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School May Turn Down $43K In Free Macs
Longfeather writes "Tukwila, Washington's cash-strapped Foster High School may have to turn down US$43,000 worth of free Macs because of a PC-only IT policy already in place. Read here(1) and here(2)." Surely some school would be willing to bend (or rethink) policy rather than turn away new computers.
Isn't this kind of government waste why god invented Fox News at 10?
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
It's Washington state. You surely didn't think that a school superintendent in Washington state would make up his own mind about which computers were easier to maintain, when he has a load of ex-Microsofties and Microsoft-wannabees hanging around waiting for the Call up to Redmond?
If he had standardized on Macs, how much money would he have saved by now?
I know Slashdot is a hotbed of anti-Microsoft bias, but would you be as outraged by these similar stories?
"School may turn down $43K in free Windows PCs; school has a Linux-only (or Mac-only) policy."
"King County WA school may turn down $43K in free Macs; many parents are Microsoft employees and want to support their employer's products."
Well guess what, Sherlock - its even easier to support NO computers! Sheesh.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I'll take 'em! What's wrong with that school? They're free! for cryin' out loud.
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
This actually makes a little bit of sense. Training is not free. If their IT guys don't know anything about Macs, they're going to need some training to get up to speed. That could easily run into the $10,000+ range. Perhaps that still makes sense in total dollars, but finding the money for it could be difficult -- the $43,000 worth of computers doesn't add any money to their available budget.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
According to the article, there are already Macs in the school's library and graphics classrooms. Also, teachers can have Macs on their desk. This school is part of a re-organization to have three academies geared toward student interests. Expand their minds, while making them use one OS? Sure.
This gets back to a number of old (mostly bad and uninformed) arguments. Total cost of ownership, applicability of OS in the "real world", etc. I'm sure that all of the IT staff have MCSE certifications, and with that, the attitude that "Macs suck". Which was why the policy was created in the first place.
The reality is money is not getting spent on education. If it is to be believed(and I doubt it), the Gates Foundation grant doesn't specify what kind of computers are required. I applaud anyone, whether I agree with how they run their business or not, that donates large sums of money or computers to schools.
Schools shouldn't be stupid and turn away new computers, even because of some short-sighted IT proposal.
Despite this grant, PCs are STILL cheaper to buy and maintain generally
Cheaper to buy? No, not really. Apple's education programs are second-to-none.
Cheaper to maintain? Uh... how do you get cheaper than ZERO? Every machine Apple sells as part of their education program comes with AppleCare for the life of the machine.
Consider that hiring ONE Mac-savvy tech to add to their IT team would cost almost as much as the value of the grant in ONE year and would certainly exceed it in two.
How about spending the forty-five minutes necessary to make their existing staff Mac-savvy, then?
If they cannot spend the two days it takes to figure out 99% of how to run a Mac they should be fired. It's not like it's linux or something that is *more* difficult to admin than windows, it's significantly easier.
I am a software engineer and I use DOS, Windows (DOS based and NT based), Solaris (2.6, 7, 8, 9), Linux (2.2, 2.4 kernel based), OS 9 and OS X. There are more similarities between these systems than differences.
I guess the line should be "Schools turn down computers because IT support staff is either too lazy or too stupid to figure out how to use a computer that most 4 year olds can use."
Pathetic really.
If they were offered $40k worth of free textbooks,
would they request that they were all the same book?
It would certainly be easier to track and catalog
multiple copies of that one book than to have dozens of
new additions to the book tracking system. If one of those
multiple books were lost or destroyed, it's replacement
overhead would be negligible.
Think of the overhead of having to provide different
teachers for the variety of subjects that multiple books
would require! Multiple teachers teaching multiple subjects,
how inefficient and inflexible. If every class in every grade
covered the same subject, thousands would be saved in salaries
and scheduling costs.
The cost-efficient school, it's the wave of the future.
Yes, this is an absurd argument, so is denying young minds
the opportunity for exposure to more than one way to approach
a problem. What makes this whole thing really stupid is that
there's not that much difference between a Mac, a Windows
box, or a Linux system. If the IT staff can't handle learning
something new as part of their job (and this is not that hard),
then they should hire people that are more capable. With the current
job market being what it is, it shouldn't be that difficult to
find people that can handle supporting Macs and Windows and Linux
and still be cost effective. If the school superintendent can't
figure that out, then it's time to replace them as well.
Maybe they can get some extra funding by eliminating student
drug testing and locker searches.
Or, heaven forbid, reducing the budget for sports activities.
How many of these kids will be working with computers,
directly or indirectly, vs. playing for the NFL or NBA?
High school students are going to be a LOT tougher on equipment than students at university, so in terms of hardware longevity a comparison between the two is invalid on its face.
...a university is necessarily better funded than a high school...
...I suspect that they would eliminate the Mac lab...
I disagree. University computers take a lot of wear and tear, if only due to 24x7 high-volume use. It isn't uncommon in a lab of 100 computers to have three or four stations out of order for various reasons.
True. My University's labs of Sun workstations was much nicer than my high school's lab of 486s.
It depends. I would expect that the science students would favor Macs, because they are easier, more elegant, and do have a good selection of scientific software. The business school, being mostly populated by Excel-addicts and Bill Gates groupies, would probably keep the PC lab.
If UNIX or Linux were in the mix, the science students might gravitate toward them. Writing scientific software under UNIX is dreamy.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
There more [operating systems|programming langugages] one knows the more the similar they seem to be.
Any so-called IT professional who only knows one solution and refuses to learn another is a moron and a dangerous liability, because the whole nature of IT is keeping up with change and knowing more than one solution to a problem.
What a horrible example these people are setting for their students!
I don't see how anyone could turn down free Macintosh hardware. It is generally of higher quality than typical PC systems sold to pre-college institutions and requires less maintenance, plus apple has one of the best support services in the industry.
On top of that MacOS X can be used for all the usual user applications, and you get a full-fledged unix development environment built in for classes that can take advantage of it.
Show me someone who willingly turns down systems like this and I'll show you someone who doesn't deserve their job.
but Schools are charged with preparing students for employment, essentially.
Really. While getting a job is a beneficial effect of going to school, I always kind of thought that the point of going to school was to get an education. Meaning, learning how to think, getting basic skills required to learn more in the future, getting exposure to knowledge outside of their immediate environment. If goal is just to get them into a job and get them on the consumer treadmill, why not just teach them to flip burgers, kick them out and be done with it?
And when these kids get employed, they will most likely be using PCs, regardless of OS.
Um, if it's a PC "regardless of OS", then the most important thing for them to put on this resume you refer to is "A Pentium IV 2GHz biege box with 512M of RAM and a 80G hard drive"?
the student putting MacOS on the "Proficiency" section of his resume is only adding a feather in his cap. A dirty, weather beaten feather. The part that will score the points is where he lists "Microsoft Office".
Doesn't "Microsoft Office" run on MacOS as well?
Using any of the current OS's gives kids general skills needed for dealing with computers. To think that they have to be trained on any particular system is really pretty short sighted. The way you accomplish various goals even changes between versions of Microsoft Office.
To turn down free equipment because of this kind of policy is just asinine. Maybe this is an opportunity for some of the kids (assuming these kids are old enough) to learn how to support different kinds of computers (and add that to their resume) since the school doesn't want to support them.
But, if they are rejected, at least the kids will be exposed to an important concept that will prepare them for employment: corporate policy.
1) Many teachers are computer illiterate. They don't like being shown up by their students who are mostly not computer jocks because they've grown up with them!
It is ironic that many teachers are very stubborn to learn new things. A teacher can teach algebra or state history for 25 years and retire. They probably think once the subject textbook is learned, why put forth any more effort?
It is probably inevitable that some form of core technology curriculum will form along side the other subjects in public schools. However, while it is understandable to be state certified for math or history, a state certification for technology would be laughable. How long until Microsoft heavy-hitters visit state education boards and the resulting certified teachers are really MCSEs?
The techology industry is so out of balance, right now, that any technology education our children recieve will be more like Bible study than anything else. The Gospel according to our Lord and Dominator Bill is the only education they'll need, anyway. Isn't that right?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Except this wasn't Apple giving it away, it was a grant that could be used to buy Macs. Probably a private Mac-promoting organization. Yes, I agree. Usually when MS gives software away, it's 'dumping'.
If MS were to give away the whole thing, it wouldn't be so big a deal. If they were to do it willingly, it wouldn't be a big deal. But when they try to give away software as 'payment' of fines, that's not okay. MS giving away '1 billion dollars worth' of software isn't the same as paying 1 billion dollars.
If MS was to get together with a hardware company, and give away a bunch of computers, loaded with MS software (especially if the software doesn't have more limited licensing than normal,) that would be okay.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
I advise my son's elementary school concerning all things that are computer related. School districts are interesting entities - There are so many dynamics running around (and different turf wars) it isn't even funny.
You hit that point on the head. I am the lone tech support person for a small-ish school district (1600 students, 550 computers) and I see the other points you brought up everyday. Running technology in a school district is a nightmare, and one that I would really like to get out of. Our patchwork is incredible, and the headaches are too numerous to count. Everything you said was spot on.
HOWEVER
I think your final conclusion is totally, totally, wrong.
ANY school district that turns down $43k in new computer equipment has, IMHO, their collective heads up their collective asses. My current installed base is close to 100% PC's, but you know what, I would do unspeakable things to get $43k worth of Macs. That would be an entire lab of new machines, which would be something that would be impossible for us to come by otherwise. So what if they are different? They amount to more seats for my students. And I need more seats.
Do you know about No Child Left Behind? One of its' requirements is that each school have a ratio of 3.5:1 or better of students to instructional computers. Instructional computers. That means teacher and office workstations don't count. that means that your schools with 100 computers in each of them must have fewer than 350 students, not counting the computers for staff. Even my schools are bigger than that... Do your schools meet that ratio? How are they planning on achieving it? Certainly not by turning away $43K in brand new apples.
One of my big projects for the summer is to figure out how to build a new 45 seat lab at my middle school. I have no money to spend, so I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but $43k in new apples would sure help.
As an admin at a college, one of my biggest problems is academic departments that put in for grants for stuff, get them, then tell us we have no choice but to support it.
Like, for example, some SGI Fuel station running a 3D projection system we were recently notified we have to support . Did anyone build in tech training into the grant for this? Of course not. Just plug it in, forget about it. What about security patches, what if it won't boot, etc, etc...
Or the famous trick of grants everywhere. Many grants require some sort of "in-kind" donation from the institution. So they calculate up IT staff time and cost, use that as the in-kind donation, then expect IT to absorb it into their existing duties.
Now in my shop, we are over a year behind in many projects and have to be restrictive with new ones launched due to budget cutbacks that have cut IT staff while numbers of equipment needing to support continues to climb. So it's possible that even a little extra effort (if it really is that) would not be possible without slashing support to someone else's project.
Now, I admit, if this is a political issue, it is assine. And, since no one really cares about IT load, I would bet that this is the case.
But please, try to temper the ole "lazy sys admin" criticism. It's most likely not warranted.
They come with the tech-support portion of AppleCare for life. That is true and is a very nice selling point, but they do not come with the hardware replacement portion of AppleCare. I get to deal with iMacs with dead Maxtor hard drives at my Mom's school that are out of warranty all too often.
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
.... I handled a reasonably big network of mixed Macs, Solaris and Windows stuff supporting TCP/IP, IPX and Appletalk protocols.
I had no training whatsoever but a big willingness to learn and try things.
They nicknamed me "The Guru" after a few months in the work and kept calling me back after I left for ad-hoc small work.
Anybody that is working under unfavourable conditions but with reasonable management should be able to learn this stuff by themselves if needed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.