 90."
Free software is an acceptable solution to the second problem. It is not an acceptable solution to the first problem.
(Neither is Windows, but many students are made to suffer with it.)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Heck, it is even a business opportunity, selling things and services to the city.
someone should get cracking.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use Linux, or other non-windows os's
but it would probably be cheaper to hire a full-time person to maintain the systems and train the teachers than pay the licencing fees - especially after the .NET scam begins...
--------
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
225HP-WB-180/25-14. No one would buy such a hideously named monstrosity
Do you ever think that it is *BECAUSE* we look for pretty-names that we also confuse the real issues that are relevant when chosing products? Maybe if we started paying attention to these issues - and ignoring the payed liars (advertisers/marketers) we may end up better off? The right place to remove this kind of back-ass-wards thinking is in the schools.
Branding is bullshit - the world has enough mindless consumers - why not encourage people to make educated decisions instead of mis-informed ones (bad ones)?
Note that we should call it Free Software when advocating to schools. The idea confusion between free beer and free lunch will help us here where it hurt us in the business world.
Ah ah ah. GNU/Linux is Free (libre and gratis) software. We should make if very clear what Free Software means in the Free Software Foundation sense. It is never 'right' to mislead. You will win more favour by informing and aiding them than by taking advantage of their ignorance and simply advocating it as 'cheap'. Use convincing arguments and less subterfuge - dont trying using marketing/advertising/branding tricks(aka lying) - this kind of decision making is what is responsible for the problem originally.
Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise.
It is wrong - and we should fight tooth and nail to oppose it. Public education is not a training program to gain a skillset in a meaningless job. Public education teaches ideas, ideals, concepts and reasoning. Broad based learning to enlighten people. Life is not about the worthless-corporate-work-world. DO NOT ACCEPT OTHERWISE. And dammit dont try and teach children that.
You are dead right. This happens more often than you think, english words are often propaganda loaded for specific purposes. Communism, Socialism, Terrorism, Pirate, hacker, and many, many, more.. the words themselves are used completely out of context - and in place of their true meaning.
If youve not read some of Noam Chomnsky's works on the media and language - i suggest you do...
That is the most cluefull and lucid comment Ive read at /. in weeks - someone please mod FreeUser up.
First of all, comparing the lack of legal Windows licenses to AIDS in Africa is stupid at best and unbelievably offensive at worst. It's not like people in South Africa are whining because they want GlaxoWellcome anti-AIDS cocktails rather than some Indian version that also works. They have no alternative. Then there is the minor point that nobody is likely to die for lack of Freecell. There are perfectly legal, free alternatives to Windows that work very well. You don't like the alternatives? That is unfortunate, but I cannot think of any other area where you can choose not to play by the rules just because you do not like the readily-available alternative that you can afford.
The fact that this complaint is taken seriously shows that Microsoft has managed to convince an awful lot of people that Windows is a necessity.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
And let's not forget the biggest problem of all: who's to know what's going to be in use when they enter the working world (often 10 years after computer classes)? Even if it's still MS/Win/Office, it could be radically different. I was taught nothing but WordPerfect at school. I can count on no fingers how many times I've even seen it being used since high school.
In short, this kind of thinking is exactly the problem, and Free software, which allows students access to more applications at a much lower cost and also educates them on actually using their computers, not letting the computers use them.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
I'm not sure where you went to school, but where I did, the teachers didn't know anything about Windows OS's, either. Face it, apart from the sysadmins the school hires (or doesn't, to save money), nobody really knows what's going on with the fancy schmancy computer lab the school bought. With Free/free software, the school can save money on installation and spend it instead on a knowledgeable admin who can double teaching kids how to administrate/program. And *never* have to worry about a Microsoft inquisition.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
I can't understand why certain products have to be discounted for the poor and others not.
What I do beleive is that software is over priced. An MS Office CD should go for the same price of a music CD. The cost of production is the same in regards to the number of copies made. People complain day in day out on /. that the cost of music CD's are over priced and that they should sell for less. Software is overpriced!!!! It should be sold at the same cost as a music CD as it is to OEM's
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
science is a religion
Let's say someone came into your office today...18, fresh out of high school. They list the Word processing program they learned when they took word processing, I'm guessing back around 8th grade for them.
This means the software they learned is 5 years old: a person going for a job would be listing Word 95 and Excel 95.
It's possible they've kept up with the different versions over the years, but the specific brand of software, and even operating system, that a student learns in anything below 10th grade should have minimal to low impact by the time he or she reaches the workforce.
Beware typoes.
Not sure why the reply has been moderated down to -1, but just to comment: I'm thinking more in terms of the poster I replied to, commenting on your average office worker and less about your Sysadmin.
Beware typoes.
I find that mildly disturbing. I'll bet the bastard gets a huge tax write-off for it too.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
"software giant launched an investigation of Philadelphia's entire public school system" As if the MS Office police are on the trail. "My name is Gates ma'am, just doing my job."
By this argument students should not be allowed to use computers or even calculators...they should have only a writing tablet and do all the calculations by hand. In fact if they really want to learn how to be self-sufficient (and I am not sure where it says that's what kids go to school for anyways), we should get rid of all the teachers and just send the students the year's required reading and let them figure it out themselves. And hell, let's forget about students learning Java or Perl or C++, and make students learn assembly language. Hell - make 'em learn machine language. If they really want to be self-sufficient, they should know all the hex opcodes, rights ? IMO, Students go to school so that they can learn how to get around in their world - and right or wrong, this is a world with jobs requiring Microsoft expertise. If the open-source zealots don't like it, they should focus on making the world one where jobs require open-source skills, instead of pushing a (partly, not entirely) irrelevant education on students. Who gives a damn whether a student knows what the root account is, or how to use Emacs, if they likely will never need to use that information once they get out of school ?
Sure, maybe pushing Linux on students now will make the open-source world better years from now, but that is a payoff that will take a while to be harvested. In the meantime, students will be without the requisite MS skills (unless they pay to get it elsewhere), making it harder for them to find work now, and it is unfair to charge the students with those costs.
That's your interpreation of what public education is or should be. It is not everyone's. I think the education system would do its students a huge disservice if the students couldn't even get a crappy entry-level position because they don't know their way around Windows. Your stance would dismiss all sorts of things that get taught in schools now, like Home Economics, Phys Ed, shop, typing, accounting, and more.
Sure. Now imagine just how much they would learn if they tried to do the same thing using, say IIS. They would learn nearly as much. And while some students may well learn a lot about hacking around with Unix (perhaps largely because they would have to do so !), I find it hard to argue that this (by itself) is a good reason to install Linux. Let's face it, most people are NOT going to be sysadmins when they grow up, most people are NOT going to use Emacs at work, most people do NOT care whether or not you learn Perl.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
One of the real reasons we are in the pickle we have today with Office having 90+% of the office apps is people made copies... copies for home, copies around the office, etc. MS owns us now, because people really did not look at software and say "how much did I pay? Was it a good value?" All software has a price, though not all of it is cash. Look at the options that fit your budget. In this case, it might have required someone to look at FreeDOS or something like that...
MS made it real easy. Now they want to end it since the only person to hurt is themselves. I just shake my head every time I hear, "but we have to be able to run Office"! No you don't... I _should_ be able to turn in assignments in .rtf format rather than .doc when at school. At the workplace, COME ON PEOPLE - there is nothing wrong with ASCI text in an e-mail, rather than attaching a one page WORD DOC.
Ok, I'm ranting. Stepping away from the keyboard....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Your reasoning and cognitive skills are commensurate with what is traditionally expected of a prospective community college graduate. Did you know that if your beloved strict capitalists had their way, there wouldn't be a community college for you to attend? Food for thought, if you're capable. Yeah, I have an ID. Yeah, I post at 2. Suck it.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Actualy, it is like a Cancer. Or even more, MS Office is a Pac-Man like application. So useless, so dumb...
And, oh! yes!, it's unamerican and endangeres business around the world, by threatening their intellectual property by forcing yo to accept silly virus-like licenses.
What? that all this is not about MS Office? Mmm
For home users they made it very easy to buy one copy of a new version of Windows and then install it on every PC in the house. I remember having to reinstall a version of Windows (95 I think) after a complete reformat of my drive. Even though I only had an "upgrade" copy of the OS (completely legal BTW) it let me install the OS even though it couldn't find any verification that I was entitled to an upgrade.
The result is that Windows and Office spread and became required for doing business.
Now that the monopoly is firmly established Microsoft is doing what monopolies do best, raising the prices above the level that would normally be supported by the market. They are doing it two ways First, by simply raising prices, have you LOOKED at the price of Office 2000? Secondly, by going after all the people who were actually encouraged or forced by Microsoft's monopoly power to steal copies.
The law is very clear on this subject, Microsoft and the BSA appear to have every right to do what they are doing. But, theft is not always morally wrong. If my family were starving I would not hesitate to steal to feed them. On the other hand, I have argued with cashier to get them to take back the extra dollar of change they gave me. It is a gray area of morality. Being poor does not give you the right to steal from the rich. But, being rich does create (in my mind) and obligation to help the poor.
No matter the law or the morality of the situation if Microsoft did not have a monopoly and did not abuse its monopoly power, this situation could not have happened.
StoneWolf
Alternatively, he could have done something intelligent and used the Word 97/200 Viewer.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
a friend of mine recently staffed a middle/high school teacher computer training seminar (using ms-windows, of course), and he said the teachers got VERY excited about emoticons. i submit that most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use COMPUTERS.
I think it is a disturbing trend of Microsoft and BSA "enforcement", which sounds more and more like a racketeering organization (Mob) than a Neighbourhood Watch group. Pay up the "compliance license" fee or Vinnie will do an "inventory" on you.
I am also puzzled how Microsoft and the BSA can compel such inventory actions. Up until the DMCA copyright violations were resolved in civil court, not a criminal offence. So I don't see how the MS goon-squad can force access to these schools.
Just another day of, "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD)" at the Evil Empire?
Hopefully school boards can look at using Free Software/Open Source where they can, easily. For example for servers. Why buy Win2K Server with heaps of CALs which costs big dollars over a Linux or BSD server with Samba, Apache, and Postfix/Exim/Qmail?
They might use JDK/Kaffe, Cygwin GCC, DJGPP for their programming needs rather than VB or the rest of the Microsoft expensive "learning" suite. This might have the side-effort of even more young people getting started in Open Source development.
Serious consideration of StarOffice might be more common within school districts I suspect.
I don't know where you came up with the idea that I am, or think I am, a "freedom fighter." I would be willing to bet that I have purchased more software than you have. I could send you digitized photos of multiple bookcases filled with commercial software packages I have purchased. So don't make slanderous accusations based on suppositions.
You missed the point: A 13 year old kid with a pirated copy of a $3000 software package hasn't cost anyone anything. It's not analogous to a theft of an SUV. Did you think he should save his allowance to buy the $3000 software package?
Beatifull moral relativism. If go that route we will end up in a lot of shit.
You might consider purchasing a copy of Office. It includes a spell checker and grammar checker that would help you avoid embarassing mistakes like the three in the one line shown above.
That really exposes the fundamental flaw in your logic: If you "borrow" my SUV, then I do not have it. When a school copies Microsoft Office no one has lost anything. Microsoft has just as many copies as before -- and there is no evidence to show that the school would have purchased those copies if the technology to duplicate them had not existed (and good evidence that they would not have purchased them given how cash-starved they were).
It reminds me of the idiots who claim that each 14-year old kid with a copy of 3D Studio Max cost Kinetix/Autodesk $3,500. As compared to what? All of the 14-year olds that purchased the product? Give me a break! Pirating something you could/would never buy is far different than pirating something to avoid paying for it.
I thought the idea was to teach people how to use computers, not how to blindly follow some steps that lead to results on only certain configurations. Back when I still ran Windows, some people would come to my house, sit down at my computer, and be parallelized because it didn't look exactly the way they expected. I didn't do anything wierd, other than rearrange the templates in office, and completely rearrange the start menu. Office had numerous changes made, but only of the kind that added new things, not stripping away old menu items.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Maybe, at a grade school level, math hasn't changed in 100 years, but mathematics have. New developements happen in cutting-edge mathmatics every year. Sure, you may say, it doesn't matter if the high-end stuff changes, since the school system will teach the same low-end stuff each year. *Wrong* I remember, when I was in High School about 5 years ago, taking IB Calc, the teacher mentioning that they had never even had the option of Calc in high school, and Calculus is as old as Mr. Isaac Newton himself.
Science is changing every year, man discovered the existance of DNA only half a century ago, has been in space for only a little over 3 decades, and is still working on understanding the fundamental nature of the universe.
Economics, and Psycology is still undergoing rapid changes, as people try to understand those fields.
And you are just naive if you believe that the English language hasn't changed in 100 years. Sure, the language hasn't changed *that* much, but the style of writing, the format of books, and the use of applied skills in life (such as writing good emails) has changed.
In history, well, in my lifetime, I've seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe/Soviet Union, the handover of HK to the Chinese, the creation of several countries, war in the former Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, and this nation try twice to impliment star wars. I'm guessing at least one of these events will have some effect on the years to come.
As for having the dumbest kids in the world, what poll is this? I thought the US was ranked somewhere 5-10, and the spread, amoung the higher-ranking countries, wasn't that much. Heck, out of the many countries in the world, that isn't bad. (Oh, yes, they started teaching statistics in schools awhile back, see how useful it is?) So, taking a semi-useful, yet probably at least slightly flawed measure of intelligence, and having our kids score in the top ten, makes me feel pretty good.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for your grandparents. But do you think that one room schoolhouse will work well for your kids? Farmers need a good grasp of mathmatics and a decent grasp of science to survive (a farm is a business, and with animals, plants, disease, fertilizers, pesticides, animal husbandry, and different plant strains, a good farmer needs to know science). It might have been possible 100 years ago to learn some of that from their parents, and the rest of it from school. But this is the modern world, and our kids will need to know how to use computers. The world grew more complicated. 100 years ago Russia still was a backwards monarchy. Nobody cared what they did. China was almost entirely shut off from the world. Now both of them are nuclear powers. What didn't matter a century ago matters today.
I wasn't able to find decent stats, but it appears about %60-%70 of PHD's are US Citizens. That's just a guess based on limited numbers. If anyone has stats that include more than just one state or University, please post.
- Dan I.
- Dan I.
There's something the article didn't mention, may be they don't want to eat lawsuit. I've told this story many times.
BSA, after an audit, threatened to sue our University using illegal copies of MS products(well, it's difficult for an U to keep track of license of them). M$ one day called over, and offered to 'help' them settling the lawsuit if they agreed to sign a deal to purchase certain amount of M$ products for 5 years.
Of course we didn't know the deal at that time. During my study they replaced many of the SUN workstations with NT workstations. Of course, our research was adversely affected. We even have to squeeze money from our tiny research budget to buy Reflection X so as to run X programs on NT.
After we graduated we found out the truth. I wondered, how could they sign such a deal at the expense of our benefit. I did consult a lawyer but he said it's nothing I can do: I've no tangible lost(sort of), I don't know who to sue(definitely no chance to sue M$), and it's strictly business deal because BSA didn't actually sue them for copyright infringement.
Very obvious, BSA is working closely with M$....well it isn't surprising.
The younger the kids, the more annoying these inconsistancies become. And then you turn kids off to computers.
I dunno about that. I'm pretty annoyed by the ridiculous number of inconsistent things that you have to do in Super Mario 69,000 and Legend of Zelda 42 in order to get the Vorpal Sword of Punishing Wrath and Bubbles, yet my 9 year old nephew can do it with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. Kids have far more capacity to learn than those of us who are older and stuck in our ways. Kids are constantly learning about life and the world anyway, so it isn't much of an extra effort for them.
My thinking is that if you teach a kid how to use Gnome and/or KDE in grade school and then teach them how to use the command line in middle and high school, they'll come out of it with a pretty good knowledge of the workings of PCs. And after learning Linux figuring out Windows and MS apps ought to be a snap.
Or stick with the Mac and OSX platform for grade school (pretty point and click) and then when they get older teach them about the BSD system that's sitting under all of it.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
You're making a false connection. I wasn't implying that by teaching the kids how to use the command-line that they would magically have knowledge of the workings of PCs. I was implying that if you started with the simplistic pictures of a GUI, and once that is mastered then move on to the more abstract/less intuitive command-line interfaces, you will have covered the whole of the system pretty well in a graduated manner.
One of the benefits of the command-line interface is that you can easily chain together series of commands or scripts to create bigger scripts and mini-programs to get the system to do exactly what you want. You learn the kinds of commands that the OS uses behind it's pretty GUI. You learn the principle of a directory tree (which most people completely miss if they've only been trained on the GUI interface). If you teach someone how to use a command-lines interface, they will come out of it with a much more complete understanding of the OS than they would if you told them to just point and click because you actually have to learn something about the computer rather than relying on an intuitive user interface.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
What a masterful troll, I salute you.
You forgot to point out that he claims to be living in Kansas, home of the "Let's not teach evolution anymore because it's wrong" State Board of Education. That's how I finally knew it was a troll.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
), and he said the teachers got VERY excited about emoticons. i submit that most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use COMPUTERS.
You can extend that to include most teachers at most schools regardless of the level of students that they are teaching. There are obvious exceptions in more affluent school districts, but for the majority of them the above is true. Most public schools simply don't have the money to train their staff. Period. I live in Ohio, and here we have a state requirement that in order for a teacher to retain their state teaching certificate/license that they must complete a certain amount of continuing education on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is generally considered the teacher's responsibility, NOT the school district's (though again some more affluent districts do cover the costs).
There is actually quite a debate going on now in the Ohio Supreme Court that has me somewhat excited about the future of Ohio's education systems. The state legislature is being forced to completely revamp the way that school districts receive funding because the current system (based on property taxes within the district) was ruled unconstitutional. Under the property tax system the discrepancy was mid-boggling. The poorest school district in the state (in the hills of southeastern Ohio) only had an average of $300 to spend per student. The richest school district in the state (an affluent suburb of Cleveland) had $13,000 per student. I don't know how it's going to finally be sorted out as it's still in debate but I think that it is important to note the size of the discrepancy. Most schools just don't have the money to properly train their students, let alone train the teachers.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
No it's not. It's not important at all. As many have pointed out, if you understand the concepts behind StarOffice, PerfectOffice, etc, then you can figure out MS-Office with little difficulty whatsoever. Beyond that, the specifics of what they are taught about how to use MS-Office XP in 9th grade will be obsolete by the time they finish High School or college and the company they work for is using Office XP+2 or XP+4. The only thing that is going to make them the least bit proficient is going to be an understanding of the basic concepts of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. And they can get that from free software just as easily, and much more cheaply.
But here's my other point: most of the people that I've had to work with in the past 8 years or so since I've been out of school have been essentially clueless about how to use even the basic MS-Office or Windows functions. "What do you mean by right-click? I clicked on the right thing!" "You mean you can open Excel without double-clicking on a spreadsheet?" "Drag and drop? What's that?" "I don't go into the Start button because I might mess something up. I only run programs that are already on the screen [she meant desktop]." I used to get stuff like that all the time. Companies in the tech biz tend to be an exception to the above, but in every non-tech company I've worked at the level of computer literacy is as close to zero as could be possible.
Some people may claim that this is because the people I've worked with never had the advantage of working with PCs in school. While this may be true, they are also the same people who have been working with PCs during the course of their jobs for the last 10 years, and they've managed to learn almost nothing.
So with the lack of computer literacy in business in mind, I think that it's more important to a) teach basic concepts and how to learn new ones in schools, and b) let the businesses train new employees on the specifics of doing a mail-merge in Word.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
BTW, for those that don't know, M$ has free viewers for most of their file formats available for download. Not that I expect your average teach to know this.
The problem with that is that when you have to make a revision or correction you're SOL.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Today, if you don't have at least a degree from a two-year college, you can't get a job that will pay enough to support a family.
Not quite true. I know plenty of people in the tech industry who do not have degrees who make anything from $50,000/year up to $100,000/year. Granted, I wouldn't care to support a family at the lower end of the spectrum (at all actually, but for arguments sake let's say that I'm a family man) but it would certainly be possible if the family weren't too big and one were careful with their money. Their are a lot of lower-middle-class families in the US who manage to get by on less.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
And when it comes to providing a school with a Linux or BSD type box, why not? Not all the teachers have to have it. For the informed student who would rather use the Linux box in the library to type up another English paper on it because everyone else is hogging the Windows machines, why not? Free Software is a labor of love, AppleII was not viable in the classroom cause you still had to purchase it. Linux and StarOffice and all the other free programs are just that FREE! If not that many kids can use it, so what, it didn't cost the school one red cent to get it. And if one extra kid per graduating class in the school has a handle on how to use Linux, then great! That's got to amount to more well versed employees in the future. Especially ones that realize that there are free alternatives to the pricey juggernaut of M$ software.
Why doesn't the Open Source community help those schools out? I'm guessing that if people from the open source community started writing code that made things easy for the educators, that this wouldn't be an issue. How about someone out there introducing them to WINE? How about showing educators how you can setup a network of terminals running UNIX? For all the squaking that the UNIX community does about how MS is the evil empire, you'd think they'd have a convincing alternative by now. Something that is there when you are in grade school would help. Something that you have to learn when you are little would be great. Does Mandrake or Red Hat really advertise in the public school system? Does any UNIX distributor realize the potential of teaching the kids what makes UNIX work? Get them hooked while they are young. It just doesn't seem like the UNIX community really believes in promoting it's cause... There is a whole community out there that would welcome Free software, and they would probably pay to have /. nerds teach them a little bit to get there systems running...
Just out of interest, apart from any other considerations (I agree it's more practical for schools to use free software from a purely economical point of view), but why aren't these schools already in posession of compliant licenses?
Is it suddenly alright for educational establishments to pirate software?
'Flamebait' is right.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
There's a bit in one of Guy Kawasaki's books in which he gave the Redmond school system free copies of AppleWorks, just to get under Microsoft's skin. I wonder if they're still using AppleWorks there?
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
I used to work for the government (state). When you buy products you have to have at least three bids, and you have to take the lowest. Because Microsoft is a monopoly even their discounted 'educational' licenses are extravagant and excessive and people believe that MS is their only option (an idea that they try to cultivate) thus circumventing the whole bid thing. Just another way for them to get taxpayers money. And in this case totally bypassing the normal checks and balances that were put in place to avoid these kind of problems.
I remember a time when companies gave away computers to the school system. A good business strategy, as it creates a dependency and a familiarity with their products, thus ensuring a foothold in the future market. Ahh well, I suppose that bill gates has a better grasp on marketing than me. After all, he is worth a tad more than I.
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
It seems silly to bitch about this - work at getting schools to use Free and free software instead.
While I agree that it would be ideal for k-12 schools to use Free software, I think it's highly unrealistic. First of all, the linux variants would get stiff resistance from the vast majority of students and teachers. This is partially because students/teachers will want the school computers to be behave in a very similar way (if not identically) to their home machines. No one wants to worry about whether or not the latest version of Star Office can decode microsoft's latest word file format. Only the truly enlightened will see it any other way.
This leads to the greater problem that virtually none of the people in k-12 schools, public or private, are capable of handling a unix variant (and even windows in many cases). If you have a computer teacher who can, you're greatly blessed. But I bet they're rare, and in high schools only.
Universities are a different story, obviously. And I bet Microsoft is far more willing to cut them a deal, since those students would be be trained in microsoft tools when they join the workforce, and since most universities have large enough budgets to purchase complete ibm, sun or hp hardware and service contracts.
Until Linux has a user interface as clean as the mac osx interface, it will never be mainstream. Not in the home, and therefore, not in schools.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
It's good to hold schools responsible for copyright violations. Maybe if they begin to see the true cost of what they condemn their students to using, they'll think about using other, more affordable software. I'm not (just) talking about free software, but even some competition in the commercial software market would be nice. Atari, Amiga, Apple, etc., all used to be used in schools because they were a lot cheaper than PCs. But with the hardware being cheap and the software being pirated, Windows just ended up dominating.
What GNU/Linux needs is a way to push their product on schools. If you were to go to your local school (elem, jn high, or high), and ask to talk to their technology expert, you'd be surprised how receptive they are. They're just looking for excitement about technology. If you present linux as a godsend (and it is), they will buy it. If they only hear about linux through newspaper articles, they'll always think it's too complicated for kids. What a shame.
I wonder why a company hasn't sprung up to do just that. By preparing an "education" package, and selling the computers to go with it, you have a very strong business model. It would be easy to make a few graphs showing how free software can be a cost savings. And then you say, "I'm just the person to help you take advantage of it."
I know a few "technology chairs" of local schools. My dad is a teacher. I've seen how a school can be sold on a bunch of high-priced lemons (they paid to get a IBM thinkpad for every teacher. The reason they went with the deal? Because IBM was the only company to contact them!) If hardware vendors can do it, you know that software vendors are too.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
"The message we need to get to them is that intellectual property deserves to be respected."
Well, Jenny, how about we worry about getting some other messages through first. Start with:
"2+2=4"
"C-A-T spells cat".
"Protons have a positive charge, electrons have a negative one".
Maybe after those lessons are learned, and these kids are doing something with their lives other than flipping burgers, maybe then they'll be mentally equipped to start worrying about problems like intellectual property.
*This page intentionally left pointless*
The message we need to get to them is that intellectual property deserves to be respected.
When the educational establishment promotes a message that a significant minority disagrees with, that is indoctrination, not education. Not everyone feels that intellectual property deserves to be respected, like the BSA. The school system ought to teach good citizenship, but it doesn't have to assert that every law and philosophy is just.
I'd rather they send the same message Jack Webb did in Dragnet years ago: "We live in a democracy, a nation of laws. And when you don't like the laws, you don't break the laws. You work within the system to change the laws.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
and, of course, gates can't be the bigger man and take it upon himself to vastly improve the schools by offering the software, and even convince other companies to throw in the hardware for free, even though that will even make him more money in the future. think about it, if he gets all the schools wired into the ms universe for free, he would automatically be the world's greatest philanthropist and he would effectively create whole generations of junkies that will then buy and buy and buy once they can no longer get it for free. he's done this somewhat already, but at the price of his company's image: most people detest ms but have to use it anyway.
sheesh. some people just don't know when they have enough money.
"Why is all this crap here?" -- 4-year-old Brandon
I recall a story on /. about a year ago that mentioned how M$/Bill Gate$ was going to give a whole lot of PC's to schools as a part of BG's grand vision to help all US students... you know... part of his whole "everyone will have a PC by the year xxxx" hype.
Seems the schools that might have been on the receiving end of Gate's benevolent side didn't get to read the bit in the license that says "pay us money... oh, and give over a quart of blood, your house, your car, a packet of skittles, and your first born child to rent our product for the next 20 minutes.
God help us when the .NET scam really starts to take off. What will they ask for then? Souls??? :)
Really? You may be right, I have no numbers, but the places in US I have been most of the Ph.D. students have been Asian or European. I sometimes think that the only reason USA hasn't become a third world country is the amazing number of bright minds they import from the rest of the world. They don't seem to produce many of their own.
You're right about most of the PhD students being foreign and it's been that way since the early 70s. This has happened for a number of reasons. First, PhDs are overproduced. There simply isn't very much demand for them. Many take post-doctoral work because they can't find suitable positions. Most US PhDs seem to be underemployed. Second, a PhD is not necessary to do most technical work. Third, grad students typically don't make much money. So there isn't much incentive to get a PhD other than strong personal desire. An experienced plumber can make more money. Many of the foreign students get PhDs to gain a foothold in America.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
hey, some of us do
The J.D. and M.D. are professional degrees and not "real" doctoral degrees.
The J.D. is the same degree as the L.L.B. (Bachelor of Law), but in the U.S., requires a regular bachelor's degree for entry. There is also an L.L.M., most typically in a tax area, that can come after the J.D./L.L.B.. Finally there is the "real" doctor of laws, the L.L.D. (or J.S.D. [doctor of jursiprudence]), which *very* few people have.
The modern M.D. (As opposed to the classical M.D. of the doctors of the university, which matched the Ph.D., L.L.D., and Doctor of Divinity) was largely concoted in the nineteenth century for the specific purpose of borrowing the respect of the doctors of the university. At the time, getting medical treatment was *much* more likely to harm than help the patient. The A.M.A. deserves a *lot* of credit for this fundamental change in the quality of medical care, but for an M.D. to attepmpt to disparage the Ph.D. with the "I'm a *real* doctor" bit is the height of chutzpah--not only is the Ph.D. the eductation to which the M.D. pretends, but the typical M.D. has never done a scrap of researh to contribute to the knowledge base.
hawk, j.d., ph.d., a real doctor
is to get a 'company' together, owned jointly by players in the open source arena (Red Hat, FSF, so on), with sales and marketing experience to go and run demonstrations at schools.
This is exactly how many places got exposed to MS in the first place. A suit turning up, running a slick presentation, demonstrating how EASY it is to run, and giving a professional image.
After all, it's the exposure and image that gets the beancounters to spend the money.. Or not, in the case of open source.
Once the presentation is made, a small brochure can be given on where to get support for open source, what it's about, how easy it is to use, where to get the free apps that can drive the institution, and so on.
Also, have a team on standby to do a few installs, in case institutions want to 'try before they buy into it'.
This same team to provide basic training on installation to members from institutions (possibly for a small fee to cover the costs of placing someone at a site, possibly hosted by the institution itself). After all, it doesn't take much to teach someone how to install a Mandrake (or Debian, FreeBSD, Red Hat etc) distribution from a CD image.This will be a loss maker financially, but, given that you can call around and have talks with many schools in an area in a day, and take one day to get maximum exposure for a demo, the costs can be minimised.
As has been mentioned on posts here, the school system is a good place to raise awareness. And once that awareness is present, and people are used to using particular software, it can then slowly move out into the business arena.
After all, even the more clueless PHBs out there had to have used software at Uni, or somewhere previously (assuming they use it at all). If they KNOW that the Open Source apps work as efficiently for a user (at least) as stuff they pay for.. No prizes for guessing what option they're going to take.
But, the push needs to come in a slick, businesslike package, presented by the kind of people that are well versed in selling a concept
Hopefully, this is something already out there, or soon to come about...
Malk
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
... another example of how the English language has been manipulated by the use of such terms as "copyright" rather than "copy restriction," which is a more accurate and descriptive term for what the law is designed to accomplish. Very similar to other forms of linguistic manipulation and propaganda, such as calling those who violate the copy restrictions placed on software by law "pirates" or "thieves," in direct opposition to the reality of their actions (nothing is being stolen, merely replicated, and no acts of violence are being committed at sea).
Stictly speaking, it isn't a "right," such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not testify against yourself, etc. It is a privelege bestowed by law, for which the constitution explicitly allows but does not grant outright.
The mistake of calling such priveleges "rights" is a common one and an understandable one
It behooves us to, where possible, refrain from adopting their choice of language, as language does by in large define the parameters of our thoughts and to some degree the limits of what we can think. Certainly in this context it biases the conversation to the self-serving point of view the Copyright Cartels wish to promote and to some degree undermines our ability to discuss the topic with anything even remotely resembling an unbiased or criticial perspective.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And yet, when you got out of HS, somehow you survived having been trained on Apples when the business world wasn't using them. Do you really think it's that much harder for kids today, who are more technically savvy than you or I in HS?
School is supposed to teach concepts, not what menu in Word to use to get the right fancy font. Students can write essays, do math homework, and research papers on any platform. If you can prepare a presentation in StarOffice, you can do it in PowerPoint, and vice versa. Office suite compatibility in schools is the worst reason to stick with Microsoft. And heck, Microsoft software is so easy to use, those kids shouldn't have any problems making the slight adjustment when they reach the world of business, should they? :)
Sure, there's some educational software that only runs on Windows, and in those cases the applications provide a good reason to keep some Windows machines around. But general-purpose productivity applications, which are probably what the kids will use most of the time, are not sufficient reason to remain tied to Microsoft.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
You're thinking of college. We need to acknowledge that there are two distinct tracks in HS. Those who will be continuing their education and those who won't. Concepts can be useful to those who are continuing on, but some students NEED to learn skills. And you may know that if someone knows one word processor, they can likely figure out another, but does the hiring authority for an entry level job know this? Maybe not. A lot of folks might shrug off someone who has no MS experience for someone who does.
What has to be realized is not all students are going into our professions, most won't. Also, not all students have the ability or desire to take concepts and apply them. The latter may be a failing of the educational system, or it may just be a fact of life, but that's certainly another debate. I am just of the mind that we need to provide students who are going to look for jobs right out of school with some skills they can use immediately.
And yet, when you got out of HS, somehow you survived having been trained on Apples when the business world wasn't using them. Do you really think it's that much harder for kids today, who are more technically savvy than you or I in HS?
I had apple ]['s in school. At home I had an 8088 , and later a 286 to play with. (I even had access to a server that allowed me to telnet) Which were machines that the buisiness world was using. I was a rather privlidged person. Most people that I went to school with didn't have these. Schools should allow less privlidged students access to what is being used in the "Real World"tm, because they are more likely to be in the group of people who will not continue their education.
In many countries in Africa around 50% of the population has AIDS and its a horrible epidimic. These governments want to help their people (probably only so those people can stay there, if you don't have any people you don't have a government, but thats another discusion) by providing AIDS medications for them. But the medications are VERY expensive when bought from the people who created these medications so the countried have found suppliers who will supply generic versions of the medication even though its under patent. So these American drugs companies are litterly trying to drag these countries throught the mud with the UN's court system, declariing that they have violated International Patent laws. Anyways the point is there countries are too poor to afford the medicine and are finding it other way. And the US drug companies have no sympathy. This draws many parralles to the situation with MS and schools, though the MS situation is not nearly as serious.
is how Sun pretty much paid to be the exclusive computer vendor to my university - well, not exclusive, but my university was still in bed with them.
The end result is that very little of our computer science work was done outside of Solaris. Perhaps none, even.
I mean, Solaris is a solid OS, but not only do I have no Windows knowledge from college whatsoever, I also don't really know Linux or MacOS or any other operating system... or any other flavors of Unix, pretty much. The CS department was also very inflexible about introducing anything into the cirriculum that would promote variety and not propriety. There was a LUG on campus, but it was strictly extra-cirricular and outside the scope of the CS program. But it was at least something.
It would have been NICE to have some variety thrown in there. It also would have been nice if they actually had a user group or any kind of initiative to TEACH us Solaris. Upon entering the CS program, it was assumed that you knew basic Unix commands. While this may not be too much to ask, they had little in the way of reference guides and decent user assistance. If a professor wanted you to do something, he told you what commands to type. Yes, there were MAN pages, but man pages are sometimes cryptic and not a very useful resource to someone who doesn't know they're even there. I fault the university AND Sun for this - their OS is not user-friendly, but it's not learner-friendly either.
I suppose the worst part was when a professor gave an assignment and left you hanging as a result - through incorrect permissions on class files, typos on command-lines for step-by-step instructions, misplaced binaries, etc. - and the solution was to ask a fellow classmate or computer site operator for assistance and receive many sneers, dirty looks, and belittlement in the process. "OH, YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO USE CHMOD? *GRUNT* " Reading the FAQ was more like going on a search engine and reading endless pages of technical documents to find simple command references, help files, and troubleshooters. On certain projects, this took hours.
There was no use trying to learn to use Solaris as a user OS, either. Every student in the university had an e-mail account on the central servers (4 MB limit to files, limited user time) that served as our work environment for CS. Yes, we got extended user time (but you had to switch groups for it for EVERY CLASS, and professors had a funny habit of not mentioning the group number on the syllabus or in class), but as you can imagine our capabilities on the systems were somewhat limited - except for the glaring security holes, but that's another story. The "where" command was disabled, and few applications were installed or accessible to students. In essence, if you wanted to use Solaris as a user OS, you pretty much had to have your own computer to use for it.
In conclusion, I have little to no programming experience outside of Solaris (I kinda stopped going to the LUG after a while, mostly because I didn't have access to a Linux box), but I don't really know how to use Solaris either. Furthermore, I no longer have access to Solaris either. I'm poor, I can't afford another computer, I don't have enough HD space to dual boot, I've got a lot of cheezy hardware that I don't want to go to waste (webcam, digital speakers, obscure network card, TV tuner), and I'm not involved or interested in any projects at the moment. And unlike the days of MS-DOS, Solaris has little relevance as a desktop OS at the moment - and even if it did, I wouldn't know about it.
This is why I don't like Sun. They don't just want to beat MS, they want to BE MS. They try to force their own brand of uniformity into institutions as well. They suck just like MS does, but in different ways. I'm glad I didn't get the Bachelors of MFC in CS, but what I have is somewhat useless to me at the moment. After four years of college, I still can't write usable programs on my home computer. At least with some diversity in OSes, I could have had more choices to find something that interested me and that I would want to work with even after college. I think that's what we need to focus on for kids today - let them learn different things so they don't get stuck on one thing in the future. Then maybe people won't have to dual-boot in the future just to use proprietary software/hardware when needed.
What the school systems have problems with is the personnel to enforce licensing, the resistance to lock down teacher machines to prevent software installs since they claim they need to install educational software, stuff that comes with texts, etc, etc... Ensuring license compliance is tough in a school, even if the school administration is doing all they can to be legal.
What I find highly disgusting is Microsoft trying to profit from this situation by nailing them to the cross instead of trying to work with them to make them legal at the cost of the licenses.
For example, one program Microsoft has is to sell unlimited per-seat site licensing for their software based on the number of FTE (full-time equivalent) staff. This agreement includes installations on student lab PCs of an unlimited number of copies. It's called the "Campus Agreement" and would be ideal in many of these cases. They should approach the schools and offer that to them with no penalties and not force them to do a costly audit and in real hard-luck cases, offer them grants to help pay for it (and since it's only a paper license, the marginal cost to Microsoft is almost zero...)
This frees up the school from a costly logistical nightmare. Now why the hell can't Microsoft work with the schools instead of trying to make examples out of them?
The other hand is making profit from other schools.
He must have read Machiavelli. Look like an angel in the public eye, act like a devil in reality.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Modern linux distributions are as easy to use as Windows. You can point and click your way to pretty much anything.
I don't think any windows user would have much trouble using one of these distributions.
As a case in point, my 14 year old brother came to visit the other day (we live thousands of miles apart), he had never seen any computer running anything other than Windows. He had no problem whatsoever using my Mandrake 8 machine.
Expert Java EE Consulting
Unfortunately, Microsoft Office is like a virus. If one of the offices you connect to uses it, it means that you have to use itserlf. In that way, Office usage is spreading like a infectious disease.
--
Bizar technology?
No, installing linux, recompiling a kernal, and using a command prompt does not in and by itself show how a computer or operating system works.
:) I just live with it. But if I was new to the system, I wouldn't want to use unix. It is way to hostile of an environment. The younger the kids, the more annoying these inconsistancies become. And then you turn kids off to computers.
Typing "/usr/bin/emacs" and clicking "Start -> Programs -> emacs" merely launch emacs. Likewise, clicking an icon in a GUI that represents the file location does the same thing. Just because you got unix does not mean you know how program execution works.
The problem with linux and especially X is:
1) Consistancy
2) Predictability
3) Simplicity
4) Standardization
These can be very fustrating to new users. Heck, it annoys me, and I consider myself experienced enough.
How can Microsoft prosecute schools when they're all still running on Apple IIs?
The version of Basic built into the ROM of all Apple II computers from II Plus to IIGS is copyright Microsoft. "Pay up on Office, or we'll terminate your Applesoft Basic license, and you won't be able to use your IIGS lab."
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now's your change to "get back" at them and cause them some pain. Quoting from the article:
So there you have it: the number to call. It might help to actually know there's some unlicensed software on a particular machine or two... but my guess is they'd be glad to have any tip, even a lie, as an excuse to conduct an audit (there will almost certainly be machines with unlicensed software, which means profit for the BSA)
Of course, it's Summer, so to maximize the pain for your school district, you'll probably want to wait until shortly before or right about the time school starts back up. In the end, doing this will only make the environment worse for everyone (except the BSA and maybe Microsoft), but it will put a lot of additional stress on teachers and administrators in the short term.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
When I first read that name I thought you were joking. No wonder why so many Linux companies are failing: lack of connection between the products and their potential customers. Here you go through the entire schpiel of a car salesman, and when it comes to the point of naming the car you blurt out some cryptic code that no one who isn't a car technician would understand. Detroit doesn't name their cars the GMC 225HP-WB-180/25-14. No one would buy such a hideously named monstrosity. And if they did, the owners would decide on a pronouncable name and call it that.
Without simplicity, products are destined for failure. Great concepts are often complex concepts packaged in simple packaging. Why would a teacher unfamiliar with your product choose "K-12LTSP v.1.0" over "Microsoft Windows"? If you don't choose a name that you can build recognition with your products will be simply unrecognizeable (and thus unsold).
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
The file attachment sent to the %user_name has been found to be of a proprietary and closed standard. The computing lab at %school_district maintains an open and commercial-vendor neutral computing infrastructure."The file you have sent is unable to be opened save specific proprietary software(s). Please retransmit your files in some of the following suggested formats:
*.doc - *.rtf
*.xls - *.csv
*.ppt - *.html
Your intended recipient, %user_name, has been notified of this transmission."
Schools have a responsibility to give students some real world skills that they can use not to enlighten or indoctrinate
Schools are meant ot teach conecpts - not as job training. Enlightenment is *EXACTLY* the goal. Indoctrination is another matter altogether, which is a bit to far offtopic - suffice it to say - "Indoctrination" occurs all around you - it is trying to instruct or teach a group of ideas... and when you run the school system, you are indoctrinating.
Teach a person what it means to 'copy a file' on a 'fixed media' is what is necessary - the implementation is trivial. cp or copy or 'cut-paste' is simply 'copying a file' afterall.
Teaching people how to use 'M$ Office XP' is a wrong - teaching them about word processors, spreadsheets and SQL/RDBMS is the *right* thing to teach.
Vocational schools (trade schools) teach job-skills. "General Public" schools should be preperation for University... and the foundations of general knowledge... otherwise the person should be sent to a vocational school.
That's funny, at my school we were always taught to share. If you had something that someone else could use, and you didn't need it, you should give it to someone else. This was never portrayed as stealing at any point during my education..
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
And with the growth of the industry stagnant, the Baron has ordered Raban to sqeeze all he can from Arakis, SQUEEZE!
[New slogan = "Through Windows I set my mind in motion."]
I'm less worried about what the move does for school budgets as much as what it will do to kids. "Dad, when I grow up I want to be a robber barron."
The education squeeze is nothing compared to the hurt they're putting on the suits. The new Software Assurance program may increase software operations costs for some businesses as much as 40%.
The deadline delay is supposed to make them look magnanimous: Kinder, Genter Microsoft Delays Buggery of Corporate America
Besides, M$ should be giving the product away.
Digital used to give away just about all their software to colleges via the "Campuswide Software License Grant" program. For a while, it really worked. DEC expanded their market share in higher ed., and students graduated with DEC experience. It wasn't enough to stop the PC trend, and DEC watered down the program in a desperate search for cash. However, it was a great idea, especially as a tax writeoff. The cool part was that they could write off the full value of what the colleges used (not what they bought or would have bought). If they used 3X as much software as before, the whole program became revenue-neutral compared to the old practice of trying to get blood from a stone.
The alternative is the current M$ strategy, which creates a huge opportunity for open source. Considering the escalating per seat cost of M$, the schools would be better off hiring open source consultants to install & train. The only problem is the availability of educational software (unless WINE becomes a reliable concept).
Apple tried the donation method and failed, but you have to consider that the stuff was pricey (for traditional paying customers), and not all that well suited for business (at the time).
M$ could easily follow the DEC/Apple example, and probably get better results than DEC or Apple did. Not only could they do this, it would not be an anti-trust issue because it's already been done by companies that once had commanding market share in the market where they were giving the product away. Besides, since when was there a limit on charitable corporate donations?
Instead, we can watch the latest example of M$ foolishness. It tells us who we are dealing with and what their priorities are.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or tax advisor. This is not legal or financial advice.
My question for the BSA was, "When is the last time your member companies have been audited?"
First they told me that member companies are not audited. Then I asked how they could expect other companies to perform costly audits if the member companies that are trying to enforce thier copyrights are not audited themselves.
Then they told me that there had been audits, but they are not publicized. I asked how the public found out about BSA audits and fines in the past if they weren't public. They claimed that the companies that infringed the copyrights and were fined were the ones making public the results of the audits. So, copyright infringers are tattling on themselves when they get caught?
I guess the best way not to get audited by the BSA would be to become PART of the BSA. Then you can go after companies and schools that don't comply to standards that you don't comply to yourself. How do you spell "hypocrisy"?
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I read an interesting article on this topic at adequacy.org, the controversial discussion site, regarding the education of children.
The article considered the sort of education that children get from unlikely sources, such as games, and the dangerous relations of this to commercial companies and some of the adverse effects.
Seems to me that we should not be overzealous and deny education and educational equipment, nomatter the provider.
That would be taking zealoutry too far.
--
I've donated a couple of old PCs (and their respective Win95 licenses) to my kid's school. I've considered installing some Linux boxes (ThinkNICs) to assist but...
When I walked in the class there was a shelf full of (properly purchased -- for the most part) Windows educational software. None of that would run on Linux. Not much point installing a PC that couldn't run any of their existing programs.
I am in the process of gathering as much educational (elementary, middle & high school) software for Linux as possible so I can present them with an alternative.
Ideally GPL, since it will be installed on 8-10 workstations. (That's the "for the most part" part of the Windows software -- they own 1-2 copies of each, not 8-10.)
Does anyone have FIRST HAND experience with educational software for Linux that they could recommend? Not just a site that promotes the stuff, but specific programs that are worthwhile.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I think comparing a very horrible, deadly disease to software problems is very tasteless.
S.t.e.v.e.
Entirely true. I got into Solaris because Sun dumped about $250K worth of IPC workstations and 21" black-and-white monitors into our CS lab when I was in college.
Strangely, everyone I graduated with also thought Sun gear and their OS was pretty cool, soundly beating the crap out of those MS-DOS boxen we had in our dorm rooms. We laughed when we saw Windows 3.1, which was the "really cool thing because you could run more than one program at once".
Opportunity to any Linux consultant-type geek: Find a school district. Point out the costs of MSFT licencing. Offer, for $20 per box, to install Linux and KOffice.
If you're in high school and are a consultant-type geek, offer to do it for free for your school, then $20 per box to other schools.
"Bring a child up in the way in which he should go, and when he is older, he will not depart from it".
- Proverbs.
I believe he was refering to the practice of large companies applying the same arm-bending tactics to financially-stricken individuals and groups as they do to organizations and individuals that clearly have the capability to pay without severely impacting the other parts of their existence.
If schools have to pay outrageous prices for software that costs next to nothing to reproduce, at the expense of paying for teachers, facilities, books, computers, etc., the kids attending those schools are disadvantaged because it will be difficult to get a good education. AIDS is bad because of the quality of life it bestows on the stricken. A poor education often results in poverty. Either way, a person is reduced to scraping to get by in life, when it doesn't have to happen.
If the means exist to treat both (drugs for aids, better teaching aids in schools), and large, profit-centric companies exacerbate the problem instead of helping, how is this a bad analogy?
science is a religion
but most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use Linux, or other non-windows os's. The applications and operating systems have yet to come to the point where "joe Elementary School Teacher" would be able to use it effectivly, much les instruct others on how to use it. Please do not flame me, all you computer literate elmeantery school people, you KNOW that most of your collueges are apart of the AOL crowd...
How about another even more outrageous reflexive relationship? If the BSA is successful at international enforcement of U.S.-based licenses, they will be able to extract rather large amounts of capital from rather poor countries. The trade balance will swing in favor of the U.S. and result in a stronger US$ (currency strength always follows the balance of trade). A stronger US$ in turn requires these countries to pay out even more for software licenses and swing the trade balance even further in favor of US commercial software publishers.
Soros's reflexivity theory explains boom and bust market cycles. It also explains why booms build slowly, reach a frenzied climax, and then bust violently (like the dot-comedy). Usually, some new factor (a disruptive technology) enters the picture and reverses the direction of the circle, changing beneficiaries into victims and vice-versa. It's no wonder Microsoft abhors free software alternatives. There are many such vicious circles in the software industry that are fueled by the current commercial software model. Microsoft's entire business model depends on these circles remaining intact. And as you know, free software is the only realistic way that these circles can be reversed.
Celebrating the release of version 1.0 this last July, 4th. let me impersonate a car-dealer:
Do you want a computer-lab in your school?
Do you need 100% uptime?
Do you want to have a maintenance-free environment?
Do you want to teach, not re-install Windows?
... but you do not want to spend $20,000 and need crash-less computers?
Well, we have a solution. The K-12LTSP v.1.0 project
For about $6,000 (less if you already have "old" computers), you can set-up a lab with e-mail, browsers, office suites, image programs...
On Linux, of course.
Newsforge article
K12LTSP home page
Work with Legacy equipment
... and a " girl magnet " as stated on their site:
Salut and education,
This is their official reason for violating the license. I've had the same problem (management droids send MS attachments), but my solution is legal and working: When I get an e-mail MS attachment, I reply near-instantly:
Sorry, I could not open the file you sent me. Got an error message 'unknown file format' or something like that instead. Could you re-send it, and please use the pdf format this time, it seems to work better on my system.
Thanks.
Most managers are not computer literate, and sometimes this would even be a plausible reason (corrupted file etc.) So, MS Word gets the blame.
Most of the managers send then a pdf. Sometimes I've had to show them how to make this. (Repeat after me: Save-as-pdf) After a few mailings like this, some guys have actually started sending pdf attachments instead of 'corrupted' MS-Word docs.
I have a Linux system, so I use pdf2ps and ghostview. They could use the Acrobat Reader or something else if they don't want to install Linux. I could of course use StarOffice, but this seems to work just as well.
A good reference for schools to use in this area is SEUL.
Bull pucky. *honks your nose*
The reason why most people (businesses) won't make the switch from Windows to Linux is that Linux will take too long to retrain employees. Teaching Linux and OpenOffice in schools is the perfect way to get this training done right the first time.
These students then go off into the world, wondering where OpenOffice is and what this crap software called Word is supposed to do.
> We end up with the same or more numbers of phds
> and master students per capita.
Really? You may be right, I have no numbers, but the places in US I have been most of the Ph.D. students have been Asian or European. I sometimes think that the only reason USA hasn't become a third world country is the amazing number of bright minds they import from the rest of the world. They don't seem to produce many of their own.
Of course, this is in science and technology only. Maybe USA produce the worlds finest doctors and lawyers.
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
I'm not sure it is in their best interest though. It may seem so right now, because of their monopoly-situation, that trying to maximise short-term profit using this kind of strategy is wise.
I believe it is just this sort of thinking that may eventually lead to their downfall.
If schools get sick enough of forced-upgrading, high prices, anti-piracy-schemes etc.. they will switch because of their low budget..
And since they may very well help influence thousands of kids each, I think Microsoft should continue to be gentle to them (which my understanding is that they've mostly been so far).
Come on people. Why bitch about this? Instead encourage schools to use Open Source. I can't believe the lack of thought I've seen on these message boards.
Remember that one of the major attributes of all educators in the public education system is a heavy concern for money. You'd have it too if you were making 1/3 of most other people with a similar level of education, and had to hear about how the budget didn't allow for this or that necessary item.
Just what do you think the most effective way to advocate Free Software to educatiors is? Note that we should call it Free Software when advocating to schools. The idea confusion between free beer and free lunch will help us here where it hurt us in the business world.
All we have to do is point out to horribly cash strapped schools that not only can they get this great software for little or no money, but they can copy it to their heart's content and put it on as many computers as they want.
There will be some problems since educators often tend to be technophobic as well, but simply pointing out such incidents in the mainstream press will go a long way to make them consider a Free alternative.
Why bitch about this? Why not just encourage Free Software? Because bitching about this IS going to be the most effective way we can encourage the use of Free Software in the education system. Sure it's scare tactics, and smacks a little of FUD, but WE aren't making this up. As far as I'm concerned Microsoft dug their own grave here, it's just up to us to take advantage of it.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
to bitch.. open/free software the way for schools to go... this would foster a generation of people who are knowledgable in open/free appliactions.
Take away Microsoft's demand at this level and this will most likely continue through the student's lives.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
Now, Microsoft is irritating the people that educate young minds. They are very clearly handing the very places where people are first exposed to computers a darn good reason for jumping on the Open Source / Free Software bandwagon. Honestly, somebody with some financial resources should contact these schools and offer to help them transition to Free Software that will prevent them from ever being hassled over licenses again.
After reading all of these latest releases about Microsoft bullying people, I can't help but think that they are either incredibly stupid (not likely), or they have an ace up their sleeve that nobody knows about yet. All of this sheds light on an experience a company I used to work at had. A few years ago, Microsoft did a license audit at the site (a hospital, BTW), and mysteriously discovered that they weren't in compliance. Now, I wondered how that could possibly be true, as we had more licenses than were being used. Anyway, under the disguise of benevolence, Microsoft agreed to forget the penalities from being "underlicensed," as long as the institution agreed to purchase an "Enterprise License." So, many many budget dollars were redirected to purchase the Enterprise License so that the institution wouldn't get sued. Quite a few high profile projects had to be scaled back or dropped altogether. I wonder what effect that might have had on patient outcomes....
GreyPoopon
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GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?