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Michigan To Purchase Record 130,000 Laptops
goombah99 writes "The Detroit FreePress reports that Michigan state is planning the largest single laptop purchase/lease ever, over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader. And of course future purchases for each new class. The main competion is between Dell and Apple, with Apple having the edge in classroom integration experience. But price points will matter since the school districts may have to pay $25 per pupil. And the Gates foundation has a foot in the door. No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run. What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
With minimal sys admin resources I would go with apple les patches and updates and virus protection needed. (Not none just less)
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Michigan has just become the new AP heaven of choice...
with Apple having the edge in classroom integration experience.
Can someone explain what that means. Integration with what?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Oh right, these are Dell.
The fight between Dell and Apple to supply the laptops
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
They are compact (12") and have enough power to do the kind of things kids would need to do in school. OS X crashes less then windows xp, and doesnt have to have a legion of anti-virus software packages installed on it to keep the machine safe.
***There is no point in asking, you'll get no reply***
Honestly, can you imagine what sort of virus protection scheme you would need if you were foolish enough to put windows on 130,000 laptops. Desktops with M$ OSii are enough of a headache, but laptops get taken home...
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Our college just switched to the Dell Latitude D800 from IBM Think Pads and I must say they don't seem to be as durable. The keyboards are particularly a problem. I can't see them standing up to use by upper elementary or middle school age kids.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
And I thought _I_ bought a lot of laptops... I even picked up a linux laptop from tuxtops.com (now something like quilinuxpc.com), throw in a Dell Inspiron 8000, and a Sony, and an old Toshiba I gave to my dad.
"Sir, I think you've had enough!"
- I'LL TELL YOU WHEN I'VE HAD ENOUGH! (Bleeding Gums Murphy and his egg addiction)
--------
Free your mind.
i'd just use the xp licenses that came with the buggers anyway. Build an image, and store it on the network. bada-bing!
Have the little buggers write there own.. and with this new generation of Nerds we then can take over the world!!!
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
They are the easiest to use and most elegant computers going. Why would you want to burden an 11 year old with the complexities of Windows or Linux?
No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run.
I'll give you a hint. It starts with a 'W' and ends with an indows.
Just think of how long it would take to patch 130,000 laptops. Even with one patch a month, that is a lot of work.
Then think of anti-virus requirements for 130,000 PCs or anti-virus for 130,000 Macs.
Apples are the way to go, unless you want to charge each student $100 a year for admin support.
The options were Apple or Dell not Linux or Windows.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
"No word on what OS the Dell laptops would run."
That can't be a serious statement.
I hope Apple wins and these kids get iBooks with an airport card. I have a G4 Powerbook and my girlfriend has a 900mhz iBook, and I have to tell you, I'm not really sure where my extra $1000 went.
TCO. That's what the REAL bottom line is. The Macs will cost less because of the lower IT staffing requirements. Unfortunately, that's the same reason many school IT administrators will go with Windows. Less staff = a smaller fiefdom for the managers.
"Clean up the air and treat the animals fair" - Captain Beefheart
I know I'll get howled down by all the techheads around here, but I'm truly wondering if spending somewhere between 500 and 1000 bucks per student on something that depreciates so incredibly fast makes any sense. History books, saxophones and art supplies do not depreciate nearly as quickly and cost a lot less. So do teachers -- in fact, most of them *appreciate* instead with greater training and experience. That's a shitload of money spent on computers where more fundamental educational infrastructure might make more sense?...
Ok, this wasn't the question, but WHY does every 6th grader in the state need a laptop?
Isn't Michigan having a budget crunch like every other state?
I dunno... maybe a blackboard, some chalk and a couple of erasers. Paper, pens and pencils would be apropos. Textbooks I hear have a pretty low TCO.
I think the deciding factor in such a purchase would be shock resistance. These poor computers are going to get the crap beat out of them.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
-realinvalidname
over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader
Great. Now every 6th grader may not be able to write a coherent sentence or multiply two fractions, but they'll be able to point-and-click their way to the job of their dreams.
Computers aren't the solution, but tools to help aciheve one.
for at least a few people that are unemployed in the area. 130,000 Laptops, means more than a few people to roll them out, support them, etc. Hope this deal doesn't fall through. Also it means that sooner or later other states will follow suit. I don't think this is the answer to the problem with education in the US, but its a step in a "good" direction.
Mac. I grew up on a Mac through the school system. Its quite simple: They don't break as often. The kids favourite games aren't available for the platform. And they'll stay useful much longer; it seems PCs get their "useless" rating much earlier than a Mac of the same era.
a Live Linux distribution storing the data on a central fileserver with robust virus scanning.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Working for a school district in Texas, I can tell you that Dell has the edge in the now. Apple had the edge back in the day. I would go with dell and XP. Honestly, I'm not a big M$ fan, but XP is very stable in our environment, and only GPF's or screws up when groups or policies are in conflict with what certain software needs.
-J
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????
Apples would be the best laptops for the kids to use since we can start early with youngsters to show them that there's other computers out there besides Wintel boxes. Kids will love the coolness factor of either iBooks or PowerBook's. Then again, it might be a bad idea to purchase laptops for kids since if they're allowed to use them in class, then I can forsee tons of kids being distracted by watching DVDs during class. Not only that, but what if a kid drops the laptop either on accident or because some bully shoved him into a locker or onto the floor?
RTFA, no one in their right mind would recommend Linux for a "minimal sys admin" The competition is clearly OSX and WinXP, but for minimal administration, and sheer ease of use without the constant virus threat and patching, OSX is the clear choice.
Now, someone disagree with me.
I mean, what's the point of living...if you don't have a dick?
Mod parent down
-1 troll
(no one could confuse OSX, a BSD derivative, with linux)
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
What are the chances that this actually get based on class/user-experiance? This will come down to gates wanting this one, and people making un-educated decisions. I see this going to Dell al the way.
This effects more then Apple though, this effects the whole computers in classrooms issue. When the go with MSDELL, and it ends up costing a lot more then they realized, other schools will not be as likely to fallow suite.
In reponse to the poster's question of: What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
I'd probably choose Win(insert version here) with the ability to quickly Ghost the hard drive. It's easy to get ahold of a teacher/friend of a teacher/whoever that has some Windows trouble-shooting experience. What can't be fixed gets Ghosted (do those backups to a central machine or a CD-R). Linux may be more secure in a number of ways, but quickly finding someone to fix the problem locally is more difficult.
They can't even keep the covers on their notebooks, what makes the "state" think that they can be responsible with a laptop?
Apparently the state has too much money to spend, either that, or someone in state government has a 6th grader or two.
I think that all 6th graders having laptops, WITH wireless acccess is a bad idea. While a laptop is a great tool, I fail to see how it would fit in with 6th grade curriculum. 6th graders have a hard enough time sitting still and doing their work without a toy thrown into the mix.
.. a custom distribution of some sort that allows the school to lock-down / prevent access to games and non-educational websites during school hours. The school did pay for the hardware after all.
In some of my old CS classes, I remember COLLEGE students playing games or watching movies during the lectures. I can forsee a similar problem with the younguns.
What OS? It should probably be "Schoolnix"
I'll believe it when I see it. Just last night the possibility of it not going as planned (not all 6th graders would be getting one) was on the news here in Lansing.
Frankly, I hope they scratch the whole idea. What a titanic waste of money!
"What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
I would have them using the Dell laptops with probably Redhat Linux. This is because it would be very cost effective for them and Redhat is an easy first step into the Linux world. The fees running a full Microsoft lab is getting to be two expensive and is not a neccesity. Everything that needs to be accomplished by these students is capable of running on Linux.
...Sounds like a perfect use for knoppix or something similar - perhaps enough to boot and connect to a terminal server (either X forwarding or windows term server via rdesktop or something), so the sys admin only has 1 machine to keep updated.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Tey shood rooon leenoox
Honestly, why is it the state's job to purchase laptops for any reason, including education?
Shouldn't parents be responsible for their children's educational needs? When the state goes out and wastes these dollars on an education system that has already failed too often in the past, the tax payers will be the ones who pay this bill.
Each family in this state has better things to do with their money, probably. Maybe they would rather save for their child's college education. Maybe they need food. Maybe the car needs new brakes. Maybe the family would like to go on a vacation. Why should government use force to take what the family thinks is best and give it to bureaucrats who think they know better because the masses have decreed they should know better?
This is unbelievable. It amazes me that so many people even here would rather debate Apple versus Dell rather than debate the need for such excessive abuse of power.
What the hell do 6th graders need computers for? I'd rather see my kid's elementary school spend their money on small class sizes or music programs. Read Clifford Stoll's book "Silicon Snake Oil." http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~stoll/silicon_snake_o il.html
First of all, there is no mention of what OS they will run, and if they do run Windows, which they most likely will, who will be responsible for patches, updates, virus definitions. Will the kids learn to defrag. their own hard drives? Can they take them home? What about monitoring? Does the school have keyloggers or keep track of cookies, history files? What if the student uses the computer (school property) to do something illegal (online gambling, pr0n, whatever...)
I believe I read an earlier article in either the News or Free Press that interviewed a family..the student indicated she couldn't wait to get her school laptop since her sister is always using their home PC.
I'd like to know more information before the kids get their hands on these computers.
130,000 Knoppix CDs?
/home dir on the HDD for user files. Buy laptops with smallest HDD possible. Save $$$ on hardware and software licenses.
Easy administration. Easy distribution of new apps...just make a new CD and distribute it. Put the
etc...
anything else sets yOUR kids up for further corepirate nazi mindphucking.
welcome the good gnus. chips are a dime a dozen.
be careful when dealing with the creator's innocents.
OS X is the best solution for this situation not only because it will be the easiest to configure and maintain. OS X natively offers scalable educational opportunities for students that win XP could never.
There are 1000s of free software / OSS programs online that educators can use in the classroom. Not to mention the benefits to future hacker students interested in learning C, or shell scripting; OS X can do this as well.
The RIAA would love this too because then all the kids can get 50 Cent mp3s off iMS.
i'm sorry, but do 6th graders really have need for a laptop? they need to be introduced to computers in school because computers are so ubiquitous in society (but not necessarily at home), but i wonder if there is a better way than handing them a laptop and giving them wireless access during class.
i learned computers pretty well, and in school i only had them in one classroom--the computer lab. we had time set aside a few times a week for a computer class. this way students get introduced to computers and you don't have to buy so damn many of them.
it's just that with school budgets so piss poor, i wonder if the money would be better spent on something like teacher salaries. i didn't RTFA so i don't know how much of the bill the government is footing.
my vote's for ibooks, though.
This is an epidemic waiting to happen. I know of a school district where all of the faculty and staff gets laptops, and they go home every night. Those people with cable modems, DSL, or whatever frequently plug these laptops into those networks and no longer have the usual district-level firewall to protect them.
The next morning, all of these systems come back to work, get plugged in there, and infect everything else. It's all inside the firewall, so no amount of border protection will work.
These guys got absolutely clobbered by Slammer and some other recent nasties, and there aren't 130K of them. I can't imagine how horribly screwed up this will be.
Let them buy their own computers if they want them so badly. Then they keep them at home, where they belong. It worked for plenty of other people before them.
I don't see how they're essential to education at that grade level.
These kids have the rest of their lives to spend in front of a keyboard and screen. Give them a few more years of relief before they get chained up.
From detnews.com
Michigan's Computer Giveaway Is Questionable Use of Tax Dollars
New technology doesn't guarantee better student achievement; kids could use devices to play games
For the first time, Apple can use the lack of games for mac as a sales point!
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
My choice for school kids is pen and paper and good teachers.
Why spend so much money on technological gadgetry with 2/3 years of life when that money could be better spent on smaller classes, more personalized education and fighting illiteracy?
What's more, one thing I strongly believe is that computers destroy what makes kids kids : the ability to imagine and dream. Computers and televisions presents them with pre-chewed images that prevents them from developing their imagination, and pretty much turns a lot of them into passive technology consumers. The last thing we need is that crap to pervade into schools. There's time enough for kids to get into technology later, even touch it a little now and then as introductory classes when they're younger, but really schools should be sanctuaries of things simple, to let kids' brains be free and allow them to learn the basics properly.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In one respect, I think that computers in education should be running the latest/greatest OS-also the one with the most exposure to the public as this would benefit students in being able to keep up with the ever-changing GUIs, nomenclature, etc. I think (and I slap myself for saying this now, as a few years back I would've been shot in my peer group) that XP Pro is the best candidate for the job. It is a robust, plug and play OS with compatibility for an array of HW and SW, and has an interface that while looks pretty, can be made to mimic that of 2K. Just make sure to apply all 28 critical patches, make a base image of the HD with dual partitions - one for Data, other for OS, and periodically re-image (if necessary) the OS, also maintining updates on a regular basis. My main choice would be 2K, but I fear that it has a very limited lifecycle in the end-user realm...And don't get me wrong-I am not an M$ fanatic. I prefer more stable OS's, however for the purpose of education, what will most of the students be using in their future job positions? Just a thought
Our sys admin is a 6th grader, you insensitive clod.
I've used both before, and ThinkPads aren't constructed all that well. Dell's are pretty good, but Toshiba Tectra's seem like the most sturdy laptops currently available (not including the ultra durable ones for mine shaft / military application Example)
Mac OS X
---------------
Pros: Lack of virii, easy remote administration, friendly interface, Office suite, flexibility, able to network easily with other Macs and (slightly more difficultly) with Windows or Linux/Unix
Cons: Some people won't touch a Mac because they're predisposed into thinking it sucks.
Linux
--------
Pros: Lack of (numerous) virii, relatively easy remote administration, stable, cheap, flexible, able to network with other computers running Linux/Unix Windows, Mac
Cons: Slightly more difficult, espeically troubleshooting
Windows
-------------
Pros: "Everyone" uses it, likely least infrastructure changes, perhaps some familiarity
Cons: Unstable (don't even talk to me about XP, it's just as bad), open to virii and numerous other vuln's, potentially difficult troubleshooting (believe me, I've worked with other college kids' computers in the dorms)
Verdict
----------
Who cares as long as it's not Windows! Though with the recent debacle with Dell's mandatory license agreement, the Macs might be the better option.
I would go with the 12" iBook, 800Mhz and an airport card. Currently these can be had for just less than 1000$. They're fast enought for what they need them for, and would be the most durable.
Of course on mine I run Gentoo, but I think OS X would be fine for the students; at least until next year...
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Subject says it all - the linked page simply reloads continuously under Opera 7.11, Win2k. It's unreadable that way.
...but it sure as hell knows how to spend taxpayer dollars and grant favors to corporations in return for cash and non-cash handouts. This is a perfect government solution to a non-problem, while hard-to-fix problems continue on.
That way they can collaborate in a massive super computing project to overthrow the Evil Dictator of the Evil Empire.
And in the end, they will be SMARTER simply for using Linux..
Why, oh why would you do this? I fail to see what placing a laptop in the hands of a student would do, aside from give them a very expensive projectile. I'm a geek. I think computers are neat. They're great tools, but they're not a magic cure for bad teaching, and, more specificially bad teachers.
Memphis City Schools tried a similar program through the 1990's, called the 21st Century Classroom. Certain Schools became "21st Century Schools," where EVERY room was a 21st Century Classroom. They had 3-5 computers per room (with 20-30 students per room) and a teacher station with a more powerful machine, large screen TV, VCR, and laserdisc player. Some of you may remember this type of setup.
They had all this technology at their fingertips -- Internet Access, Word Processors, Presentation tools, A/V Equipment -- and almost NONE of the teachers OR administrators knew ANYTHING about how to use any of it. The machines became, essentially, electronic babysitters. A student could finish his or her work, and "play on the computer" with some edutainment program.
Computers for every student aren't needed. They won't use them as they're intended. They have no need for them. Rather than blow ALL this money on machines, they should place, at most, 5-10 machines in a room, and create large labs, available to all students / faculty, and then reallocate the rest of the cash to luring in better teachers, and TRAINING them in how to use the technology.
</rant>
Start a coherent discussion around this rant. I dare you.
Michael C. Hollinger
...particularly in the classroom? I can't really fathom a use for them at the grade school level. You're centainly not going to be teaching programming. You can use them for word processing and web searches at best. My opinion is kids need to learn how to write with paper and pencil first before learning to use a word processor; there is more focus on content than presentation that way IMO. Also, if you want to do web searches, why do you need a latop for every student? Just have a dumb term in each classroom running a webbrowser.
Maybe a paperless enviornment is a goal to work towards? But just imagine paperless homework...kids will learn to cut and paste from each other's work. At least with handwriting you have to copy the answers manually and maybe learn something out of it.
I would think that the money spent on purchasing laptops and related tech support would be better spent on better pay for teachers...
NO CARRIER
Maine did this and it was a smashing success.
I happen to be a parent of a 4th grader in MI...And with all my years of computer experience...I'd have to say there is no better platform for children to learn the ways of computers. It is a very easy, freindly, and fast platform. I have always felt that Macs are best for people that are new to computers...and with the increased flexibility of OS-X...now the computer can really grow with the users knowledge. I am already going to be buying my child an iBook for X-Mas.
My comments may be crap...but they are my crap...and I am brave enough to stand by them...Never post as AC!
Forget the laptops. Buy books, hire teachers, buy new classroom furniture. Why do we in the US think that throwing money at unmotivated students, overworked or underqualified teachers and buying into the latest technology is going to fix the education problems? Kids don't want to go to school, and parents don't inspire or reward them. Our culture sneers at educations as being "nerdy" or "geeky". There's a reverse-snobbery in being clueless about the world around you. As a side note, maybe this fosters the behaviors that make the rest of the world dislike us.
Fix the root causes of the problem, don't just throw money at it.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Come on, please give it to Apple, please give it to Apple, please give it to Apple...
Anything to get more Macs out there in the hands of impressionable youth.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
What the f***?
Schools are closing because they can't hire
teachers or afford to repair the lights overhead
but somehow, they have money to buy thousands
of LAPTOPS FOR 6th GRADERS?
It boggles the mind why would you need or
even want computers in grade school for every
student.
Gentoo. No X - command-line only. They get enough eye candy when they watch their Super Pokemon Power Rangers. Let's see, theyre in sixth grade, so we can expect them to know a little bit of yacc...
My choice would be Windows XP on Dells.
;o) It'll happen, not just because of OS choices, but because they're students; students break stuff. 130K laptops among students and I guarantee you'll see every strange thing under the sun done with those machines. But at the end of the day you want something that you can just dump a factory image back onto and away you go. Dell do images with specific software on as well, so no problems there - apart from service packs and hotfixes...
Why?
Well, firstly I'm gonna get shot down for saying Windows over OSX and *nix, but why not? This is 130,000 students who are gonna want to use the machine for other things as well as studying, and they don't really want the OS and learning curve to get in the way. OK, so you could argue that OSX would be a good bet, but I guarantee that most of those students have had exposure (!) to Windows, so it makes the best choice if you actually want your students to study.
Secondly, Dell because thy've got their act together on system reinstalls.
Add to that price and performance issues and that woudl sell me on Dell and XP, support from 2 major companies whose products - while not perfect - work well together.
A custom Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) Linux LIVE CD with storage on a central file server.
IMHO, FWIW, etc.
=C=
If you wanted me to agree with you, you shouldn't have given me Mod points.
The idea of "lowest bidder is always better" has permiated so completely in our society that nobody ever even thinks to look at the value-add and long term costs.
Michigan should look at:
1. System administration costs (there are plenty of studies already out there)
2. Upgrade cycle
3. Life expectancy of the product
These three things will change how "affordable" each option is. I would argue that you get more laptop for the money with Apple - and on top of that you will get better ROI with Apple because of its substantially lower cost of administration, upgrade cycle is longer, and the longer life expectancy of the Mac.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
By the way, what's this delusion about "no word on which OS the Dell's would run." That's because it's such a non-issue it's not even worth mentioning. Ok, I like Linux, you like Linux, but does anybody really think there's snowball's chance in hell of Michigan putting Linux on 130,000 laptops?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
From what I understand about the state of the american educational system, isn't this a rather absurd way to be spending the reduced dollars that US schools are receiving? $156 million could go toward reducing class sizes, improving curriculum, even (gasp!) books...
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
In one state a school gets sued for deploying a wireless network:
t ml
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/33294.h
In another state all the kids get free laptops with guess what... Wireless networking.
What a cocked up place ot live.
Minimal sys admin? I'd say OpenBSD. Either that or QNX. Yeah... that's what 6th graders want.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I don't think there's much of a doubt the Dells will ship with WindowsXP. I think most people will agree that the Apple laptops are going to be less of a headache to the people administering them and keeping everything functional. They may also be slightly easier to use or to teach the kids how to use.
But what also needs to be considered is what kind of skills the kids are going to acquire for use out in the real world. Face it, not that many places are using OSX and alot are using Windows. Alot of these kids may also be likely to have windows machines at home.
So, if you get to teach them how to use one OS and its major applications, which do you think they'll be more likely to run into in the future?
It's not about which is the better OS or which has the lower total cost, it's about which will provide the better education.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
You go with Apple, you're dealing with Apple. Go with Dell, and you're dealing with Dell... and Microsoft. These people don't need to worry about weird licensing agreements and whatnot.
On the other hand, I'd prefer to see the money go towards some actual teachers and textbooks, since they do a much more effective job of teaching then laptops do.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Not to be inflammatory, but in today's market, even for the six to ten years until sixth graders are in the job market, Windows is the skill set our schools should be training for.
Macs? Sorry, they're still a bit player. Linux? That will be gaining ground for the desktop, but slowly. If you want parents to help kids with homework, chances are the parents know Windows. If there's educational-related software, chances are it's for Windows (or possibly DOS). Maybe WINE can run some of it, but you're hiking your support costs up again.
But security of these machines is a big deal: Their contract had better include long-term antivirus support, firewall, having the vendor deliver with all patches installed (or 130,000 new Blaster hosts come on line all at once), and last but not least, a steel chain attaching the laptop to the kids' wrists, or they'll swiftly be traded for various illicit and licit (MtG cards, Yoo Hoo, MP3 songs) items.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I won't claim that Linux would be the best, nor will I claim that XP would be the best, however, we're talking about a STANDARDIZED install here. That means it comes preloaded with whatever it needs, and all the drivers, and (presumably, from the article) built-in wireless, so no swapping out of cards, or modprobing anything. In fact, under no circumstances should they get administrator access under any OS if you want ease of administration. They will be browsing & writing, not developing & compiling.
.doc or .xls files to open).
You could have an efficient system with WinXP, all drivers installed, & MS Office, WinXP, all drivers installed & OpenOffice.org, or Linux, all drivers installed, & OpenOffice.org, or Linux, all drivers installed, & Koffice (assuming everyone is standardized, there won't be many
To achieve low TCO, you just need a standard install, some type of imaging tool, and just re-image the laptop every time someone installs "unauthorized" software and fouls things up. How to get 6th graders to make backups will be the biggest issue.
>>>but have you ever tried installing Linux on a laptop?
Yes. I used Linux on my laptops since early 2000. Quantex (Dell clone), Dell and now Fujitsu. RedHat and Mandrake. Everything worked. There were issues with winmodem (doh), power management but the latest distros just work. I dont' remember restarting networking to put the wireless card in either, it just beeps and goes.
No, I am not a Linux zealot, just use it regularly.
"What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
You really can't beat Windows 2000. Yes, there are problems with viruses and security holes, but those can be managed with Norton and a good patching policy. The main thing is that these students shouldn't have administrative access - this removes 90% of the threat. Also, Microsoft provides tools to "push" patches to remote computers - they must be used properly.
Whatever your opinion about Windows 2000, the fact is that it's exceedingly easy to administer if configured properly. In my high school of 2,200, with nearly 900 computers, we only have one full time and one half time IS employee. They lock things down, make the students store their documents on a Samba share, and if a computer *does* break they can have it up and running again in 10 minutes with Ghost.
Linux, of course, is another viable option. Unfortunately, however, the centralized management is somewhat more limited. Yes, there are tools, but none can quite match what Active Directory gives you. This may or may not matter in a school environment. The fact that you can't get Microsoft Office is another downside. The positives are clear however - you can save at least $200 a seat on software, and you don't have to worry about viruses (you still have to stay up on security patches, though).
Mac OS X is another alternative. You still have to pay for the OS, however, and schools would likely want to run Microsoft Office. Thus, the $200 a seat charge is still there. This may be an especially big disadvantage if Microsoft provides huge discounts as a tax writeoff (as they likely will). Also, the cheapest Mac laptop is the iBook at $999 - and I doubt that the school would want to run OS X in 128MB, so the cheapest real Mac laptop is $1050. The school would certainly get a discount, but Dell would also likely provide a discount. I suspect that a comparable Mac notebook would be $200 to $300 more expensive a seat. That's $3.9 million dollars - money that could be spent elsewhere in an already underbudgeted education system.
Microsoft so often likes to talk about Total Cost of Ownership as a reason people shouldn't use Linux. I can just imagine how hard it would be to lock-down all the laptops so children weren't messing up the configurations, etc. Plus the admin time spent fixing all the problems. Apple's OS X is much more likely to run smoothly with less maintenance.
Also, the amazing power of the Cocoa development environment would make it much easier to develop custom educational applications for classes quickly.
Murray Todd Williams
Man, it would suck to live in Michigan and be in 7th grade when they hand out all of those laptops!!!!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Yowza thats a lotta laptops!
I recently completed a project installing a major local private school's network and infrastructure, a large portion of which aimed to re-use their existing truckload of IBooks.
Frankly, I was impressed. The Macs were mainly used by the lower levels (grades 1-6) and the little monsters were only able to completely wreck about 10 of them (of about 50) over about 3 years of fairly constant use. But my, what a job they did on them.
Whoever decided to buy them PCs and laptops in the first place wasn't really thinking, because their teachers would spend hours trying to teach them how to draw something in MacPaint or whatever it's called--I encountered several lessons of this while trying to fix stuff, and it made me pretty resigned; they should rather have invested the time teaching them to dot their is and cross their ts, but the parents were paying a lot of money for the school and expected to see their precious little treasures "learn computers".
Given that, buying IBooks and IMacs was probably the smartest thing they could do, as they didn't have any floppy drives to shove dead rats and PBJs into in the first place.
However, you should have seen these things. They were filthy. God knows, I love children, although I couldn't eat a whole one, but they're dirt magnets. And most of it rubbed off on their laptops, coating them in sometimes near-impenetrable layers of grime and crap and dead-rat-parts. I'll grant that these were mainly the children of high-level managers, so they started with a bit of a genetic mental disadvantage, but nonetheless, for us IT guys trying to get things working, the most important technical tools were a bottle of windex and a sponge.
That said, I agree with most posters that this is just a plain bad fucking idea. If you want to give them IT schooling, get a bunch of robust desktop machines, lock them in reasonably shockproof cabinets, and run steel cable channels down the legs of the desks so they can't cut them. It'll come cheaper per unit than a laptop, including cost of acquisition and constant repairs, and they won't get stolen as much.
Add to that the fact that even in a private school, with
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Mac-world, while not really un-biased, did a thing on the durability of iBooks quite awile ago. I would not imagine that things have gotten any worse since then.
In addition to that, having been the guy that fixes coumputers at a sorority for over three years now, I would say that iBooks have a much high ability to absorb shock. I dropped mine from my knees onto a hardwood floor (onto it's corner) and it never stopped playing the dvd.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
Let's let the local districts decide what hardware they know how to support. A school district that already has hundreds of Windows PCs and servers is NOT going to appreciate hundreds of macs to try to integrate into their network. Most school districts have understaffed and undertrained IT departments, and there is no way that average technicians can be expected to do their normal jobs and learn a completely new platform/OS. I can see this being a HUGE burden on local IT departments who aren't getting a say in the matter.
I worked for three years in a Michigan public school IT department, and this isn't the first wave of laptops the state has purchased. I remember we got about a dozen in a pilot program, and it was a complete pain in the ass that we didn't have the resources to deal with. The laptops came with Windows ME, but our network was standardized on Win 98/Novell. Putting Win98 on the laptops was, of course, impossible because drivers only were availible for WinME. That is only one example of dozens of problems we ran into trying to get those damn things working. Moreover, no one in our department was trained in laptop repair, so we had to outsource repairs (at substantial cost). Unless the state plans on providing the whole package: existing network integration, repair and support contracts, server licences, etc; I can see this being a huge burden that will not be deployed in a timely fashion due to lack of resources.
Unless, of course, you can make a compelling argument as to exactly why a sixth grader would need one...
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog!" - a dog
Just a thought....
Blar.
In some of my old CS classes, I remember COLLEGE students playing games
...you were in the Counter Strike classes. The Computer Science classes were next door.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
:)
MacOSX, of course.
It's Unix-based and is widely acknowledged to have the best user-interface.
The UI means less problems of the "how do I do...?" kind.
The Unix-based means you can actually lock it down so that the user can't terminally fuck it up. At worst he loses his home directory.
Linux would be 2nd choice, as it has the Unix advantage, but not quite the slick interface.
Windows would be 3rd choice. It has neither, but is widely used, so the kids will find it again later in life.
*BSD and other less well-known OSs come later, mostly due to their obscurity and the lack of a wide selection of software. Also because even with the "minimal admin" goal you will need some admin work done, and that means you need to find people who can handle the machines. Easy to find for windos, Linux, MacOS (in that order). No so easy for NetBSD, Plan9 or LispOS.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Wouldn't THEFT be the most obvious problem here? Imagine all the low lifes in Michigan salivating at the thought of that many easy targets running around with laptops. The pawnshops would runeth over.
Every 6th grader in Maine has an Apple iBook. A lot of Apple's infrastructure (net boot, net install, etc.) is perfect for this, and iBooks are small, light, durable, and portable. I'd expect from an experience POV Apple would be ahead here -- there's a working implementation they can point to.
Does Dell have a sub 5 lb laptop?
If you think about it, you'll realize that the 'ability to adminitster the laptops' isn't the reason the laptops were bought, and thus shouldn't dictate the OS installed. I agree with those who've posted that for normal studies, nothing beats a book and pencil, but I don't think the laptops are useless. At a sixth grade level there's an opportunity to make computer proficient individuals out of students who may never get another opportunity around computers again. As much as I do like Linux, Windows is probably the most appropriate OS to make the kids familiar with, simply because it's on the most desktops. If KDE ever assimilates the lion's share of the desktops then Linux should be installed.
PC's suck!
Mac's suck!
Linux Rulez!
M$ Sucks!
Some days I swear the editors are just posting stories to test out their new Anti-DDOS boxen...
It's like throwing chum to sharks...=)
Uhm.. Why don't they use this money to hire more teachers and lower the number of students per class?
With 130,000 sixth grader with wireless internet access, the state of Michigan has just become the center of the P2P file sharing universe ...
I wonder if anyone has really thought through the necessity of giving a 6th grader a laptop? Aren't there better things to learn/do at this age?
The blind rush to place a computer on every school desk mystifies me. It's a tool, like any other. It has its place (in computer class in this case), like any other. We don't give them cars or hammers, although they are useful tools as well.
It sounds like a great program, until you find out that the State of Michigan is cutting the budgets with one hand, and then forcing the purchase of the laptops at a cost of $25 per unit with the other. This is a great idea, but it is happening at the wrong time. The State of Michigan needs to find a way to not cut the budgets before they force the school districts into this program. On top of that most of not all of the school districts have no IT staff. My local district has one person, and they still have boxen in boxes because they don't have time to deal with what they have.
-- Charles A. Plater
Politicians like to fund new things. You can talk about what they WILL do without the burden of data to discredit your arguement. I guarantee they could not take this money and spend it on something else, it was earmarked to " bring their students into the 21 st century" or some BS like that.
I think Something Awful shows perfectly just what happens when you allow teenagers to use the internet: The end of the known world.
but 6th graders do not need laptops, especially ones given to them using state money.
High school kids are doing powerpoint presentations instead of writing term papers. Just what our society needs, people that can only think in terms of borrowed images and buzzword phrases.
What's next, getting graded on your choice of on-slide animation effects and transition effects?
I'm glad I'll be dead before we've had more than two generations of these clowns, the spiral into ignorance and incompetance won't be pretty.
Hmmm -- if I were in 6th grade again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't care what OS they are going to load on it. I would just wipe the disk and load linux and Open Office and be done with it.
Back when I was in 6th grade, in 1976, I think we might have had portable manual typewriters as the bleeding edge technology. I didn't see a computer, outside of video games, until 1980.
Back then life was simple - you just had to remember stuff and use your brain - and you actually went to the library if you wanted to find out about something - or for entertainment in the form of Fiction. The librarian would be there as a guide to help you with difficult searches - and the card catalog would suffice in most cases. As a result, there was this built-in filter (as a result of having limited access at a measured pace) that allowed you to focus on what was important.
Now there is terabytes of crap we have to sort through to get to the kernel of truth on the net. The counterpart of the knowledgeable librarian are few and far between, and information has to be taken with more than a grain of salt.
While I applaud providing computing resources to children - I think it is more important to now start looking at ways of taking those resources to the next level beyond simple hierarchies of filesystems - to a real collector and recorder of critical knowledge for everyone, tailored to their specific neural wiring. I think that will be the next great leap in computing - and now that we have machines capable of making it a reality, we will see it happen.
Information is not static - lets build applications that take that idea to its fruition.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Michigan state tax payers will be subsidizing the tech industry by means of the largest single laptop purchase/lease ever, over 130,000 wireless laptops--enough for every 6th grader who has reading and math levels below that of many '3rd world' countries. And of course since it would be a shame to end such subsidies plans for yearly purchases have been made.
Honestly, does anyone REALLY believe that having a laptop with wireless access is going to improve the education of the average 6th grader? Does anyone honestly believe that this isn't anything more than a buddy-buddy government-business subsidy plan?
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
spell-checkers may be part of the solution... :-)
6E8C 8721 B3D9 5269 5A9B 1122 00C3 C03D 99A7 1CFC
with the amount of articles about the evolution (not Ximian!) of linux on the desktop and all of the linux zealots/advocates on /. - i find it very interesting that fewer people have recommended linux for this, preferring apple.
i read two things into this:
1) linux on the desktop is just not ready for the masses.
2) open source advocates (/. geeks, whatever the general collective is) are siding with apple - simply because its not microsoft. i suppose an argument for apple is that it is essentially pretty unix (with freebsd underneath). and the anti-microsoft argument, well, need i go on about it. what concerns me most about this is why are we so happy with what apple have done? i'm not totally aware of the licensing differences between bsd and linux - but i ask the question "where is aqua's source code". and by this question i infer - have apple screwed us over by leveraging a great os with a licence that suits them because they don't have to publish their source?
and... if i've made a mistake and the aqua source code is actually available - as far as i'm aware OSX only runs on apple hardware. how less evil is that than microsoft running on any x86 archichture, or sun's closed solaris architecture?
...i find this to be a remarkably bad idea. not only is it going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars per student for the initial purchase, it's also going to probably double that cost for maintenance. who'se responsible if the laptop is dropped/damaged/stolen? the parent? tell that to an inner city detroit single mother when her lovely daughter gets her laptop stolen by some random 9th grader. is the state going to cover maintenance? great, double the price then to cover the life of these machines and take it out of my pocket. the state of michigan, like most other states in the us, has been under an intense budget crunch in the last 2 years due in large part to the recent mass exodus of manufacturing jobs in almost every market segment. is this really the best way to spend our money?
:)
as far as an OS choice, i'm going to burn any chance i might have of being moderated up here by suggesting windows xp. apple still doesn't really have a robust and easy to adminsiter means of locking down large numbers of systems and handling application delivery that would be required by this environment, nor does linux without a significant amount of research and development. while the software may be free, most of your local middle school admins (and i've worked with a number here in west michigan) don't have the first clue about managing linux (and barely the second clue on managing windows). this means that there'd be a large investment in outside contractors. of course this might mean some juicy support contracts for anybody that _does_ have these skills locally... hrmm.. maybe linux is a good idea after all
i'd also image that m$ is going to give a signifcant licensing break to the state to indoctrinate the students into the m$ shining path - i wouldn't be at all surprised if they gave away the windows licenses for free. before you act shocked, keep in mind that apple has been giving steep discounts to schools for decades for just the same reason.
I'm struggling to understand why 6th graders need personal laptops.
More well-paid and competent teachers would go a lot further in helping the students.
Oh well, it's the American way -- thinking that a quick technological fix will solve every problem.
*sigh*
Teachers need the tools more than the gradeschoolers. Give each teacher a laptop and a projector that can hook up to the laptop. Geometry would have been so much cooler in class with a math teacher using some 3d rendering program like POV-ray to show how things relate to functions and coordinates. Or mathematica/maple/whatever, but those are $.
Throw the teachers a bone every once in a while. They are underpaid and underappreciated as it is.
They should give the money to the teachers. A salary raise would attract more qualified people as well as increase job satisfaction thus lowering the turnover rate. In my high school, teachers burn out after 3 or 4 years. Maybe with a few extra dollars they would be more inclined to stay.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Instead of computers for each student, why not let them use classroom computers when they're actually needed (for simluations in physics class, or plotting in math, or whatever) and instead hand out books to stimulate their minds and actually teach them something?
Perhaps they can start with some easy-to-digest classics of the Western canon, like Aeschylus, Swift, Twain, Shakespeare, etc., and then move on to the more difficult philosophical works of Donne, Rosseau, Locke, Jefferson, Hamilton, etc.
Most of this stuff I didn't get to read in high school because the standards were too low even in AP classes, and that's just too bad. Perhaps with fewer computers and less bullshit, and more books, better teachers, and school choice, students would actually come out of 12th grade knowing something and not requiring remedial education for their first year in college.
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130 000 potential customers for the next 30 years. I can see how Apple could benefit from that to expand its user base.
But seriously, when you hear (especially abroad) how bad the state of education is in the US, is it really money worth spending ? If we want to educate kids as users, sure, but I don't see ho this could be useful at all. Some might say it's going to bridge the 'digital gap'. Sure, and leave the social gap wide open.
In some interview, Faulkner was asked if he had read Freud. He wittily answered that Shakespeare hadn't. The point is, this is not going to make kids smarter or more educated. It is not going to give them any 'edge' in future studies or jobs. Although using a computer cannot be avoided and that computer illiterate folks ARE disadvantaged, there are still many options that allow students to learn the basics.
And I don't think giving a highly breakable (for 6th graders at least) and stealable item to each and every kid is wise. Makes me wonder what are the real motives behind this operation and what global program is planned to use these laptops.
great, my illegitimate 12 year old will have a better computer than me. At least I don't pay Michigan taxes. Does this make sense? Will students ever learn to spell when they have spell check? and what about basic math?
I'm sorry but my laptop crashed and I lost all my homework.
Contrary to popular belief not everyone has a computer and schleps around on slashdot all day.
The difference as you move forward between those who have easy access to computers and those who do not is HUGE.
Even in my generation, I'm rapidly approaching 30, the gulf created by those of us who had machines at home and those who didn't created a digital caste system of sorts. I remember in school how those of us who sat in front of computers at home found it much easier when we ended up in front of the behemoths in the classroom.
While they stared blankly and hunted and pecked me and my compatriots were busy writing infinite loops in BASIC to make the screen say Mrs. Farrell is a booger.
That's a huge difference and like it or not it comes down to socioeconomic issues. My family had a little bit of money so I had those advantages -- which consequently allow me to make a little extra money doing troubleshooting and consulting -- and earned me lots of freebies in college when dealing with people who couldn't even spell printer driver much less install one.
Anything we do to close that gap is good in my opinion. The earlier the better and for everyone.
... to be a 7th grader.
Live web cams
Just like Dell, and every other supplier does, spend days or weeks stabilizing XP on the platform then image the hard drive...
Linux doesn't need the "spend days stabilizing" part. Things tend to work, and if a few things don't they are easily traceable since the hood isn't welded shut and linux has tools to probe the system state.
I can install a stable Linux system on any computer with any hardware - it tends to work or not work or require one or two tweaks for things like sound (e.g. if the BIOS isn't allocating interrupts right and there is a conflict or starvation of resources).
If they don't take them home, some version of the k12 LTSP project would work so there wouldn't even be a problem switching laptops.
My WXP laptop at work isn't stable - Usually I can get something done after the third reboot.
Installing any Windows OS usually takes over an hour and often doesn't work, or when it does it will crash the first time it sees new hardware. Trivial upgrades become nightmares.
If you are comparing the vendor's "return to original CD wiping out everything" state when you open the box and the OS is already installed v.s. actually using an install disk on a new hard drive, you are just being stupid.
Even NT wasn't that great - my video capture card and audio card could use different interrupts but NT wouldn't so whenever (except once after removing and reinstalling the drivers then rebooting for three hours to see if I could find some order it would accept) I turned on the sound and it would lock up hard. Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't work. I couldn't make it work by allocating interrupts manually but this was easy though unnecessary with Linux.
Viri and/or Worms? One wardriver with one infected laptop near one school and Michigan overloads the internet infrastructure. There is enough problem with monoculture in just the OS. Having hundreds of thousands of identical loads all connected together wirelessly is a cause for nightmares.
This could still be a problem on Macs, but they don't do stupid things like giving everyone Admin priviledges or leaving two dozen ports open "just in case someone ever uses them" and makes it impossible to find the service or driver to shut down to close the port.
I will give one thing to Apple because they want WIRELESS networking - they've been doing it longer and so it won't just be the laptop, but the access points and other infrastructure. Otherwise that will also require major investment and I don't know how many people really know how to do wireless infrastructure correctly. Including and especially any security.
And the MS-BSA Goon squad is another problem. They will want a windows license for every cpu, computer (yes, even iMacs if you remember Oregon) and probably an Office and other licenses as well. Compliance costs probably make it not worth it.
The potential cost to schools themselves from this program is $25/laptop/year, but I wonder if the people in charge of choosing the provider are considering the cost to schools based on administration, as mentioned by the story submitter. The small reports I found don't mention this, and most likely the decision as to what sort of administration to employ is a school or district decision, not a state one.
/., I hope they will show to the board some reports on TCO over the life of the laptops (Mac OS X versus Windows XP) and possibly other features some ambitious schools might want to make use of (Mac OS X Server versus Windows 2003 Server).
If anyone with influence on the Michigan board deciding this is reading
Michigan needs to look at more than just the bid price.
"Linux has a ways to go with proper support for laptops".
2 9840.html
t ion-sig n.html /m
- This is not relevant in this case. If you're a customer who's willing to buy 130000 laptops, you'd be surprised over how much support you can get. In many recent cases (ie Centrino) the spec's are not available to Opensource developers since MS is putting pressure on Intel.
- I think that this would be a good opportunity for the authorities to put their foot down and say no to centrino since that will lock you to XP. This would give Intel the elbowroom to push MS to abolish the current "XP-only" policy currently in effect for the Centrino family.
You might/might not want to run Linux/XP today, but choosing anything that uses Centrino results in a lock-in effect (to XP) that could turn out to be horrible in the future. What if the XP/Centrino combo wins and a virus chaos ensues? Due to the Intel-Microsoft Centrino relationship, you'd be screwed since only XP will run on it.
I hope that they consider:
1. Vendor lock-in
2. Supporting Open standards
when deciding.
more relevant links regarding the XP-Centrino lock-in:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/
Oh - and PLEEEASE SIGN THIS:
http://www.petitiononline.com/xanthan/peti
What a crushing waste of resources just to say student have computers. There's not one study that indicates computers help in the class room.
Student's issue are not lack of computer skills but lack of basic skills across all disciplines especially reading and writing. Better to put the money into that than something that sounds cool than try and really help education.
Better educational software and you can use imaging software to get around viruses/patches etc.
We recently installed enough new computers in OUR middle school (in Bishop, CA to lower the student-to-computer ratio to 10-1.
When making the platform decision, the ability to quickly restore services if any given desktop got hosed was absolutely critical.
Using Norton Ghost, we can *immediately* re-cast the ghost image to any computer on the LAN, and restore the computer to pristine condition. This is not client-based, and can be done from remote.
Using the Active Directory for installation of redirected student folders, setting permissions on a per-user basis, locking down some desktop components, allow roaming profiles, and remote desktop management keeps our staff level manageable. This is done using, well, me.
Manpower required is THE determining factor when analyzing platform requirements. Sure, there are zealots for pretty much any OS choice, and Mac zealots will swear by their platform, and Linux zealots will cry out for how cheap their platform is, but the fact is that I have myself, one part-time network manager, and two after-school student workers to manage over 500 workstations on three physcially disparate campuses. It works well, because we automate almost everything, and despite some clear anti-MS bias here at Slashdot, Active Directory works great for remotely managing desktops to the nth degree, all from one location.
Norton Ghost is a godsend when dealing with hosed machines that would take hours for a technician to reformat and rebuild manually. It works from remote, and it works flawlessly. In combination with realVNC and Active Directory (to lockdown the app itself), we can remotely view workstations and troubleshoot from any other workstation. This is great when we get a call from one campus, but we're on another.
Just thought I'd give the perspective of a public school IT Director here in California.
Share and Enjoy,
Joe Griego
Bishop Union Elementary School District
Bishop Joint Union High School District
Don't Die Wondering
I'm bigger then most 6th graders!
Look for my ebays auctions on slightly used laptops, coming SOON!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
LOGO. Easy to learn and there isn't much damage you can do with a turtle.
for the goatcx man!
(Now THATS an education)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
This is an obvious choice IMO...
SCO Unixware 7.1.3
A kid in 6th grade will get a laptop
So what happens
- My screen isn't working
- My wireless card broke 2 years ago
- I'm missing the '@' key
- My laptop won't run Windows RG (Really Good edition)
-
Are they going to expect kids to repair or replace these laptops?
Has ANYONE thought of this?????
Nice idea, but it could be expensive to the student in the long run
Comedy relief
When the 6th grade student asks his 11th grade brother what school was like when he was his age, he replies:
"We had to type our papers, AT HOME, on a PC with a TUBE monitor. And we couldn't take the PC with us, we used CDs and disks to transfer information. And we usually used the same PC
The 6th grader says "Wow
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Dell, Sony to purchase 130,000 cars.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
Let the kids pick their OS. Ask them what looks prettier, and they'll say Aqua looks better than Luna.
Then show them themes for X.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Actually I would recommend thin-clients instead of a full PC, even an Apple. The idea even works if you want just a Windows solution. Throw in one of these on the backend, and a school is set.
crack dealer? what are they going to steal to support there habit?
thats the problem with this country, no one thinks about the crack addicts.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
Fisher-Price. Anything with Barney or Pooh-Bear on it.
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
:)
Man, you post that question on Slashdot...Do you hope you'll get answers, excepted "micro$oft s*cks", "bsd is dying", or same old shit ?
____
nico
Nico-Live
TSIA
Natch!
Not MSFT...I know when I was in highschool our administrators bought apples over PC despite the benefits the PC solution had (cost, existing student experience with PC, etc..)
Blar.
Why are schools always behind the curve? It's time that they get ahead of the technology curve. Tablet PCs allow students to develop faster because they are able to combine well taught skills (pen and paper) with new technology ...
c buzz.coml s.tuxreports.com/lch
Check out the great sites (english):
http://www.tabletpctalk.com
http://www.tabletp
http://www.whatisnew.com
http://journa
And ton's of personal blogs
You can follow links to non-english sites, etc.
There are even newer sites popping up because the TPC is becoming more popular.
http://www.tabletquestions.com (might be valuable for those with questions)
Why waste money on technology that you'll know will be old in a few days? Schools should stop wasting money.
A beowulf of 130,000 laptops with wireless connections. It's all fun and games until Auto Power Management kicks in!
I couldn't resist a beowulf joke, sorry.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
the kids are going to have a blast stealing these things.
#!/
WHAT A WASTE!
I'm from Michigan. AND I've been using computers since the third grade. A C= PET, in fact. I was introduced to it in a kind-of school enviroment -- the intermediate school district media center (kind of a hierachical thing here in Michigan). They didn't have computers in every classroom; that would have been waaaaay too expensive. I had an inside track then. But Playing with the thing introduced me to my love for computers (shut up, sicko!).
We didn't have computers in the classroom until intermediate school (what you folks pro'lly call middle school--6th-8th grade). Even then, it was a single lab full of TI99-4A's, with a couple of Apple ]['s for the fun of it. Through all that, I was a C=128 kid at home, since it was better (let's start that flame war), and had all of the good warez (in 64 mode). Even in high school there was a small Mac-lab-slash-teachers'-smoking-lounge (!!) that was only for teachers and journalism students (like me at the time).
We did some fscking good things without having a computer with us all the damn time. Hell, now that I'm a responsible adult I'm undisciplined enough to be posting here during the work day! Imagine a kid. What does a computer do that a teacher doesn't? Research skills are going to hell. English is going to hell. Math is going to hell. Okay, maybe for Geography they'd be pretty useful. And maybe aspects of science. But ONE computer with an LCD projector would take care of that (yeah, I was a pioneer when I brought my C=128 to school to hook to the 19" TV to give a speech in speech class. I should own the patent to PowerPoint to this day.).
That said, if this stupid waste of taxpayer dollars is going to go through, let's hope it's Mac OS X.
But back to the stupid waste of money -- I'm what the schools look for -- someone who knows math and science. But only in their wet dreams for $35,000 per year!
--Jim (me)
You are a typical non-thinking individual. Please cease posting, I will stop flaming your obvious lack of intelligence if you do.
Come out from your anonymous coward hiding place and we'll see whose intelligence is lacking. Take ownership and pride in what you say and write. That is, if you have anything worth saying.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Ok let me start by saying I am as pro linux, open source, etc as most anyone can be, my whole business relies on open source and Linux based servers, all told I have over 50 linux based servers in operation hosting over 10,000 web sites with all the usual open source goodies, Perl, PHP, Mysql, etc, and I don't use Microsoft products except for playing an occasional game.
But let's get serious those laptops are gonna be Windows, or Apple, no ifs ands or buts about it, and my vote for which I think they'll use is Windows at this point because I figure Gates is gonna make damn sure it happens.
Sure I'd love to see all these students learning on some flavor of *nix, Linux, BSD whatever, anything but Windows but I know it's not gonna happen, and frankly expending effort in pointless "I'd put on there" musings is just well, pointless really.
Sometimes the adding of anti Microsoft barbs in what would be an otherwise fine report such as this just gets almost tiresome. I support Linux and use it religiously but I even get tired of something anti microsoft being injected into any article. Was this even necessary in an article about 130K laptops being purchased for school kids?
--- www.f-theocean.com
Familiarity with computers is a positive attribute, but considering the lack of money for lots of other things in the school system with longer term records of benefits to students (art/music/sports) and lower equipment turnover (don't need to buy all new music or instruments every year for music, for example), Spending a lot of money each each year on consumer goods will only decrease the amount of money available for other things. The continual update and modifications will require students to either buy computers every few years after 6th grade or for the state to buy them, spending even more money; without the expenditures for continuing education, this doesn't make much sense as a one-time expense. Add the costs of maintenance and administration and this could cost a lot of money in the long term. Other programs such as testing also require fixed budgeting (money that has to be used for a specific purpose - if schools don't test I think they don't get other funding from the federal gov't?) - thus computers are replacing discretionary money (money that can be moved between programs) for fixed expenditures. Unless the use of computers in the classroom (and its displacement of other educational means) is a significant benefit in the long term, this is a bad idea.
Finally, this seems like armament for people who claim that education already spends too much. Computers don't seem to be the primary problem with American education, and so spending lots of money on that problem before others seems to be an error in priorities. Computers for every 6th grader sound like the anecdote about cocaine - it's God's way of saying that you have too much money. Since that probably isn't the case, it doesn't make so much sense to me.
You obviously haven't purchased any instrument for a school band. My son wants to be in the band and has a clarinet. That easily cost $350, but I could have the bill wrong and it might be $450. Also, he wants to play the saxophone, and the band would not let him without clarinet experience first, so the sax will cost another $350 to $450 itself.
And this is all passed onto the parents, and not paid for by the school!
As for depreciation, you haven't tried re-selling an instrument after 4 years that was thoroughly beat up by a middle schooler/high schooler, have you?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
Knoppix. Actually, Morphix with appropriate apps. Give the kid a self-install CD: stick it in the CD drive and boot (even the dullest 6th grader can do that) and it wipes the disk and makes the laptop "just like new". Keep user files on (or mirrored on) an NFS partition and you have a fairly friendly, robust machine. Optionally, install the distro once and set the BIOS write-protect on the hard drive, making the machine essentially haxxor-proof.
All of this is a lot of work, and might take some customization on the laptop. But you're fielding 130K of them.
Here in Oregon we can't even afford desks for all of our 6th graders. Sigh.
I think you make a good point. Giving 6th graders laptops at this point only sets up Michigan for huge maintainence costs as they drop, break, smash, delete and otherwise screw them up.
High quality versions of the applications necessary for a young student to thrive are available on every modern OS...spreadsheets, word processors, presentations, web browsers, and other internet utilities. It's even arguable that Macs have better tools for creating multimedia content for projects, which may excite the students even more.
The purpose of the laptops isn't to teach them how to maintain a computer, it's to use the computer as a tool. That being the case, why wouldn't the state choose the platform that is more easily maintained, more secure, has a lower cost of ownership, and has fewer headaches in general?
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
From a sys admin point of view, I'd pick macs. They'll run the MS Office software (for a hefty price) that most people will crave, and they are *way* less prone to viruses. They're also easier to erase everything and reinstall from an image than a windows box-- which will come in handy when the students put god-knows-what on them. Apple's Remote Desktop is fairly inexpensive ($500), and it would make the sys admin's life much easier in conjuction with these macs. Tech support will also be much better with the macs.
However, a decent mac laptop with MS Office software is going to be about $1200. You might be able to get a Dell for about half of that with MS Office. 120,000 X $600 savings on each computer is a bunch of extra chalk and erasers. Maybe the Dell people could throw in a bunch of InFocus projectors, too...?
It's a tough choice, but from the sys admin point of view, I'd go with Apple. If I felt the money squeeze, I'd go with Windows.
I was a sys adin in Arizona for an EVIL school district, and we mostly used macs. The more I think about it, the kids could adapt to about anything. It was the teachers who had the most trouble. Re-training those teachers to use Windows could be a major pain in the tucus. Teachers stayed away from their computers when they were afriad of them. That was mre than 50% of them.
It would be nice for Apple, Dell, Bill Gates, or whomever to make sure that everyone gets enough training.
Yep, I'd go with macs. You get what you pay for.
Computers in classrooms are diversions, perhaps even toys, especially at the elementary level. Let's focus on teaching these kids to read, write and 'rithmatic first.
Umm... I would be surprised if Dell didn't completely dominate computer sales in Texas.
Like a lot of people here, I would tell iBooks are the best choice because of functionalities:
- Clean OS with simple use and easy adoption by "non-computer-friendly" people (I believe not all the kids love computers)
- Powerful way of limiting some harmful use (even improved on Panther), with clear experience from schools specialists (macosxlabs for example) and from Apple
- All the basic tools necessary for class/fun are included and some other can be found for free on apple.com.
But robustness is also and important issue in the hands of kids. Basically my experience with Dell computers is clearly not as happy as with Apple's ones.
I imagine the cost is an important matter at this scale and Dell can really go low on big quantities, but Apple proved to be able to. On that specific "price" field, I recently searched for a small (second) computer and compared iBook to Dell (and some others, but those 2 arrived in short list) and I realized that the world had changed and, for my needs, Apple was cheaper than Dell!
So perhaps is it the time to say, like in Virginia (G5), that Apple is the choice on the price...
ClaudeBBG
Sounds like lots of IT openings in the Michigan area. 130,000 laptops equals a whole lot of IT support techies.
I doubt very much that the Board of Ed. has even considered the associated support costs of managing 130K of laptops. Sucks to be a taxpayer in Michigan!
Top five reasons not to give middle school and high school students laptops:
5. Kids download Gigs of porn for those show and tell sessions at school, or uses it to commit a computer crime.
4. Laptop gets totaled when Kid gets the laptop soaking wet, drops it, runs over it with bike, burns it, loses it. Ever fix a laptop that been drenched in soda or coffee?
3. Hawks it on E-bay for a Playstation or hard cash.
2. Reformats the hard drive and installs Linux/FreeBSD.
1. Laptop battery shorts out in a locker, catches fire and burns down the school.
- as high a degree of expandability and ability to be modified as possible in laptops.
- full Linux support
My rationale for 1 is pretty obvious and simple. Different areas may want/need different capabilities for the laptops and it would be silly to weld them in place. (i.e. avoid embedded differentiation as much as possible) As for 2, the reason is a bit more difficult but not complex. The difficult part is for zealots to understand that for a end user, as described in the info linked, will not care what OS is on there. (end user here that means the kiddos and teachers at one level and the school computer/network admins as another)I would go as far as to suggest that NO OS desktop, theme, etc be available to the kids. What they should see and work with should be a special environment setup for them that renders 2d info as both HTML and the OS/Window Manager specified type (win32, GTK, etc). 3D will be properly abstracted as to avoid compatability issues with other existing systems, especially in content creation and modification. Many zealots will demand Linux based OS for political reasons. Here I say Linux should be used for customization (by admins) and performance reasons. The catch is that you must insure compatability of the data and hardware with Linux, often a teeth pulling experience. Going with MS will by definition give you hardware compliance as any vendor is crazy not to support Windows. Data could be said to be the opposite almost. Going with proprietary formats as opposed to proprietary use of that data (formats) will undeniably cause many issues, especially on this scale. MS will undoubtedly try to lock in their products through the oft named "embrace and extinguish" policy. No conspiracy theory there, just pattern recognition of proven and admitted practices by them.
One question I have is if these laptops will serve also as "computer literacy" tools as well. If they do, then there should be a variety of OS's, applications, productivity suites and network configurations to look at. Enough to simulate the various home and working environments out there. Sorry, but Outlook alone is not a solution to that (even if it was not so bloated and unsafe). I never use Mac's but it would be silly to count them out, especially given the number of i-Macs out there (or whatever each release is called... laptop Macs basically, I don't keep up with foolish branding and jelly colored crap)
BTW, does Dell sell AMD? Hmmm, interesting. Perhaps once again we should do some research on performance vs. cost, performance vs. voltage, etc. Dell clearly does not sell AMD because they would loose out on deals from Intel. Competition is not vogue in the computer industry, but politics is alive and well.
Hmmm. I see almost no comments in favor of this. I am in favor of it, and I would support it locally with my own tax dollars...
But I have to ask - how many of the people responding even HAVE kids?
Everyone slams 6th graders like they couldn't handle a computer if it killed them. When I was in 6th grade I already had two computers. Now that was the 80's so I was unusual then, but NOW? They already know more about the computers than most adults.
If you treat them like they are too young and immature to have a laptop - then they will be. If you teach them and allow them to learn - they will grow and expand. Children expand to fit their environment. Too many people treat children like they are stupid because they are young. Lack of experience is NOT THE SAME as lack of knowlege. Kids are AMAZINGLY smart. And they will never GET the experience you all want them to have, if you never ALLOW THEM TO.
6th graders are perfectly capable of keeping laptops.
And why not start using technology in the classroom? As long as it is just a TOOL - and not the focus of the course, it is fine... What if people had said the same thing about pen and paper? "We already have chalk and slate. We don't need any new gadgets. Kids won't be able to learn." Technology moves forward, we should use the technology as a TOOL to move forward as well.
Give kids some credit - they need to learn and grow sometime!
Oh yeah, and in my opinion the iBook is more durable than most Dell offerings.
Simple. Warn parents that they'll be held responsible if anything happens to them and hand out fliers about SafeWare. You could insure a $900 iBook for $75/year with a $100 deductible against theft, dropping, etc. Almost all parents would go for it.
I'd vote for the macs any day of the week. I don't care for them, but I think yesterday's program on NPR (Mid-morning?) had a few good points on the topic. Both PCs and Macs have browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, etc. but PCs have 10x the games base, and I'd wager a 6th grader today would find it much easier to do illicit things on a PC which he/she is familiar with, than a Mac which more than likely they have had minimal experience with. Honestly, is there some capability students in 6th grade need that Macs lack?
What the heck is a 'sig'?
In the future, the vast majority of our society will be incredibly proficient in Solitare and FreeCell. These mere "games" will be the building blocks for our future, and will pave the way into our future society.
Wyld Stallyons!
I think this job is best left to Windows. Wait until the first of these is seized by police filled with p0rn, credit card numbers or who-knows-what.
Plus, software development is an implementation of problem solving skills. The best hardware teaching people problem solving is those brain-teaser books and pencils. Not as sexy as notebooks, so not the best way to appear tech friendly for the voters.
With kids not being able to read and write you would think giving them a laptop would be low on the list..
How many Slashdotters had a computer by the time they were in sixth grade? I know I did (a Vic 20).
I happen to think my high level of comfort and adaptability with computers greatly benefitted from my early exposure to the computer.
I also know that I WORSHIPPED that piece of crap with its cassette drive (30 minutes to load Pac Man???) like it was the most prized object in the universe.
Now the Michigan Laptop program may be a flaming-pile-of-shit, but before everyone starts talking about idiot sixth graders, maybe they should think back to when they had their first computer, what it meant to them, and whether or not they were and idiot 6th (or 7th, or 8th) graders at the time.
First, you need to cover the basics:
Custom shock absorber cover with vents and easy close Velcro fasteners: notebook remains in cover for use. Openings for ports, drives and battery
Battery charging stations in each class room. Extra batteries- three per unit per day
Spare units 10% of total purchase per school. Expect damages theft etc.
Server and storage capacity to hold document back-up, Script or software to make back-up simple
Second, plan to hire an administrator / technician -minimum admin school students GET REAL!
State should hire architect for system. System architect would design network basics and train local or roving administrators.
Have educational plans pre-build to maximize student impact -go beyond simple user instruction
Install tracking software either type that reports IP of stolen system or GPS
Which OS to choice? Who foots the bill? Linux or Mac requires different experience that Windows. A competent architect can structure any of the OS choices into stable secure system.
Windows security software can add considerable cost. Linux or Mac can be more cost effective with security.
- What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?
Depends. Are these to be used in classroom/controlled buildings or are they to be truly mobile units to be used at home as well?- Controlled environment use
- Mobile stations for anywhere use
For remote access to the thin client server, some kind of phone-home VPN hardware/software could be used. I really like the thin client solution for this implementation.-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Said it before, and it needs saying again.
Computers don't teach children, teachers do.
Teachers need the money to pay off college loans and to have a life. Yes, anyone who has to spend _any_ time trying to crowbar useful stuff into the obdurite little brains of children deserves more appreciation than successful exploitive artists of corporate finance.
It's not the kids that need the laptops. It's the teachers.
There's absolutely no need to give kids in this country anything that doesn't have a joystick attached to it. All the keyboard "gruntwork" is being done in other countries. We're still going to need doctors, and tradesman, but if M$ and big-business have anything to do with it, anything more intensive than cleaning your mouse will be a DCMA/TIA terrorist offense and could result in a semi-permanent "rape" sentence.
We'll be much better off not setting our K12 institutions up for a fall at the hands of the BSA anyway. Face it, if you want mindlessly simple, easy to use/exploit/crack cheap software with built-in idemnification for the fat-cats that sodomized you with it, you'll have to go with lock-in crippleware.
What's easier to keep track of, 50 laptops with licenses, or 1200? Maybe we should ask a k12 network administrator?
Large software and hardware corporations are milking taxpayers (government computer $oftware/hardware purchases) and big business already. They need to keep their wandering hands out of K12.
Our kids need to have some basic skills, like writing, math--serious math and early with it too, and being able to look things up in dead-tree books. Dead-tree books are more important than blogs because they are traditionally less malable and depending on the subject, still very timely. How much has changed when it comes to history? I think school textbooks are more dangerous than webpages--pure revisionist "politically correct" pap taxpayers already pay too much for. Children should be working out of college texts, at least they are in my house. Ahahahahah! (I'm having a blast)
If a school needs computers they should limit computer use to faculty through an encrypted wi-fi network and really support parents through the use of a moderated listserv (per teacher) that allows them to notify parents of class-events, and what the current homework assignments are. There's always this big disconnect between teachers and parents and I know this would bring any parent with an email account into the loop. It would certainly be better than having to rely on our kids to tell us if they have homework or not. How painful would it be to simply give the school an email address and from that point on the school/teacher would have another less intrusive, less confrontational vector to communicate?
Yep. That's too easy, makes too much sense, and won't make large corporations and budget monkeys in K12 very happy...after all, they have to demand more and spend it all. Rinse and repeat yearly.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
>Why would you want to burden an 11 year old with the complexities of Windows or Linux?
For the same reason most all first world countries burdened them with the complexity that is the English language. So that they can communicate with 95% of the people on earth (ok, a *slight* overexaggeration, but you get the picture).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
be pretty happy. They just got 130,000 new ad revenue generators...
Blogging because I can...
The state will pay once for the laptop computers. A pay raise goes on forever so buying the laptops is trivial.
I'd also point out that in most American school systems pay is set by the district and not the state government. But the economics of schools is a zero-sum game - you can pay teachers more - but something will have to go because there is a limited amount of money in the system. Want to give up that music program in the elementary schools? How about larger class size? Less art? Fewer field trips?
It's not a trivial problem and just saying "pay the teachers more" isn't sufficient.
The only way I would install Windows on that many kids' laptops would be if I put NT 4.0 or Win95 on them. Without the optional networking.
There is really no reason to standardize on MS Office. Get them all using AbiWord. Have them all doing photo editing in gimp. With that many kids using free software, in a couple of years they just may be contributing to it!
why are we spending more and more money on students, and yet they're getting dumber and dumber?
how is it that some other countries have students 30 to a room with one teacher and one piece of chalk, and yet produce high-performing, disciplined individuals who can pass tests?
has anyone done a cost/benefit analysis for laptops?
While there, I was involved in a project designed to bring technology into the classrooms. The key sides of every arguement was:
1. Kids don't need it.
2. We only need one per class room.
3. Every kid needs a laptop to be successful.
Of course, each one had its own woes of "Where does the money come from," and "How do we prevent them from goofing off?"
Well, the reality is this - any system, when administered properly, can be locked down. That means they have a large choice - Mac, Windows, Linux, Novell for Windows. It's all in the planning. If they make the correct roadmap, they will require less TCO to maintain it.
Someone here asked why we would buy soemthing that losses it's value overnight, but you are looking at it for the wrong reasons. Will it be able to play HalfLife 2? Probably not, can the encylopedia be updated with the latest content from the web, showing how California elected another actor for Governor? Why yes, it can...
Technology is the future - I'm not saying that they don't need to learn to read and write, but that is what elementary school is for. I don't know about you, but I learned to read and write in cursive well before the end of third grade (hell, maybe sooner).
Vocabulary can still be taught, literary works of art can be read (this content won't change), and RIAA can get involved to provide instruments to children after they sue the parents.
And - if you made it this far - no one ever said these kids were taking them home and running around with them. That's what home directories and mapped drives are for. You should be able to sit down at any machine, log in, and do your work with the standard set of tools (office, adobe or macromedia suite, internet explorer).
You see, laptops are simply an effective use of space in an already overcrowded school environment. I can easily stash 30 laptops in a cabinent faster than I can move 30 desktops and monitors out of the way. That is why they have choosen laptops.
Better watch out - your kids will have this luxury too!
--
Sound In Motion DJs - Official Music Provider of the San Jose Sharks!
I agree with you. I'm part of a small IT dept. that runs a medium sized school district's network and computing infrastructure. Every suggestion made about theft, breakage, viruses and computer security will be my nightmare. There are better, cheaper solutions for technology if you want every 6th grader to have one, that are far more secure. I have seen time and time again, especially in homes with poor levels of parental involvement, children treating school equipment as if it was okay to break, after all, it wasn't their responsibility. Some children could genuinely benefit from this...and certainly several years down the road (i.e., 9th grade) it could probably be implemented well. If we could provide a major benefit to our childrens' reading, writing, math, and science skills through this, I'd be all for it. I'm just not certain this is going to happen, and I worry that this program is being implemented by people who do not have the full picture, or cannot visualize all end-result scenarios.
Never look down your nose at others. Someday, someone is bound to see your boogers.
Reading the headline, I would think that Michigan State (MSU.EDU) was buying all those laptops.
Jeeze.
woops am I fanboying :-p
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I agree with many of you that this is a poor way to spend a large amount of taxpayer dollars, BUT - if these kids are going to get laptops it only makes sense that they get familiar with the operating system that 95% of them will be using in their future jobs: M$ Windows. As much as we may wish otherwise, if you work in an office you're probably using a Wintel PC (unless you're a /. reader, of course).
As far as administration, which is easier to find: a compentent M$ network admin or someone who can network OSX?
Just my $.02
Kids do not need laptops! It might make sense if all their textbooks were loaded on the system, but I bet that will not happen. They could have a 386 at home running Win 3.11 and use Write to eliminate the 'dog ate my homework' excuse if that's what they're after (Bruce Green ate my homework - say it out loud).
What is it with schools now, having kids do reports with PowerPoint or making awful websites? Is this supposed to help them become middle managers or bad web designers or something?
The latest Slashdot meme.
First time I've heard the "there aren't enough games for the Mac" argument used IN FAVOR of going with the mac. Gotta love it.
Actually, I think there are some other compelling reasons:
1) The kids are going to be spending the rest of their lives using windows as adults anyway, so expose them to something different for one year.
2) At least for now there is a lot less worry about worms and viruses. Would _you_ want to be in charge of the admin team that had to patch 130,000 3 times in a row for the same vulnerable service? I think not.
none of the above.
.02$
The problem i see here is
1) admin
2) teachers
3) platform
to explain most teachers are idiots when it comes to computers. plus what the hell good is a laptop for school, i use pen and paper and my palm ( easycalc) for most school work. i do see this could be a good thing but theres no real platform. ( apple is the best choise)
why
because.
1) you can be as simple and as complex with it as you like.
2) it comes with a compleat developer package ( ms costs allot)
3) it comes with and editor, image manipulation software, presentation software. and any application that you would need for presentation.
4) its got a low learning curve.
5) it just works.
the platform is the problem though
what would work best is and apple bassed tablet with built in keyboard, like most tablet pc's
why would this be good.
with tablets you could also distribute the books electronically. this would end up saving the school money.
so theres my
a tablet version of the mac os with ebook support.
Ok,
Usually the rant goes "this country spends lots on weapons, not enough on schools" -- and with what is positively the worst high school system in the rich nations, the US probably deserves this one attack.
But... now that money is found, in the state of Michigan they decide the right thing is buying laptops ?!
1) they will be stolen
2) they will be broken / nonfunctional (are you gonna give each kid a sysadmin ? I sure hope they go with MacOS, it will last longer...)
3) they are not what is needed.
Listen, I have been teaching freshmen at a top US university for the last two years. I get some students (US born, not immigrants) that CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH AS THEIR FIRST GODDAMN LANGUAGE. Every year, a class of 40 Freshmen has 5/6 such types, not to mention that the verbal and math skills of the whole group are lower that they should by a measurable margin.
I teach CS in case you wonder, and I say, forget the laptops, get good teachers in high school AND teach the kids English, math, logical reasoning (ever seen a Freshmen widen his/her eyes when you tell them that a certain class of statements can only be true or false, not both ? I have!) and if you want to kick ass some science and some arts. But please, forget the damn laptops!
The only thing a sixth grader can learn from the school issued laptop is disabling netnanny (possibly while the professor is teaching something "boring"). Gosh, go slap the assembly of that state with a large trout, willyaplease....
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
Vivian Riddle Middle Magnet School
There isn't any iBook related stuff on the web page. But Riddle has ~300 12" iBook G3 600s. Having a great deal of personal experience with Riddle, I can tell you that this is a good but doomed idea that is waaaay ahead of time. Apple will and should get the deal in my opinion. Dell, and Gateway were the two others in the race for this smaller grant, and they lost because they were just going to sell the Lansing School District the computers. Apple has donated a lot of professional development, tech work, and hardware (almost 100 iBooks, eMacs, and iMacs) since the start of the program. I'm not trying to sound like a zealot, but I doubt that the integration level from any other company would have approached this.
There are a lot of amazing pluses to this program, but unfortunately, this isn't ready for the whole state. There aren't enough people around to fix these computers, none of the money will go to hiring extra staff. It will fall on the backs of the already understaffed school IT people. And as this program enters its second year here, I notice a big drop in the respect for laptops. And if anyone can tell me how to fix an iBook power supply, I'll eat my hat!
On a good note, there are rumors floating around about yellow dog on each mac, and redhat on every x86. This is 3-4 years down the road to testing, but very cool.
If they have to do this, they should seriously consider the Alphasmart Dana. It's a Palm OS device in a laptop-like configuration. It has a normal sized keyboard, a much larger screen than most Palms (5x wide), USB for printer output, and is available with optional wireless to boot.
Plus, it's much tougher than any laptop, and has no hard drive to crash. And, it costs under $500.00 US. TCO should be low as well, there's just not as much to go wrong with a Palm device. Lastly, people won't be as likely to steal them, because there isn't a black market for them.
The sticking point might be software, but Alphasmart has made a business out of supporting this market, so I know some options are available.
It's not going to do as much as a full-fledged laptop, but it should be able to do the basics just fine.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
What would be your choice for middle school classrooms with minimal sys admin?"
Pencil
Paper
erasers optional.
Middleschoolers have enough problems paying attention when all they have are the above three things to play with.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
OS X on iBooks. This is the ideal platform for students at all levels. I used NT and other windows OSs throughout college and highschool, there was nothing I hated more than dealing with windows problems and waiting for sysadmins to fix them. Windows required a large,mostly dissatisfied staff of mcse boneheads to keep everything running and under control, even then it seemed like nothing ever worked and NT labs would be down for days. The Apple labs for graphic design students had maybe one person working in them, that was mostly so people didnt go around stealing RAM from the G3s. Cost of ownership for iBooks will probably be much lower than for windows/intel laptops, and apples tend to be useful for much longer.
TallGreen CMS hosting
...why states are going bankrupt?
"High quality versions of the applications necessary for a young student to thrive are available on every modern OS..."
Reader Rabbit (remember the age group).
If I wanted to start a company, this would probably be it. Imagine, tens of millions of kids in the us, and the current trend is to put them behind an expensive windows box. Strip that hardware down, concentrate on a linux distro based on the classroom, and you've got yourself a paycheck, and an extremely rewarding job.
It doesn't make any sense to give a kid either a mac or a windows pc for educational purposes.
Each route is flawed, because either option wastes hardware. You don't need external monitor support, firewire, floppies or big hard drives. You need a thin client with a school-based distro of Linux that is downloaded and run remote off of a mainframe.
Not only does this improve the price-performance ratio, but it also improves accountability by allowing for detailed logging of the kid's activities, and can allow for detailed administrative control on a classroom basis.
Say a teacher has a classroom of students. The students show up, boot up Schoonix (loading remotely via high-speed wireless). The teacher's first subject is geography. The teacher unlocks the Geography Suite of programs for her students. The students are allowed access to pre-determined geography based websites.
A problem occurs, a student can't find the right web page. The teacher clicks on the student's icon on screen and immediately switches to that students desktop. The teacher remotely shows the student how to find the right web page, and everyone moves on.
Sound far-fetched? Not really. Throw together some PAM auth, hack some remote x11 displays, write a couple custom admin programs, and strip down a linux kernel and you already have something that would work much better than Windows or Mac OS X by customizing it for the classroom.
I support this completely. Kids need all the help they can get. I hope they get the most powerful notebooks around.
On a side note, anyone want to join me on a road trip to Michigan? I have some 6th graders I want to "meet".
Given the opportunity, I would set up a dual boot system to expose them to a second, different OS. Probably RedHat or SlackWare for their simplicity. I know I was raised in my school on Apple IIe and nothing else. EVERYTHING we had from the time I was in 4th grade till I graduated in '94 was Apple IIe. It made for a rough transisition when I went to college and had to relearn everything on VMS systems, Windows, DOS, and MacOS. I consider myself rather tech oriented, but it was still somewhat of a learning curve to use a mouse for the first time, or to program in a GUI.
just my $.02. Mod me down if you like, but I jst speak my perceived version of the truth.
-Ab
Nothing fails quite like prayer.
I agree with the people stating that the school systems need to be better. As the son of a great highschool teacher I know how the quality of teaching can verry even within a school. Paying teachers resionable salaries and funding schools properly are two much needed changes that are desperatly overdue. Teachers should make more money than doctors and lawyers because their roll in sociaty is much more important. They help build the future.
As for which OS? OS X on iBooks would be the best bet, IMO. I'd wait till highschool to give the kids Linux boxes. WinXX is not an option. At least not until MS fixes it (which we all know will never actually happen).
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
The iBooks are really durable, and we have had only a few smashed LCDs. The kids are respectful of the hardware, just not the software. There was a lack of planning on software restrictions, and now we are paying for it, but this is ITs fault, not OS X. Its actually very easy to do in OS X.
The power supplies break all the time, but they are somewhat fragile. They are expensive, and I don't think there is a 3rd party power supply available.
Some children from Riddle went to the House today, and they were showing off the iBooks. Apple can lobby like hell, and I really think that they should be the choice.
I'm the sysadmin for a mid-sized company in the telecommunications sector. We have lots and lots of windows, a growing amount of Linux, and very little in the way of Macs.
The Macs will never take over here. You need a Mac to do administration on a Mac. However, with one PC I can do administration of all the Windows and Linux boxes.
The thing that is making Linux orders of magnitude easier to maintain now is Yum, maintained primarily by Seth Vidal at Duke University. I kickstart install my new machines, with a home-rolled Yum RPM as part of the installation process. Every night clients download patches from an internal server, and also install any packages that MIS directs them to (via yum's as yet undocumented groupinstall feature). One man can maintain hundreds of machines pretty easily. I anticipate that it could scale much higher than that without difficulty.
There are new features coming out in Yum shortly that will make it easier to have centralized MIS control while still empowering department or division level sysadmins to augment the base configuration delivered by a central IT organization.
Some of my other favorite sysadmin tools that make Linux easy to maintain include Xvnc, Perl, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL and PHP. For you Windows or Mac guys that are curious about Linux, you can check out the aforementioned tools at http://freshmeat.net
"Michigan To Purchase Record 130,000 Vic-20s"
Now that would be cool!
Heck, if someone had bought 130,000 Atari130XEs back when I was in the 6th grade, we all might be using a different OS today.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Now when the dog eats your homework, you'll have the proof (a chewed-up laptop).
I just read in the paper today (I'm from Michigan) that our state is almost 600k in debt! 600k!!! And they want to cut UPPER education for LOWER education... why am i getting an anuerism thinking that some future drug dealer is going to be getting a laptop so that he can keep track of the trafficking of his drugs in sophomore english, while I have to drop out of the University of Michigan because tuition jumped another 30%?
I'm gonna go shoot myself, anyone care to join?
Maine started a program like this a while ago (but with 8th graders), and it has had predictably mixed results. We gave out iBooks. The decision to use iBooks rather than a PC notebook ended up being a good one, not because of students or because of IT support, but because the teachers didn't know how to use either and learned the iBooks faster than they would have a Windows machine. The school districts where the teachers now know the technology have been making good use of it; the ones where they don't know it it has been wasted. Worry more about the teachers than the techies.
Macs are much easier to administer and use in the classroom, thanks to Apple Remote Desktop. If you have never used this, it is pretty slick. It goes way beyond the normal remote desktop software like VNC or Windows Remote Desktop. And it is designed with education in mind. Some of the cool features include the ability to request help, for the teacher to display anyone's screen on everyone else's screens, to lock students screens (eliminates the issue of students goofing off on the computers while the teacher is trying to teach), and for the teacher to monitor students' screens (so you never know when the teacher may be watching you). And it helps administrators by creating reports on machine states and simplifying the rollout of software updates. I haven't seen anything close to this on the PC and I am pretty sure it doesn't exist.
Plus, Macs are very easy to lockdown. You can specify what apps a user can run, give them disk quotas, etc. Use an LDAP directory for network login (just use the OS X Server GUI admin tools) and you're set. For people who haven't had the pleasure of working on a Mac network, it is a breeze.
I know schools mainly look at price, but you simply can't do most of this stuff on a PC and you definitely can't do it as easily or as cheaply (OS X Server w/ unlimited client licenses is $999; how much would the school pay in client licenses if it went with a Windows solution?). That is why Apple has been winning a lot of the EDU deals.
Just a though.
Assuming giving 6th graders laptops is a good idea (have to agree with others in this thread that it's optional at best), and that they'll be leased, Apples are clearly the way to go.
Apple hardware in general (and laptops in paricular) are famous for holding their value over time. Check out iBook sales on eBay - people routinely get 70% or better of original retail for machines that are two years old.
Also, Apple's recent OS X upgrades have improved performance on older hardware, rather than obsoleting it. A batch of recent-vintage iBooks ought to still be usable by students three years from now, maybe more.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Given the way the US is headed, these schools would better serve these future
proles by providing deep fryers, grills, basic gardening tools, and toilet brushes.
Basic urban wildlife hunting skills and how to make a shelter and clothing out of tarps
and cardboard will also be essential. They can probably reduce the number of books
they buy because any on the job training they'll get won't require much reading, but
they might need a little basic training in spoken Hindi, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
Somebody should talk to schools in the state of Maine. Every 7th grader has a laptop... They have to leave them at the school. They are all Macs with just minimal software...
My choice would be QUITTING. Holy mother of god, there isn't enough money in the world to convince me that a "minimal tech staff" could possibly handle a school full of fragile laptops! Giving every sixth grader their own wireless laptop is bar none, the single worst idea I've ever come across in my entire life!
It's been a long time.
This is a shock. That's what I get for having Slashdot as my primary news source rather than local TV and newspapers, I guess...
My son will be in 5th grade next year. I bet he'll love the idea. I can just see the taxes going up already. And for what? The schools' ever increasing PC lease rate and broadband bills?
How on earth are all these schools going to manage internet connectivity. I haven't seen a clear example that these people can manage basic computing yet in their environments. Sure they might try hard, but the admin/expert is a teacher who toys with computers in his spare time. I have to help my kids unlearn that garbage when the get home. (No kids, the CPU is right here under the fan; it does the work; it's not the whole computer case. No the monitor is not a computer; it's just a way to display what the computer is working on so you can use it.)
And, yes, I'm one of those staunch, stick-in-the-mud, "thought police" types when it comes to underaged kids, especially middle school and below. I hardly like the idea of wireless internet access in the schools, but I can assure you I'll be checking it's security (authorized or not). Free pr0n for middle schoolers... won't they be happy?
While the idea is cool; (yes, I'd think it was cool as a kid or neophyte parent) I think this is just bad on so many levels.
They've approved technology.. YEAH! Laptops for everyone! (think of the mobs in C&C Generals)
Where's the educational plan? Where's the clearly defined list standard of required applications or functionality?
They've approved a purchase, but for what?
Now I've gotta go and cause trouble, or quietly forget about it and pay more in taxes...while receiving paycuts and facing unemployment.. The IT market ain't looking nice in the Detroit area lately. Unless maybe you're on the inside of this contract.
ugh..............
Why shouldn't SCO be left out in the money / land grabbing!! SCO in SCHOOL! That's the Motto!! Or how about SCO or ELSE!!
...what the heck is my sixth grade brother going to do with *any* laptop?
He uses computers for 1 thing:
Games.
And *maybe* the occasional paper. Maybe. And I can guarantee that most 6th graders, given a laptop, will have laptop pieces within a few weeks.
Thus leading to my second thought: If they're really serious about this, they should get Panasonic ToughBooks or something ruggedized... but those are a *little* out of the price range.
And my third thought: *imagines warehouse filled with OS X laptops*
BEOWULF CLUSTER.
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
Hardware is just a means to an end. What needs to determine the operating system is the software they intend to run.
Knowing the software available for education that will likely be apple or microsoft platform (my wife is a teacher, I often wind up "volunteering" time with the school system to fix the idiotic schemes they come up with).
Quite frankly unless they're going to write a lot of their own software from scratch they'll probably wind up going with a microsoft solution. I've always liked apple, but they've never given the third-party software market as much support as microsoft, so guess what, there's comparitively little.
Realistically since these are 6th graders there is little reason to teach them any one platform at this time. By the time they reach 10th grade (job entry) windows, Mac os, and even linux will have changed so much they'll bear little resemblence to our "latest and greatest". The best we can hope is that they'll learn general principles they can apply to other software.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
To appeal more to the slashdot reader at large:
I'll give you a hint - it starts with W and rhymes with "Lindows".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They need to be at least up to the military spec in order to survive 6th graders. The tablet format would also make sense. They're only $4000 apiece: http://www.groupmobile.com/product-ix104.asp Seriously, the form factor doesn't exist yet that makes sense for 6th graders. My kids can't even keep their calculators for a whole school year.
yes, i use PC's, yes i use mac's, no im not gunna go fanaticle on either, here it is how i see it
Kids want simple
Admin's want easy
They aren't (hopefully) going to try and install games on these things, they are learning machines, so why use a PC?
besides, the mac's resale better later on, they have all the school software the kids need for an office suite, they have alot of educational software already out there, they are easy to admin, and well, kids can learn a bit of unix if they want (it's good, puts hair on your chin and all that)
besides, if it's a windows laptop, then all your teachers have to be avid PC users because when it breaks, they will have to fix it, or have a support staff on hand for when these things break, kids have a much harder time breaking a mac and it's a ton easier to fix, besides, for those with kids, don't they seem to find the oddest ways to break them and never know what happenned?
my $.02
hey, i may be wrong, but guess what, that's why it's my opinion, not yours, if i'm that wrong, enlighten me so we can be better eductaed and friends
800 MHz iBooks with airport, and the extended warranty.
Overpurchase by 5% on the units. You won't have a care in the world for three years, repair wise compared to anything else.
Viruses? Feh.
TCO? Much lower.
Networking is self-configuring if you just RTFM.
Airport base stations judiciously placed. Secure the hell out of them, though - each school building will have a big 2.5GHz target painted on it from day 1.
An Xserve for each building, or use your existing servers (in the other articles, the wintel IT people are freaking about the added something or other.
As for the guns or butter arguments - they already have chalkboards, chalk, books, pencils, paper.
The average per pupil expenditure in the US is around $10,000 per year. If a $1200 iBook (that's their target price - easily done for an 800+airport+applecare in volume) lasts 3 years. I know. I bought a 500 the week they came out 2.5 years ago and it's still running circles around anything else from that long ago.
So the cost is $400 per year per student. That's 4%. try and reduce class size with that sort of increase. No can do.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I dont know what kind of 6th graders your dealing with but I have a cousin who recieved a laptop from the 6th to the 8th grade in NYC part of some "bridging the digial divide" nonsense anyway she doesn't live in the greatest of areas and she would walk with her laptop from school past drug dealers, users, gang members and all sorts of shady characters and back every single day. A bully should be easy to deal with in comparison especially since the laptop is school property the teachers will be more than willing to handle a situation with a simple bully.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
I think the most robust way of running something that large without system admin support is to create a CD-ROM-based distribution (Knoppix, Morphix) and have students always boot from CD. That way, everybody is guaranteed to have a working, virus-free system.
While Macs are perhaps a little easier to administer than Windows machines, they still require extensive handholding and their disk-based installations do "go bad" when users start installing software or messing around in system directories (and they will).
Are the school nurses trained to handle carpal tunnel syndrome?
What needs to be included at it's most usefulness is a web browser (for research, web casts, etc.), a word processing application, a presentation package and what I think would be the absolute most useful program would be a PDF reader. The reason for the PDF reader is multifold.
First of all this could be used to replace textbooks. Instead of public schools having to shell out thousands if not millions of dollars on physical text books, they can mandate that the big publishers (Harcourt Brace, MacMillan, etc.) release their current books on PDF. Licensing fees would be immenently more cost effective in purchasing, shipping, and simple logistics of the books at the end of the year. This way a kid will never be out of a text book, no sharing, no graffiti, and can't forget it at home or in his/her locker. The publishers will make their issues more interactive in the future, in order to compete with other publishers, and states can buy them statewide so that ALL public schools have the same books so that parity is across the board.
A daily backup would be kept on the servers at all times to ensure that work done during the day will be kept in case of a fatal crash. Or even simpler if the HD crashes a mirror can be easily installed. Students can access their own folders at home via the internet etc. etc.
Teachers can easily post assignments for the day or even week. Children that miss school because of illness can get assignments ahead of time, by logging into their classrooms site, their own folder or even attend class via webcam. Tests can be given via the computer in either PDF forms or html/xml pages. Grades can be automated and kids and parents can see exactly where they are in each subject.
For admins this would be a dream. At the end of the year, a networkwide wipe of all the HD's to coincide with next year's text books etc.
I think the logical choice for this is Apple. They're VERY capable of handling and supporting an order of this magnitude. The initial cost is on par with other companies, but the real savings is in the IT department. The amount of people needed to manage a school district is miniscule compared to that of a Windows system. The OS is very robust and security is much tighter. Less worry about viruses etc.
To me I think this is a no brainer, cost effective, way less paper (better for the environment) and will keep the kids more focused on learning while keeping technology at the forefront. All states should be implement this into public education at all levels.
Pete
As a parent of four, I have replaced an average of 1 calculator per year per child. I have a laptop -- it wouldn't last 2 weeks under a 6th graders care. None of them would -- not Dell, not IBM, not Apple.
How about a nice tablet style military hardened pc -- they're only about $4000US
Computing concepts should be taught at the root level. They shouldn't be taught what buttons to push to get something to work on a specific platform...they should be taught the underlying principles of a desktop GUI so that they can use any OS they are put in front of. Sure every OS has its idiosyncracies...but by understanding the core concepts, a student can teach himself how to maximize his computing experience.
Pssst, some people use computers to do OTHER things! There might be some people who feel the need to disect everything and see how it works, but I doubt 6th graders would be in that group (or atleast 99.99999% of them). As I said before, some people use computer as a tool to do other work, and it is not in the interest of every computer user to see how it all works (i.e. the underlying principles, as you mentioned), but to just use the damned thing.
How about teaching them how to write and spell their own names with a pen and paper first?
Since ~40% of kids graduating from high school can't read, guess what those kids are going to do... surf the porn/Britney Spears photo crap etc. First teach kids to read, write and do math.
I would have to go with Windows... likely XP. The OS has to be simple to use, and it has to be something the children are familiar with, or at least can be familiarized with quickly. As much as Linux or Mac OS may be better in other aspects, I have yet to find a build of Linux that would be easy to set-up in this fashion AND user-friendly for all of the children. As for a Mac, while the OS may be more friendly is some ways, different peripherials are involved, including different keys on the keyboard, and different mice than the PC... As well, software could be a potential problem... the usual thing Mac and Linux users always hear. Sadly, it's pretty simple. They will pick Dell because the vast majority of computer users use PCs with some form of Windows on them, thus causing minimal training of the children, and there's never a shortage of Windows "professionals" to take care of the system.
For Windows NT:
Tools/devices needed: 3.5" USB floppy drive and a 3.5" disk
Software: NT Password Boot Disk
1. Download floppy image of NT Password Boot disk, write to a floppy
2. Boot from floppy
3. Change the local administrator's password
4. Log in as Administrator and add you to the local Administrators group
For MacOS X:
1. Power on
2. Hold Apple+S during the startup chord
3. Release keys after text screen appears; wait for the shell prompt
4. WARNING: YOU ARE SUPERUSER !!
Armed with a google search and some free time, all sorts of things can be done. The most important criterion is that they have physical control of the box.
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
That's why I recommended thin-clients. One of the links is to a site that has school case studies that have gone thin. And yes it works over a WAN. You can even get inexpensive or used terminals. Plus some companies have a trial period if you want to evaluate them.
These people are crazy. I don't think I've heard of anything more wasteful and useless in my life. I thought it was bad when South Dakota's previous governor kept putting Dell desktops in computer labs throughout public schools and universities, because they rarely ever got used. Not only that, but they were expensive, and kept getting replaced.
Now, there's this. Laptops for 6th graders. What braindead politician came up with this one? For one, a 6th grade kid is usually not responsible enough to take care of his bicycle, let alone a commercial electronics device with sensitive equipment that costs 5 times as much. They'll be broken within days as they put them in their laptops and lug them about.
That is, if they last for more than day to begin with. As someone else has mentioned, kids like money. Unless these kids are hardcore geeks, careful, and can run like a bat out of hell, chances are these laptops will a) be stollen or b) be sold within the first couple days. A laptop that is seen as primarily for writing reports and papers, is big (for their age) and heavy, and has to be lugged around is not something that a kid would want, when they could sell it and buy, say, two or three years of the most trendy clothing and toys. These are middle schoolers we're talking about, here.
What's more, they're 6th graders. I don't know if you guys remember 6th grade or not, but the majority of 6th graders in my school were affraid of the upper classmen (7th and 8th), because there were always a few that would pick fights, and there was always the chacne that your stuff would be stollen. I'm sure some 7th or 8th grader that didn't get a laptop will want one, and know just where to get one.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...about one of our local school districts.
I think the damage issues won't be too bad. It was pointed out that kids carry violins around too.
Remember, they will be learning _coursework_, not CS, so the OS doesn't matter so much. Mac has the advantage of (way) fewer games and probably some other advantages.
One thing that bothered me about our situation is that the schools saw a book savings because all the coursework will be on web sites. I really hope this isn't "education as learning facts." Will the kids be able to highlight? Write in the margins? DIALOG with the books as they think about what they are reading?
I find the biggest obstacle to technical education for my kid is the lack of technical capability, training and computer access for teachers. Many teachers are technophobes. I was a trainer for a while, and they were the most challenging group I worked with. Many administrators have been really slow to "get it" about the need to adopt technology.
This is the 1st year that my son's high school teachers will be expected to use the email addresses they have had for several years. Not all classrooms and offices have working computers with network access.
And this is in Maine, where the laptop experiment was tried. It was a huge PR sucess for the then-governor. As an education initiative, the money could have been used much more successfully elsewhere.
OK...I am a K-12 tech coordinator.
This free laptop thing is assinine. I am already doing way too many nodes as it is. They keep piling on this shit MS hardware.
I choose mac's, hands down. Netboot em all.
Political free hardware programs only help the agenda of the politician. Giving one grade a bunch of laptops makes no sense. We had to cut so many programs this year because of reduced state funding, it is insane to hear that they are handing out hardware. We have lost reading programs, after school programs, para professional staff, etc etc.
If anything, we need intensive staff training, standardization ( for support reason, and I would standardize on Mac) and realistic staff to node ratios. Is under 300-1 too much to ask?
And, I totally agree with the poster who said 'concepts' are what needs to be taught. Way to much time is spent denating the platform of choice. Cut copy and paste are all things that are similar...Platform does not matter in nearly all cases.
I'm currently a highschool senior at a vocational school that provides laptops for every student, about 2000 students total (junior and senior only school). The laptops provided for each student at my school would probable beg to be given to a 6th grader rather than having windows xp installed on it considering its an IBM thinkpad 390e which has a 300mhz p2 and 64MB of ram. This years juniors got IBM thinkpad A22e's and those only have 800mhz celerons and 128MB of ram. All these laptops are all runing Win98 because they just cant handle win2k or winxp without being bogged down so bad theyed be unuseable. OfficeXP boges them down enouth as is (ever see somebody type an entire page before the first character was displayed on the screen).
I dont see them getting 130000 NEW dell laptops for every 6th grader, its way to expensive compared to used/refurbished equipment.
Also, with just highschool juniors and seniors the IT department is constantly busy repairing or reimaging laptops because either hardware fails or acidents happen. I'd hate to work at a large school where every 6th grader has a laptop.
And even though our laptops cant handle winxp, weve had debian, knoppix, and gentoo running great on them =)
Training kids to use a computer only 2% will use in real life is foolish. Supporting Dell is another foolish thing. Small form factors based on VIA's mini ITX is the smart thing to do. Cheaper, smaller, less power consumption, and you have the flexibility to run any number of opterating systems. Having had a mother who is a teacher, and an uncle superintendent I have seen zero savings from Mac usage. I could not recommend them and feel good about it. I can recommend MINI ITX small form factors, and not blink.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
What do they think that the Dells would come with? Thanks to Microsoft's "loss" in the judgement you get to chose from:
1. A flavor of Windows XP
2. A flavor of Windows XP
or
3. Another flavor of Windows XP?
The BeOS and Linux options were optioned out quite awhile ago thanks to the terms of MS licensing.
My personal vote would be for iBooks, Apple had better get on their toes and make sure they don't bungle this deal.
@ $30,000/yr salary, that $39 million dollars can pay for 1300 teachers! Or hire less but give them all raises!!! WTF!?!?!?!
Which do I think is more likely to help the kids in the future; a nice new laptop or reduced class sizes and more teachers?? If the kids need computers, give them 400 MHz computers, they do NOT need brand new comps.
GEEZ!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can see a laptop being used in a high school setting but in middle school your just asking for trouble. First off we want learning to take place in the class room... giving kids laptops with wireless cards... can you say lan party. And theft is another big issue. Do you want to be a kid caring around a $1200 laptop? (When I was in school I would forget where I put my lunch.) Last of all the money should go back to the colleges where it came from. The governor found it necessary to cut funding to public universities in Michigan quite a bit. I'm glad to see it's getting used in a productive and intelligent way. j/k
I would normally be all over Dell winning this contract. But since I do corporate wireless networking support...I'm not sure I want calls from 1,000 elementary school IT guys who can't figure out their 1,300 systems with wireless cards.
So maybe this one should go to Apple...
p.s. This was sarcasm...I'm all for Dell winning the contract! *looks around for management*
Michigan is facing quite large budget shortfalls (they seem to be growing by hundreds of millions each week) and because of this they are slashing funding to ALL adult ed, most advanced programs and math and science centers and public universities. While this might be helpful, we _need_ to have GED testing centers and reasonable rates for college kids. If one were a dropout on their own trying to put their life back toger, you are SOL in Michigan. If you are a poor college kid, things just got a lot harder. And honestly, the schools in michigan (at least those that I have seen) cannot handle the technology that they currently have.
Virginia had a similar program as I recall. This article demonstrates that the VA program was, unfortunately, more of a boon for the porno industry and online gaming community than anything else: http://news.mainetoday.com/indepth/laptops/020207l aptop.shtml
These are 6th graders, they're gonna screw around with em. Going with iBooks with OSX would limit them from installing games or filling up the HD with crap from p2p. Those are the same things some Mac users complain about, but for something issued by the school thats supposed to be for education, its a good thing.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Other than religous schools, it's pretty much carte blanc what school you want to go to..if you can get in. All the schools get the same funding, so a small Uni-backed, parent supported school can pay a non-union teacher 2/3 pay and offer lots of "perks" for the students that the larger public schools, that have to accept everyone in their district, can't. There's a real threat to the school system here because the money is draining out of the public schools. It dosen't cost $6k to teach every student, but part of that money goes to facility maintenance, computers, gymnasiums, libraries, chem labs, career centers, etc that these charter schools just don't provide. Many of the Charter schools get each family a computer for their home to do homework and stuff on [they save that much money on other stuff] I think Granholm is trying to get some of the students back!
Frankly, before they get computers, they need software to run on them. I haven't seen a really good educational software package anywhere that would suit the needs of said students. The state should be investing in OSS software for all the schools to use FIRST. Then if it's really good, get computers for the students. That said, many schools in the state already have computer labs with fairly modern PCs. Michigan is really 3 parts, Detroit/city, suburban outstate, and rural. The detroit & rural schools need this most, they have been hit worst by the former governer's budget "toying" the suburban schools are mostly doing fine, we're willing to pay extra tax to make up for His errors. But, the school of choice is really cutting into the suburban schools [you know grass is greener... type stuff] So they really need the PR boost.
if you can get everything setup on a linux box, and not have to change anything, OR, every machine is networked (sounds so), then linux. otherwise windows.
-P
Then kids would be learning the most prolific productivity environment, and the special kids (eg high school 3dsmax club) would be able to have thier cake and eat it too.
The maintanance would be minimal if we could set them to automatically install all of the latest windows updates.
But I would most likely go with a linux solution (samba/whatever) for the backend. That way we wouldn't have all the hacker worries and just have to deal with email worms, which we could buy software for if neccesary.
Many Thanks,
Luke
On the other hand, it seems that I am paying more for that "no-service" and am a bit confused. I remember shopping around for complete systems a few times, giving in it seemed to time contraints. Yet, once again I was forced to do the ugly detailed research and actually find what system configurations worked. All I really needed at that point was hardware and software support for my system so that in the future I would NOT have to fix the problem myself. Looking at the knowledge base, it was clear that was not the case. Looking at the configuration options (assuming I wanted to NIX (haha) the use of AMD, I was even more at a loss. So in the end the choices were to:
- Pay more, get less, get shipped things (e.g. the OS) I wouldn't use, and get the runaround when asking tech questions.
- Build it myself, save tons of cash and actually have the tech specs on hand, not that jumbled "system specs" you get after logging in and entering that Dell code.
Really, who's idea was it to replace common brandnames of components and their part numbers/IDs with Dell specific and useless names? That does me NO good when looking for a component list to record in an inventory database.Its no longer, "I want my child to get a great education" as much as it is "I want my child to get letters next to their name to guarantee good job placement." PHB's say, "Uhh, what's the difference?" Heh, viva la small business!
6th Grade?
Amigas for Everyone !
New employees, especially young ones must "conform." Conform did not mean necessarily doing what they told you and doing it well. It did not really mean not rocking the boat either. "Conform" meant that you blindly accepted foolishness even when it meant screwing both the company and the customer.
Oh, I know what you are thinking... "Well, you don't have the knowledge yet to understand the subtle nature of business" yet the attitude was never (by management) one of "Its good you are concerned, however understand that X and Y have led consistently to a bigger and better Z. I ask you to trust me based upon evidence and not blind faith. Your observations of unethical behavior and showboating are disturbing and must be addressed instead of being ignored. Thank you." Rather it was, "ummm, we pull in lots of money and stuff... so you are stupid." Looking at the morale, ingenuity, teamwork and productivity levels of veteran employees it becomes clear that like a Geisha's footsize, these poor employees were only a fraction as productive as they could have been given the correct direction and leadership.
You guessed it ...
USB 2.0 compliant
Digital Mammary Glands !
as the response would be, "then you fail on the grounds of not backing up." Not to mention data forensics and recovery. No, I like your analogy but I can imagine this being used as an excuse quite a lot until the above happens.
I agree and to go even further. I predict that the same will trickle down to the home user. But instead of thin clients, and blades on the other end. It will be thin clients on one, and "appliances" i.e. net, application, etc on the other end.
When Mr. Bill started the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, he promised and swore it was to research medicine for diseases in Third World countries that were unprofitable for pharmaceutical companies to research. I thought it was awesome that someone was finally tackling this problem. I thought this was the Bill Gates many people admired, now the greatest philanthropist in history, etc, etc.
Now we find out the point of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is to push programs like this that expand his empire and make him richer? Not that there is anything wrong with Bill making money or anything, but this is seriously fucked. To me it represents a grave disservice and at least proves that once again he is up to no good as usual, saying one thing and doing another.
Now some wiseacre is probably going to pipe up and say "Well it's *his* money you dirty hippy he can do what he wants with it!" and I agree. But that does not mean it was not dishonest to get all this press about one altruistic purpose for the Foundation when it is really a completely selfish purpose he has in mind. To me that is the meat of this story and it is no wonder it is underreported. At least slashdot got a blurb in on it.
If however, one of the goals is to teach computer literacy, then it is vital that the kids learn that there is more to computers than one vendor, one tool, one way to skin the cat. To do otherwise is to expand the precident already in place of teaching children that critical thought and problem solving are unnecessary in modern civilization.
I would hope that there is more to this program than simply providing word processing and browsing devices to the kids. If not, then they should be setting up thin-clients and worrying not about the cute and cuddly crap of the GUI and get down to business. (that would set a good example for all future computing done by these children, IMO)
When I was in school, I can clearly remember me loosing all respect for most of my teachers due to their attitude and unprofessionalism. Thus I quickly lost interest and became one of those minor disruptive students. However, there WERE those very few teachers who were very disciplinarian, very effective and VERY demanding. Most students hated, and I do mean HATE, those teachers yet I found them to be fantastic. I learned more from them because I was encouraged to learn and grow. The others were no different than many of the sheep you see today. Sadly, the age old pattern there is lost and the cycle continues.
I was always amazed how very intelligent students would be so eazily written off but that after graduation would become so interested in learning. Why? Because they 'learned' that "learning" is a good thing, you must just trim away the fat... teachers. (apologies to the good teachers out there)
Also, don't ever confuse higher wages with better qualification. That and the relationship between higher salaries and ATTRACTING more talent is a definite bell curve. I myself have been in both positions, paid too much compared to coworkers who were clearly more qualified and worthy and then doing all the actual work while incompetence and lack of work was rewarded in others. It takes diligence beyond any standardized test, grade report, or teacher satisfaction survey to determine the good teachers from the bad. That lesson alone is the most important one in life as it encourages critical thought, use of logic and reason, and an undying quest for perfection weighed against the realization that perfection is actually impossible to obtain.
Well, everyone on earth is using PC's. I've supported both and all I'll say is that users who are good with mac's are usually not very good with PC's. For that reason, they would be doing the students a disservice by not preparing them for the business world with Windows. Those who are going to be sysadmins won't learn those skills in school anyway so forget linux.
On the other hand, I wouldn't want to be one of the people supporting all those Dell laptops. We used to get them at work and they're the most unreliable laptops I've ever scene. Changing the model didn't make a differance. We have around 20 of them. They are trash! We've had bad motherboards, memory, screens, keyboards, mouse click buttons that fall off, hard drives - pretty much everything. When you get in a new dell laptop there is usually a new bios that fixes some really bad display anomoly.
Optiplex desktops are great but I could never recomend the laptops.
How about a thinkpad. Not cool enough...why not a sony - can't be worse than dell.
I can't even begin to imagine the headache much less the liability this would cause for the local school and their tech geek/sys admin. Think you have enough problems keeping campus machines going? How would like a group of whinny 6th graders outside your office door every day complaining their laptop is broken? I'd say no to the added headache.
You didn't understand what I was saying. I believe that once someone understands the desktop GUI, they can use virtually any OS. I don't mean they have to learn the low level stuff...just things like what "Menus" are and how they work and what the ubiquitous ones ("File", "Edit", etc.) generally contain, what a dialog box is, what a file browser is, etc.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
You're going to have to format them at the end of the year anyways, after the kids are done with them, may as well put Windows 98 on it, and it will start to get horribly unstable right around the time a new class is going to use them.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
First of all I doubt these laptops are ever going to leave the school. They'll probably be put to bed in a safe place between classes and after school.
Second, for pete's sake order them with no writable removable storage.
And give a team of about a dozen people about a year to develop a custom bootable cdrom or dvdrom.
These would be unique to each user, and would contain crytpo certificates to identify the user. Don't even bother trying to get a hundred thousand 11yos to remember their passwords.
First thing it would do on boot is checksum itself and everything that needs to be on the hard drive. If it found problems it would reinstall itself.
Then it would connect to the WLAN, cryptographically authenticated, using a VPN over the WLAN if nothing else is secure enough. If it detected a duplicate or other suspicious activity, that boot cd would be invalidated. Without the keys, nothing gets on the network.
All storage on the network.. use afs/dfs w/kerberos.
Kerberize all other apps.. you could even kerberize web proxy with the sources to mozilla.
You get the idea. This is the only way to keep maintenance/admin cost down.
It's spelled article
I would give the kids Windows XP. That way, the computers will cause so much trouble that Michigan will pass a law mandating the use of free software instead of Microsoft's garbage.
You know, they're still young. They haven't stopped having the ability to absorb knowledge they're given directly yet, but they also still have complete curiosity about the universe. Meaning: Give 'em Linux, the hardest one you can find, and tell them to learn how to use it themselves. If they like their laptops, they will. It's not a matter of ease of use, like it would be with a computer they used only at their scbool. They can take these home, play with them, figure them out. If they have a problem, it's like they have a 1000 member LUG they visit every day. Even better, give them laptops with blank drives, and a list of OS possibilities. Windows 98: $150 Windows XP: $300 OS X: $(illegal conversion of NULL to char*) Linux: $0.39 / disc burnt. That'll teach them something about the real world. EOT
I mod down pathetic posts.
I've worked as technical support in an elementary school that had a "mobile lab" of snow iBooks. Now, I realize that it's not quite the same as giving one laptop to every student, but they were used quite regularly for large portions of the day.
It's not as bad as everyone thinks.
First of all, you will have the odd kid who manages to get grape jelly on the machines (no, I'm not telling that story right now, sorry). However, the vast majority of them understand that it's a piece of equipment that they need to take care of. It doesn't matter how much it costs, they'll treat it with care anyway.
Second, you might be surprised at what use teachers can get out of them -- especially with wireless access. I'm sure a lot of you have seen those "visions" of the future things, where every kid has access to media the teacher is using to illustrate the point, in realtime sync etc etc. This is one step toward that, and it really does work.
Third, there is absolutely no question that NOT choosing Apple for this would be the biggest mistake the IT department could possibly make. The iBooks and both OS 9 and X hold up very well in real world usage. The fast-recovery tools are excellent -- Apple works with schools to make sure the support needs are met. With Apple, the solutions are very quick and straightforward. The Windows environment can't match that, and I don't have much faith in the mass-management mechanisms behind commercial Linux support. They're far too complex for the uses these laptops are going to be put to.
Dells running whatever OS would be more appropriate for older students -- high school or college age.
My own history includes work with schools for a long time -- I volunteered after school in 6th grade, and 8 years later I had a full-time job doing IT support in the same area. I'd like to think it's given me a better idea of what this education environment is like than some of the previous posters.
Since when administration is reduced to fix it or ghost it?
Security, security, security.
You can't ghost your way out of that, and given the nature of todays's technology you need a competent IT support group to provide for that.
Give me a break, how anybody sensible can consider a good policy to delegate administration and problem troubleshooting in neophytes?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You are joking.
AD is LDAP or the other way around. The point is that that point is not a point at all.
What is the downside for a 6th grader of not having Office? It is not like children go around sharing Word documents to their clients... It is like somebody saying "oh poor students, they don't have pens to write their assignment". Ludicrous.
Why would schools want to run MS Office? Mental blockage and lack of respect for budgetary concerns are the only reasons I can think of.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
More correctly, as a brainless Apple droid, you choose what you like. Apple has LESS than 10 percent of the market share. What you are really saying is that you want the children to be at an extreme disadvantage in the real world. They will have to Re-learn about PC's when they hit the workforce. You are a typical non-thinking individual. Please cease posting, I will stop flaming your obvious lack of intelligence if you do.
My Response-A messsge to flameboy. Bite the ass of the world!
I've worked as an admin in school districts for both an Apple network and a Wintel network. Know what? The Apple network was a hell of a lot easier to secure, and maintain. The Wintel network, I ended up having to apply for OT every couple of weeks to patch every PC. Plus all the other random querks that come with maintaining PCs. GPFs, Bluescreens, .dll hells etc.
I didn't have to worry about some jerk off coming in with an infected disk, or installing a CD with permission. Also, the students and faculty who owned Apples at home were more patient and respecting of my job than the ingrates and trolls who were die-hards Wintel users. The Apple users were more accepting of having to use multiple platforms. Meanwhile the Wintel users were constantly bitching about having to use these "boat anchors", and how they couldn't find where anything was. Whine whine bitch bitch. Hopefully Michigan does itself a favor and buyes the Apple laptops posthaste. Not because of my bias, but because it's the cheapest longterm solution.
BTW you fucktard, the only reason why people would have to be retrained in the workforce is that brainless mindzombies like yourself kneejerk into badmouthing Apple and keeping out of the workforce. It's the damn chicken and the egg. Businesses don't buy Apple (or other OS of choice) because Apple doesn't have a large market share, but Apple can't get a large market share because business WON'T BUY FROM THEM!
I can also turn around your arguement as well. Maybe business should be buying Apple because they are already being used in school, and it wouldn't TAKE THEM ANY TIME TO RETRAIN A WORKFORCE BECAUSE THEY ALREADY KNOW HOW TO USE THE PLATFORM.
If there's anybody still moderating, please feel free to knock my post down to -1 Flamebait or -Troll.
try searching versionntracker.com ...personally I didn't go with the whole "ramrod the whole OS down the network"
Instead I use Radmind www.radmind.org to manage our OS X n Linux stations. When something goes screw or if you have the process automated via cron it does a checksum against the current filesystem versus a transcript then downloads only the files it needs to go back to the loadset.
Imagine sending 15-20MB over the network vs the whole OS whenever anything goes wrong.
as an educational researcher and a tech of education professor, i heartily endorse all Apple products after 15 years of struggling (often very unsuccessfully) with windows based machines. i will never buy another windows computer.
Personally I would not suggest such a liability as running Windows in such a mass, it will NOT be easy to control...If a Virus / Worm comes up and manages to infect you what are you going to do, Ghost the whole school? the whole District?
I'd go with A Unix based and yes probably Apple, simply because it IS an easier OS to pick up yet it has a bit of bite to it if they want to learn.
Not that the kids won't do thinngs to a Unix based but at least it won't be a massive all at once failure you like could receive if a worm gets in)
To manage all of it I'd use what I use to manage OS X now. Radmind (www.radmind.org)
#1 its free opensourse
#2 its a way to remotely manage filesystems based on tripwire. You have transcripts and routinely (cron, login, logout, manually) it checksums the file system against the designated transcript then any filedifferences the file is replaced over the network. Instead of ramroding the whole OS down the network you only replace/delete what has been changed.
#3 You can create one OS and have Overloads for all the differences (between classes for example)
have a script at the end assign say the machines name / any network settings based off the Ethernet MAC address from a table.
That and while I don't think the kids are incapable of caring for the labtops I still think the ibooks are more rugged than any dell I have even seen.
Course to be REALLY honest I also agree with several that this is NOT the best use of money.
Sorry for the AC but I'm a lazy bastard who doesn't like to register.
Your intentions are commendable, but the reality is how do you find teachers that can teach true computer concepts. All my teachers from grade school through high school (excluding the one competent programming instructor) were pretty clueless about using computers, let alone the underlying concepts. Note, I went to school in an upper-middle class neighborhood, not in a poverty stricken district suffering from underfunding.
And, afterall, the English did invent, or at least originate English, so their version is probably the most "correct" one. But I will agree with you on the pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet. Aside from "double-u" there are no other letters in English that are pronounced as "distinct-consonant-sound -> distinct-vowel-sound -> distinct-consonant-sound". The "zee" pronunciation (while sounding somewhat french) sounds much more like other letters "bee", "see", "dee". As the pulp fiction characters so aptly put it, zed's dead man. Zed's dead.
Speaking of international uses, it even has better Unicode support -- two clicks and I can be typing in Hebrew, for example.
Your basis for comparison is ten years out of date, at least.
>False analogy. My Mac powerbook goes to the same websites, runs the same java apps, runs the same Perl scripts, reads the same word documents, plays the same music, burns the same CDs and DVDs, writes to the same network shares, authenticates with the same domains, plays the same movies, views the same pictures, uses the same USB devices, uses the same wireless and ethernet standards, can hook up to the same televisions and stereos, and plugs into the same wall sockets as any other laptop.
:-)
No, it isn't a false analogy.
People who don't speak english can do anything someone who can speak english can do, within the confines of their own language. Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll pretend you're right) except you can't run anything I would run. You can run translations of the apps, but that's as close as it gets. I've heard "The windows version of this app works better" from enough Mac users to know that doesn't cut it.
That's just like someone who speaks French can say any English word translated into French, but it still isn't English, is it?
>Your basis for comparison is ten years out of date, at least.
Interesting. Can I record DVB-S signals on a Mac yet? That's the main use of my PC at the moment. Oh, and I need to be able to run all the various Xbox and PS2 modchip tools also. I can do that with a Mac also? If so, cool! If not, well, it's a waste of my money to buy a Mac.
I guess, last but not least, I can buy a Mac for $459.99 CDN new including the OS, right? Because if I could, that'd be cool -- I might actually try one then.
But then again, those things were invented within the last 10 years, so perhaps Macs are only 10 years out of date. Beats me! Why not inform me on this! It's the opportunity of a lifetime!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>someone who can speak english can do, within the
>confines of their own language.
That is precisely why this is a false analogy. 'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply, when the issue is one of 'comminicating with 95% of others', for in the case of communication between a Mac, a PC, and a Linux box, the "languages" are the same. Hence my list: Same websites, java apps, perl scripts, word documents, CDs, DVDs, network shares, domains, USB devices, wireless ethernet, televisions and monitors, and wall sockets. It's not that they're equivalent within confines, they are in fact the same protocols.
A batter analogy would be that, no matter where you buy your shoes, you're still able to walk on 95% of the same sidewalks.
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can
>do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very
>much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll
>pretend you're right)
Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim. But I'll go along with you:
>except you can't run anything I would run. You
>can run translations of the apps, but that's as
>close as it gets.
Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"? Must be CPUs?
>That's just like someone who speaks French can
>say any English word translated into French, but
>it still isn't English, is it?
Leveraging the false analogy, see above.
>Interesting. Can I record DVB-S signals on a Mac
>yet? That's the main use of my PC at the moment.
You had to dig pretty deep to come up with that, didn't you? Show me statistics that indicate that this is a major - or even minor - concern for ONE PERCENT of computer users the world over, and I'll eat my hat.
> Oh, and I need to be able to run all the various
> Xbox and PS2 modchip tools also. I can do that
> with a Mac also?
Now why would you be wanting to run those? >:)
>I guess, last but not least, I can buy a Mac for
>$459.99 CDN new including the OS, right? Because
>if I could, that'd be cool -- I might actually
>try one then.
*yawn* And if I could get a 700 series BMW for ten bucks, that'd be great too. Straw man again. That must be the only trick you know?
>It's not that they're equivalent within confines, they are in fact the same protocols.
Cool, by that definition, your mac is fully commodore 64 compatible. The C64 can read CDs, could run Java applets (if someone was bothered to write a JVM), and connects easily to an ethernet network. It also runs on standard wall socket.
Wow, didn't know the Mac was so universal. Again, you've educated me. I just wonder, how can I fit a C64 disk into a Mac? Your knowledge of the units appears so vast, I'm sure you will be able to explain it to me.
>'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply
That's interesting, I never knew Macs could run x86 code. That's cool. You've educated me.
I'll make sure I say "garote explained to me that the Macintosh CPU supports x86 code" whenever someone questions me on this.
>Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
Ho hum, It's tedious quoting other users own words. Surprised you couldn't remember them being you said them today:
My Mac powerbook goes to the same websites, runs the same java apps, runs the same Perl scripts, reads the same word documents, plays the same music, burns the same CDs and DVDs, writes to the same network shares, authenticates with the same domains, plays the same movies, views the same pictures, uses the same USB devices, uses the same wireless and ethernet standards, can hook up to the same televisions and stereos, and plugs into the same wall sockets as any other laptop.
Of course, if you really are focusing on the fact it plugs into the same power outlet, well, so does my fridge. Why waste so much space to say that?
>Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"? Must be CPUs?
Perhaps you don't program. Let me explain how a computer runs:
Machine code is executed to perform various operations on the computer. Every CPU has it's own code (called a 'language') that is often incompatible with other processors (often called the 'computer' by the less experienced, or in general discussion). Machine code is often compiled ('translated') from higher level, more generic code, such as C, Fortran, or Cobol. This makes programs more portable, however, they are unable to run directly on the computer, as they are not in that computer's language (machine code).
I'm happy to educate you, just as you've educated me, of course.
>You had to dig pretty deep to come up with that, didn't you? Show me statistics that indicate that this is a major - or even minor - concern for ONE PERCENT of computer users the world over, and I'll eat my hat.
It's what I sell, it's what I use. And that's the same reverse argument I use about the Mac: Show me 1% of users that think the ability to use photoshop is a minor concern to using their computer. The numbers will be about equal (you'd be surprised how many people want these cards -- I've sold 1 per 2 computers I've sold -- I can't even keep the damn things in stock they fly off the shelves that fast!).
>And if I could get a 700 series BMW for ten bucks, that'd be great too. Straw
man again. That must be the only trick you know?
I think I already told you once, fuck you.
This time, the jokes on you. I *run* a computer store. Here's the specs, and if you want that machine for that price, I'll be happy to ship it to you tomorrow (shipping not included, of course). No, it's well above wholesale prices, I don't take anything close to a "hit" on cost at this price. Maybe before you accuse someone of a straw man argument (which is the only way YOU know of ending a conversation you can't win) you'd like to click the link under someone's username?
Specs:
- 1.3 Ghz Duron CPU
- 128 MB RAM
- 40 GB HDD
- 52x CD-ROM
- Built on Video, LAN, Sound
- Windows XP Home edition, pre-installed, ready to go
So, tell me, being that these are all new parts, what equivalent new low-end Mac can I purchas
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Cool, by that definition, your mac is fully commodore 64 compatible.
You know, Shep, I really admire the way you twist the argument around semantic games rather than debating substance. That's really cool.
Oh, wait. Not cool. That's not the word I was thinking of. I meant to say "fucking lame." Sorry.
I never knew Macs could run x86 code.
I do it every day, using a little program called Virtual PC. Works incredibly well.
Let me explain how a computer runs
The bit about how you're sarcastic and arrogant and condescending is also really fucking lame. I mean, it might be funny if you were actually correct about anything, but as it is it's just really fucking lame.
So, tell me, being that these are all new parts, what equivalent new low-end Mac can I purchase, ready to go, for that price?
There is no such thing as a low-end Mac. They simply don't exist. The lowest-end Macintosh you can find--either an eMac or an iBook, depending on whether you're looking for a desktop or a laptop--comes with a top-of-the-line color-calibrated display, stereo speakers, FireWire, iLife, DVD, and most importantly Mac OS X. That puts it in a different class from the little toy you talked about. I mean, shit. How do you organize your music with your computer? There's no iTunes, and nothing equivalent to it. How do you organize your schedule? There's no iCal. There's no iMovie, so editing movies is out... but that's okay, because there's no FireWire so you can't get the movies into the computer from your camera anyway.
Your argument boils down to this: Apple doesn't sell computers that meet my scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel specs, therefore they suck. Whatever, dude.
What new Mac makes a good business computer for the value conscious?
Any Mac makes an excellent business computer for the value-conscious. The eMac in particular. Because, you see, the key word is "value." Not "price." "Value" is the idea of getting a lot of bang for your buck, getting a lot of stuff for every dollar you spend. The value--the ratio of stuff per dollar--of an eMac just can't be beat.
Now, if you don't want to buy a Mac, fine. Frankly, the community of Mac users is glad not to have you: you're an arrogant, condescending little shithead who thinks that assembling beige boxes from spare parts in the middle of the arctic wastelands makes him an authority. But when you start making up random arguments for why your personal opinions are well-founded and universal, I just feel compelled to call you on it.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
>You know, Shep, I really admire the way you twist the argument around semantic games rather than debating substance. That's really cool.
You know, I really tire of your lack of knowledge. How can I prove that?
Why, in the next things you say!
>I do it every day, using a little program called Virtual PC. Works incredibly well.
In other words, you've used an emulator. That's nothing like running PC code at all. In fact, that's the same as saying my PS2 is a nintendo because there's an emulator for it. It isn't.
>The bit about how you're sarcastic and arrogant and condescending is also really fucking lame. I mean, it might be funny if you were actually correct about anything, but as it is it's just really fucking lame.
Clearly you needed it, though. I mean, you think an emulator makes your computer the same as what it emulates. Uhhuhh, yeah, right...
Interesting how you're willing to bend the truth to suit your needs, but when it doesn't suit you, you're willing to cry like a baby over spilt milk.
>There is no such thing as a low-end Mac. They simply don't exist.
That would explain the lack of penetration of Macintosh into the business and home areas. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave hardly any "wedge room", and is why Mac will always remain an inferior system for a long time to come (perhaps until prices come down to the point that the difference between "cheap" and "quality" is only $50).
>That puts it in a different class from the little toy you talked about.
Yes, it puts it in the class of having a bunch of features you really don't need. And puts it totally out of the business class. And put it out of the reach of most home users. Again, exactly HOW does that make a Macintosh superior? Because it runs OSX? Because its higher prices make it "elite"? Because it includes features the majority of computer users have decided they really don't want or need? I mean, Volvos come with ass heaters, but the majority of the public has decided this isn't an important feature, so the car doesn't sell anywhere near as well as a Toyota Corolla which is ass heaterless.
Both cars get you from point A to point B at exactly the same speed. Just one has a lot of junk built into it nobody wants and costs a bundle to get fixed/upgraded. Interestingly enough, this applies very well to the Mac/PC argument, except that while the Mac is feature-laden, it requires emulators (how pathetic) to run all the popular software.
>There's no iTunes, and nothing equivalent to it.
Thank God. That's one hell of an overpriced shitty service. I can buy REAL CDs for less, quicker, and they aren't DRM encumbered.
>How do you organize your schedule? There's no iCal.
Outlook is free with windows, and is the choice of the majority of the population, so it must be good enough.
In fact, Microsoft has been offering scheduling software free with their OS since before the Mac II, if I remember correctly. You're at least 13 years out of date on this "fact", my friend.
>There's no iMovie, so editing movies is out...
LOL! Windows has come with video editing software for a very long time. Get in touch...
BTW: I was editing movies for free with windows for far longer than you could do it for free on a Mac. And it was easier, and cheaper, too. Nothing available for a Mac could touch the value I got from my Rainbow Runner-G series at the time.
>but that's okay, because there's no FireWire so you can't get the movies into the computer from your camera anyway.
Actually, it is fine because the majority of cameras are now including USB 2.0 anyways. Not that both of my PCs don't have firewire in them, at a cost that truly puts a similar Mac to shame (As you've noticed, I use my PCs for some high-end activities). For well under $1,000 you too can get a dream PC that will have all the features above, and much, much, much more than a Mac.
>Any Mac
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
In other words, you've used an emulator.
Yes. I am. I can run Windows and Windows applications on my Mac. Can you run Mac OS X or Mac OS X applications on your PC? Who's more compatible?
That would explain the lack of penetration of Macintosh into the business and home areas. Unfortunately, that doesn't leave hardly any "wedge room", and is why Mac will always remain an inferior system for a long time to come
There's the problem. You think "lack of penetration" (what incredibly patriarchal language; you should be ashamed) is the same as "inferior." That's incorrect.
Yes, it puts it in the class of having a bunch of features you really don't need.
I don't recall giving you the authority to tell me what I really need. Remember, you're just a nobody from nowhere. Your opinion of what I really need--or, more generally, what a person really needs--is completely out of line with reality, so I give this statement no consideration whatsoever.
And puts it totally out of the business class. And put it out of the reach of most home users. Again, exactly HOW does that make a Macintosh superior?
Sigh. It's superior because it's better. By any measurable criteria, it's better. It works better, it looks better, it does more. It's a better value for the money.
I mean, Volvos come with ass heaters, but the majority of the public has decided this isn't an important feature, so the car doesn't sell anywhere near as well as a Toyota Corolla which is ass heaterless.
Ever been in a car with heated seats? Living in a snowbank as you do, you'd appreciate it.
Now let's hear why a Toyota Corolla is a better car than a Volvo. (Volvo? Whatever. Mercedes is what you're looking for.)
Both cars get you from point A to point B at exactly the same speed. Just one has a lot of junk built into it nobody wants and costs a bundle to get fixed/upgraded.
Sure, dude. Whatever you say. If you don't understand why heated seats or a sunroof or power windows are good and worthy things, there's no sense in trying to explain it. Also, if you don't understand why FireWire, iLife, and the rest are good and worthy things... well, you know.
Bottom line is that this has more to do with your being an idiot than it does with any objective facts.
That's one hell of an overpriced shitty service.
Earth to Shep: iTunes and the iTunes Music Store are not the same thing. If you ever manage to pull your head out of your ass long enough to take a look around you, let me know so we can continue this discussion. Okay?
Outlook is free with windows
No, Outlook Express is free with Windows. All it does is email. Outlook is a productivity application that you have to pay extra for. And while it's not just a calendaring program, its calendar portion is demonstrably inferior to iCal. Can you have multiple calendars with Outlook? Can you sync them between computers with Outlook? Can you publish them to a web site with Outlook?
Moving on now.
Windows has come with video editing software for a very long time.
Nope. You've already demonstrated a colossal ignorance of iTunes and iCal, so it should come as no surprise that you don't know what iMovie is, either.
Explain this one to me, Shep: how do you intend to use this alleged video editing software that comes with Windows if your computer doesn't have a FireWire port? There's no way to get the video in or out!
Actually, it is fine because the majority of cameras are now including USB 2.0 anyways.
Again with the ignorance. You can't do video over USB. USB isn't a video transport. It's just a data transport. FireWire is both: it has a video transport protocol and a data transport protocol, which is why you can use it for both video and data.
You cannot do video I/O with USB. Non-real-time data transport, maybe, but not DV25 video. Which is, after all, what we're
>Cool, by that definition, your mac is fully commodore 64 compatible
...
... Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card signal decoders.
= straw man crap
>>'Within the confines of their own language' does not apply
>
>That's interesting, I never knew Macs could run x86 code. >That's cool. You've educated me.
= straw man crap
>>Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
>
>Ho hum, It's tedious quoting other users own words.
>Surprised you couldn't remember them being you said
>them today:
(blah blah)
Correct, that's exactly what I said.
Now here's what you claimed I said:
>Just like with a Mac, according to you, you can
>do anything I'd do on a PC (I doubt that very
>much, but hey, for the sake of argument I'll
>pretend you're right)
Once again:
Straw man, my friend. I made no such claim.
>>Are you talking CPUs, or languages, here, when you say "translation"?
>>Must be CPUs?
>
>Perhaps you don't program. Let me explain how a computer runs:
>
>Machine code is executed to perform various operations on the computer.
>Every CPU has it's own code (called a 'language')
Moron. Machine code is not a language. C and C++ are languages. Machine code is machine code, and is what languages -- even assembly language, which is essentially just machine code made more human-readable -- are COMPILED INTO. I knew this back in the 80's when I wrote an assembly language compiler in BASIC on an Apple II+. Get your definitions straight.
> It's what I sell, it's what I use. And that's the same reverse argument I
> use about the Mac: Show me 1% of users that think the ability to use
> photoshop is a minor concern to using their computer. The numbers will
> be about equal
You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
> (you'd be surprised how many people want these cards -- I've sold 1 per 2
> computers I've sold -- I can't even keep the damn things in stock they
> fly off the shelves that fast!).
Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten.
>Specs:
> - 1.3 Ghz Duron CPU
> - 128 MB RAM
> - 40 GB HDD
Blah blah blah this whole paragraph is based on the straw man argument you just stated, and in fact has nothing to do with what I was talking about. Remember? I did not EVEN MENTION the relative costs of a Mac or a PC. You brought it up, you claimed I was disputing it, and then you proferred support for it. I've had nothing to do with the whole side-track. You act as if you're proving something to me - frankly I'm not interested in the relative cost of one computer component or another, as it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which I should probably remind you, is the compatibility level of Macs and PCs in real-world uses.
> The XBOX makes an excellent media center, I don't want my PS2 games
> ruined by kids at the shop, and, more importantly, I install modchips
> for a living.
Ahhh, I see, so you're a bit of a pirate? Let's see if I can get you in trouble with a few phone calls and some research then.
>Yes. I am. I can run Windows and Windows applications on my Mac.
I think we've already been over how emulators and being able to run the code on the hardware aren't nearly the same thing.
>You think "lack of penetration" (what incredibly patriarchal language; you should be ashamed) is the same as "inferior." That's incorrect.
You know, being in the minority often means you're doing something wrong. If you don't believe me, that's fine. I'll be in the majority, selling systems to a majority of happy customers. You, however, can enjoy trying to find work using a minority system. Wether that makes it inferior or not depends on how much you care about your career.
>Your opinion of what I really need--or, more generally, what a person really needs--is completely out of line with reality, so I give this statement no consideration whatsoever.
Yup, that's why I'm doing quintuple the sales of the average start-up shop, and that's why current projections show my 3 month old store doing better than established 5 year old stores before january. It's all because I have no idea what a customer needs. Yup. That must be it.
>Okay. Then why do you keep posting?
Because I'm amazed at the IQ level I'm seen here. I mean amazed in the archaic "Jesus Christ, I'm sorely amazed." way not in the new "Cool! That's amazing!" type way.
>I just bought a new CD. I want to put that CD on my portable music player. I put the CD into my computer, and then... well, that's it, actually. It automatically gets converted to AAC and synched up to my iPod. Can you do that with your beige box, with or without an iPod?
Sure, but I don't need to do that! I just play the CD in my CD player. Oh wait... yeah... Apple doesn't make CD/MP3 combo portables, do they?
>It was only $20 more from my wireless provider than the non-Bluetooth model, so I sprung for it. Whenever I bring my phone home, my computer automatically synchronizes my address book and my calendars to my phone, wirelessly. Can you do that with your beige box?
Actually, yes.
>How's the workmanship? Is it well put-together and factory-tested? (A Mac is.)
Yes. Built like a brick shithouse. I've dropped the damn things, all it does it make a dent. I've dropped a Mac. Fucking case smashed to smitherines.
If factory testing means getting cracks on case screws (the Mac cube) then it isn't worth spit.
>How's the industrial design? Is this build-it-yourself computer shit-ugly? (A Mac isn't.)
It's build it yourself easy to work with. (a Mac isn't)
>Is the monitor color-calibrated at 6,500 K? (A Mac's is.)
Yes. And 9,000 K (a Mac's isn't)
>Does the monitor have an electrical plug? (A Mac's doesn't.)
How is that a feature? So when the monitor dies and shorts out, you have to throw away the computer. Wow. I guess that does help Apple's bottom line though, eh?
>Does it have built-in AirPort? (A Mac does.)
Nope, it doesn't. Why don't you take a look at the model I linked that includes no WiFi? The one reccomended by a Mac zealot?
>Does it have Mac OS X? (A Mac does.)
Nope, thank God. I need to use my computer to do DVB stuff. Can't do that with OS X (or at least nobody here can tell me how to).
>Does it have iLife? (A Mac does.)
What the fuck is that? This shitware? Yuch. All built into one application? Blech. How absolutely horrid to build a Unix OS up, then tear down the entire core idea of Unix that is "One application, one function".
>[snipped bullshit about wordprocessors and invoices] Can you do that with your beige box without additional software? If so, how?
Yes. Install open office. Export to PDF. Done. One step. Probably costs less than doing it on a Mac too (did they finally finish the Open Office OS X port yet?).
For me it's just one step. After the invoice is ma
>= straw man crap
I have better things to do than listen to this. If you have no argument, I've won, and I'll leave it at that. PCs are obviously better than Macs in so many ways, and you're unable to beat my arguments, so that's ok.
>Machine code is not a language.
Then you know far less than you purport. If it's not a language, pray tell me, how was I able to do my second year EET project in it?
>You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
Hmmm, let's see. If I (a small computer shop) were able to sell even 1/100th of the amount of cards as Adobe sells copies of photoshop, that would make me right. I mean, in my city alone, there's 20 computer shops. That makes a lot more cards sold than copies of photoshop in Ontario alone, doesn't it?
Or are you just spouting off vitriol again?
>Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten.
I took statistics classes. If you don't think that's a statistic, fuck off. You're just not right.
>Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card signal decoders.
Let's see:
3 satellite stores in my city.
1 DTP shop.
Hmm, I'd say you're wrong. But perhaps you live in one of those strange parts of the world (Northern Alaska?) that is pretty much unable to receive satellite signals.
>Ahhh, I see, so you're a bit of a pirate? Let's see if I can get you in trouble with a few phone calls and some research then.
If, my enemy, this is what this argument has come down to, I've won.
Again, HAND. No need to reply to your stupid crap any more.
These are the people I need to call to file a John Doe libel suit against you, right? I'm not sure about US law, so perhaps you could enlighten me. Let's see if I can get you in trouble with only one phone call. Fortunately for me, you guys are 3 hours behind, so I have ample opportunity.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
My bad.
The number I really needed was this one. I didn't check your homepage closely enough. My fault.
Jeez, no phone number on the home page? That's a bummer. It's one of these, though, I assume:
Criminal Prosecutions (831) 454-2400
Watsonville D.A.'s Office (831) 763-8120
Victim Assistance (831) 454-2010
Consumer Affairs (831) 454-2050
Check Recovery Unit (831) 454-2233
Public Administrator (831) 454-3532
Investigations Bureau (831) 454-2121
If that doesn't work, I'll just try this one:
Santa Cruz Police Department
155 Center St.
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(831)420-5800
I suppose you should have taken that homepage down before libeling me. Well, what's done is done... now... where did I store wget?
I'll forgive and forget, though, if you apologize promptly. Everyone makes mistakes, don't they?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>>= straw man crap
>
>I have better things to do than listen to this. If you have no argument, >I've won,
Way to turn the tables, bonehead.
>PCs are obviously better than Macs in so many ways,
Same straw man shit. This is not what we were discussing.
>>Machine code is not a language.
>
>Then you know far less than you purport. If it's not a language,
>pray tell me, how was I able to do my second year EET project in it?
Pffft! You didn't encounter it until college? Loser. >:)
>>You're living in fantasy land if you think you sell even a
>tenth as many of those as Adobe has sold copies of Photoshop.
>
>Hmmm, let's see. If I (a small computer shop) were able to sell even
> 1/100th of the amount of cards as Adobe sells copies of photoshop, that
> would make me right.
At CONSERVATIVE estimate, Adobe sells two million copies of Photoshop every year, including educational discounts and volume licensing. Over the lifespan of the product, including upgrades, Adobe has sold over 20 million copies. And none of this includes the TENS OF MILLIONS of pirated copies created and/or sold every year.
, comma, you IGNORANT HICK.
Taking the lowest possible figure from this set, two million, that would mean that your dinky little shop would have to sell twenty thousand cards a year, or 80 cards every single business day of the year.
You lose, pal.
>>Those are not statistics. My hat remains uneaten.
>
>I took statistics classes. If you don't think that's a statistic, fuck >off. You're just not right.
Whether or not you took "statistics classes" is irrelevant. Those aren't statistics.
>>Which does not, by the way, encompass a niche-market such as PCI-card
>>signal decoders.
>
>Let's see:
>
>3 satellite stores in my city.
>
>1 DTP shop.
Mmmyep. That's a niche alright. was re: hick. You have no idea how big the rest of the world is, do you.
*yawn*
I still don't see an apology. It's not 5:00 pm where you live yet, it appears...
Have you considered one?
Probably not.
I am quite serious about considering the libel suit. You would do well to apologize.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I think we've already been over how emulators and being able to run the code on the hardware aren't nearly the same thing.
Sure they are, in this context. The question revolved around compatibility. Can Macs run Windows and Windows applications? Yes. Usefully? Yes. End of discussion.
The subsequent point, of course, is that PC's cannot runs Mac OS X or Mac OS X applications. So we're up one for the Mac, and down one for the PC.
You know, being in the minority often means you're doing something wrong.
I could argue the analogy, pointing out counter-example after counter-example. But I see little point in it. Not even you could be stupid enough to believe the bullshit you're spewing now.
You, however, can enjoy trying to find work using a minority system.
I'm turning away clients, actually. In fact, I just not five minutes ago billed a local client $1,200 for helping them configure Retrospect on their server. But thanks for your concern anyway.
Yup, that's why I'm doing quintuple the sales of the average start-up shop
You want a lolly-pop?
Because I'm amazed at the IQ level I'm seen here.
Me, too.
Sure, but I don't need to do that! I just play the CD in my CD player.
Good for you. It must be hard on your back to carry around 300 CD's. What do you use, some kind of backpack or something? As for myself, I just use my iPod.
Actually, yes.
Bullshit. I expect crap from you, Shep, but I don't expect outright lies. Even YOU should be ashamed by this.
Built like a brick shithouse.
That analogy is more apt than you realize: solid brick on the outside, nothing but shit on the inside, I'm sure.
If factory testing means getting cracks on case screws (the Mac cube) then it isn't worth spit.
Yawn. You think you're the first person to confused injection-molding seams with cracks? Old news, old story.
It's build it yourself easy to work with. (a Mac isn't)
You won't find a computer that's easier to work on than a G4 or G5. Period. And as for iMacs and eMacs, they're not for people who like to tinker. They're for people who don't like to tinker.
Most importantly, though, you don't have to work on your Mac. At any time, you can call up Apple or take it into an Apple retail store, and they'll fix or replace it for you overnight. Hell, they'll even give you a loaner machine if you need one. Can you do that with your beige box, Shep?
Yes. And 9,000 K (a Mac's isn't)
"Sure, 220, 221, whatever it takes." Whatever, Shep.
Nobody drives their monitor at 9000 K. 9000 K is blue, not white. 6500 K is as white as it gets for color work; 5000 K is often used for simulating paper-white under incandescent light.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's impossible to calibrate a monitor with the white point driven at 9000 K. The gamma curve would be too far off to bring into line with a transformation profile.
How is that a feature?
Reduces spaghetti.
So when the monitor dies and shorts out, you have to throw away the computer.
Wow. You're completely ignorant, aren't you? An Apple Studio or Cinema display has one plug: it carries digital video, power, and USB. To make my monitor work, I plug it into the computer. That's it. No mess, no spaghetti, no need for those silly little power-strips or extension cords.
And as for "when the monitor dies," you sure are concerned about things dying. You do understand that things don't die very often, right? You'd know that if you'd ever used quality gear in your life. But in the unlikely event that your monitor does "die," if you've got an all-in-one Mac or a laptop, you call Apple and they fix it overnight. If you've got a G4 or G5, you just get the Studio or Cinema display fixed, again overnight. (With a loaner from Apple.) No muss, no fuss.
Hey, Shep? You look like a complete dimwit. Are you unfamiliar with what "libel" means?
It's one thing if you're going to pretend to know more about computers than you do; this is Slashdot, that's what everybody does. But pretending to know something about the law? Giant, huge mistake.
Bottom line: you're a fucking Canuck, you have no rights here. Shut the fuck up or we'll bomb your fucking terrorist-loving Socialist regime back to the stone age, oh wait, you never clawed your way out of the stone age, did you?
Shithead. Shithead, shithead, shithead, shithead. STFU.
it is not just credentialling, in the academia there is also the issue of mixing up EDUCATION with TRAINING. As an example we can give teaching programming (an example of the former), and teaching VB (an example of the latter). Notwithstanding the fact that VB (yech!) is a useful tool (*ehm*), that is not education, that is a training in a specific technology. Now, if you were taught well how to program in a structured way (in Pascal if possible) or in OO style (I would use Java for this, but Smalltalk might be slightly better as teaching introspection there is a lot easier), then it does not matter which language you have to use, you can adapt very fast to new ones and even train yourself quite quickly. BUt now in Boston we even have a university that gives graduate credit for certification classes... great for credentialling, but education goes down the toilet when master students wind up taking "windows 2000 TCP/IP MCSE prep" instead of Operating Systems....
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller