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UK Schools Warned Off Microsoft Deal
rs232 sends in a BBC piece on the UK computer agency Becta advising schools against signing up for a Microsoft educational license because of alleged anti-competitive practices. "The problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licenses for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else." We have discussed Becta's role in British education here several times as they have acted as a watchdog warning of perceived Microsoft excesses.
For a minute there, I thought they were making some sort of metaphorical statement.
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
Insert self-referential sig here.
Sort of, kind of, not really? Schools are supposed to teach children skills that they can apply in the real world. One of these skills is keyboarding, and honestly, how many typing training packages have you seen on 'nix? Or even Mac?
Kids' software needs are significantly different from that of adults, with the possible except of a good Office suite, which everybody needs. Where's the equivalent of your doodling software, trivia games, and all that stuff you would find in a primary school computer lab?
While I agree MS's tactics here are pretty low, it doesn't immediately lead us to "switch to Linux", because honestly it's not a viable alternative.
On the other hand, Apple has traditionally had the support of children's software publishers. Maybe they can leverage this situation to their advantage...
THE OTHER ONE IS: You pay for all your machines OR users (you can choose the license type). Say , you have 30 users. You pay some ammount of money. Then you have the right to install every MS product for those users in every machine in the university/college/scool, etc AND at home as well. Of course, if you dont use MS at home you are still paying, but this is the agreement. And the prices are MUCH lower than on Select. But nobody is forcing you to agree with this license. Use the old goos Select (pay by installed produts) and thatä's all and well. Of course, this being slashdot, we need our daily article odf env^z^z^z... hate.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows If someone learned UNIX 10 years ago, they could pick up a modern Linux distro and have little trouble with it, if you take someone who learned Windows 98 and put them on a Vista system, they would be confused and have no clue how to do the most basic things. Same thing with Office, if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system, take someone who learned on Word 97 and put them on a Word 2007 machine and they would be confused. Not to mention practically anyone knows how to check e-mail, surf the web and get around an operating system, that doesn't get you ahead, now if someone knows PHP, Perl and Server Administration, they could be an entry-level sysadmin for a small company, while the other student would be more or less a data entry clerk, Windows leads to more dependence on MS products, Linux leads to more solutions and more opportunities.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
And if you had simply RTF Summary, not even RTFA, you would have noted that the issue is not whether or not to use Windows, but the draconian, monopolistic terms that Microsoft tries to force on schools with their educational subscription licensing models. The idea that they force schools to buy licenses for every single machine regardless of whether or not it is running Microsoft software is just this side of extortion, and BECTA was simply pointing out that it is not in a school's best interest to sign such terms, and should opt instead for the normal perpetual license that people purchase. Not over whether or not to use Windows (and Office in this case too), at least not in the short term.
How many are you supposed to need?
I know you were trolling, but I have to thank you anyhow. I hadn't thought to look for a touch typing tutor on Linux, but now I have and KTouch looks like it's pretty decent.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
> "The problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licenses for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else."
Microsoft can't "require" this. Same as the BSA or CAAST can't just show up at your doorstep and "require" anything. Not even a "license audit."
Good for Becta.
Then there's this
Kids' software needs are significantly different from that of adults, with the possible except of a good Office suite, which everybody needs. Where's the equivalent of your doodling software, trivia games, and all that stuff you would find in a primary school computer lab?
Actually the vast majority of that type of software runs pretty flawlessly under wine.
Its not generally complex software. I'm sure you could find exceptions, but for every exception that didn't work, you could probably easily find software that did. Its not like there are a shortage of 'doodling' and 'trivia' games to try.
That said, my daughter's kindergarten class has a classic iMac with OS9 on it. And I have no issues with that. Its a suitable machine for what they are doing with it.
It would be absurd for them to have to license XP Professional for it, even if it is a discounted copy.
I hadn't thought to look for a touch typing tutor on Linux, but now I have and KTouch looks like it's pretty decent.
What? The regular 'touch' command isn't good enough for you?
This guy's the limit!
Most schools I work depend mostly on crap from RM, and if lucky the admin can buy some shit like Dell. E-learning credits to blame...
The machines bought have always had older hardware for their time, and are a nightmare to administer. Made even worse that as ad admin there is no decent install cds - all restore discs. great.
Many of these places I`m probably the only person that is aware of licensing and paying for each install etc... but unless it's some shit sent in by one of the many education software companies to review it's near on impossible to get permission to get money released. Had to laugh when we needed a server license for a network file share (cos xp max 10 limit) when all the old 95/98 did it anyway.
rant rant rant too jaded but it's all bollocks in education over here. I just can`t imagine a situation where IT would install an OS wide spread without a hardware change. Education was better off with old computers before all this funding started getting mis spent. Spending most of my times filling holes and fixing stupid crap rather than developing.
yadda yadda yadda
I already replied above, but on an unrelated note, it just occurred to me that this license would brilliantly require schools to pay Microsoft subscription fees for all their macs with Intel CPUs. As education is one area where Macs are close to dominant, this is a brilliant move. Kudos.
Insert self-referential sig here.
Well I'm a Sys Admin / Network Manager in a school in the UK.
Truth of the matter is I have approximately 2% of the school budget made available to me; this equates to about £150,000. Using that money, I run a 2000+ user network, with nearly 750 attached devices (thin clients, fat clients, printers, etc).
I run an almost entirely Microsoft shop - 2000/2003/Exchange/XP/XPe, with Office 2003 / Encarta / Project as well. In terms of non-MS OS, take your pic from Debian, Thinstation and a host of Linux-based thin client devices (Neoware, Wyse, etc).
My Microsoft licensing costs come in at around £12,000 per year, this also includes my terminal service licensing. Is that a lot? Not really - the buy price for 650+ copies of XP, Office, plus CALs for Exchange, 2003 and Terminal Services is prohibatively high imho.
BECTA can complain about the terms of the agreement, and suggest we spend our money 'up front', but unless they are going to provide funding, I'm afraid to say I'll stick with the Schools Agreement for now.
I'd love to have the money to buy outright, don't get me wrong. But for a school with a relatively low income (ie our students come from a high socio-economic area) I simply can't afford to do it - £12,000 a year is however a manageable cost.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Typing training packages? When we were taught to type, we had these things called "books," that we put next to the computer. In fact, I'm pretty sure the book we used was published when the Selectric was new.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Sort of, kind of, not really? Schools are supposed to teach children skills that they can apply in the real world. One of these skills is keyboarding, and honestly, how many typing training packages have you seen on 'nix? Or even Mac?
Kids' software needs are significantly different from that of adults, with the possible except of a good Office suite, which everybody needs. Where's the equivalent of your doodling software, trivia games, and all that stuff you would find in a primary school computer lab?
While I agree MS's tactics here are pretty low, it doesn't immediately lead us to "switch to Linux", because honestly it's not a viable alternative.
On the other hand, Apple has traditionally had the support of children's software publishers. Maybe they can leverage this situation to their advantage...
When I was in school, the only difference between the computers we used and the ones that adults used was that kids were at the keyboards and the particular programs we wanted to use. The typing programs were on computers that were probably 13 or 14 years old, and all of them were still monochrome. Most of them were mid 80s era ibms.As for typing, there is always http://tuxtype.sourceforge.net/ I haven't used it, but it looks like it is in a similar vein to the typing program I used at home.
Typing programs are really not that hard to design, especially if they are like the ones that were used in my typing class. Basically we would copy on the line below what was printed on screen, and the teacher would yell if we were looking down. The computer would then compare the lines, calculate the time and give a score. Not really that hard to do.
The big issue is that if a student can't afford to purchase Office 2007 on top of the price of a computer, why should they be unable to bring files over to the school computers? The site licensing isn't inherently wrong, it really depends upon how much is being charged, if the price for the total computers is below what the price for just the ones in use, that isn't such a bad thing. The school my mother works for has a site license for a number of programs and they can install that on a huge number of computers without having to account for where each copy is.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows
...) is also available for Windows.
No. Linux and Windows are equivalent in the sense that neither teaches students about computers, they both teach students about an operating system.
if a UNIX student learned on vi, they could edit text files with ease on a Linux system
Again, Linux and Windows are far more alike than you claim. The student who learned DOS EDIT can open a console and run EDIT under Windows.
More importantly, much open source software (OpenOffice, GIMP, Apache, MySQL,
Schools should not be teaching Windows or Linux. Neither is appropriate. Common business and productivity tools are appropriate, but only to the degree that a student could write and print an essay, solve some math problems with a spreadsheet, etc. Expertise in such tools should be reserved for some sort of business class. Teaching kids to be admins is *not* something K-12 education should be doing. We have already stolen too much time from basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and science.
I'll play devil's advocate here.
If you buy licenses per-computer where needed, then the school has troubles figuring out what licenses it owns and where they are being used.
If (say) 90% of a school's computers are going to run the MS software, and MS is offering a 20% discount for site licensing, the school wins both in money and in admin hassle by taking the site license, even though some of the computers won't use the paid-for software.
(In this particular case, there is an additional complication that the site licensing is per-year, whereas perpetual licensing is one-time up-front.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
TuxTyping has a rather limited wordlist...at least on the "long word" setting (I haven't tried any of the easy settings). A friend of mine is a high school teacher, though, and he teaches computer science. The "advanced topics" class, where students who've taken a year of programming classes are given the chance to write whatever software they want (basically), has a student who is writing a typing tutor program that is in a game format similar to one the teacher said he remembers. It sounds like it acts like TuxTyping with the falling letters, but you have to type the full word and it won't let you switch until either you get the word wrong or you finish it. TuxTyping, unfortunately, lets you type the letters out of order. Of course, as with all software written in that teacher's classroom, it will be open source for Linux (they use Edubuntu in their school computer lab, so Linux is their natural target OS).
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
I love the fact that the word wankers can result in a +1 Informative.
Idiots.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Hey! I practiced my typing with 'touch' and it put tons of empty files all over my /home! grr... buggy software
On a more serious note, KTouch is a useful program, and you will likely find an open-source program equivalent to pretty much everything.
For languages:
For Physics:
For Math:
For geography:
For music:
For Mind-Mapping:
- Semantik
Anyhow, you get the gist. As someone who has taught in both High School and College and whose wife tutors middle schoolers, I can't say that I've seen anything they are running that can't be replaced by linux based code (or in rare cases, by Windows code running on Wine).That's a poor argument. As much as I dislike Windows, it is possible to lock it down so it is barely customisable / tweakable / usable too.
Afaict the situation goes something like.
An educational establishment has lots of PCs running various versions windows and various versions of various software some MS, some none MS, some legit, some pirate. This is a management nightmare but paying regular prices to upgrade everything would be cost prohibitive. MS comes along and offers windows and office at a very steep discount and with the right to use any version you want (the windows OS part is upgrade/downgrade only but since virtually all machines come with an OEM windows license that is not really a major issue).
However to get the products at this discount they have to sign up to terms that are not very nice. The license cost is based on some factor other than the number of machines running windows (for schools I belive it is total number of PCs, for universities I think it is total students or something like that). So there is no financial incentive to move individual machines to free software. Further the deals are often subscription based so the institution has to keep paying even if they have no desire to upgrade.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
So while lazy, cheap teachers get the free windows and M$ office at home they are making everybody else pay for all the student licences even when the student's computers aren't and likely wont be using any M$ software. So it is a straight up lie and to be honest your lie is just that as well. The truth is M$ is not a viable option for school use, where you would have to be paying a licence fee for each and every student for the 12 years that are at school amounting to thousands of dollars added to the cost of public schooling, M$ exploiting children yet again.
As for keyboarding, I used a computer everyday at work no touch typing, basically because I had to shift the keyboard around my work, no set location, no touch typing. So you see everybody on the planet employed as secretaries, computer coders and data input operators. Silly me and I though the OLPC XO laptop was already being used with Linux to effectively teach children in schools and that was the real reason behind the new M$=B$ licensing scheme.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Slashdot covered a very similar predicament a while ago:
Clicketh
Given the timestampdiff between the two it looks like it is taking people a while to wake up to the reality of Microsoft licencing.
Couldn't stand the weather
You have to lock Windows down to make it barely usable now?
how to invest, a novice's guide
The best way to teach a kid to type is a IM Client. Seriously, i have seen it work for a lot of kids and some of these kids have learning disabilities (like ADD).
"In Soviet America, Passport Stamps You!"
"Y hello thar, R U gonna cum over tonite?"
Won't anybody PLEASE think of the children???
One student at the high school I was administering discovered that even with our more prohibitive settings (many/most of those alternatives were disabled) he could simply create a shortcut to C: on a floppy disk and he was home free.
Sure, I was pissed at him, but at the same time I was impressed with the elegant simplicity of it all.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
"Slashdot is the graffiti on technology's bathroom wall."
/. sig, IMHO!
'Though They paint these walls to stop my pen, the Shithouse Poet has struck again!'
I cannot properly attribute this, but I did see it in my high school restroom in 1974.
BTW, that line of yours would make a great
"I wonder what it is any of us are doing here?"
Yeah, it can seem like that quite often, but for me...
I have learned some neat stuff here, some not so neat stuff(goatse I'm looking at you-aghhh!), and have heard a lot of useless stuff.
It seems to find equilibrium at slightly positive for me.
Sometimes it's something funny that makes my day brighter. Sometimes it opens whole new mental doors for me. Sometimes I find out how far I am either ahead or behind the curve on a subject. Sometimes it's just silly and a waste of time.
But it is always Slashdot....kind of like online Russian Roulette, but my survivors don't have to clean up the mess off the walls and floors when it goes bang!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Take it from me; teachers don't administrate, and when they do all they do is mess things up. Usually pretty horribly at that. Teachers in public (elementary, secondary) schools tend towards the computer illiterate side of the fence. Some to the degree of simple uncertainty, some to the degree where they'll order a student suspended because they changed their desktop background - that's the outright fear category right there.
We've had teachers inform us, the lowly know-nothing network administrators (see, we weren't University Edumucated so what could we really know anyways?) that their lab was working PERFECTLY the day before, that NOTHING had changed, except somehow the computers wouldn't turn on anymore. Yes, of course they're plugged in! I checked it personally!
Yes, the power bars were unplugged from the wall outlets. He was correct though; the computers were in fact plugged into the power bars.
As for software administration, hoo-boy, you don't even want to go near that one.
Security? What of the teacher who used to perpetually walk from his math class to the computer lab across the hall and leave his online bank and investment site LOGGED IN all through 2nd period?
Or even common sense. Like why I, a male network administrator, would want access to the girl's phys-ed office (not the change room, the office, where the computer connected to the dead printer was).
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I wonder if Ubuntu will replace Microsoft on school computers.
I just saw that Tesco UK is selling Ubuntu PCs as well! This is a first in England.
For those that don't live here Microsoft is the computer. For about 10 years I have never heard of anyone else using Linux in the UK (I mean walking around or in real life. Not over the internet), then this year suddenly walking around the university everyone's laptops have Ubuntu or Fedora or SUSE. Even my university has SUSE in one of their labs. Now that is a first!
There was a piece from 2005 in which it talks about the government seriously thinking of switching all its software to open source.
Haven't you ever known somebody who speaks mostly because they like the sound of their own voice? Same principle applies to the text from their fingers.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Haven't you ever heard of employees who denigrate a competitor's products?
I doubt we'll agree on this, so let's be fair and split the difference. 50% astroturfer and 50% psycho?.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There, fixed that for you.
Kids who use IM clients, text messaging on cell phones, etc. develop a very early crutch on short forms, symbols, letters in place of words, acronyms for anything common, a complete lack of syntax and a dozen other nightmares preventing the proper development of language skills. The younger they're exposed to this the worse off they are.
My younger brother is guilty of all of the above and I insist that when he talks to me via IM he use proper sentence structure or I'll ignore him. I don't want to hear about "2day wen i went 2 da part wit ma bffls ... " and it serves no educational purpose to him or his friends to continue in that fashion.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
At work I totally blew up the security one of our tech guys work, using Internet Explorer's Help Menu. Click Help > About > System Info > Open > Right Click > Explore. If that's disabled, then it's off to View > Privacy Policy > Tell me about cookies > Tools > Internet Options > (Temporary Internet Files) Settings > View Files. Even if all the icons are gone, get Task Manager open, click Help > About > End User License Agreement (would you believe it opens NOTEPAD?!?) And to top it all off, MS Word is officially the biggest vulnerability in that type of security (can you get to the VB Editor in that? "Shell cmd.exe" is the one line that demolishes all security).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Its also trivially easy to bypass such server side login scripts. :)
Pulling out the network cable about 5 seconds after logging in usually does the trick.
Windows then defaults to a 'allow all' state.
Yes Windows is fully scriptable but it will only allow you to lock down the really obvious things.
They are extremely simple to work around if your determined enough.
Hint: At a school, there will be plenty of bored kids who are determined.
At my university their are XP machines locked down so that one cannot even open the file manager, they are web-browser only (supposedly). To access my disk on key, I found that I can simply browse the filesystem in IE's File -> Open dialog.
When I decided that I'm sick of that setup, I tried to boot Slax but discovered that the BIOS is set to boot from the harddisk first, and is password protected. So I unplugged the machine, and using a broken mechanical pencil managed to pop to battery off the motherboard through air vents in the locked case. Five minutes later, hehehe, I opened the now-default-settings BIOS, set it to boot from CD, and away I was.
Moral:_ANYTHING_ can be bypassed so long as the intruder is determined, and having physical access to the hardware (locked case or not) certainly helps. Linux probably might have helped prevent me from using the disk on key, but it would not have helped prevent me from defeating the BIOS.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Obviously a troll but...
Nope.
The education system has a responsibility to teach it's kids skills for the future. Absent an actual time machine, that means predicting what they will be using in the future and giving them the best start you can from that information.
On that front, education fails miserably in almost all countries when it comes to Computer Science.
I was "officially" taught, between 1985 and 2000, BBC Micros, BBC BASIC, Windows 3.1 and (in the last year of University) Java. By the time I was taught them, they were already obsolete (I was still being "taught" BBC BASIC in 1997, for example, despite the fact I'd been programming Win32 C programs for about four years in private).
If I had even been "taught" the current tech as it was, I would have come away an expert in Windows 95 and 98 and would have almost no experience in Windows 2000. Now, to someone willing to go on to learn further, that's not too bad. But most people stop learning when they leave school, so we'd have an entire nation who, at absolute best, would be trained up on and never want to leave Windows 98.
Additionally, most SENSIBLE education systems (and that might accidentally include the UK National Curriculum but that's purely coincedental given the state of the rest of the UK education system) NEVER recommend the use of a particular product but a general overview of the type of hardware/software. If your schools teaches MSAccess courses, leave now. If they teach Database classes that just happen to use or prefer MSAccess, you're okay. Because by the time the kids grow up and get into a serious career almost nothing they would have learned in school would be useful or relevant unless they were taught generalities.
Even in Science - if I was rigourously taught that there were nine planets, I was wrong. The only way to counteract that is to keep up as best you can (although most places still teach that there are nine planets!), explain that things change and teach generalaties (i.e. know that a planet is an object of certain size that orbits the sun, rather than that Pluto is a planet, always will be a planet and can't be anything else). Like science, education has to keep up with modern trends but, like science, it has to be impartial and generalise information rather than teach by rote. Otherwise we'd all still be being taught that the Earth was flat.
It would have to come with a health warning: Three pints and a keyboard can severely damage your karma.
That's bullsh#t. In Windows Group Policy Manager, enable User Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Scripts > Run logon scripts synchronously. This tells Windows is disallow any user interactive (i.e. no desktop, no windows explorer, no nothing) after logging in until all login scripts have run. Of course any admin using loginscripts would have this setting enabled.
I used to work in a highschool, trust me we had to lock the Windows computers down well. There are simple work arounds but for a few things, but they're all solvable with a bit of effort - only stupid admins would roll out a locked standard profile without serious testing anyway.
I have seen laptops, that if you popped the battery off to tamper with the BIOS, or if you forgot your password, you have to ship the unit in to have the BIOS reset. I am not sure if anyone has found an exploit on those yet, but that is a step in the direction of security.
And, yep, it is darned inconvenient for the average Joe. It has a home in the corporate and government worlds though.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Myself and another student actually ran the Windows network at my high school. We administered the network and created the majority of the security settings on it. We were able to do it much more efficiently than the the staff, as the other students had no idea we were in charge. Other students would share their little tips and tricks with us, and we would promptly make adjustments to stop them from happening. Surprisingly, the student body never caught on (but rather thought our faculty to be particularly adept) over the 3 years my friends and I held the position. Last I heard, our basic setup was still in place, 6 years after leaving. Apparently a "spy" produced system is superior to the best they could concoct.
Just another ignorant American.
You can do quite a lot with a floppy disk on a school computer. Unfortunately for a guy in my old school that doesn't include dragging the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop to the floppy so that you can get on the Internet at home.
/me types this from a GNOME session he has started up on his University's supposedly locked-down, Firefox-only Sun Microsystems thin client.
The guy running the network there was such an ass. He "solved" problems by disabling stuff; by the time I left he had disabled the floppy drives, USB ports, school email, Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail/etc. and pretty much every way to get work to and from school. Thing is, these were disabled within Windows, so I used a boot floppy to load Damn Small Linux from a USB drive. There's always a way around these things.