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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 As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements.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."
Seriously.. Rebel! Grab yourself a Knoppix CD and outperform everyone else. Now, you have to be smart about this. It'll probably involve some after-school time practicing and making sure you can do absolutely everything your particular course requires without problems. Knoppix by itself is a very eye-appealing distro but you can do some things to spruce it up (i.e. School logo's where appropriate. Set proper homepages. Setup any printers and other networking quirks.) Having the one computer in the class that looks the nicest will quickly draw the attention of your fellow stu^H^H^Hrebels.
:). The fact that it is something you "shouldn't" be doing will only help you here.
:) Just don't ask them for support when your sound stops working.
Now, Your teachers depending on their level of expertise will probably either ask you to remove that theme or actually wonder what the heck is going on. This can be a good thing if your teachers are smart - getting them to join the rebellion will help you in your fight.
Now, this being a technical school of sorts, you probably have other enlightened persons hanging around. Polish your CD up a bit, make a funky logo to print on it and start handing it out to your fellow rebels. Having 3-4 people in a class running something different will immediately draw the attention of everyone else in the classroom (the innate nature of teenagers to all be different in roughly the same way
Now, you have a few possible endgame scenarios. First off, the administration can come down hard on you for violating their acceptable use policy. Not much you can do in this case without ending up as a martyr.
Secondly, you could get the teachers more or less on your side. As long as you get your work done, they shouldn't have much of a problem. The more converts you get, the more points you score
Finally you could achieve total victory against the software monopolist throughout the galaxy (or at least your classroom). This is when every student carries around his/her own Knoppix CD or you get a Linux-based installation on a few computers. This is a tough one, but you can always shoot for it.
So my advice is don't try and convince anyone. Show them that you can do the same job faster, cheaper, better, and somehow learn more out of it. Administrators like the first three benefits, and teachers especially like that last bit!
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When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac. Jojo
your school website even has an MS colour scheme
;)
you're doomed, drop out now
When I first started there (almost six years ago now)...
Lane, I've been going to this high school for 7 and a half years. I'm no dummy.
I think you'll find the disproportionate number of Windows PCs is the direct result of MS' selfless donations to cash starved educational establishments. It's true altruism; the fact the children will grow up with no experience of anything other than MS products is a completely unintentional side effect, and must be a complete surprise to Bill and his merry men...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
At my office (elementary school), I'm stuck with a network made up of 98, 2K, and XP machines, and they're 95% Dell.
At UH-D, where I go to school, it's _all_ Dell and Windows XP or 2K unless you're in a high-level CS class and you've got Linux.
I blame Dell and their cheap, bulk PCs - sell them cheap, throw in Windows, ensure a monoculture and continued upgrades from their company.
On the plus side, they're now notoriously easy to reghost if something goes wrong.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Where I went to school, almost every machine outside of the CompSci dept was a PC/Windows machine. In the compsci dept there were a number of linux, unix and pc workstations. Of course I went to a science and engineering school, which explains the lack of Macs. I think the Metalurgy department had some Macs as there were a few met programs that we Mac based. Also, the mining & geology departments had some old unix workstations that they were replacing with linux and windows 2000.
In my professional life the only places I have ever encountered Macs were graphics designers and journalists. SO for my career, the college environment emulated the real world. That isn't meant to be flame bait, but there really are not a lot of Macs in use compared to Windows machines.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
The school I consult for will be purchasing over 1000 PCs (with monitor) for 750$ each. Per seat costs for anti-virus and remote imaging bring the price up to 780$ per machine.
We manage spyware and patches by remotly reimaging the machines. It's scheduled and completely hands-off. I can reimage a lab of 30 machines in an hour. As long as everyone remembers to save their files to their network drive, they'll never know anything happened to the PC.
Schools generally get grants and capital project money which they can use to purchase NEW stuff. Rarely will they get money to maintain the old. This means the primary educational app my 1000 new 3 Ghz PCs will run was written for a Windows 3.11 peer to peer network, and it shows.
As a result, you can imagine how very pleased I am to see students running knoppix or lugging in their own laptops or anything else that threatens the pathetic security I'm forced to setup just to make some of these apps work.
Finally, I've worked with a fair number of students, including the smart ones who were permitted to take the cisco academy course. The vast majority have never even attempted to manage a network of a dozen PCs, let alone several hundred or thousand. I can only see huge problems with a classroom of kids playing BOFH on a production network they barely understand.
Caution: burning karma ahead
They have windows because you're in a technology school! If you had Macs, you wouldn't learn as much because they would work! You wouldn't have to spend time learning how to troubleshoot Windows, which is what you're there for anyway, right? If all the computers worked, how would they teach you how to fix it? I'm guessing they don't have a 'If-it-ain't-broke...' class.
Now before you reply, it's called 'humor' and 'sarcasm'. Not to be confused with zealotry.
Speaking of Macs, I managed to crash mine the other day. If you count the time I tried and succeeded to get a blue(black on Mac)screen on the OS X Public Beta, that makes twice.
"the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000"
Lemme know what your ARIN range is. I'm running low on remailer zombies.
" 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.
Under most circumstances? Simple economics? Bullocks. Cheaper purchase price doesn't mean that it's cheaper in general, think about TCO and the frustration you'll have to deal with when faculty get up in your face because their machines are down because of the latest Windows virus... And of course, those numbers in your comment aren't a good example. It's comparing a cheap PC to a more expensive Mac. Do a little bit of research.
A base-model eMac starts at $799 retail, $749 educational and i'm fairly sure Apple gives a bigger discount for purchasing larger quantities. Yes, there are base configuration PCs that start out lower, but the hardware in the eMac is more bang for your buck. The machines are also better for classrooms since everything is built-in, along with a great 17" display. I can't speak much on the side of 'educational' software as I've never really used any. I do know however that there are some applications that do need a decent video card to run well - you won't get that with cheap bargain basement PCs - the eMac comes with a Radeon 9200 and 32MB dedicated video memory. The last time I looked at a newer Dell purchased by a school at a cheap price - integrated Intel video chipset that was sharing the system's RAM. Talk about slowing down the GUI.
Also, consider this - cheap PCs come with anti-virus demoware [the majority of the time], not full versions, so the school is going to have to invest in that if they don't want to worry about infecting their entire network. That costs money. I can almost safely say they could set up OS X machines and not have a virus problem, unlike Windows which can get infected just by being out on the internet. Viruses = downtime. When my college got Norton Anti-virus Corporate Edition, it wasn't cheap. With Macs, viruses aren't such a high priority on the worry list and it's generally safe to run them without virus protection. With a limited user account for students, the worst that could happen is that the student could trash that account's home folder. No big deal, really.
I can also say that upgrading MacOS versions is a hell of alot cheaper than Windows versions. An individual copy of OS X 10.3 retails for $129, and education drops that to $69. It can be used for clean installations or upgrades. The full version of Windows XP Professional [retail, none of that OEM crap] catches around $300, an upgrade costs about $200. A friend of mine purchased hers through an education site for $99. And then of course, no upgrading Windows without a previous version.
I won't even get started on how much easier the OS is to manage either. When was the last time you set up Windows without needing a bunch of drivers to go along with it? Yet another problem avoided by switching to Mac.
I do believe that schools should do what is best for them, so I'm not just pushing for the Mac, but as far as I'm concerned they look at the short-term costs instead of how much better things would be in the long run if they just spent the money upfront and got it over with.
Congratulations, citizen! You have correctly answered the question: the sole purpose of education is to train everyone to do what everyone else is doing, exactly the way they've always done it, forever! Your cooperation is appreciated.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
And windows computers are cheaper than Mac's.
There have been many surveys done by independent groups that have shown Macs to be cheaper in the long run. At my school, for example, we have the same situation--all PCs. While it sickens me every day to use them, I get a certain sadistic kick when certain "unfortunate" events happen. Example:
My school also recently installed grading software on ALL the teachers computers, effectively whiping out the old pen-and-notebook grading system. Well, turned out that this wasn't a very smart move because for over two whole weeks, all grading systems were unusable because of the Blaster worm, and seriously degraded classroom productivity. The school had to pay lots of money to call in the "Alpha Team" (no joke) to come in and repair their lousy system.
I'm sure that our school isn't the only that's experienced similar situations because of the counter-switch from the Mac, and there are always those windows-centric quirks that I see happening all the time too like "blue screens". The problem is tripled when 90% of the staff population barely understands the concept of a mouse (and this is in a school that's somewhere in the top 30 public schools in America).
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Your background knowledge is in Windows, not OS X, and that is painfully obvious. I can restore an OS X machine with NetRestore (free) in 15 minutes, not two hours. You don't know what you're doing with OS X because you lack the background knowledge. PC's win on hardware costs and compatibility but the rest of your argument is based on your ignorance. I'd say the bottom line on which platform to choose is support. If you have a support staff that only knows Windows, you might ought to choose Windows. If your support staff knows OS X, you should choose OS X.
Music - www.richardmac.com
My students loved Linux. They could do more faster and more reliably. A gui is a gui. A gui that does not crash is better. Favourite apps were OpenOffice, the GIMP, and Mozilla. Students learned to set up simple servers in 5 minutes or less on some of the doorstops laying around. The grade 12 students set up dynamic webpages using LAMP. Not one student had a bad thing to say about Linux because they had seen what the other OS would do. They definitely had marketable skills and many of them are prepared to use computers more effectively at home and work because of Linux. Of course, they did express their opinions about their decrepit, old, ugly, over-the-hill teacher.
As your school to install Software Update Services(SUS). Free to run on windows servers running IIS (also free). I dislike Microsoft as much as the next *nix guy, but at work, I set up Software Update Services and it keeps all the boxen up to date with 0 user intervention. Your administrators aren't that bright if they don't keep their windows boxen up to date with software that is freely available.
Then again, that's the same school system that taught you to spell "whiping".
Chris
Now I know this is heresy, especially on Slashdot, but there was a time in the not so distant past when people somehow (I know it's hard to believe), yes somehow managed to learn the three R's without the aid of computers. Don't shoot me! It's true.
...
So, exactly WHICH applications that run exclusively on WINDOWS are of such importance that the high schools cannot fulfill their mission statement without them?
As for the rest of your comment
Windows is the more common operating system -- irrelevant. We should be teaching the applications, not the operating system. If the students absolutely need Windows specific information, they can get their MCSE after graduation. Next please.
More hardware is supported -- irrelevant. Do these boxen need to be able to support every conceivable graphics/sound card combination, SCSI, RAID, and 3-dimensional printing? No. Determine which widely supported hardware will do the job for the least amount of money, and purchase as many of these identical machines as necessary.
Don't get me wrong, Windows absolutely should be in the school. But, in the name of diversity and fairness (and the fact that the graduates never know which type of box they may end up sitting at) the schools should also have *nix boxen as well.
After all, the day may come when Windows is NOT more common OS.