Slashdot Mirror
Maine School & Linux
Feztaa writes "This story talks about a private school in Maine that has introduced linux into their computer labs, with smashing success. Apparently, they spent less than half of the money that other schools spent on new computer labs, and got better hardware to boot."
I am sure you need a lot of experience to learn how to click on icons and press ctrl-alt-del whenever some app crashes.
And kills the whole lab
FRA: STFU GTFO
Yeah, the concepts are SO different. I mean, if someone learned to use the Maximize button on Linux, it would take weeks of retraining for them to figure out how to usethe Maximize button in Windows. And if they only knew OpenOffice, wow, they'd have to start all over again when using Word, because the "Bold" buttons work SO differently.
Puh-lease.
While reading the story, and looking at the photo which shows a bunch of fifth graders sitting behinds KDE workstations, with a huge Tux poster in the background, I had another idea how our government can save money.
As we all know, nuclear tests have been banned for quite some time now. And government research labs all over the fruited plain spend enormous amounts of money on supercomputers that simulate nuclear explosions.
Well, it should be much cheaper just to set up a bunch of cheap earthquake monitors in the northwest US; have someone print that picture from the story; mail it to Steve Ballmer's house; and carefully watch the monitors for the next couple of days.
Seriously, if that article ever makes its way over to Redmond HQ, it's not going to get a warm reception. Given what I've observed about Microsoft's mentality, just the photo itself is good enough for a few ulcers. Seriously speaking, this is not a cheap yuck. That small picture clearly shows the biggest threat to the monopoly that Microsoft has spent the last decade building up. Stuff like this has to be a pepto-bismol moment for the MS bigwigs that read it.
I'll start with Internet Explorer here. The main interaction w/ a web browser is via the adress bar, clicking on links, and some bookmarks. Obviously there is no chance that these poor kids will ever be able to surf the web w/ IE if they learn the basics using mozilla. (although there might be the chance that they don't WANT to use IE if they know mozilla)
On to MS Word. While it is true that there is some difference in word processing programs, the core operations and abstractions are the same on each. Ditto for Excel.
And i won't event talk about Visual Basic. I'll only say that while i oppose the death penalty, i still think that the person who came up with the idea to build some wierd object-oriented bastard BASIC should be shot. sorry. almost went on a rant here.
Free as in mason.
Imagine how the school's board would have reacted if the instructor had chosen FreeBSD instead.
About 500 years ago, a guy named Martin Luther decided to translate the Bible into German, thus was born the Protestant revolution. The point being, that before this, if you were German and could not read Latin, you had to have a priest translate the words of God AKA the Bible.
A Brit named William Tyndale had the same idea, he printed 50 copies of the
Bible *in English*, the establishment was that shocked at this idea, they burnt
him at the stake. Probably because they thought the idea of the common people
having direct access to the 'holy writ' would lead to them thinking for
themselves and having dangerous ideas.
How like the current debate between open source and closed source this all
sounds. Just substitute operating system for Bible, money for God, the stock
market for the Holy Roman Empire and Bill Gates as the Pope and it all lines up
Windows does its damndest to prevent users from accidently encountering any confusing internals.
Except for when windows gives the blue screen of death. That's enough to scare the average user away.
"while on Windows, such things are mostly hidden."
Are you sure you want to view the contents of c:\winnt? Changing the files in here could cause your computer to stop working.
Show me the files, dammit!
"...and got better hardware to boot."
With Windows, you have plenty of hardware to boot too. And you enjoy booting it more.
~D:
there are still people out there that have problems turning on computers
Maybe this would help?
Future warning:
"Are you sure you want to view the contents of c:\documents and settings\ryan\my documents? Editing a file could cause the file to be changed."