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Software Monoculture in Schools?
The World Is Not Microsoft asks: "I've been worried by changes my school has made over the past year or so to the general computer setup we have. The school is a City Technology College, and as a result of this there are an abundance of computers around the building which everyone is free to use. When I first started there (almost six years ago now) there were approximately even numbers of Windows and Mac machines. As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements. What I'm bothered about is that when they did this they completely eliminated the Mac population, and by the time school starts again in September the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000. What's the situation like in other schools? Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?"
"There have been security problems with these systems in the past (mostly IE toolbars which requested content from sites which were blocked by the content filters, which caused problems for everyone), and with all the recent IE security problems I'm surprised that the people in charge aren't considering alternative systems (I know Linux would be too much to ask, but rolling out some OS X machines would be good). In addition to this, those who actually study ICT are required to use MS Office for spreadsheet and database tasks; no OpenOffice allowed."
At my school (University of Regina) they are actually going in the opposite direction. When I started 3 years ago, all of the public computers were Windows 98 or Windows 2000 - Now they have a complete Linux lab, another restricted lab that is 50/50 between Mac and windows. I really thing that going towards open source is a good idea, just based on the cost of licensing both windows and macintosh OSes.
At my school (Univ. of Arizona), there are definitely more MS-PCs more than Macs. I would assume this isn't some sort of takeover, but rather, simply because most people use Windows-running PCs. I wouldn't call this some sort of anti=(insert OS of your choice here) plan,but it just makes more sense. Simple economics also apply in this case. Most manufacturers do offer educational discounts, but I would assume under most circumstances, the PC is cheaper than the Mac....Consider
PC - $999 vs Mac - $1399
Now, don't mod me down or call my prices stupid/inaccurate/flamebaity, but just use those numbers as an example. For any college in these cash-strapped times (public or private), saving money where needed is mighty important, and if there is money to be saved somewhere, upgrading at lowest cost is probably one of the best ways to do so....Hell, if they had it their way, they'd probably not upgrade at all......
My MythTV HowTo
I work at an educational institution, and we have the machines locked down so that users cannot boot from CD. in addition, any attempt at something like the above would get the user in serious trouble (due to the usage agreements they sign).
the above is a very, very bad idea in most situations.
What I do find surprising is that the Univeristy of Waterloo's computer department went from 90% unix, 10% mac to 50% windows, 50% unix.
Waterloo is supposed to be one of the best technical schools in the world, and all it took was $10M from M$ to change that.
I work in the Computer Services department at a private school from which I graduated this June. As we speak, we are looking at ways to phase out our remaining Macs. When I started nearly four years ago, we were buying new Macs like crazy -- for multimedia and art in the upper school and for all purposes in the lower school. Now we're phasing them out. We took delivery of Dells to replace the Macs in our multimedia lab this spring, and we're getting a delivery of twelve new Dells with 17" flat panels tomorrow afternoon to replace the Macs in upper school art. In two year's time, the only Macs on campus will be ones in the lower school classrooms that we will have rigged up to run Citrix and connect to a Windows server.
Why are we doing this? There are several reasons.
1. Administration. Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory, hard-drive-based backup of network storage, web caching and filtering, and the like, we're having to jump through hoops to get our Macs to work with these new systems. Instead of hiring three Mac specialists to maintain the machines, it's cheaper to move to an all-PC environment.
2. Administration again. We've implemented RIS of all PC machines that can PXE boot, which is most of the ones on campus. If a machine is acting funky, we just PXE boot and walk away, and two hours later, all of the OS components and applications are restored to their original state -- the hard drive has been wiped clean and redone. Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps. We can't afford that.
3. Cost. Macs cost a lot. The machines that are getting delivered tomorrow are Dell Dimension 4600s with 2.8 GHz processors, 512 MB of dual-channel RAM, 80 GB hard drives, and 17" Dell UltraSharp flat panels. We got them for $800 a pop. You just can't compare a $900 eMac to that kind of value.
4. Upgrade cycle. This ties in with cost. We buy most of our PCs from Dell Refurb. We generally get them for about $400, upgrade them for another $100, and we have cheap, capbable machines. That means we can upgrade twice as often as if we buy $1000 Macs, and that translates to better experiences for students.
5. Compatibility. It's true -- there are more applications for PC and those that are cross-platform often run better on a PC. Even my die-hard Mac friends admit this. That means that if we buy PCs, we get an assurance that they will meet our needs. Also, our student-coded ColdFusion-based website barely runs on Macs -- so it's a no-brainer. PCs for all.
The official reasons: *nix is too hard for students to use and the world uses Microsoft exclusively, so why should they be different? This coming from a school with a slogan of "Why not change the world?" At least the CS dept sees the light and runs BSD and Solaris primarily, with a small sampling of Windows.
" Now that clones cost $600-$800 for a full fledged machine, and Apple still thinks it needs those margins. "
Wow you don't say.
Apple has nothing like that. Nope, not at all. Nope, 599.00 will not buy a 1GHz PowerPC G4 256MB DDR333 SDRAM 40GB Ultra ATA drive with 17" CRT display and stereo speakers built in.
And no... 300.00 more wont get you a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
256MB DDR333 SDRAM / 80GB Ultra ATA drive with SuperDrive.
Well, you may have gone to school, but that doesn't mean you've got a clue. I'd get back to manning that deep fat fryer before your 17yr old manager finds you playing on the computer.
I write this trying not to sound pretentious, but read it as you will. The Creative Writing department at my University has four separate computer labs, all with one-year-old (or less) computers. One lab has your standard Windows XP Professional machines. Another lab has about ten G5s, three of which have dual 20-inch Cinema displays and one which has dual 23-inch Cinema displays. No one in the department bothers to use this lab, but occasionally graduate students from computer science work there. The third lab has 25 Dell Precision 560s running Debian GNU/Linux (unstable). The final lab, and the only one that shows any wear (from its constant use) is the FreeBSD 5.2.1 lab. Each machine is powered by a dual Itanium 2. One of these machines is dedicated to running dictd and therefore runs headless, but the others run a heavily modified GNOME 2.6 desktop.
The four labs are kept separate to reduce inter-operating system fornication.
-Letter
Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?
.NET. Thankfully in a few of my CSET classes I'm not restricted to windows for my programming, but in others (some for no good reason) I've needed to break out the windows partition. While I'll agree that VS isn't such a horrible piece of software, I think that promoting it's use so exclusively is probably damaging our career options.
Yeah, it's pretty much windows everywhere, at least on the desktop. At OIT (Oregon), everyone's using windows workstations and there is an unfortunate number of windows servers as well. The server part is especially bad since certain Microsoft SQL servers go down on a regular basis.
What I think is real bad though is our CSET department teaches almost exclusively in Visual Studio
Interestingly enough I think if awareness of alternatives increases we'll see a jump in the number of users of openoffice and Firefox and eventually Linux. Just today I got asked to create a PDF file from an excel spreadsheet. I just fired up Openoffice and exported it as PDF (after hassling with some options to get it looking right). When I gave it to them and told them I used openoffice they seemed genuinely interested in openoffice. So slowly but surely people are becoming aware of the alternatives.
I went to a science and engineering school, which explains the lack of Macs.
:) Are you a lemming, or a scientist? :)
Science and engineering was traditionally one of the Mac's strong markets. When I was an EE undergrad (87-91), there were far more Macs than PCs in the labs, and some software development classes were done only on Macs. I got to learn Unix, too. As other posters have mentioned, free PC donations from Dell and Intel (with the requirement to run Windows) quickly replaced anything else. It's hard to compete with FREE. Now the fresh grads are all Windows users, and surprised there's anything else.
When Mathworks cancelled MATLAB for the Mac, there was enough outcry that they eventually brought it back. Wolfram had enough sense to keep Mathematica on the Mac all along. There are plenty of people in science, engineering, research, and higher education that are still using Macs. I think MacOS X has begun a Mac resurgence with lots of geeks. It's nice to have Unix and productivity apps on the same box. LOTS of OSS programs just run on MacOS X.
there really are not a lot of Macs in use compared to Windows machines
And that means what, exactly? Linux Insider has definitive proof that scientists should use Macs.
Please help find my missing daughter: FindSabrina.org
I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.
The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I go to Univ of IL at Chicago. We have 7 Windows labs. In each lab there would be an average of 30 Computers with about 5 of them Macs. There are two Linux labs. One is about 30 computers. The other has 30 or so Red Hats, and another 60 Sun computers. The only people that can use the Linux labs are the CS majors. Everybody else has to use the Windows labs. They use XP, and their configuration sucks. I remember when they had 98 and let you do pretty much what you wanted, but now everything is locked. Ironically some of the CS profs teach us how to get past the protection. Last semester we were taught how to get around their protection to open a dos prompt(I know, pretty basic).
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
Here at UC Berkeley most of the public computers are windows boxes, but so heavily locked down that all you can do with them is browse the web and the library catalogues. However in the dorm computing centers it's about 3/4 windows and 1/4 mac (cubes, G4s, or better). What i've seen though it's mostly the windows boxes that get used. On the other hand, in the CS buildings almost all the computers are linux, with only a few rooms dedicated to windows 2000. Even the intro cs class uses SPARC workstations.
What are you expecting to find here?
I call Straw Man.
Everything you listed was a comodity - that is, the brand of chalk you use does not alter your chalk-drawing experience in any meaningful way. Thus, the brand of chalk you use in school does not influence your chalk purchase decisions once you leave school. Sitting in front of one brand of desk for 13 years does not mold your ass in such a way to make sitting in front of other brands of desk more difficult or painful.
Past? Right now I can get an iBook (combo drive) with Airport Extreme and iPod from Harvard for $1066. That is $411 under retail. Last week I bought a 17" Powerbook with Applecare for $2559. That is a $589 discount. Had I been buying it as personal, rather than departmental purchase, I could have thrown in an iPod for another $67 (after rebate).
Apple educational deals are still fantastic. And I'm not even talking about bulk purchases.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
It entirely depends on the courses being taught.
If the school teaches UNIX courses, you need Linux machines for people to work on.
If the school teaches multimedia courses, you need (well, need may be too strong - make it preferable) to have Macs - because that's what multimedia firms use.
If your school is crap and only teaches courses which are irrelevant to the local business community, you'll run Windows only because they're cheap.
City College of San Francisco offers UNIX and multimedia certificates as well as Windows-oriented certificates and therefore has Macs and Linux machines (and more Windows machines, of course, since more courses are Windows oriented or general.)
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
also add the cost reductions in only having to support one platform. runing 2 sets of file servers, managment stations etc is an unessasary expense.
Also windows techs are a dime a dozen. mac or linux techs cost more. a tech who does both well is rare and expensive (i know, i am one)
when your organization runs one or two apps that dont run on the mac, and realize that supporting 2 platforms is an unnessasry expense, the writing is on the wall.
..., my school, is mostly Linux and UNIX (Solaris, to be exact). Sure.. we've got some Windows machines for some of the civil engineers (Who CAN'T build a bridge?), but I would say the ratio is almost 4 to 1. We've even got a few supercomputers in the building which certainly aren't running Windows!
What is your penile percentile?
Let's face it: these "technical" schools aren't the best place to find people who want more than to learn how to use computers enough to find themselves a comfortable job; that's what these schools are for. He may be able to find a few of these people at his school, but I wouldn't count on it.
City Technology Colleges are a long running thorn in the British Education system, set up by the previous (conservative) government in the late 80's the current (labour) government tried to abolish them but came up against a lot of resistance so decided to create their own version known as 'City Academies'.
To cut a long story short I attended a CTC (Dixons CTC to be precise) and the schools are not in any way designed to just get people a "comfortable job", roughly 90% of pupils go on study at university (not work in supermarkets as most UK school leavers seem to do). They actively promote wider thinking and encourage pupils to look behind whats visible and learn more than would be expected in mainstream schools. In my experience a shortage of students (and, to some extent, staff) willing, and wanting, to delve into IT aspects there is not.
Wow, what a clueless rant. Here's some suggestions:
But hey, thanks for your dramatic little piece of fiction. Your cluelessness is only surpassed by your ability to blow things out of proportion, to make a mountain out of a molehill. Perhaps you should go into politics.