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Indiana Schools May Purchase 300K Linux Computers
GuitarNeophyte writes "According to an article at PC Magazine, Indiana School systems may soon be purchasing around 300,000 Linpire desktop computers. Linspire, via its Education Program has a straight $500-per-school (not per-seat) cost, providing an incredibly-alluring price incentive for this to happen." From the article: "Many schools across the state have already had the chance to try out desktop Linux, and everyone seems excited to get this program going...This groundbreaking initiative makes it possible for schools to afford computers for every student, something that makes a huge impact on their overall educations."
For a Linux box?? How much does SCO get?
What?
Possible 300K KDE deployments ... Those K just goes fine ;-)
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
does it run Linux?
Oh, wait...
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
A whole crop of sudents entered the workforce at a time when the move to CAD was in it's infancy, all familiar with, and able to use AutoCad. They were put in charge of the move to automation, and they all purchased AutoCad when they entered industry.
A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.
... when it actually happens. A PR release from the company trying to sell their stuff isn't exactly news; it's marketing.
I don't respond to AC's.
...ubuntu or such would free, even cheaper no?
take it easy, but take it.
Way to go. Good to know there are smart people other than Munich's officials.
I know most schools don't operate in class computers and labs in a traditional Windows Domain environment, most of the time running as stand alone workstations. Provided the right setup of these systems, it could be great for them. Not only can they lock the systems down from students, they also remove most of the chance for spyware and other malware. Best of luck to them.
...MS provided steep discounts to Indiana schools for their purchase of Microsoft software
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day. Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive. 500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $100,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation) so $200,000 per hour of operation. Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third. Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There are tons of discarded machines out there that can still run a good linux.
What would be nice is a distro meant to make it as easy as possible for relatively unskilled people to turn them into a desktop linux. Linspire may have a lot of that, but here's the elements I see.
A simple program, on a floppy and/or CD, which analyses the hardware in the machine, and gives an estimate of how suitable the machine is to the task. Ie. how well supported the components (chipsets, cards etc.) are, and how much performance one can expect from it.
It could also estimate what you would have to buy to bring the performance to your specs. "This machine is great but by just adding 128MB of ram -- just $20 -- it would be super." and "The machine is good but the ethernet card is one known to have problems. Cheap solid ethernet cards include these..."
And so on. School boards, not wanting to do a lot of fussing, might insist on a certain "easy to convert" rating from this program before taking donations.
Stage 2 is a distro which does a super-simple install on machines that make the cut. It knows the hardware is approved, so it's a hassle-free install, with ideally no questions asked, or barely any.
Then you would get a lot of computers converted and ready to be linux boxes.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Linspire has a nice update service which might be more attractive than the free update services from ubuntu.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
oops, dropped a decimal point! make that $20,000 per hour to operate.
500K cheap linux boxes. This is going to be a massive number of hard drive crashes and system rebuilds per day.
Why the heck dont schools use thin clients to servers. Or at least use some of those multi-headed configurations that can seat four students per box. Even the power bill makes this attractive.
500K * 200 watts = 100 Megawatts of power at 10 cents a kilowatt hour is $10,000 dollars per hour to operate. In winter time this might offset the cost of heating if they can distribute the heat, but the rest of the year the cooling costs to offset this heat load will double the operating cost. (since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)
so $20,000 per hour of operation.
Now imagine you had a four headed system. it would cut this cost by half to a third.
Will Linspire Netboot. If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Not a bad deal, overall ... just not a computer on every desk for $500 or a single laptop.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
In most schools, the windows computers are soo very old AND locked down, so students don't install random fishy fudge and take the computers down. Unix-like system are perfect for mult-user environments.. They're designed for it. Very Computer literate students will adapt and find that they have more priviledges and options than before.. Like installing applications as a user. Students who care less about computers will continue to flame their admin about how they can't install pirated starcraft on it. (which they couldn't do before on these boxes.)
Considering my Indiana High School just bought 30 or so Dell systems pre-loaded with Windows XP last year, I doubt they'll even think about buying more new systems that the sysadmin will have to deal with learning about. And considering they use Novell's NetWare for the network, I don't know if the systems would be compatible or not.
More than likely, they will take their current IT staff and send them to some training classes to get them spun up and have a couple of linux savy consultants on standby for when stuff breaks that is over the full time staff's heads.
And why won't the sell go through? Cheaper licensing, cheaper service? How is that a bad thing for a cash strapped school system?
Right now, someone is boarding a plane at SeaTac, on their way to the Midwest with a special, one-time offer...
So hundreds of thousdands of students will have Lindow^h^h^hspire as their first experience with Linux? Who the hell's idea was that?! Why not a real Linux distro? One that doesn't require a subscription fee to access the package collection for starters. Oh well, at least it might inspire (Without the 'L', thankyou very much) them to investigate alternatives at home and set up an actual Linux box.
Maybe is good that they didn't choose Windows, but Linspire (IMHO) is much worse.
I've tried linspire and I couldn't do anything without paying.
On the other hand, Ubuntu has worked much better in cheaper hardware and the installation for new applications is SO much easier (and FREE).
Also, this is a Debian based distro, which is great, but accessing the package collection requires a monthly subscription fee... that's just sick.
For some schools thin clients are impractical, I know it my school, mind you I don't live in the states so I can't say what it's like there, but at my school we have full blown animation and film courses along with some heavy photoshop classes. For situations like this you'd need a pretty powerful server and it ends up being more trouble than it's worth.
Having a computer for every student is not a good thing, in my opinion. Actually, I believe that any computers in classrooms are for the most part a bad idea - and this is coming from a former computer programming student.
With computers in every classroom, it really requires each teacher to become a system admin and I think it really distracts the students from their work. I have a friend from Vietnam, who never had computers in his classrooms growing up, and he was way more skillful in math then the rest of us students that grew up with computers in the class in Canada.
And, it's not just the cost of software that's expensive for schools. It's the hardware, maintenance, and electricity costs too! The Ontario teachers union is always bitching about not having enough resources, but any good teacher should do just fine with a box of pencils, some paper, a chalkboard, and some chalk.
Offtopic:
Now with the standardised curriculum, many of the teachers are basically just babysitters that hand out material written by someone else. It must be hard working 6 hours a day, 9 months a year.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Remember kids, buying a computer without an operating system is the first step towards piracy. Act now and call BSA and report anyone who offers you a computers without a licensed operating system. Say No to Piracy.
Offer not valid outside the USA especially Finland.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Is the idea here that once the schools have the licenses, that they'll feel strongly compelled to purchase a service contract agreement with Linspire to provide technical support?
Because if it was free, they wouldn't want it.
"Computers for every student, something that makes a huge impact on their overall educations."
Does it? After just finishing at a school that had ample access to computers, i can tell you first hand that the whole thing was pretty pointless for the price it cost, and that most kids just messed around during it lessons (more so than other lessons by far) I can honestly say that it was pretty pointless, including to the computer illiterate.
I'm not saying it is completely without benefit, but i do not understand this assumption that spending money on computers in schools is a good thing.
However, i come from the UK, and i think part of my problem with it is that the teaching of IT in our school was so terrible that I'd find myself searching Google for answers instead of asking our teacher a question.
I agree. My main complaint, and what Linspire's real plan is? This scenario.... "Mom! I can't edit this file/whatever on our computuer! I need $50 for a copy of this operating system!" "Ok, here ya go". I'm well aware OpenOffice could bridge most compatibility issues, but if you know little about computers, and are using some "strange and exotic" operating system at school, I'm guessing your average user would just get that OS, because it seemed to make the most sense. I wouldn't be surprised if Linspire gives them fliers to give to students to get it for home, perhaps for a slight discounted price....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
As a student in the Indiana Public Education program, I can't wait for this. I have long helped teachers out with computer problems and have even used knoppix to fix problems deemed 'unfixable' by our support staff. Now I can't wait to see how much more stable my life will be when people can't fsck everything up. But, however nice this is, the main problem in my school, as I see it, isn't the number of computers, but how they are used. Constantly broken machines that won't let you print to certain printers and teachers who barely know how to turn the computer on are a humongous drawback. On top of that, our school corporation is just NOW getting on track with Windows, teaching everyone how to do simple things like delete programs (my mother is a 3rd grade school teacher and even her kids install programs on the computers without her knowledge). I simply hope they spend much more money teaching the teachers how to use the computers.... But hey, now instead of getting people calling me about Blue Screens of Death, I get to answer questions about Kernel Panic!
So they'll be about 80F?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
There seems to be plenty of good, stable, free linux distributions available these days. Even SUSE is to be open sourced. And each school will need at least one person maintaing the computers no matter what they run. So, why would Indiana chose to pay for Linspire?
I'm really curious. Did I miss something?
Microsoft has had deals for years with IU, IUPUI, Purdue, Ball State, et al. for their products. Basically, you get all their products in a few different packs for $5 each. Everyone I know in Indianapolis got their XP from an IUPUI student. Viral marketing at its finest...heh.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
This is going to be a first encounter with Linux for anybody who uses this - students, teachers, etc. Why not use something that gives a favorable impression? Even if it entails paying somebody to customize Debian/Slackware for use in a school enviornment they could do much better than Linspire.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Linspire has one, Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora don't.
Linspire has actually been paying attention to *how* software gets deployed to the mass market, big companies and government agencies. Red Hat also figured this out long ago. The rest of the distros naively think that somehow "if you build it, they will come". That works in Kevin Costner movies but not in the real world.
What will Dell and windows do? Give out Dell computers for about 300$. And windows might get on them for free or something? I know it sounds crazy but maybe they can make a loss to turn around the market. ( Investment for the future ). I don't know about Linspire but there has been great improvements in Linux desktops in the last couple of years. But for basic stuff it works, just wondering what will happen to all the apps the schools use to teach their students are there Linux ports or wine or vmware solutions that they are implementing ? One thing that will be great is that they will be able to manage these systems and have cleaner networks for there students. With the HALD and usb lot of students can bring in inexpensive memory sticks to save there work, web pages, documents etc ...
I wonder how all this work out, will the school departments hire coders to write applications which will teach these new students. Or use 100s of highschool geeks to write GPL'ed educational tools :). Lot of cool things are happening and let's see what happens.
-A
It sure does make a huge impact on their overall educations. They will suffer. Computers != solution for bad teachers. Now we have another babysitter along side of the TV.
Sure, they can be useful, but they are mostly a distraction and should only be used when neccessary. You know these people will want to use them all day long because of their "investment"
Has anyone thought about the increase in energy consumption and that added cost?
Here in Indiana, they teach us how to speak with an American accent and make up hobbies so we can relate to all the tech support callers.
Will Linspire Netboot.
It is Linux, yes. See below.
If not they are going to have a lot of corrupt systems to fix every day. yikes!
As if the other OS would not? I think they are on the right track, make the PCs cheap and get an easy to load OS for when it happens recovery is cheap, simple and fast. If it is stolen, cheaper to replace.
BTW, booting Linux over the net is simple, start with a customized install CD, store a reference image on a server using cpio or tool of choice via NFS. Then with a Linux boot/install CD that simply partitions, downloads and cpio's the data bask to disk. Finally writing the MBR. With a moderate amout of shell scripting install for a school situation could be 100% automated except for putting the CD in the coffee cup holder.
For mail, pop3/imap/sendmail/spamasassin. OpenLDAP for entity management. NFS for file sharing.
If the above does not make sense, change incompetant or underskilled administrator. If an NT admin, send them back to McDonnalds. It is actually faster, easier and cheaper than Windows alternatives as the registry issues don't exist and the tools and protocols are tested.
Here in Wake county North Carolina we couldn't give 3 year old computers to the schools. Too old, too slow not sexy enough. The schools went instead to IBM down the road and got brand new Netvistas for either free or something close to free.
From what I understand apt-get is in Linspire just like any other Debian-based distro.
#apt-get install synaptic
Problem solved.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Anytime soon yes, but never? One day an "easy to use" version will come out with all the loving features of the other linux distros, then things might slightly change.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Who's distro runs the default user as root, lied about using some new technology to run all Windows software nativly, and ran the worst ad campain that consisted of pissing MS off whenever possible. They give Linux a bad name. Want something windows like with Wine compatibility? Try Xandros. They are also pushing for centralized management areas. Something that, I believe, only Sun and MS are doing, with MS the only real complete set of tools.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
If you have a modern SEER 16 A/C unit then you can typically 'produce' 16 times as much cool and the energy required.
So it'll increase you cooling costs a fraction of power budget of the computer systems.
this is excellent news - now microsoft will probably come out with some statement about the BSA and how piracy rates have risen in India.
Here's the Coral Cache of the article: http://www.pcmag.com.nyud.net:8090/article2/0,1895 ,1844695,00.asp
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
in my district, they're linuxphobic. mostly from ignorance, but also because M$ throws freebies to all the techs. it's disgusting really.
I wonder how much input the IT people had because most of them are probably MCSE's or whatever, and linux poses a real threat to them. and to be honest, schools don't care much, at least fro mwhat I've seen, about costs. Saving money sounds great, but see the problem is that if you don't spend it all, then you get less next year. and if you get alot of value, i.e. lots of computers for the same money, you have less "need" next year, and thus less "need" for money.
is it sick? absolutely. i have been trying to get linux into my district for ages. in fact, my school's tech coordinator is very pro-linux, but he keeps it quiet. we're setting up a small internal message forum I wrote with php/mysql, and it's running on fedora. he literally has to tell the district people it's running on win2k. they think linux=hacker, yet win2k is a hacker's wet dream.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Ubuntu and the Shuttleworth foundation are doing great work in creating a version for classrooms ("Edubuntu"). LTSP/thin client stuff isn't the exclusive focus, but it's being incorporated too, I believe. I don't think they're really going after the US market though--Europe and Africa are more the focus IIRC.
While Apple did have a few big-name universities in their pocket, the largest segment of their educational market was always K-12. And yes, there were PLENTY of K-12 schools that were all Apple. About ten years ago, I was involved with the local Apple Users' Group, and almost everyone there was a teacher.
About the beginning computer classes teaching MS Office... what those classes are really teaching is basic computer skills. "This is a mouse, this is a pointer, this is a drop-down menu," etc., etc. The beauty of this Linspire deal is that it shows how ubiquitous computer skills have become, as well as how homogenous software has become. Aside from a few cosmetic differences, a word processing or spreadsheet program is going to be virtually the same on a Mac, PC or Linux distro.
Really, though, it's more important that kids understand the concepts of how these programs work, because by the time they graduate high school or college and get into the work force, the interface of MS Office will likely have changed again.
I prefer the Microsoft platform for application development, but it makes no difference what the students and teachers are using the access the applications, since they're all web-based. Be it curriculum delivery, school management systems (SMS) or even internal administration applications.
I say more power to the schools. They should be concentrating on educating our kids and saving more of our taxes.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Linspire used to be Lindows, it used Wine heavily, emulating Windows programs. It also looks a lot like Windows. Many people have the opinion that distributions like this that aim to merely clone Windows hurt GNU/Linux as a whole.
But wouldn't they be better served by Windows boxes? (ducks). Seriously, odds are they will be using Windows in the "real world" once they graduate and move on to college and jobs. How well will the Linux skills translate?
Really? I thought it had been shown over and over again that computers do not contribute to the overall quality of education for children. And in some cases, relying on comptuters can actually reduce the quality because the basics get ignored.
Seriously, what IS the value of having computers in schools besides computer literacy? Sure, kids should have *a* computer class. Maybe a few computer labs for research. But why one computer per student? What is the value? So kids can skip lunch and IM their friends in another room?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
are they gonna be a patch behind, which causes the whole school's network to get pwned? back when i was in high school around 1998-2001, our school had a lot of problems regarding security. i do believe a stupid sysadmin forgot to password protect some shared disks on the network.
i hear they're running wifi there now.. i should get me some antennas, i bet they're running password-less.
lameness filter thwarted.
Divided by a couple million students, wow, it's a negligible cost! Taxes pay for the crap, it's still cheaper than a bunch of dell boxes loaded with windows. Welcome to the real world, things cost money.
Glad to know that as the son of an Indiana teacher, who's mother-in-law is also an Indiana teacher. That must be why I had to quit my job to go back to school and finish my PhD. Sheesh. Grow up.
I'm jaded by these PR stunts. Wake me up when they actually end up buying the Linux boxen! Till then, it is just a ploy to get super-steep discounts from Microshaft.
It's interesting this is starting to be pushed by schools in the US. So far, the pursuit of low-cost computers for education and other markets, has primarily been a focus for developing countries like Brazil, India, China and other Asian countries. The holy grail continues to be the $100 PC, which is still difficult to attain. However Windows PCs have come down in price to about $500 for a desktop and about $700 for a notebook...low, but not low enough. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/s_9.html
My kids' school is not air conditioned, you insensitive clod!
Is Xandros not "REAL" ? It too facilitates use of Wine.
If you don't like Wine, don't use it. I really don't have a problem with some folks wanting Linux to run photoshop, office, games, or whatever. Contribute to e.g. The GIMP and OpenOffice.org projects if you have a problem with this. Make them good enough for everyone to switch.
And since when does the default `look' define whether Linux distributions are "REAL" ? There are literally millions of Window Manager and Theme combinations available. Pick whichever you like and quit complaining about matters of taste.
The unofficial
dude,
20K/hour is a teacher's annual pay every hour and a half. Most school districts are concerned about losing even a single teacher. It's not negligble if there's a way to cut it in half or a quarter.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Okay, so it uses an open source compatibility layer and looks like Windows. So what? Looks do NOT matter. It uses the Linux kernel, runs all regular Linux programs, it's not Windows... It must be Linux!
Everyone who uses computers gets is exposed to Windows, whether they want to be or not. Anyone who uses Linux from one of the GUIs will have no problem with Windows. Those who can't use Linux from KDE or Gnome won't have a prayer of being able to use Windows, either and are likely to have some kind of serious learning disability.
What you are asserting is equivalent to saying that learning another language won't be employable. The truth is quite the opposite. Now, what are you really afraid of?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
"Linspire, via it's Education Program has a straight $500-per-school (not per-seat) cost, providing an incredibly-alluring price incentive for this to happen."
I dont think there are 300,000 schools in Indiana.
Standard PCs have a lot of flexibility that thin client solutions lack.
That $500 is per school, annually. There are somewhat fewer than 300,000 schools in Indiana (I don't care to support that, though).
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
While it's true that a full GUI boot of Knoppix won't happen in < 96 MB, and isn't particularly happy in less than ~128 MB, your comment promulgates several fallacies:
Knoppix and kin offer the analytics necessary to profile a system, what they lack are the heuristics to make a sane statement of what improvements would be useful for a system. The idea of a bootable distro which simply runs an analyzer and produces a report (to be saved to file, printed, etc.) is reasonably straightforward.
Yes, you can run Knoppix entirely in RAM (800+ MB are recommended), and yes, performance of a bootable CD isn't what you'd see from a HD install (in part because of the overhead of reading from CD and performing the on-the-fly decompression). But tests of system speed (memory, CPU, hdparm) should give a pretty good sense of performance characteristics.
There are also floppy-based distros which run entirely in RAM (eg: Tom's Root Boot, Trinux), but they have pretty minimal system requirements.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Maybe not at high capacity
c iency_ratio
But that's easily possible at a household scale, and i doubt large installations are THAT different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_energy_effi
OMG. ROFL.
There's no way in hell you could run an entire public school worth of computers without dedicated adminstration staff.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Great. It figures that when the schools decide to switch to Linux they would choose the worst distribution available.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Actually, I think that Linspire is well suited for technical reasons too. They provide a remarkably Windows-like environment which other distros go out of their way *not* to do. The result is an OS which is pretty familiar to the one in the student's household. With the added advantage of a full suite of programs and easy system management tools (which I hear are pretty good), then it's almost a drop in replacement for Windows.
Linspire also does a lot of "it-just-works" modifications. Check out Linspire's distrowatch page for some good overviews and reviews. So yes, they are good at marketing themselves, but I believe that marketing aside they would still be a good choice for schools to deploy.
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Anything's better than having to force security with Windows. Took me only a few weeks to crack the programs my high school used. Got a week's suspension for that 'cause someone ratted me out. Hopefully using a more secure O/S will prevent other kids from making that mistake.
My guess is that it probably doesn't apply because the schools are buying preconfigured computers from Wintergreen, not educational licenses from Linspire.
The GPL doesn't force all software using the libraries to be GPL software. It forces all software distributed with the GPL libraries to be GPL software. All the Indiana schools would be considered "within the organization" for the purposes of licensing, so as long as they don't send out a CD to their students with GPL Qt and Proprietary-App-Of-Choice both together, they'll be fine. Chances are they'd be violating the proprietary software's licence agreement with this, though, so it's unlikely.
This is the same way that nVidia gets away with binary kernel modules. There is no clause allowing binary drivers, which some people seem to think Linus includes with the kernel licence. The nVidia proprietary drivers are not distributed with the kernel source. Therefore, when you download and install them, you aren't distributing anything proprietary linked with GPL code.
Of course, that means if you sell a computer with Linux and the nVidia drivers pre-installed, you've broken the GPL, and probably nVidia's licence also.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Aren't there ways to allow thin clients the ability to save things to local drives?
Ha! Spoken like someone who has never had to maintain computers with children beating on them (the computers). Who, exactly, do you think is going to make the "phone support" calls? Students? Teachers? Who are they goign to call? Teachers have enough to worry about and they rarely get paid enough to do what they do as it is. The reality is that properly supporting many Windows machines is a full time job.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
when the schools actually DO purchase 300,000 Linux installs, let us know THEN.
This is a pilot project.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
TrollTech gives you an option to distribute your Qt-dependent program with the Qt libraries, and still keep the whole thing proprietary. They also give you the option of getting the same Qt libraries for free, but they require you to license your program under the GPL too, if you choose to distribute the Qt libraries with your program.
If you just choose to make your program dependent on the Qt libraries without including those libraries, then they don't give a hoot what licence you distribute under, and have no legal right to even make it an issue.
Were the API different between the two versions, I'd say your right, but it's not. Unless you get a modified version from somebody other than TrollTech, of course, as the GPL allows. But if you do that, and expect it to be supported by TrollTech, and have the exact same API, then you're smoking something cheap. So take off the tinfoil hat, and try to take life a little less seriously.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Wouldn't it be better for them to develop their own distribution for such purposes? Spain has did it (SholeLinux or smth.) so it is the matter of only tweaking the distro to local needs (localizing is not the case, AFAIK the best/primary localization in Linux is english). They just could hire some consulting firm and they will build setup suitable for schools - it would be fair below $500 per machine (I think $200 would be easy).
WOW, Indiana finally makes it to Slashdot. I guess I am not moving to California now. LOL. Anyway, I will let you guys know if we ever get those 300K computers.
Has it occured to anyone that you don't need a computer for every student. At the secondary level I can see it. But in elementary school they need to do more on paper, they learn some on computers but not so much they need one for every student. You don't need computers to teach reading and how to do basic math.
IIRC, you don't lose your academic version license when you leave the University (at least with Microsoft; with others (e.g. RSI) you do lose your license). So essentially, if you run out of money at the uni or otherwise have to leave (not everyone who leaves the uni is a "loser"), all the money you spent on this software is wasted money--especially since you may well have been able to buy at least one or several academic licensed softwares. I just don't think it's worth it. You may disagree, and you're welcome to throw as much money at Microsoft as you really wish, but I don't want to partake in that particular activity.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Cost man, cost.
You know how much it would cost to give each kid (300,000 kids) a seat of a REAL distro of Linux?
Shit, someone should invent an operating system that was very similar to Unix, but was free.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I feel the need to comment that having worked through high school with physical and other challenges some deem "LD", I find your comment highly offensive.
I will be entering college as a sophmore next year and am a budding lawyer.
--Sam
Last time I checked, thin client setups still require a monitor! And a lot of the power used by today's high end systems are for the graphics card. a system designed for students would have much lower power requirements. -c
"(since it usually takes one watt of cooling to offset 1 watt of heat generation)"
I disagree with that.
I once calculated how much an air-conditioning system would need, using SEER numbers of recent minimal requirements, I found required cooling power to be 25-35% of the heat.
SEER numbers account for the whole AC system across whole range of use (time of day, etc).
Remember that airconditioners use heat pumps, making it need less than a watt per watt (...). If you don't know what I mean with that, look up the difference between resistor heating and heat pump heating for heating a house, and relizing that a heat pump is a reverse AC... Or just lookup what 'SEER' means, or simple compare BTU numbers with amps/wattages of AC units...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Looks like Indiana might have a lot of fun with 300,000 "student-customized" machines...
$500 is cheaper than free - you give me (a school administrator) something for free, I've got no comeback if something goes wrong. I might be left with a whole bunch of unusable machines. If I hand over a small amount of money, we'll probably exchange some sort of contract with some sort of support agreement. Something goes wrong and I can call you and get support, if I need to I can sue you for selling me unfit goods. I'm very likely to be assured of a better deal by putting $500 dollars on the table.
At last, tentative first steps to looking at alternatives to Windows. Anyone who has heard of Linux has almost certainly heard that it is free, so it should be obvious that the potential Linspire contract is about *support* - paying them to hold their hand through a potentially messy change over.
Sure, their software needs would be better solved if they could somehow elicit a large investment in development, testing and IT infrastructure for Linux based solutions - but that won't happen until some positive trials have proved that benefits can be made.
Once a company willing to say It Can Be Done (Red Hat actually recommend Windows to non-Techies IIRC) exists, they should try it out. Then Linux distributing companies can fight it out in the proper competitive way most other industries do, improving the choice and quality for the customers.
Once people see that Linspire demonstrates some advantages over Windows, the floodgates will open to a proper Linux solution - but without support that costs money, it's too much of a risk to switch to Linux.
Teething/Linspire specific problems won't scare off Linux interest, it's come too far.
I said it before and I'll say it again: The IT training companies are rubbing their hands together will glee as all those students will need Windows training so they can work on PCs with applications that most companies are using. i.e. Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Servers.
> Xandros doesn't run as root by default.
Is that all you are left with?
It's really not that hard for the sysadmins to run adduser on all the lindows boxes if this bothers them.
The unofficial
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
"gimp has taken a turn for the worst since switching to gtk2"
Got anything to back this up?
Up until 2000 or so one could d/l just about any software that was available under this license agreement off of an IU website by providing your username/password. But then they decided to change the rules and make it so you had to pay $5/copy if you wanted an OS.
This is inaccurate. IU and IUPUI staff and students may login to http://iuware.iu.edu/ and download FOR FREE Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and a bunch of other software titles for linux, osx, and winders platforms. Last I knew Red Hat AS4, WS4, and Desktop4 are OS's!
One may also "checkout" installation CD's from UITS with a valid student or employee ID card. So saying one "has" to pay $5 for an OS is Bullschit.
Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
Anything's better than trying to force security with Windows. Took me only a few weeks to hack my school's security system (they used Fortres on Win98 for most of the school). It'd be way harder with Linux.
the national average for killowatt hour costs last year was 8.7 cents per KW hour. but many places it's well over 10 cents/kw hour. It will be rising sharply since the new clean-coal laws were passed this year as well as the price of natural gas going up due to the war.
Except this isn't a program in all of the US, it's a program in Indiana. The best electric rates I could get are from 1999, which puts the rates at just where I said, between 6 and 7 cents/kilowatt hour. See
http://www.incontext.indiana.edu/2001/oct-nov01/d
When I measure the current it, draw 11.4 amps average current on average. so thats 130 watts
You must have a very powerfull machine, or you're measuring it while playing a game. Most PCs at idle don't use much power. The processor and graphics chips only draw large amounts of power when performing calculations. Most of the time the PC is going to be idle. See:
http://www.macalester.edu/cit/faq/power_usage.htm
for actual numbers.
add on a monitor and were up around 200 watts.
LCDs are cheap enough that most new computers for business are coming with them because of the smaller space, and decreased power usage. At most an LCD uses 40 watts, many use far less.
With AC the efficiency of the unit under ideal conditions is not the measure of how it performs under actual conditions. You are assuming that the cooling power needed is delivered in a perfect fashtion to where it is needed.
I actually never stated any conclusion about heating costs. I'm merely pointing out that they're far less than 1/1. You can nitpick about perfect efficiency, but the costs are obviously far less than 1/1.
your're right about the 300K->500K slip up, though the estimate is essentially correct given the stated inputs. You just want to use different inputs.
So being off by a factor of 1.66 is "essentially correct"? That's a big amount to be off by for something to be correct. When you order a dinner and they're off by 66% in telling you how much it costs is that "essentially correct"?
aside from a quibble over the AC its essentially correct.
A factor of two is a "quibble"? He's dead wrong about doubling costs for cooling. He's wrong from a thermodynamic perspective, and a usage perspective. Add up all those large errors, and you get one big huge error.
AccountKiller
"The GPL doesn't force all software using the libraries to be GPL software"
Yes, it does. As long as you distribute it, it must be GPL.
"It forces all software distributed with the GPL libraries to be GPL software."
No, it doesn't. It forces all software distributed to be GPL, full stop.
It is both the letter and the spirit of the GPL to be so.
You need LGPL libraries if you want to distribute non-GPL software linked to them. That's why LGPL exists in first place.
All the Indiana schools would be considered "within the organization" so as long as they don't send out a CD to their students with GPL Qt and Proprietary-App-Of-Choice both together, they'll be fine."
It is not Indiana schools the ones at stake, but the proprietary software vendor: Indiana schools would be in their perfect right to ask the vendor for the source code of the sold product, which the vendor doesn't want to distribute or it shouldn't have sold it under a proprietary license to begin with.
"This is the same way that nVidia gets away with binary kernel modules"
No, it is not. The "COPYING" file distributed with each and every source of the kernel clearly states:
"NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work"."
nVidia and the like use a "trick" to stay within license terms: they provide a GPL "wrap" module to interface the kernel and then they just use "kernel services [as provided by the open source module] by normal system calls" from their proprietary drivers.
FSF probably doesn't agree with this understandment of the GPL, FSF is not copyright holder of the Linux kernel code, so anyway it has nothing to say about.
"Therefore, when you download and install them, you aren't distributing anything proprietary linked with GPL code."
So what? The problem is not me breaking the GPL, but the one that distributes software TO me. Should it be under GPL violation, I would be able to ask my distributor for the source code of such software.
"Of course, that means if you sell a computer with Linux and the nVidia drivers pre-installed, you've broken the GPL"
Non-sense. nVidia drivers are developed in such a way not to break the GPL (nVidia obviously distributes nVidia drivers which work with the Linux kernel, if this were a GPL violation, even Linus Torvalds would be able to ask nVidia for the drivers' source, no to talk about each and every people that recieved the code from nVidia).
"...and probably nVidia's licence also."
nVidia binary drivers license clearly states that you shouldn't redistribute them so it is not "probably" but "surely", unless you hold an special agreement from nVidia.
"Thus, you are locked-in to Trolltech, because you are dependent on Trolltech-controlled protocols."
No, you aren't. You are only somehow "locked" to Qt as long as you yourself "lock" your own clients (which seems to me quite a reasonable situation). If you distribute your code under the GPL, you are bound to GPL Qt. Would Troll Tell decide to do something "nasty" with a future version of Qt, you are free to modify Qt (as per the GPL) in any way you see fit.
Even if you are distributing proprietary software linked to Qt libraries, you are not bound to any future Troll Tech development: you are only bound to your current agreement with Troll Tech, regarding current Qt libraries, which are the ones you use with your code, and which you already decieded was OK with you.
This is quite different from say, Microsoft lock in. Only Microsoft can further develop any Microsoft-controlled API while ANYONE can further develop Qt- dependant API, at least under GPL, so if your -even proprietary, software is distributed respecting Qt's GPL (by making only "normal" system calls to Qt libraries or Qt-dependant code, for instance) you can rest assured Troll Tech will never be able to lock you in.
You are to be commended for overcoming your challenges. Some do not. It's not clear to me how a pyhsical challenge could be considered a learning disability. Few people were more challenged than Helen Keller or Stephen Hawking--and yet they are considered giants, and rightly so. Their ability to learn must dwarf my own who have had no serious problems not caused by my own choices.
Be that as it may, what do you find offensive about my comment? Re-reading my post, it seems clear to me that it was not aimed at people with learning disabilities, but at the fear implicit in the post I was responding to, the fear of learning something new. Also, there really are people with serious learning disabilities. Should we pretend there are not? Finally, assuming that I were the boorish ass you seem to have concluded I am, why would you give a crap what a boorish ass thinks, anyway?
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
Very insightful questions. I really appreciate them. Stephen hawking and helen keller were geniuses by innate ability, even more so because of their decisions to let conscience reign over any emotional troubles they may have had. (Helen Keller certainly had emotional disturbances.)
The questions you are asking are interesting, because they shed light on a danger. We can only improve so much-- progress has its limits, and at some point, the human body must be made stronger through the act of will, and perserverance, not through technological mudslinging-- the operating system of a person's ambitions must come first before the operating system of the computer.
Which leads me to wonder -- are these Linux systems accessible to the disabled, certainly not. And that is indeed a travesty.
--Sam
Both the Gnome and KDE desktops have assistive technology,as you may find at Gnome and at KDE. Whether either would be of any or sufficient help to you, I cannot say. What's loaded on my Debian system has at least one check-off for terminal/CLI stuff in addition to the graphic desktop. Best wishes to you in your present and future endeavors.
Jim
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.