Slashdot Mirror
Most Useful OS For High-School Science Education?
Clayperion writes "I teach at a high school program for gifted students which emphasizes math, science, and technology. Currently we have two computer labs for the students: A new programming lab (all Dell PCs running XP, MS Visual C++, Eclipse, and SolidWorks for programming and CAD) and an old general-purpose lab (all Macs running OS X 10.3, with software ranging from some legacy OS 9 science applications to MathCad). Most of our students eventually pursue graduate degrees in science and engineering, and we would like them to have experience with the tools they will find out in industry. As we look to replace the old machines, there has been a push to switch to PCs with XP so that there is only a single platform to support. There are over 5000 machines on the district's network and the IT department is very small (fewer than 10 people), so the fewer hardware and software differences between the machines, the better. Without opening a flame war as to which one is 'better,' I'd like to know what those of you in the science and engineering fields actually use more in your labs (hardware, OS, software), so that we can decide which platform to support. It will most likely have to be either XP or OS 10.6, with very restricted permissions to students and teachers, as that is the comfort level of IT and administration, but I'll push for whatever would benefit the students the most."
I'm not sure I'm following the logic... Windows XP is getting close to EOL. Why wouldn't you use Windows 7? Certainly it and Windows Server 2008 has more features to make admin'ing easier.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Give them something open they can play with. You can learn plenty on windows, and I assume mac (last macintosh i used was a green screen and I learned plenty). Let them get hands on and into the guts of it all. Let them write their own OS from something open.
*DrugCheese rants*
You know those are meaningless unless we know what kind of science or engineering right? Civil engineering? Network engineering? Traffic engineering? Geneticist? PhD Researcher? Hell, Sexology??? What of donuts?! WHAT!?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
IMHO, nothing but free software should be used in science and science education. Any research relying on results produced by close-sourced software is voodoo.
XP, of course. Windows is still the One Big Commercial Marketplace. It is an advantage to know, and a disadvantage not to. It runs the world's software from games to big business, from COBOL to Ruby on Rails, from free to MacLockdown. Run with that puppy.
..so I'm going to go out on a limb that some version of Linux is going to get mentioned.
For science, I'd have to say OSX, or at least for the life sciences. The majority of the up and coming programs for data analysis are for OSX/Linux. These include MOTHUR/DATUR/4peaks/ARB/R/etc. I'm not so sure for engineering, but I'm sure someone here can answer that.
You can teach computers and programming without a computer. For initial learning, the box gets in the way, big-time.
Better to teach someone the ideas of structured programming BEFORE they write their first line of code. I love pasta, but spaghetti code is a different matter.
Feed the brain, then let the students pick their own OS. Otherwise, you're just creating the next generation of BASIC Zombies.
I do process engineering calculations in some pretty big applications. Many of them are web-based since I'm too lazy to program user interfaces. Side bonus is two of us can work on the application at the same time if it is web-based.
The single most useful thing I can recommend for engineering & science students is SQL. I can't tell you how many people I've seen using spreadsheets for a completely inappropriate application because they don't know how a proper database works.
But SQL doesn't do much by itself - I use PHP to interface with it. PHP has its problems, but it is simple, forgiving, and widespread.
Most of our labs in college use a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu Linux, with some Solaris speckled around.
I'd probably go for Fedora, since a lot of students will likely be working on some Fedora derivative, and it is easier (in my opinion) than Ubuntu to administer. However, it's really up to you.
I've also heard that many of the co-op companies our college partners with use some form of Linux. Though, for obvious reasons, a few design oriented companies use Mac OS X, though that may change in the future.
Windows is a rarity, from what I've seen and heard.
because it's for human beings.
I'm working on my master in math and Linux is a must. There is so much compiling, scripting and ssh'ing that it makes Linux the best choice.
MacOS as a second choice (I hate mac) however it still does lack in some places. Examples are software libs, sparse matrix solvers, r, sage, latex, root(physics) .
That being said you can install most of these on a mac but its a process vs a 'sudo apt-get install' in a debian type distro. Also at least in my experience there are alot
of people in these fields running linux which makes collaboration much easier do to similar software versions, ideally this shouldn't matter but not many program that cleanly.
Frankly, expose them to all 3. Linux, Windows and Mac. If these are G&T kids, they shouldn't have a problem with the learning curve between environments.
Which would you rather have: learn distinct programming and design environments on Microsoft or MAC, or being shown the differences between the intending software tools across all environments, and why proprietary software might be better than FOSS in some circumstances.
To have them learn a software package that they might not use again is kinda pointless. Software is a tool. Giving them the proper perspective when deciding on an OS, software package, or programming environment would be a far better prospect.
Windows for running hardware and doing experiments, linux for running computer models, and macs for generating articles and figures.
There is just not much support for other OSes for the vast majority of experimental hardware- load frames, cameras, data acquisition, Simulink, Labview, etc. This is especially true with smaller companies that sell very expensive equipment with custom software- it is almost always winXP and maybe win7.
Chances are good that when your students are running a small model then the OS doesn't matter, they will be using a common language that is available on all (java, FORTRAN, matlab). If it is a large, complex model, then they will be forced to use linux because the cluster they buy time on will require it.
If I am post-processing data to generate figures, articles, presentations, and reports, I use a mac- they are still the most productive OS for creativity, IMO.
1. Load a VM enviroment on your XP boxes, then you can create instances of VM's running other x86 based OS's. I'd recommend UNIX, in paricular a flavor of Linux, a flavor of BSD, and Open Solaris.
2. Boot an alternate OS on your XP boxes from a USB, DVD, or other removable media.
While I'm a confessed Apple zealot I'd go with PCs running XP. It's the more common, more supported platform. A lot more of the "industry standard" type of applications will be running on PCs running either Windows or Linux. In the computer labs I support we're replacing all of the machines this summer, and I toyed with going Mac, but it just doesn't fit the educational needs of the students software-wise. Not to mention support for any sort of specialized hardware.
As far as the concerns from your network admins go - tell them to find a good hardware independent imaging solution. There are some great products out there that do this type of thing. I'm partial to Altiris (now Symantec) Deployment Solution. It can kill the hardware abstraction layer and then drops in replacement drivers based on the hardware it's imaging. It runs over the network and images via PXE boot and I've heard of a lot of places that use it in pretty spread out setups (thousands of machines in far-flung locations). It scales extremely well and in cases where you do need specialized drivers for things like video cards or other special equipment they do provide a way to install those drivers. Although if you're using Novell Netware it really causes problems - in which case you'd want to look at Zenworks but it's definitely not as easy to use as Deployment Solution (works great with Active Directory though). I've been using it since the beginning of this year and I love it. I've got 12 labs of varying sizes to maintain and I only have to keep up one base image. Each lab has a scripted OS install setup that installs any special software that's needed in the lab. It's also handy to be able to reimage the labs overnight and not have to wait for semester breaks to update software.
This space for rent...
Be aware that your multiple objectives conflict somewhat.
How to resolve the conflict? It isn't easy. You don't have enough information to predict the future of IT (nobody does).
I teach at a high school program for gifted students
Ah. Have you asked your gifted students for their views? They'll have opinions about the future of IT that may differ from those of your old grey haired colleagues in IT.
Since they are going to spend most of their life justifying their budgets with PowerPoint, might as well get them used to windows ;-)
Teach principles and do not prefer one kind of software. Show alternatives and teach them. If you go by the "industry standard" you end up with Microsoft Office. Yesterday I had a discussion with my aunt who has been working as an construction engineer for 30 years. She told me that kids coming out of college these days have no idea how to calculate stuff. Instead they depend on software that they studied in the college. That is a very dangerous path to walk on. It may seem that teaching "industry standards" is a good idea, but in reality it is a slippery slope.
I work at NASA and have many university colleagues I work with as well. A recent IP survey I had IT do at GSFC in MD showed a Mac OSX installation base of about 30%. This is similar at my freind's universities... at least in the physics and engineering depts. We recently moved our 20 or so PC's over to Mac a few years ago and have been very happy. I was able to show I saved the government approximately $60K-$90K a year in gained productivity and reduced IT support, salary, etc.... So, while Windows is used mostly now by the Best Buy consumer level base, which is 80% of the "market", the professional technical use of OSX is much higher. I suggest having a mix of new machines if possible and taking your own data. Track how often the machines are used, under repair, software costs, and how the students take to them and make your own conclusions. Good luck.
So science, religion and porn have three things in common with your network. Neither of them are really going to play a huge role in the decision of the topology or specifics regarding your hosts.
What is important to consider are what are your requirements for the specific applications that apply to your curriculum today and in the near term. These things dictate what is necessary to support your environment. If you don't know what you should be using I would consult a similar audience rather then the general populace. In practice, I've generally found most educational institutes are staffed with at least some individuals who do thrive in the industry. (Hint, industry experience is a good thing).
In any event, this is a very long winded ask slashdot, but offers very few details. Even if someone said to change all of your systems to XYZ using ABC it wouldn't really matter. You can't base a purchasing decision on a few paragraphs. I certainly don't want to draw up a diagram of how your architecture should work and toss out a handful of applications.
The bottom line is that you should know at least some of these details. What are the pain points with whatever and certainly not detailed plans on the horizon.
Here is my two cents....
Come up with a consistent approach to your operating system selection and configuration. Ensure you have the capabilities to deliver a clean and automated of said services. With only 10 individuals it will really will become a painful support paradigm if you continue with some haphazard configuration.
As far as software selection.... because I know virtually nothing about what you currently use or specific fields this is in regards to... I want you to find the most expensive application that does a single 10th of what you want it to do. Buy lots of this software and pray they release the features you need in the next release.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
computer hardware is probably a pain to procure at a high school, so i recommend the relatively inexpensive Mac mini. we're planning on converting our XP lab to Mac Minis running Windows 7 in a virtual machine (Virtualbox) which means our computer hardware won't be a limiting factor when selecting the software we teach students in our lab. Mini's are as much power as you'll need, and this makes more sense than iMacs when you factor in the cost of 22" or 24" LCDs. and by running Virtualbox, you can even set up multiple vm's so you can test out new versions of software without having to perform complete rebuilds if some microsoft update hoses the system. hell, you can even add some linux to your environment should their be some cool engineering or programming tools that would otherwise be too costly on the microsoft or apple platforms.
yep, you can buy a pc cheaper and of course you can run Linux for free, but it will probably help your students the most if they get a little bit of experience with multiple operating systems since once they graduate from college, they'll probably be using OSX 10.7 or Windows 8. running XP is a nightmare because of the security holes AND because Microsoft has already started to eliminate XP, say 2 years ago when they first discontinued it.
having dealt with apple dealer to school sales since 1991, I think the choice [Mac or PC] is a false choice. And since there are no viruses or malware that run on OSX, the schools we support who run OSX spend a shitload less on support costs, which can quickly suck up your budget, your time, and your patience in a school environment should you be running XP and get zapped by malware. since running vm's is easy, it's become a preferred way to quickly switch a lab from one group of students to the next.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
In college we used HP-UNIX machines a lot. The general idea was that UNIX offered the largest gamut of languages with which to work, and learning different programming languages was generally more beneficial than learning a lot of platforms. I'm not a hardware guy, but for software, I generally agree that comparing different languages and coding styles is the best way to learn about computers. Any open-source OS is a big plus for this. If this is high-school level work, I assume the class work will largely focus on programming.
Of course, that was on the north campus where all the geeks were. I was also studying art on the south campus, and they used Macs exclusively in the art program, as well as in the newspaper office. Windows machines were available for word processing and "everything else", but not much in the CS program. Windows would be a curious choice, especially XP, as it doesn't offer very much useful stuff for education out-of-the-box.
Windows XP is the obvious choice out the two choices. If you have to have a single platform, it should be Windows. If you had enough IT support for two platforms (which you don't), then Windows and Linux. I've worked with various companies as a software engineer. The distribution of platforms that I've worked on has been roughly 50% Windows, 40% Linux, 10% Mac. Macs are much more common for creative fields, but if you're focusing on math and science and want to use what industry uses, go Windows.
running multiple partitions on computers is probably a little too techie for most high school computer lab administrators to handle. with school budgets slashed and fewer techs available in almost every school district, multiple partitions = multiple headaches. there's really no need to run multiple partitions when you run virtual machines with different OSes. plus by using OSX as your base OS, it opens the door to running whatever OS you want in a VM.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
> I'd like to know what those of you in the science and engineering
> fields actually use more in your labs (hardware, OS, software), so
> that we can decide which platform to support.
But research or engineering is quite different from education, you know... I don't think a high school program should narrow its scopes in 'preparing the students for the industry', especially when most of your students are going to pursue graduate degrees eventually, as you said. It's not like you're teaching in a vocational school, isn't it?
I do hardware design (RTL for FPGA's, C/C++ coding, etc.). All you need is Ubuntu for this. If you need windows for something you can run it under VirtualBox.
My experience from the past 25 years (degrees in both natural sciences and medicine, nowadays both practising and teaching mediicine) suggests that for the purpose of just using applications, the choice of platform doesn't matter much as long as long as the applications that you need will run on it.
However, most people serious in science are curious minds, want to understand how things work even if it is outside their main research domain - and that occasionally extends to IT even if the primary domain is outside IT. To facilitate this, I think the open sourced platforms such as the various BSD or Linux clones will fit the bill far better than the closed alternatives - provided the software you need will run on it without problems.
"I teach at a high school program for gifted students which emphasizes math, science, and technology." This sounds like any slashdotter's wet dream.
macs are good for all kinds of tasks, not just art, electronic design, filmography, or music production. have you ever seen XCode? it's free with the OS and provides a fairly powerful IDE. don't knock it until you've tried it.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I work for a research lab in a university and we do a lot of scientific computing and webapp development. Here it is UNIX variants and only UNIX variants. We use Debian Linux on our clusters, Mac OS X or Debian Linux on my Mac Pro or Mac Mini desktops. Knowledge about C/C++ and scripting languages is very important. We are recently interviewing candidates for an opening, and it is very sad to see people who cannot code without IDE and who think building the binary is equivalent to clicking the little button on the toolbar. If education needs to do one thing, then that should be to give students a broader view instead of limiting them to some false impressions. In that sense, UNIX is a much better tool because of its rich history and active development.
High School seniors are between 4 and 8 years away from working in an engineering field. That's enough time for things to change considerably, and even if it weren't, the operating system really doesn't make that much difference. If you could give them some experience using the apps that will be relevant to them, that might be a little more useful, but that space is so broad that there's no way you could know what will be needed.
I'd make sure you pick a platform that runs the software the teachers want to use for classes. If that software is available on multiple platforms, then pick the one that is most cost-effective, considering acquisition and maintenance both.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
In 10 years of working in the medical and engineering fields, i've seen exactly 1 person use a mac at work.
I would say the best option is to install windows 7 and have them load linux into a vpc so they can experience a unix clone. if they can handle that then if they DO come across a mac down the track it won't be such a shock - they'll know there's more then windows out there.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It is more important to introduce them to what they will use in university and grad school than what they might use in industry. By the time they get through univ. the world will have changed enough that today's OS+1 or 2 will be vastly different & obsolete to what they will be using. So teach them skills not any particular software.
I hate to make wild predictions, but the scientific language of the next 10 years will be Python 3 + numpy. (I am an old school FORTRAN* + C programmer, but it's pretty easy to recognize the writing on the wall) This is advice from deep in the trenches btw.
*(yes, FORTRAN is still widely used and useful in CFD & applied physics; don't be a language snob)
The Python part is free and (mostly) OS independent and they can have it on their own laptops & work on homework and projects at home & on the weekends.
In all honesty, the only possible way for you to manage that many workstations with an wide assortment of different hardware & so few staff at your disposal is to use Debian/stable with some custom bulk management scripts. Ubuntu might be easier for the students, but Debian is unsurpassed for server management which has to scale. Lock it down as tightly as you like. It may be a formidable learning curve for both your team and your students, and there will be pushback (less so from a sci & tech HS faculty I would like to hope), fukups, and assorted bad days, but you'll get those regardless of OS, and in the long run it will be better and easier for you and give a better foundation for your students. The thing about a learning curve is that you have to learn, which is the whole point of this exercise, right? And the good thing about Linux is that it is usually going to be reusable knowledge that you have to learn. The better you get at UNIX the better programmer you become; and vice versa.
Plus you can redirect the license budget into hardware (get some 8-cores and teach a multi-processing programming class) and salaries allowing additional staff (keeping local tax money in the district).
I write software in aerospace and our hardware is whatever the guy put in charge of buying it picked when he ordered them from Dell, our OS is usually Windows because the more influential people when they started the project were most comfortable with it (linux and solaris are used on some projects -- no OSX though to my knowledge). Our software includes a whole lot of Office and LabView. LabView is a "love it or hate it" programming language. It's also complete trash. The reason we're using it is the same as the reason we're using Windows.
Despite being a LabView hating Linux nerd I still like my job, hence the AC. But the lesson here is not to push people into a comfort zone that they're afraid to break out of. Give them a taste of as many different things as you reasonably can so they're not causing headaches for people like me when they graduate.
In our district Freshmen take Earth Science, Sophomores take Bio, Juniors Chemistry and Seniors take Physics. There's also some techy electives such as Intro to Programming, Computer Animation/CAD and an Intro to Computers (teaches the basics of how to use a computer, browsers, word processing, etc...)
Check out the applications that your those that set the curriculum want to use. Some software suites are available for one platform and not another. You can't just say, "We're using OS/2 and that's the way it will be!" As you'll have 10 department heads yelling at you that there aren't any XYZ applications available to it.
Also, who says you have to have 5k PCs each with it's own disk, OS load etc.. Why not look at Virtual Desktops (vmware view with dumb terminals/thin clients in the classrooms? The Unix folks have been doing this for years, but this solution is pretty slick. We've deployed it for all the staff as they only use a dozen or so standardized applications.
Btw, I'm an ex-mainframer and managing 1 mainframe and 5000 dumb 3270 terminals is much easier than 5000 desktops; and speaking from experience managing a couple of large X86 servers and a 100 thin clients is very similar.
It will depend heavily on what path your students pursue.
I've done a mixture of hardware design and firmware development for both storage peripheral companies and IC houses. What I mostly see is:
I have yet to see any significant use of Mac's, except as clients to log into Linux workstations. Almost all IC design and verification is done on some POSIX compliant OS because of the the requirements of the tools. IC houses I've worked for generally have large numbers of 32, 64, and 128 way multi-processor systems with huge amounts of RAM. Windows XP is simply not able to take full advantage of these large systems and the tools require this much horsepower to be effective. I also have noted that many IC designers generally seem to prefer the power of a good CLI over GUI point-in-click file managers. There is also a lot of scripting in these environments, mostly in Perl (although I've also need shell script and Python used). Linux and similar operating systems lend themselves more for this sort of work.
As for tools, I would suggest that you seriously look at trying to give your students at least a taste of such tools as MatLab, MathCAD, AutoCAD, and S. There are free equivalents for MatLab such as Scilab and Octave as well as Python packages such as SciPy, NumPy, and MatPlotLib (which I sometimes use for modeling). I know that languages such as S+ (or the free R language) are sometimes also used for statistical analysis. If you want to give your more advanced students a taste of chip design, consider the free offerings from Xilinx along with a few of their FPGA evaluation boards (available through DigiKey).
I hope this helps.
I'm working as a programmer since '99, and most usefull to start my career life was tha fact that I already knew how to fix Windows. In school, our computer policy was "you break-it, you fix-it", and face at a virused computer all teachers did was to tell us some names of free antivirus tools, show us how to regedit, give us some links concerning registers towards msdn, and show us some good forums to search on for info. The teacher was there if needed, watching our advancement.
Nowdays, sooner or later, in enterprise, an IT employee will - sooner or later - face Linux. But since you only put MacOS as alternative, this Unix will do. But here too, you shouldn't lock-it down. I mean, let them do theyr user stuff, no one says they should have root access, but they - at least - have to be regular users.
I think you should PXE boot either OS. That way, they may tear-it down, once the machine rebooted, the initial state will be restored.
I'm currently a CS student in college as well as a phylogenetic research assistant on campus and we use Mac OSX 10.6 for everything.
I find it hard to believe that you're considering Microsoft Windows as a platform to teach computer programming. That is the absolute WORST decision you could make. Windows really lacks the tools you'd need to do good programming, especially for the sciences.
macs are good for all kinds of tasks, not just art, electronic design, filmography, or music p
Thing is, the writer of this question is wanting a real world idea. And not to knock the Mac, but in most businesses Windows rules and so I'd say Windows would be the best bet. Sure Mac could be done, but it's not done. There are also other signs that Apple has no interest in real world business options.
Where I work (very much a science and technology organization), our DESKTOP platforms are extremely limited. Office, lab, whatever, it doesn't matter. We have the following choices:
MS Windows
Mac OS X
Linux
This list is considerably reduced from what it used to be.
On the server side Linux dominates, but MS Windows is quite prevalent, and I imagine UNIX is around as well.
If you have to go with a SINGLE platform (not good), I would recommend OS X. It straddles the Linux/UNIX and Windows universes, and for a high school level lab, will give you the best of both worlds.
First of all, my credentials: I'm not a professional sysadmin, just a professional software developer who also admins a few systems. You may want to give more weight to opinions posted by actual school sysadmins.
Okay, my recommendation: Ubuntu. And my dis-recommendation: you don't want XP.
With Ubuntu, if the computers are reasonably fast, you can do a full re-install in a short amount of time. I imagine there will be cases where someone manages to monkey around with a computer and mess it up, and ease and speed of re-install will be a win for Ubuntu. With Ubuntu you don't need to install, reboot, install a driver, reboot, install another driver, etc. Note that if you know what you are doing as a Windows sysadmin, I believe you can make a "slipstreamed" CD image with the drivers and such pre-installed, which would mitigate this a lot.
Other Linux distros would also work well, but Ubuntu has the momentum as the free home-user Linux distro of choice. Some of the high-school kids will possibly already be running Ubuntu at home. I would suggest having all students login as "guest" and have the "guest" account set up so that, when the user logs out, the /home/guest directory is removed and then replaced with a copy of a standard /home/guest directory. If some clever little black-hat wannabe edits .profile or something to try to set up a joke on the next user, this would sort that out.
With XP, you can configure the logins to be non-Administrator, and unless you are totally insane you will do so. It's hard enough to keep the computers virus-free in any event, and if you let high school kids have privileges to install software, you are just asking for trouble. But you will absolutely want anti-virus, and that means you will want to keep the anti-virus up to date, and that is a big headache that you can completely avoid with Ubuntu.
Now, as for software. Everything I'm discussing below is available on both Linux and Windows. On Ubuntu, it's trivial to install these; on Windows it would be more work. (But again you could probably work something out with a "ghost" disk image or some such.)
Depending on what kind of engineering we are talking about, many of these students may move on to using Matlab in their working lives. Matlab is expensive, but educational copies are probably available. But there is also the completely free GNU Octave, which is basically a Matlab-alike, and is freely available on Ubuntu. There is even a GUI wrapper for Octave, written for the KDE environment, but I haven't tested that. I have only used Octave for DSP work, but it is adequate for that, and did I mention that it's free. The graphing tools in Octave are not as good as real Matlab but they can get the job done.
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
I have hopes that someday Matlab will fall by the wayside, and Python will replace it. Specifically, Python with the NumPy and SciPy extensions. With SciPy, Python can do much of what Matlab can do, and it does it with a much better base language; Python is a marvelously clean and tidy language, while the Matlab language is just annoying. Let's face it, it will be many years if ever before Matlab could be replaced by Python, but there are science labs and engineering groups out there using Python and the numbers will only grow. The graphing tools in SciPy are IMHO better than the ones in GNU Octave, and almost as good as the ones in Matlab. You can get Python with all the SciPy stuff pre-installed as the project Python(x,y):
http://www.pythonxy.com/
There is also a project to take every bit of free math software and glue it all together into an amazing giant math tool: this is called Sage. Sage, also, is based on Python. You run Sage as a server and you use any standard web browser as the GUI client. You can run Sage on the same computer as the web browser, or you can set up one
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As far as the budget goes, Apple/Mac is going to be more expensive than Dell or any other Windows box you can buy (we're talking about hardware only) Then you have to take into account all of the software licenses.
For (Windows) software deployment, there is a free Dell tool called Image Direct. Basically you order one system and set it up the way you want it to create an image and then you can order systems directly from Dell with that image on it, and there's a free training and HelpDesk for assistance.
I know when I went to college, I used RedHat in the computer labs and all of our work was done on one flavour of GNU/Linux or another. The entire Physics & Sciences Labs were also running Linux. So if all of the books that teachers are using are teaching programs that are only available for Windows, then that answers your question on which OS to go with.
I wouldn't take into account which OS people like better or think would be easier to manage. Definitely go with which ones the students/teachers need, but if you do have a 'General' use Lab, you can save yourself a lot of money by buying systems that have a GNU/Linux OS on it, and there are hundreds of Free tools/apps that students can learn about and even use on Windows or OS X. To name a few, Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, OpenOffice, and not to mention all of the compilers that are readily available in most GNU/Linux OSes.
Anyway, I hope this helps and you don't get flooded with responses that say things like "Windows Sucks." etc. Good luck to you with whatever you decide.
—Kruz
> Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway.
I'm not a chemist, but I think your investigation is not about controlling the spectrometer, but the resulting spectra. So I think it would very interesting and potentially productive if you have the source code of the software that transforms/filters/enhance/displays the output data.
BTW, I don't believe the people at CERN will rely on some close software for tracing their particle collisions.
. . .I would recommend Windows, Windows, and (not strongly) OSX.
There is no question in my mind that Windows is the way to go for chemistry software, as I've now spent almost ten years at three different universities working my way to a PhD (almost there!), and besides the occasional foray into Linux (control software for two different brands of NMR), it's been Windows all the way (and the NMR software was available for in a Windows client, also). I could post a list of all the instrumentation I've used, but trust me, it's long, probably around twenty-thirty instruments now.
From my undergrad experience:
I haven't used as much software earning my bio degree, but we mainly used statistical packages, and they all ran on Windows - the SEM (the only instrument I used in that department) ran on XP, too.
I only had a year of physics as required for the chem and bio degrees, but the physics department uses Macs for the computer labs and the classroom computers - supposedly there are a lot of interesting software packages available, which I never used. The instrumentation I had the opportunity to use (the Mossbauer spectrometer and the x-ray diffractometer) both ran on XP, though.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
For students variety is good. Too have a solid background one must understand the Unix OS and Windows since these are the most viable in business Today. So to be fare to the students you should have both Windows and probably Linux is a good choice. As for administration it's quite easy to build golden images and simply scratch machines, also make sure home directories are stored centrally this can easily be done using NDS for Linux and Samba for the Windows shares.
Once you have no local document on PC's you can simple replace/re-install whenever is needed, will save a alot of time.
I haven't touched Windows or Mac OS since I got my bachelor's. I work for an IC design firm and we do all of our work in Linux and BSD, from the ASIC, to the test board layout and embedded developement.
I'll name a few reasons why we're stuck with Windows XP & 7:
- AutoCAD - Land Desktop & Civil 3D
- Leica LiDAR Scanner Software
- ArcGIS
- Trimble Geomatics Office
etc...
The tools of industry are written for windows. Your employer will have Windows based computers with Windows based software, so education follows suit and we're stuck with all-windows systems.
with Windows 7 limited to machines for AutoCAD. ..and don't be too cheap to shell out for a Landscape licence if you want manageability.
They're probably already being exposed to Windows or Mac OS at home, so why not do Linux?
When I was in university, (graduated 2008), the Mac Lab was usually empty, and more people would be hanging around the Windows Lab.
There was a third lab but had no clue how to log into those machines, (probably for hardcore computer majors).
Of course, nowadays, most people would have their own laptops, and they'd connect to wireless networks.
I'm sorry, but am I the only one who choked when he said 5000 computers to 10 IT staff? Maybe I'm out of date but the last average I heard from Gartner was like 115:1, is this not the case anymore? And I thought I was overworked w/175 pc's and an equal amount of IP phones.
Most new engineering software requires more ram than a 32 bit xp install can provide.
Advantage of Windows: 1. .NET framework
2. Vizio?
Advantages of Apple's OS:
1. No licensing fees for Snow Leopard Server - greatly reducing cost
2. Lower level of IT support required - IT team could easily manage 5k clients over a school district.
3. Students learn C+, Objective C, and develop iPhone/Touch/iPad apps as a way to learn programming.
Check out Apple's site for iPhone developer support for education - really interesting.
The obvious answer is: buy Macs. They guarantee you flexibility. You can install Windows on them if you need it. You can run Windows and Mac OS X as alternative systems (Bootcamp), using a virtual machine such as Parallels, or without Mac OS X at all. Windows licenses are very cheap for educational organizations.
So, any argument you read in favour of Windows in this topic goes for choosing a Macintosh computer.
Choosing Macs only, such as iMacs, makes your hardware support very easy, compared to buying a mix of computers.
Bert
Who suffers in daily life from programs written obviously by programmers who have never worked with a computer with a decent set of GUI XUI guidelines. They would have learned some basic things from that.
The key is in automating the crap out of the entire "OS lifecycle". At $university the machines actually booted netware, presented a menu, then booted the OS of choice. I forget how it was done exactly, but some things booted entirely remotely and others less so. They were actually more stable than the w95-only kiosks running netscape the library had deployed. Yeah, this was some time ago.
The thing is that a monoculture inevitably does you in, and that wouldn't benefit your students. To excel they'll have to be able to use whatever they encounter later in life so it's actually beneficial if they're exposed to multiple systems. Same with programming languages for that matter. Teach at least two and preferrably wildly different ones. Show the differences and explain why they exist.
As to which platforms to support, well, you already have a pretty good mix. Part of what you should teach your students is how to automate their own daily tasks, and "something command line" (shell, python, forth, whatever) is still a good, quick and easy way to achieve that. hypercard with its hypertalk was another. windows never did support any of that very well, in fact even before it was windows it sucked at that to the point that a shell replacement (4DOS) was a must-have. macos X has much BSD userland but a few clicks away, so that's good. Or you could go a linux or *BSD route, and see how much you can supply that way. But whatever you do, make sure your shop can efficiently support multiple platforms. And the key to that is automation. This is IT, man.
Future engineers shouldn't be smothered with warm body entertainment eye candy. They should be taught how to make their tools dance for them. And what engineer has but one trick up their sleeves?
As a molecular biologist and bioinformaticist, any exposure to Linux is key. I use some flavor of linux as well as shell OSX on a daily basis. I do bench research in an immunology laboratory and analyze data using bioinformatic tools. Being fluent in Perl and Linux are not absolutely essential, but they make my job a whole lot easier.
I taught myself programming (and how to wire together an 8080) a good two years before I was able to use a real computer, from those things made out of dead trees. I can still find problems in assembly, C, Verilog, whatever, by reading the code much faster than many of my co-workers can by running simulators and debuggers.
A rigorous understanding of logic requires no hardware.
It's not OS's your students need experience with. It's software and programming languages they need experience with. If they're going to go into experimental science, they would also benefit from building hardware and interfacing it with their computers. (i.e. Some basic electronics)
I do experimental quantum physics work in a university. We use everything. OSX, XP, Windows Server (no Windows 7 or Vista installs surprisingly!), and a few distros of Linux. Sometimes we are forced to use a specific OS (usually Windows) because some piece of equipment we're interfacing with only has drivers for one OS. When that isn't the case, it's personal preference. (I gravitate towards Linux distros with decent KDE environments.) Really, you shouldn't worry about what OS your students use. Ideally, give them a chance to try out a variety of OS's.
The applications are what's really important and the big ones tend to be mostly the same across platforms. If you're doing basic (or not-so-basic) simulations or analysis, you're probably going to use Matlab or Mathematica. Something requiring higher performance will probably be written in a low level language like Fortran. (Yes, Fortran. It's surprisingly good for Physics work. Try doing linear algebra in Java or C and you'll just waste a lot of time writing tools.) If you're running an experiment you might do a little driver work in C or C++, but odds are you'll tie things together with something like Labview. Origin also gets used a fair bit for plotting and curve fitting even though it has a pretty horrible interface. Excel, gnumeric, etc. just aren't as good at fitting. For writing papers it's Latex and nothing else. Many people use Latex add-ons like beemer to make presentations as well instead of powerpoint. I'm sure other people can suggest software to get, but it's going to get expensive fast unless you can get some free educational samples, which you should probably try asking for. You might be surprised by what you get!
Here's my ideal environment for your students:
-Not one OS, but many. They should be exposed to something they don't use at home. This will help them become adaptable.
-These OS's should not be locked down. Locking them down will stifle your students ability to learn. Heck, encourage them to try breaking and fixing things. You should probably, however, create disk images so you can easily restore the machines to a useable state if they are wratched. Your sysadmin will hate this idea and would probably prefer to lock things down tightly. Just remember that if sysadmins had their way nobody would ever use their systems.
-Get as much far-out scientific software as you can. Let your students play with it. Encourage them to try checking their Calculus assignments with Mathematica or Matlab, or perhaps write them up in Latex.
-Get some hardware to hook up to the computers. Find basic sensors like thermocouples or photo-diodes. Get some USB-interface chips, prototyping breadboards, and misc components and put your students to work interfacing those sensors with a computer. They might find it impossible, or they might surprise you. Being able to tackle tasks they're not prepared for with minimal guidance is one of the most useful skills you can teach them.
-Don't make boring lessons like, "Today we're going to learn how to print, "Hello World" in Java!". Give your students projects. Ambitious projects. The sort you don't know how to do. Give them lots of class time to work on it. Even if they're doing stuff you don't know anything about, talk to them about it. Ask them what they've done, what their current problems are, and what they plan to do. It's their problem to solve, but you're the coach who helps keep them on track.
If you do even a fraction of the above, your students will be well ahead of 99% of the students coming into University.
If they like to tinker, are interested in programming, or may want some postgraduate hard science or engineering degree: have them use Linux.
If they have a strong artistic streak, are obsessed with "Web 2.0" sites, or have more than 1000 Facebook friends: have them use OSX.
If they enjoy attending club meetings after class, like keeping track of the chess team results in a spreadsheet, or think the title "MBA" sounds cool: have them use Windows.
On one hand,
VS.
There is not one single platform to support in "the industry".
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
In my district, the main thing computers need to do is access Facebook and Google essays to copy.
Consider yourself very fortunate.
At my university all computers available for students run on a Windows XP environment with a Novell client which isn't up-to date (for example, the default browser is still IE6), so almost everyone uses a laptop. I've been using Windows for all my life, but last year I bought a Macbook Pro. After almost a year of using it I think I personally prefer the Mac, with some tasks it's a bit quicker, has a good amount of software available for most tasks, the battery can last for 5-7 hours which is well enough to last through a lecture (yeah I know, netbooks also last that long, but I am talking about a 15" laptop here), there are very few drivers to install (for example, by default all the printers at school and my printer at home work without a problem, I don't need a driver for the network at school where older (vista and below) windows machines do, that's solved with Win7 though. It just works and keeps working
However, I still find that at some points the Mac lacks when compared to Windows, that's not really Mac's fault but it's because Windows is more mainstream. I work with microchips at the university, the software for updating the microchip is Windows only, also I work with software, most of the time we use Java or C++, but in some courses we use .NET (so I have to start Windows). Manuals for installing printers or the network at schools are mostly focussed on Windows only (now as IT-guys that's no problem for us, but not everyone has the knowledge do they?). Now at my school they start focussing more and more on other OS'es but it's still not enough.
About Linux, for an average student it's hard to get used to, there's limited software available (for example, MS Word isn't available, you'd have to use an alternative). This is not an option.
So my conclusion is: At this moment, Windows is the best option because it has the most software and the most support however in some time that might change, and I certainly do hope so! That bein' said I still don't regret I bought a Mac :D
I'm a a physicist working on statistical simulations and we use Linux based software exclusively. This is largely related to the kind of simulations we do which require huge clusters and benefit greatly from distributed computing. We also tend to write our simulations ourselves so the Linux base helps greatly there, too. Anything but Linux would probably be harmful for our purposes.
However, experimentalists will have completely different conditions. There controlling the equipment is important and the software is often only available for Windows. From what I've seen the experimental side (experimental physics and probably most engineers) will have to use Windows.
For programming its mainly between industry and academics. In academics I've seen a lot of Linux usage simply because it's the more natural programming environment. In the industry however only Windows development is relevant.
Long story short: Offer multiple systems if possible. I know it's more work but they all get used so educating on all of them makes sense.
By far the best solution from an educational perspective is to have the kids provide their own support. If the kids can't provide most of the support then you've chosen the wrong platform. I don't pretend to know enough about the current market to know platform is the best for the kids to manage. But that should be the deciding factor.
Our district is much like yours in the restraints that district IT puts on new purchases / expansion. Our district has about 12,000 machines (80% mac - 20% PC) and about 18 core IT folks at the central office. And IT will support either XP-Pro or OSX 10.5 or 10.6.
Going Linux etc is possible but any and all support would be by your local school tech which would be daunting. My take would be to go with Macs in your second lab and look for open source application solutions for both the PC side and mac side. Both machines have their strengths (and I'm an ex-PC designer) and students should be exposed to multiple environments if possible.
Its not the years, its the mileage
... allow for a dual boot system. Our university has dual boot for Suse and Windows XP. Most people have a laptop here anyway (this goes for most science students I see, not just the IT folk around me), including myself. A dual-boot gives you the best of both worlds. On the other hand, it takes more time to maintain.
If you really want Unix, don't install an actual Unix system but instead install Linux which isn't Unix?
You're going to run into one of two problems.
1) By time the kids grow up everything in industry will have changed.
2) You can't afford what they use in industry with a HS budget, even the [college] student licenses.
I'm a mechanical engineer. I make my living using Matlab, Simulink, CANape and some internal company programs.
I went to HS with Windows ME (with MacOS 7/8 at home) I honestly don't ever even remember using them. Our "Physics Lab" was an Apple II running some highly custom software and hardware. (Running lasers to time ball bearings going down ramps and such). I learned the basics of programming with TI-Basic. In college I picked up Java, C, & Matlab/Simulink.
Now I run 10.6 at home and XP at work. Something no one could have predicted back in the day. Teach the kids the basics. If someone 'gets' how to program, it doesn't matter. If someone 'gets' chemistry, it doesn't matter if they're drawing them on paper or in some 3D model.
And I haven't priced a student's version of Matlab recently, but I know my seat at work runs 20k. Simulink doesn't make too much sense until you've had DiffEq. I haven't used Octave enough to know how compatible it is. CANape... well you'd need quite a bit of money for the stuff to run it on. There's a reason there are a half dozen solid modeling programs, because companies use different ones. And with my short time with most of them, they're completely different. AutoCAD, CATIA, ProE, SolidWorks, etc.
I am a university faculty member in biology (in an ecology and evolution department) and Macs are by far the most common, with some Windows and Linux. I do programming as part of my research (various projects on Google Code, R-forge) and do it on a variety of Macs. One thing to note is that with a Mac, you could install Parallels or VMware to run any necessary Windows-only programs, but you can't do the reverse on Windows easily (I doubt your IT department would want to build a set of hackintoshes). You could even install Windows later using bootcamp, so by choosing Macs, you can still switch later, but you're locked into Windows (or Linux) on a Windows box.
I've done a few roll-outs and migrations, and one of us is off the reservation. I go all the way back to Windows 3.1 and DOS 4x, then DOS5. I worked on a DEC mainframe once so I've been around the block. ,so this users group needs some meat on the bones.
You're intrested in costs? Cool.
You are committed to providing services to an internal customer with narrow but rich criteria.Cool.
You mention C++ and engineering
Of all the Microsoft products, I think XP has a lot to offer, but you have missed a real opportunity and it ain't a Mac. Its Linux and I can easily justify that suggestion. You want these students working in code and at the command line.Why? Why not. Open Source provides a rich and meaty catalogue of anything these people demand. Oh they aleady know Windoes and they will continue along that path,but education means pushing the boundries then pushing them some while providing a diverse opportunity.Its cost effective and secure absent the virus/malware hassle which costs bucks. A Linux/Open Source network lab meets that catagory. I use Windows but I've ventured into Linux and there are a bunch of suitable distros. SuSe is owned by Novell,which contrary to conventional wisdom, is NOT dead, even gasping and its got the support you'll need. So does Red Hat/Fedora. Debian based distributions are hot. Ubuntu is the word. You have choices. Earn your money.Do the right thing and enrich your skills at the same time.
A Mac. Oh please.
IMO there are three different answers depending on exactly how you want this answered.
First is - what do you like. In this case you will see a great deal of variation. Indeed, we can see a large portion of people here recommend Macs. You can also see studies where university professors have a higher than industry sales percentage use of macs too, more often than not it really doesn't matter in that setting as the concepts being taught are generally platform independent.
Next answer is costs - this one is decided elsewhere. While obviously Linux has little cost in up front purchasing its total cost of ownership may be different. I do not know how well it supports your hardware or how much retraining of your IT staff it would need. Further I know Microsoft often give colleges a nice enough deal for quite a number of seats that the cost is negligent. Even the small college I went too (East Tennessee State University) had donations from them for software, our IT lab also had a donated 30 seat license from Oracle and students could purchase Visual Studio for around 20 dollars (this was early-mid 90's).
Last answer is what will you see in industry. In this case "science and engineering" isn't really specific enough to give a really great answer. The only thing I can say is my parents have owned a land surveying company since I was one year old. I worked with them from 12 to some time in my twenties. From all the civil engineers we worked with I could count the number of apple machines on one hand and have five fingers left over (that is I never saw one) and an occasional architect would have one (but would still have a windows machine for AutoCad). I would see the occasional Unix workstation but everything was Windows. At this time I do not think AutoCad comes on anything other than Windows and that is the software of choice there. After college I worked for about five years as research staff at Oak Ridge National Labs in the high performance computing division - I do not think you can get more "science" anywhere else. That was mostly Linux and Unix (not just us - but the chemists, physicists, biologists, etc). However there were a handful of macs there, I can immediately think of three people I knew with them out of close to 50 that I regularly worked with but then again those were macbooks they used, their desktops were either windows or linux. I suspect true commercial applications to be little different there - you needed specialized tools and often had to make them yourself. The few bits of Apple hardware (power archetecture at the time) ran Yellow Dog Linux so those do not really fall into the "macitosh" realm either.
So, given that your choice is between Windows and Mac - well I have seen less than 10 macs in a production environment. That is with a little over 10 years in an engineering environment, 5 in a pure scientific world, and around 5 in mixed environment. Then again due to Apples deals they give schools I know of a great deal of people that learned on them, the concepts can be taught on most anything if the platform has the right software. It isn't until you get to a production environment that, well, production, robustness, and flexibility matter. Apples philosophy generally meshes well within a university setting and often doesn't in a work environment. Both Windows and Linux are flexible, Apple products (macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, anything) need to be in an environment that adapts to them, good if you work/think that way (as the graphic artists do - hence why they still dominate that field), not so much for engineers and usually scientists.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
There is another solution. Use Aqua Connect (www.aquaconnect.net) to provide for the Mac, this allows you to have over 100 users on one Xserve, then connect to it using net stations or One Laptop per child systems. You can also setup some Windows Servers so that using the same terminal server, you can access a Windows or Mac desktop.
Fight Spammers!
I love Windows 7 and VirtualBox, but I had to leave some old hardware behind when I previously moved to Vista.
There is a big difference between supporting 1 or 2 home computers and THOUSANDS of computers at work.
For most non-technical home users, espeically people that can't handle upgrading windows, I tell them to just keep using their same O/S until they need to buy a new computer, then buy it with Windows 7.
Because of EOL issues, it would be better to start a transition to a newer O/S like Windows 7 and install VirtualBox on each one. For applications that are very picky about the O/S, then create a VirtualBox image for each one and distribute to users as required until newer versions of the software are released or purchased. You will need computers extra ram and large hard drives, but it is getting to the point these days that almost every computer have lots of RAM and big hard drives. An alternate approach might for each computer be a dual boot of (Windows 7 + VirtualBox) or Linux.
And not to knock the Mac, but in most businesses Windows rules and so I'd say Windows would be the best bet.
That's true, but he's talking science and engineering, not business. I'm not sure about engineering but OS X has a much larger presence in science labs--especially in life sciences and data visualization--than it does in the overall marketplace.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Do you see where he said "30% install base"?
Take a wild, random stab in the dark at what the other 70% might be.....
I don't think you can follow the industry standards with your plan to "just have one OS" and deploy all programs your entire education needs there. That's a manageability hell with all the educators and so on involved, and the frequent industry changes.
Get the right license agreements with OS and program vendors, then virtualize. This will let your educators set up very nice VMs that focus on what they want to teach. And your students will be able to use their own hardware or the lab machines without any particular problem. And you will not have problems with any mutual incompatibilities or difficult deployments.
Then just install any bog standard OS you like as host OS. I propose Linux, because it is free and easy to keep updated.
It does not matter how you access Linux... I personally use Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) with KDE4 to work remotely on expensive (>$15,000) Linux servers. My friends use both Windows and OS X.
A reasonably thorough table of next-gen-seq software available in the commercial and public domain:
http://seqanswers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43
Windows 7 running the applications you were talking about, that's what you are going to find out in the real world, you are going to find new jobs with new equipment with the latest stuff, and everybody going to training to learn how to use the new version!
AIX (1) All Windows platforms (1) IRIX (1) Linux (38) Linux 64 (5) Mac (3) Mac OS X (4) MacOS (3) MacOS X (8) MacOSX (1) MacosX (1) OSX (4) OpenBSD (1) PC (1) POSIX (5) Solaris (4) UNIX and Windows (4) UNIX/Linux (3) Unix (12) Windows (17) Windows (Cygwin) (1) Windows (probably) (1) Windows XP (1) linux (1) platform-independent (3)
Languages
Bash (1) C (19) C++ (29) D (1) Fortran (1)
A lot of the equipment we use runs on windows machines (Gel Imagers/confocal microscopes etc), but there are exceptions (FACScalibur) which run on Mac (dunno which version but its old!).
For general use our lab uses a 50:50 mix of mac/windows, pretty much down to personal choice (sorry, no linux boxes). While I tend to use a mac, but for a lot of the software theres no getting around using windows, as the equipment vendors don't really consider cross-platform issues as important. You could attempt mac/linux on crossover to get around this, but I don't rate your chances for getting all/most of the software working.
For this field at least theres not really a right answer. However when I first had to use the mac equipment it was my 'mac virginity' and previous mac experience would have been helpful.
If the issue is system administration vs the need to expose the students to appropriate toolsets for... whatever it is they're doing, why not standardize on one set of hardware/OS (most likely Windows of some flavor, whatever your political leanings are), and have the students use virtual machine images of Linux, OSx, Windows, whatever for their work? As long as the use of the VM image is relatively transparent to the user, the students can use the best system setup for their needs, while the system admins only have to deal with one system configuration with an additional piece of software for running other system configurations.
The only real answer is Linux. If you want to let kids play with something different, that's it. Keep Windows because that's also typically attached to computers you can tear apart and rebuild. Apple...I don't know. They might turn all douchy if you set the kids loose on it and let them do what they want.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Tell them to use whatever they want, as long as it works. Let them figure out interoperability.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
No one in engineering uses Macs; it's all Windows and Solaris (or Linux).
Amiga?
-- Linux user #369862
Apart from Visual Studio what IDEs does anyone pay for.
There are a lot of free IDEs on Linux that could be considered better than Xcode. I have not used it but they are all somewhat similar, and having to buy a mac over a PC is a significant cost.
There are good solutions for everything on all OS.
Unless you need to allow sudents access to specific industry standard software, i would think teaching command line usage and allowing students free access to the same OS at home would resault in the completest education for university.
Our university has linux and windows duel booted with all non matlab programming done in linux. I cant see any justification for paying extra for a mac, the OS be easy enough to pick up if they are required in industry anyway, at least thats one of the selling points for the OS.
You say you want to choose the OS for your HIGH SCHOOL science lab based on what your engineer wanabe students may actually use when they make it to industry. Good Grief!
XP is already EOL and DISCON. They won't be using that in 6 years.
Win7 will have been replaced by at least 2 subsequent versions and will probably be DISCON.
OSX 10.6 will be replaced and DISCON, will be actively unsupported by Apple.
Whatever version of Linux you choose will have forked 600 times by the time they get out of college. Whichever one you pick now will be wrong.
The (wrong) choice you make today will have absolutely no impact on your students' preparedness for real-work in 6+ years.
SO:
Find the applications you want to use. Choose an OS that runs them all.
OR
Ask the IT guys where you work to choose. They have to support it, they know what they know how to support best.
OR
Load an old Slackware Distro and make the IT guys hate you. Make your students write the software they'll need. Then they'll really be prepared.
Protip: When you ask SLASHDOT what OS to use for ANYTHING, the consensus answer is going to be "well, you could use linux..."
I see a lot of "Use linux, its the way to go" type responses. However, you're going to lock down the systems a bunch anyway - its a school. If they're programming, big freaking deal, they can always use cygwin, they aren't going to be doing kernel hacking or something on school computers unless if its in a virtual machine type setup. What do your tools which your users are already comfortable run on? Windows? Then run windows - theres no reason to screw people over with a switch unless if it will improve something. Students will have to learn different interfaces anyway at some point, so its not going to kill them - they may as well get some concepts down beforehand rather than presenting some specifics. If you want to teach them about linux, you can always setup virtual machines or ssh into some boxes setup for this purpose explicitly. The users are probably comfortable for the most part in windows as it is, and frankly, they're probably going to be sitting around in gnome or kde on linux anyway, which really, theres about a 15 minute transition time tops, aside from keyboard shortcuts which, really arent important.
Editors like vi(m) & emacs clones run on windows, so thats not a big issue either. And most of the software has alternatives anyway that can coexist with the ones you're using right now, i.e. visual studio and eclipse for some cases, scilab and matlab (though matlab is far preferred in my experience), etc.
And what about solidworks? doesn't run on mac os x natively. gotta bootcamp/parallels it.
These kids are probably going to college anyway where they'll see more appropriate tools of the trade anyway. Their coursework shouldnt really be about the OS they're using, but what they can do cross OS. ie. even if you're on a windows machine, you can teach them shell scripting through cygwin, and the concepts will carry over to windows powershell or with some simplifications to cmd. Or, you can teach them how to code in C++ using visual studio as an ide, do a lesson on makefiles and they can move to g++ when they want - its more important that they know good C++ though (i guess people are using java here now though).
they'll eventually be dropped in an unfamiliar environment anyway... may as well teach things that are more general than what OS they're using specifically. And a lot of things can be done that make sense cross OS anyway thanks to virtualization and things like cygwin. And you don't really want to make students unhappy by switching them off something they're pretty comfortable with already for no good reason - you have wonders like X forwarding and what not which can help.
From my experience, companies like Dell have better support for large deployments than Apple (and more modern experience with this sort of thing). So the hardware would dictate windows (or linux, but im against that unless if its virtualized or dual booted). You can get all 3 with mac mini's or other mac hardware, but a recent OS shouldnt make too much of a difference in a high school setting (ie. win xp, vista, 7, a recent fedora/ubuntu/centos/slackware/etc., os x 10.3 or above, etc.).
and a good portion of science and engineering graduates don't end up in science and engineering.
I'm a postdoc that works mostly with biochemist-ey types, and I'd highly recommend adding a math package to whats available to your students. With something like mathematica, you can do:
what I also like about the math packages is the ability to synthesize "test" data to illustrate what can't be done simply in lab (or not at all, depending). And I think its also a great way to start learning a bit of programming/scripting without requiring too much CS (for those not interested in CS), but at the same time getting enough exposure to it so that they won't be completely lost when they see a conditional loop. And, I can personally tell you that science types use them quite widely.
I'm a little surprised you seem more concerned about the OS the programs run on. As long as the students can run the stuff you've listed along with some sort of math package to learn about handling data, just go with what the IT guys are most comfortable with.
But to answer your question: most science labs run whatever they want, but some hardware and/or proprietary analysis software for some equipment can dictate the OS.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
I went to a private prestigious school in the 90s. We had a lab full of computers, but they were never fancy. Some were still DOS when I was a Freshman, but they all were Windows 95 by the time I graduated.
What was important, however, was that we were able to learn the core concepts that needed to be taught. We didn't need $3000 computers to learn data structures. We also brought in a FAST internet connection before anyone knew what broadband was.
It's my opinion that a reliable network is much more important then having the latest and greatest computers. A computer that's 2 years old can still get on the web, but a slow network will hold your students back. I would stay away from obscure things like any Unix, and even any Linux, unless you're planning on keeping some Windows computers around for "getting things done." If you are going Windows, make sure to go with Windows 7. It's been out long enough that it doesn't make sense to keep 15 year olds working with technology that's half their age.
No, I will not work for your startup
Years ago the division was between UNIX (Sun, etc.) and VMS on mini-computers. Then Linux on PCs became popular. Now the mix is mostly Linux and Mac OS X. A few groups use Windows. A UNIX-based OS tends to be preferred by scientists who develop their own software for data analysis. Mac OS X is gaining, as easier to install & maintain. (Not discussing special needs, such as super computers, instrument controllers, etc.)
If the kids are that gifted, they ought to be able to support any OS by themselves.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Ubuntu is the right choice. It has tons of scientific apps, it's what many universities use, and it's easy to set up and maintain.
I don't think either Windows or OS X are a realistic choice. Windows is hard to maintain, and OS X would end up being quite expensive.
In the context of saying "The single most useful thing I can recommend for engineering & science students is SQL." you can assume he is suggesting that databases are more appropriate in general for engineering and science than are spreadsheets. That was what I was commenting on.
I would say the best choice for high school students is to actually expose them to as many varied systems as possible... That way they learn how to use computers in general rather than specific systems.
Teach users what the bold option in a word processor is for and how to find it in different applications rather than "its third from the left in the row of icons at the top of the screen" or similar.
The reason for this is simple, when they leave school and enter the world of work whatever system they used in school is likely to be irrelevant... When i was in school, the computers ran wordperfect 5.0 for dos, but since entering the world of work i haven't encountered any such systems, and even current versions of wordperfect are very different to the dos version... If you give the students XP or OSX 10.3 then these systems are already outdated and being replaced, even if you give them Windows 7 and OSX 10.6 by the time students enter the workplace they will be a generation or two behind anyway and if they never learned general concepts rather than specific applications they will have trouble adapting to newer versions.
So you either teach kids specific systems, which they will never again use or you teach them general concepts that they can apply to whatever they might be using in the future.
As for maintenance, setup a cybercafe style system where each machine downloads a fresh image whenever its booted, have students store all their work on usb sticks or a centralised server (if you go for a server make sure you secure it well, some of the kids will be smart and try to break into it). It's not hard to have a handful of OS images available for such a system, especially if the hardware is relatively similar and if you reimage the machines after each boot you can give the students a lot more freedom to learn (ie you can give some of them root/admin rights) without it creating extra work for you (any mess they make is gone by rebooting). Build the network like an ISP instead of a corporate network, keep the servers away from the workstations and ensure that any security in place such as web access filtering is done at the network layer and doesn't depend on the workstations.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
If you want to teach network-related stuff like how to easily deploy a firewall, a proxy or a mail server a ubuntu-based distribution like www.ebox-platform.com is a good choice.
If your only choice is between XP (SP3, I assume) and OS X 10.6.x and your goal is to keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible, then I think the decision is a rather obvious one: OS X. If however it's an option to upgrade the entire network to Windows 7 and thus have a uniform environment, then you might want to research into this a little further. As for software, I can't really comment, but with the right tools, Macs are still more versatile than pure Windows machines, even if it means having a dual boot system with OS X, Windows.
Should, definitely, look into Sage - sagemath.org
OSX 10.6 will be replaced and DISCON, will be actively unsupported by Apple.
How can anything be `actively unsupported'?
If it was me I would be using Windows 7. This is what they will most likely be using when they go to do work in the commercial/government world. Microsoft offers excellent free development software via Visual Studio Express. But you can also use tools like gcc etc if you want. Plus it offers great management capabilities and is easy to deploy.
The best OS for learning is a simple white board operated by a good teacher. You should back that up with some good books on the subjects. For best results you will need dedicated students as well.
I used to work at a company where we developed with embedded c. Our machines were windows but ran x-terminals to a linux server. Worked really well, we could program in either a windows or linux environment.
In my experience, most of the graduate level work is done on Linux. When I say most, I mean 99%. The other 1% has to do something with people's strange addiction to Power Point (even though there are many different tools available that can perform the same functionality, like OpenOffice and pretty much anything that can output PDF files which you can display as a slide show).
Other than that, I would recommend C++. Mastering that language allows one to not only be capable of writing low level C code (C++ is a superset of C language), but also it allows them to comfortably write higher level languages (such is Java) if at all necessary.
Ignore the fud from fanboys. While they are fighting stupid holy wars about OS' and languages, majority of research and high performance computing (HPC) applications are done on Linux and in C++.
There is a reason why software giants such is Google based their entire architecture on Linux and C++.
Being a university student myself (CS and engineering, robotics), imho it's very useful to learn solidworks. It helps the mind think better in space and understand mechanics. The open-source alternatives really doesn't quite cut it when it comes to cad... As for programming, your setup with eclipse and visual c++ sounds good. However, it may beuseful to keep programming at a "notepad"-level for starters (I don't really know what level the students are at?) One final note though, as stated by several others here, why XP? Windows 7 is here and it's looking good, just make the switch.
I'll just cut right to the chase: you ought to run Linux, and Ubuntu is probably your best choice.
Here's why:
1) I'm assuming you don't have a budget to buy new hardware across the board. You've got 5,000 machines running (mostly) XP, and a modest IT budget. Your _real_ choice becomes: keep running XP, or switch to Linux. Why? Because you won't be able to run Windows 7 on your old machines (firstly, because of prohibitive licensing costs, and secondly, because your old machines aren't going to be powerful enough).
2) So, the only important question in your case is: should you stick with XP, or start migrating to a free Linux variant? Continuing to run XP is a really bad idea. So far, apparently you've been pretty lucky, and haven't been hit too badly with viruses. If you had, then it would be next to impossible to keep 5,000 XP machines running with a staff of 10. Linux is rock-solid: once you get it installed, it's pretty hard to mess it up.
3) If you stick with XP, you'll necessarily have to switch to something different for any new machines you buy. You understandably want to standardize on one platform, given your tiny IT dept. That won't be possible if you stick with XP.
4) Why Ubuntu? It's very easy to maintain locally (i.e. without an admin), and it has very widespread support (i.e. you'll find almost any Linux-able software can be installed on Ubuntu).
From my understanding of your situation, the bottom line is that the only reasonable way you can hope to keep 5,000 machines going, on a shoestring budget, with 10 support staff, is to switch over to Linux. Then, figure out what software you can run. You'll probably find anything you need for a high school science curriculum.
(And keep an XP machine in some labs if you have special equipment that requires it.)
It will most likely have to be either XP or OS 10.6, with very restricted permissions to students and teachers, as that is the comfort level of IT and administration, but I'll push for whatever would benefit the students the most.
If you work in a call center then everyone will have exactly the same system, running the same software, doing the same thing with minimal privileges.
Just about anywhere else you'll get a mix of stuff, different tasks, different HW, different software, more flexibility, greater privileges.
So... unless you're training future call-center operators try to keep as much flexibility and variety as you can.
(yes, I know that's tough, especially on a limited budget)
I think you are wasting your effort by exceeding your authority. Your intentions sound good, but if these machines are going to be connected to your district's network of 'over 5000' machines and supported by district IT, I'd say your input _on the OS_ does not really matter. I think your time would be better spent deciding which applications you would ask to have installed on either Vista or OSX.
HOWEVER, if you are actually going to have the freedom to set up and run your own lab, I would recommend Linux. This kind of OS will allow you the most flexibility as far as cheap / free, upgradable educational software. You would also have more flexibility to lock the machines down without preventing the students from doing useful work. You will definitely be able to update the OS and applications more frequently than if you used Windows or OSX.
Disclosure: I went to a science and math high school. The computers in the lab were woefully outdated and most of the students used their own. It didn't stop us from excelling at coding, math, etc.
linux.
I am in (combinatorial) scientific computing and high performance computing, and use *NIX environments almost exclusively (ranging from proprietary Unix to different kinds of Linux flavours).
This goes for universities as well as businesses (ranging from software consultancy to companies like Shell). This choice is due to performance as well as productivity. These statements come from my own experiences.
Besides, if you want your students to learn something new, it makes sense to pick something else than Windows.
MacOS 10.6 vs XP? How do you even come to those two choices? XP is a dead OS, live with it and move on. Ask the question later when you consider Win7 as another option (because a dead OS shouldn't even be in consideration).
XP is (or near) EOL. The fact you'd even consider shackling your school with an OS that has (or will have soon) no support tells me you're not even qualified to be asking this question to begin with.
And personally, I don't like MacOS X, or XP for that matter. So there.
I work in one of the National Labs. Our particular group uses a smattering of Macs, but the vast majority (at least 99%, and every last percentage point there is justified) of data acquisition---in OUR group, of about 70 people---is done by PCs. My guess is that 95% run Win98, Win2k (neither allowed on the network), or WinXP (allowed on the network with heavy institutional patching), simply because strange acquisition cards and analyzer hardware is best supported under Windows (plus the QWERTY lock-in effect).
I try to use linux for all of my work, but a lot of our equipment doesn't play nice with it. I find it hard to do hardware support in one OS and then switch over to another for the software support.
One area where both linux and OSX are beating the pants off of Windows is in not being impeded by the institution's security policies (though OSX is going to get a much closer look in the coming year). We recently had a kerfluffle where people's Win PCs were being rebooted by the security system to apply MS patches. A lot of people follow the "early-warning" announcements, so they know not to do critical acquisition/analysis work on the days when it could happen, but emergency patching isn't unknown, and a lot of people's data got trashed, on some very difficult experiments, because they run Windows and didn't disconnect from the network.
The "computer lab" is something your students won't encounter in grad school or the "real world". They will use a network-based resources, and redirect the display to their personal laptop, in most instances. So your CAD "lab" actually runs on servers, and students just need to run a display client to interact with it.
The future is portable, and multiplatform, with a mix of Windows, Linux, Mac. That's actually a good thing, as computer monocultures are bad for a number of reasons.
You may be driven to Windows (and Windows 7) by CAD software requirements, if nothing else. But that doesn't mean you have to install Windows on the desktop PCs, you just need something that allows screen sharing. If needed, use the Macs in the publication department for the "Mac Lab", for apps that need it.
My Son's school is considering Google Mail and Google Apps, because of onerous MS license renewal costs. My daughter's college switched to gmail in 2008.
Another way to consider the problem - what software would you choose if your students were bringing their own hardware? If they bring their own hardware, you certainly wouldn't waste time in a cat-and-mouse game of trying to restrict their actitivies, and you'd focus on preserving network access. By the time they are in high school, you want the combination of an acceptable use policy and computer ethics to have the students manage their behavior appropriately. If the AUP calls for a failing grade in a classes based on "cracking" into other systems, the problem will be self-correcting. 99% of the challenge is gone when the students use their own hardware.
As for grad school compatibility, you will find that Linux is more dominant there than in current elementary and secondary schools, especially in the schools your math and science geeks aspire to. SAGE, System R, and other Math/Computer Algebra packages are something they should be exposed to early.
I use Unix/Linux command line stuff all the time for installations, deployment, management and so on, but I develop using a visual IDE because it is more productive for me. Since I began doing assembler on PDP-11 and 9900 processors, moved on to C, and am still actively involved in development, I think I'm in a position to say that command line snobbery is simply counterproductive. If some kind person has already configured Ant for me to run in an IDE, I accept what I am given and am grateful. Why do I want a programmer to spend all day on a script to automate something that the IDE can do in 9 seconds? The object program is exactly the same size and runs identically.
It's like stupid people who boast about using stick shifts as if this made them virtuous. I've used them for over 40 years alongside automatics. Current autos have computer controlled manual gearboxes that use less fuel and change more appropriately than human drivers, and I'm glad I bought one.
I want programmers who understand exception handling, corner cases, graceful recovery from external failures, automated database backups, data prevalidation, efficient algorithms and data structures, bloat avoidance, profiling, and debug. I really don't care if they drive an auto or a manual when it comes to compiling, so long as they don't thereby waste time getting from A to B.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ubuntu with gfortran and vim. Really, what more do you need for science?
That's the problem with random stabs in the dark...you can never be sure if its actually random.
LINUX is the clear answer.
OS X for desktop with FOSS for most of our "work" software. SuSE on the servers, some Ubuntu clients. When we interview college grads with only Windows experience, they tend to be regarded less highly than ones who have significant FOSS experience.
Books are Instant On technology and they seldom get viruses and other infestations. If however you don't really care too much about the students and is dead set on getting computers, whether it really makes sense or not, then a low maintenance setup would probably be best, given the small size of your IT support team. Therefore Apple Mac or Linux would be much better than anything made by Microsoft.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You don't care about all those specialized scientific applications that only exist on one platform. In fact, all the scientific applications that students use like mathematica are available across all three platforms. You care about two things :
(1) What students learn from the platform itself
Mac OS X is the undisputed king of being user friendly, while offering enormous room for growth, but Ubuntu is extremely good assuming you cannot afford Mac OS X. By comparison, Windows teaches "there's a certification teaching you to find the button for that", which is awful pedagogically.
In general, Mac OS X and Linux users will have little difficulty adapting to Windows, but Windows users will face more trouble switching to Linux. Linux will also minimize admin headaches like viruses, games, etc.
(2) Programming language availability
Linux offers numerous free programming languages that simply aren't that well integrated with Mac OS X and Windows. In particular, python and ruby are almost surely the best widely adopted languages for teaching programming. PHP and Visual Basic are moronic by comparison, but PHP is more widely used than VB.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
> In 10 years of working in the medical and engineering fields,
> i've seen exactly 1 person use a mac at work.
my department is entirely staffed by research scientists and engineers of various flavors. A few run Linux, just 1 runs Windows, the entire rest of the staff from top to bottom are on Macs as their desktop installs (by choice). Some PCs exist for software/hardware that need it, but since the advent of VirtualPC and then intel Macs +VMs there haven't been any new PC purchaces that I can think of.
summary: YMMV, OSDNFA.
I recently toured the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (where they're working on nuclear fusion research). The control center appeared to be mostly Macintoshes with a smattering of Windows and some kind of XWindows system (probably Linux).
Personally, I think the best thing you can do for a future scientist is give them a taste of several different systems. The very premise of enforcing homogeneity and a locked-down lab goes against the spirit of scientific exploration, IMHO, and will naturally lead to worse results.
Thus, my recommendation: iMacs with large screens and a virtualization system with XP, Win7, and Ubuntu images available.
E pluribus unum
I work at a high school, so maybe I can provide some information.
In the physics classes the students can use any OS that provides a spreadsheet. Most of the students already bring a laptop that run windows, so the obvious thing to do is to teach the students to use their personal computers. If a student happens to bring a mac book or a linux machine, then they should be taught to use that instead, but of course the teacher is best at teaching a program that already know. If a student does not bring a laptop then he can borrow a stationary computer during the class. In principle these stationary computers could run Linux, but that would be the same as telling the poorer students: "You could not afford to bring a laptop, and therefore you are forced to run Linux".
So instead of shifting to Linux we should focus on making sure that a student with a mac book do not suffer too much from not using windows in a windows-based environment.
The chemistry students have a nice windows program that can name organic molecules and draw 3D images. This program does not interact with any equipment, so in principle we could replace it with a web service. I think web services is a nice approach to gradually allowing students to use other OSes than windows. The only problem is that I would hate to rely on a web service during an oral exam. What do you do if the connection disappears?
The physics lab contains some measurement equipment that can interact with a windows computer. So the students can measure pressure and temperature in a gas, and draw it as a graph on their screens. That siunds pretty cool, but in reality it takes a lot of time to install new software on all the student's laptops. It is much better to rely on portable devices that have a small screen. That allows the students to read the numbers from the screen on the device an type them in to their spread sheet. So in the physics lab the best solution seems to be to use portable devices instead of computers.
The class rooms for teaching math have electronic white boards (hitachi starboard), which allows the teacher to use a fancy pen to draw to interact with the image provided by an LED projector. Hitachi has kindly provided a Linux driver, but I haven't found good Linux programs that work well with the board. The most common use case is to import a pdf-file and draw upon it with the pen. I would be grateful for some advice.
The students have some fancy calculators that can differentiate, integrate, and solve systems of equations. The producer of these calculators also provides a nice program that can emulate the calculator on a laptop. This is very useful for the teacher, because he can use the electronic white board to teach the class about the calculator. Sadly this emulator program doesn't work on linux. But actually this is not a big problem because you can probably explain the calculator just as well by writing on the black board.
So in conclusion I don't think it is helpful to shift an entire school to Linux, but it would be good to do some work to help teachers and students that prefer to use mac or Linux. The best approach is to rely on web services and portable devices.
I'm a maths researcher. At my previous and current institution there's a mix of Windows, OS X and Linux. The people doing more serious coding tend to be on OS X or Linux - often both. IMANPE (In my admittedly narrow personal experience), I have never come across any research level codes that are Windows-only and I often use libraries that assume some kind of Make-style UNIX build environment.
IMHO, teaching programming without a computer is like trying to teach math without using numbers
The teaching is done in the classroom in abstract and general ways. The learning occurs in the lab where a student tries to actually wrap their head around the concept and implement it.
I don't know if this can be modded up to a 7 or 8, but it is very insightful as well as interesting.
Fact is, schools have to deal with Realistic Budgets and any computers they purchase will certainly need to be multiple-use and not just for the teaching of programming. They'll need to be general use, as well.
I run a small business and I recently purchased a new computer. It's a workstation-class computer and needs to be because of what I do. And I bought on the kinda cheap side from a top-tier manufacturer. This one computer cost me $7,500 (and I need to add RAM). If you have a class of 20 students, all of whom need a separate CPU, you're looking at a cost outlay of $157,500. Heck, my daughter's school just bought whiteboards and it took them about four years to raise the funds.
First thing I would do is find out how much budget you can sink into your project. That will guide what you can buy. Second thing I would do is hit your local Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, Kiwanas Club and so on and see if you can get local sponsorship for your project. Since you're a technology school, see if you can get a tech company to give you a grant as well. Target around a quarter million and you're looking at a first class lab that will begin to go obsolete as soon as you build it.
I realize I'm talking to a school teacher here. School teachers in high schools and elementary schools don't write grant proposals, because that's university stuff. But, by thinking in terms of raising funds, you suddenly place yourself on another playing field all together. And, with respect to computer purchases, bake sales just won't raise anywhere near sufficient funds. I know -- if it takes four years to get White Boards, your computing technology will be on life support by the time you can replace it.
Also if you develop the kinds of leads to get funding for this kind of a project, you will be set to upgrade and stay with current technology as you go forward. And if you have a tech company from your area that is supporting you, they will probably be able to offer you curriculum guidance for what they think they will need in the future as well.
As to platforms, the only computer that can run everything is made by Apple. You can install Windows, OS X, Linux, other Unix, emulators for iPhone and iPad, etc on a Mac. While workstations are really nice for schools, you might look at the Quad-Core processor iMac. The only downside I see to this computer is lack of hard disk space for multiple operating systems, so getting a server and having everything boot off a server might be the best solution for that problem. But the discussion of what hardware you should specify should take a serious back seat to funding.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
I work on a Java development team, and our environment consists of XP machines (IT mandated) running various VMs. The VMs come in handy for us because we support multiple OS (mostly XP and Linux) and middleware stacks for our customers. Another advantage that would be even more notable at the school is that a damaged VM is easily blown away and replaced with little harm.
Last place I worked, as a technician, was a nuclear physics lab. Linux and OS X ruled. Software written in Fortan (still widely used!), C, Java, Tcl/TK.
Current job is engineering for instrumentation manufacturer. Windows rules. Software written in C, Visual Basic, LabView, Matlab. Most of the engineering tools are too expensive for high school budgets: AutoCAD, ProE, Orcad
I love osx I have four MacBooks at home. But when it comes to software dev I end up with vmware running ubuntu or windows. I work for the military ( in a non software/ engineering role ) and I see the huge IT admin issues they have with windows that if I were in a situation like his where some apps need windows some need Linux and you want something as cheap and easy to maintain as possible I would look into vmware and thinclients. That way the student boots the os of choice for his need and it's a he'll of alot easier to maintain.
This thread seems to be dominated by the pro Windows crowd. For what it is worth, I work in a Mac dominated science department at a University with an IT support unit that does not support Apple and has lobbied actively to discourage any use of Apple products. Two weeks ago IT began exploring ways to begin Apple support. What caused the reversal in policy? Over the the past decade Apple usage has increased in all departments, and the voice demanding Mac support has increased in volume. Last week the University revealed that 50% of the access to the campus-wide wireless was from Apple devices. All this happened in the face of active opposition from central IT, which is a pretty strong statement of the Mac platform succeeding on merit.
Ten years of consulting on university IT issues and working in the only Mac majority department at the time, demonstrated to me that Mac support is much easier than Windows. What is more difficult, is to support Macs exactly the same as Windows, which is what Windows support staff feel compelled to do. What Windows support staff mostly fail to recognize is that Macs don't need the wild support gymnastics the Windows requires.
Theneed to run a gatekeeper (Antivirus software) to protect OS is an admission the underlying OS is so hopelessly screwed up that it can never be fixed. I realize that there are circumstances where Windows is the only recourse, but why choose to use that mess where it is not necessary?
One additional comment: Windows software controlling instrumentation has also been mentioned in several comments. Using this implementation as a case for teaching Windows is a red herring. Much of this software has been ported from Unix, uses very eccentric UI elements (paragons of poor design and bad programming) and mostly freezes the OS version it was written on, because OS updates will break it. Our university IT support won't touch these computers. We had one very expensive analytical machine networked because the manufacturer did remote online support. That machine got a Windows virus and was down for two weeks; it has never been networked again.
Half Word - Will Double, Wire Palindrome, San Francisco
I'm a PhD Chemical Engineer with 25 years experience in the field.
I learnt computing on a Sinclair ZX81.
I use a Mac for all office and presentation work - anything where the end product talks to a human. I use PCs for anything that needs to talk to a machine. I could use a PC to do everything but I prefer the mac OS (which is fine when its my money, not so fine to spend other people's money on).
I don't think the computer makes much of a difference. The platforms are, for the most part, irrelevant. 10 years ago, we all thought we'd be working on nothing buy Suns and Crays.
What you teach is much more important. Look at the software packages that you want to run and THEN look at what computers will run that software. If it's just to run MS Office, a web browser, etc. then anything will do.
Solidworks mainly runs on Windows. You don't have much of a choice then do you?
What does it matter what operating system you are using if studying science.
Of course the acronym OS could also stand for OverSeas, in which case I think it would be a good idea - learningscince abroad is probably better (assuming you are living in the USA. Learning science in this country may mean that you are taught PI=3 ; the earth is only 6000 years old, and JFK fired first.
Funny. I only spent 7 years in the industry, but I did all of my programming on a whiteboard. Codign was done on a computer, but if you design software, writing code is easy and fast. Debugging is still a bitch either way, though. Don't believe the zealots who tell you that any method substantially reduces bugs.
As for the laboratory, well, I still reject the concept of a "computer lab" for anything outside the scope of "computer engineering" and semiconductor design. I suggest you do whatever your funding source expects, as that is truly the important thing. I know you're an idealist, but education is about the money, not the students.
Apparently they will release patches that break the OS, on purpose.
Like anyone can even know that
since there's no games for Linux.
be it *BSD, solaris or linux. You can then virtualize the XP or more likely Win7 installation (or one of the other *nixes - no need to lock yourself in). Of the many responses, only a handful try to answer what you ask - what is used in university and industry labs. As is to be expected, there is a variation - some fields rely on applications written for the windows platform, others on a unix environment and many will have both available. This is why a virtulization environment is probably best for your situation and yes, it could be standardized to avoid too much additional headache for your IT guys.
To the commenters saying junior/senior hs students are 4-8 years away from real work and that things will/could change dramatically, that is BS. Most scientific software goes through a long life cycle because labs are not in a position to endlessly buy new (as opposed to patched) software. Also, many libraries which are used in coding are very long lived as once proven to be efficient and vetted for accuracy nobody wants to waste time and energy changing for changes sake. Engineering students are almost immediately exposed to the lab environment and science students if not right away, will be doing more advanced lab work by junior year. I would also point out that XP has lasted 10 years and that Win7 is not *that* different from XP. The various *nixes are, for all intents, what they were in the late 80s with incremental improvements under the hood to the kernel and Xserver.
While you're right that NASA use of Mac OS X is much higher, it's not true industry wide. The *only* people with Macs are the NASA employees. Everyone else, working at conventional companies like Boeing and Northrop Grumman use PCs.
This is not good or bad, it just is. NASA gives their technical people significant freedom in choosing their computer and software. But it's atypical. Everyone else buys Wintel systems.
(I'm a Ph.D. working on a NASA project through a major subcontractor. I just spent the week at a joint meeting with NASA, ESA, and industry reps for a NASA project.)
ShoutingMan.com
You're buying outdated, conventional desktop platform for kids that will be developing on Mobile / Touch OS systems in 8-12 years.
That is, you can't predict the future, so get an appropriate system to teach them fundamentals, problem-solving, and some immediate skills.
ShoutingMan.com
These are gifted and talented students. Work with the teacher to give the students the responsibility for maintaining the classroom computers.
Give them ONE or TWO machines that are supported by IT and on the campus network. Lock these down and make sure they have super-aggressive virus-checking for any removable media that is inserted in them.
For everything else, run a DSL line in, run the DSL line through an outside, difficult-to-bypass porn-filter to keep the school board happy, and tell them "you guys manage your own equipment."
Buy them a 50/50 mix of Macs and Windows an give them the media to install the vendor-supported OSes. Maybe, just maybe, as courtesy give them a hard drive with a basic "canned" image for Windows and a similar image for Mac.
Oh, and educate the students that using the non-school network is a privilege and anyone caught trying to bypass the porn filter or do anything else that would embarrass the school will be kicked out of the lab, possibly for good. Have someone from the local district attorney's office come in and tell them about computer security laws and how using school computers to do things that are illegal or which might not even be illegal from home can get them into even hotter water.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Since my experience is primarily in molecular and computational biology, my opinions are obviously biased towards those fields. I have worked in both academia and industry (i.e. >15 years of "Science" experience with 9 years at the PhD level). In my opinion, you should be concentrating on these science skills in upper grade level high school (11-12 grades, preferably just 12).
1) Really get to know MS Office or some other package of word processing (with references support, like Endnote), spreadsheet, and presentation software. You will need a good understanding of the word processor to write grants, reports, and manuscripts. A good understanding of the spreadsheet to organize and analyze your data, with special attention on doing correct statistical analysis. A good understanding of the presentation software for ... presentations. Macs or Windows since it doesn't matter.
2) Really know how to use websites such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and http://expasy.org/. The biological science world revolves around biomolecule and biopolymer databases. Then, make them find manuscripts in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and evaluate them. They also need to learn to evaluate the quality of the information that they find.
3) Make them do journal club. That will hit all levels of Bloom's taxonomy, is student-centered, and buzzword compliant!
Other skills that maybe useful:
3) Entering, searching, and retrieving information from a SQL-like database. Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL servers are everywhere in both academia and industry. Maybe industry has enough resources to create a frontend for their scientists, but most likely they will have to wait for the comuputer analyst group to provide the data you want. Better to ask for read access and do it yourself. Any operating system can be used to access the data. MySQL and PostgreSQL are well supported in Linux.
4) Industry is moving to Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) and large data generating academic labs are also using LIMS. I don't know if there are free/low-cost LIMS software available, but this would be extremely nice exposure considering most universities won't have such a system for undergraduates. Most LIMS are web-based so it really doesn't matter about the front-end. The back-end is probably Linux or Windows Server.
5) In academia, knowing Linux/Unix/BSD is very useful as most academic software packages are made to run on a Unix-like OS. MacOS X support is actually pretty decent for academic software due to its BSD underpinnings. CygWin is a must if you want to run on Windows. Academics program for the computers that they have, and they mostly have Macs and Unix-like systems.
5) Programming languages that are used extensively by computational biologists are C/C++, PERL, PYTHON, JAVA, and Fortran (more legacy now). From what I saw, PERL and PYTHON dominate on the bioinformatics side.
As for hardware/OS...
For computational biology or computers in biology, Windows is winning that market share. Macs are pretty much only found in academia and mainly for MS Office. They can be used as front-ends obviously, but the general trend of specialized software is to run on XP, for now. I don't know how many science software developers have moved their code to support Win7 natively, but probably not many as these companies are rather slow in adopting new tech. Still, obtaining these licenses is pretty much impossible for a high school. I doubt even the district could find the budget for them.
Setting a Linux cluster for computational number crunching is seen very often in academia and probably in industry, too. So, maybe you can salvage some of the older computers and turn them into a small computational cluster. However, setting up things like this may be impractical with your IT department...
Overall, I think it is very ambitious to provide "real world" science
Definitely go with the most restricted permissions for your science and technology students and teachers. Lord knows the comfort level of the IT staff is the primary goal here.
SolidWorks and CAD are a big no for thin clients as they need a lot ram / cpu power to run as well a good video card that a VM will be hard pressed to do.
Super locked down systems and programming do not work well as for 1 thing you need to be able to debug and the locked down default profile takes that way.
use deep freeze and open the systems up a bit.
Main is Win for Admin, AIX and RHEL Linux for the "meat and potatoes" but we use all three.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I had a bad luck enough having to buy Windows 7 for a company as Linux was really no-go for their needs. The machine runs cheap end AMD (cheap version) with 1 Gig RAM, EOL (ask ATI) semi integrated gfx with all kind of trouble making things attached like realtek internal sound.
I had to make sure their broken XP was really "broken", not backdoored or anything so I am sure it was clean machine with no spyware whatsoever. Windows 7 is almost 30% faster on that machine even with several services running. After seeing that, I give no credit to "Run XP" anymore. Not anymore... Even cheap hardware is beyond XP now. That machine has AHCI for example and that cheap amd is 64bit capable.
From the last two physics and astrophysics conferences I've been to (last 2 years) it's been running around 80-90% Mac. I actually tried to keep a more or less random sampling from the sessions I went to and counted up to about 100 computers each time.
If the intent is to aim for computer science/engineering degrees and you have bright energetic kids, start your track with a "ground up" sequence.
Dump anything having to do with the IT department. This is not a class sequence for learning Photoshop. The kids should have full access to the boxes. With the understanding that they will be periodically wiped. No networking (no wireless, ethernet).
Load the OS on the bare box. Load development system, etc.
Don't worry about teaching "Mac" programming, "Windows" programming, "Unix" programming. Larn em up so it won't matter.
Nice list of basic skills (I'll just start with one):
- be able to take an object code file and reproduce the C code it was compiled from, manually
boot your older existing hardware into Vmware View so you can use and change to any x86 OS at will, on a per user basis. This way it's all coming from centralized servers.
Having worked in a school with a mixed environment (XP and Mac) I'd say you should reconsider consolidating to a single platform. My school had a single "business lab" where the business teacher taught. She probably could have used a mac lab, the software she was using was for the most part easily available on any platform. The purpose of the lab was to teach students how to use windows, more than to teach business.
The other PC lab was the Cad Lab. There, autocad 4 was the primary reason for the windows machines.
Then, other than 6 or so custom windows boxes to run specialized administration softwares in the offices, plus a few specialized IT machines such as the firewall, everything ran Mac OS.
Despite the windows machines being vastly outnumbered it was our experience that the upkeep on the two windows labs was equal to that of all the macs on campus. If you are short-staffed, you should consider upkeep like that. If you're presently in a mixed environment, simply adjusting the ratio of your mix may recover the support time you are looking for.
Removing the windows (or the mac) machines is probably a bad idea. They each serve their own purpose. And as much as I despise windows in general, it's a fact of life in the business world, and students need exposure/training on it in school. Heck, I just installed 7 (boot camp) on my mbp here this week. Sometimes you need it. Students need to learn this stuff. To be quite blunt, deploying straight linux all around is probably the worst thing you can do for your students, regardless of the support it lets you provide. If you don't teach them what they need to learn, it doesn't matter how underbudget you are, you've failed at your job. The students are going to need to know how to use macs and windows, and you should keep both of them in place.
That said, getting back to support. ALL of our general labs were macs. They were extremely easy to maintain, and were next to impossible for the students to break. Two weeks ago I had another admin tell me a horror story that some kid had found a program he could run that would open a dialog box message on every windows machine on campus. He had something rather unkind to say about an instructor. That sort of problem is simply unacceptable. (they have yet to figure out how to block it without disabling windows networking, all they can do for now is make major threats to the students since it's easy to track - yes they've talked with a lot of admins about it and no one can find a simple way to block it) Even if you've got the entire lab deep-freeze'd (and you'd be insane not to) you still have to deal with them finding ways to break the machines. So for a good 80%+ of the general machines on your campus you'd save yourself a big headache going with the macs. Linux systems are approximately as difficult to break and give you a tradeoff, cheaper hardware for experience using a machine they are likely to be using in the workplace. Macs are better for the students, linux are better for you, and which are you here for?
Supporting just one platform can vary in difficulty. On windows, unless you have godlike fortune, you're dealing with a wide variety of hardware. It's unfortunately common to see every new lab bought with totally unique hardware, and that leaves you with dozens of hardware layouts to try to image and juggle. The macs can be done per OS. So for now for example, you'd have two images... one for 10.5 and one for 10.6. Maybe a third image for the labs with pro graphics software. You can take a hard drive out of a mac and plug it into another and just GO, and that's insanely useful for support. I can "fix" a macbook in 4 minutes by physically swapping a hard drive, no setup, rekeying, relicensing, drivers etc to muck with. So, three images for the entire campus. This really cuts down on your support time. Throw in firewire target mode and you will never have to take a screwdriver to the machine. Big plus there. So unless you know you can pull off a
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
the mini has weak hardware for it's price core2 at that price and only 2gb base ram? ALSO a slow and small HDD as well.
Teach Students How To Think, not how to point and click on menus like every other school does.
There will be different software used in the science and engineering industries based on all sorts of things. Some will only work on Windows7, others WinXP, Linux, MacOS, HP-UX, Solaris, and even mainframes. I've used them all in my work as an engineer.
More and more, I find that cutting edge programs will run on Linux because of the lower cost to develop and deploy when compared to MS-Windows. You already know the cost of MS-Windows infrastructure - basically, once you eat a little of the MS-food, you are forced to eat it all. Want to centrally manage users, then you need Active Director + CALs. Want to have central documents, then you need AD + Sharepoint + CALs. Want to backup any of this stuff, then you need commercial software.
With a Linux infrastructure, you don't **need** any of that stuff. You CAN have commercial programs and commercial support if you choose not to perform those tasks yourself, but you aren't required to. With MS-Windows or even MacOS, you're options feel "closed and limited." With Linux, the entire world is open, for free at the cost of learning, searching for others in your same situation and time. It is up to you do determine which path helps to prepare your students more.
The more that students are exposed to different computing environments, the better prepared they will be for the workplace.
I am an admin in very large private high school, and ~90% of our network (~200 machines) are running OS X 10.6. We do have a small presence of XP machines floating around in the building, but they will be phased out this fall. Our tech staff is also under 10 people (4), and because we are using 10.6 we are able to manage our network just fine. We have yet to run into any problems involving malware, and Apple has one of the best ed channels out there. The representatives are very knowledgeable and always willing to help. To address software compatibility issues, because let's face it... it is a school and some people refuse to switch from their old and crumby PC software, we will occasionally run XP inside a VM for them. When I was in school, (1 year ago) obtaining my BS in Computer Science, I also used an Intel-based Mac, and it was a common trend amongst engineering students. The machines are extremely reliable, and IMHO the quality outweighs the cost.
I work at NASA too.
NASA desktops are procured by ODIN. They are ALL Windows boxes. Why? In a nutshell, public key infrastructure. The US Government only trusts specific vendors, and it will eventually all be hardware based. DoD already uses CAC readers -- and they are mandatory -- which are not supported by Linux. NASA will eventually do the same thing.
The other-than-desktop machines tend to be Linux or some other Unix variant (Solaris, etc.). But the Matlab seats are all Windows, and there are quite a lot of them.
People tend to use Macs for presentations because the BSOD is kinda embarrassing. Last year's ADASS meeting had one Windows presentation -- presented by Microsoft Research itself -- and you can guess the results. In fairness, it was a wonderful product, but reliability counts.
If you're letting the IT department sway the decision based on what's easiest for them, then you've lost the educational battle. They will push for what they know instead of what is coming next. Actually, they will push to not even let anyone use the computers so that nothing can break. Paperweights are easy for IT to support.
I'd say at my university (Carnegie Mellon) the coursework is OS agnostic, but Linux and Mac OS X are both very popular. (Mac quite possibly only because it shares so much with Linux for open-source software support and command line usage.) If anything, Linux tends to be the encouraged platform for the CS dept. Windows is practically an also-ran around here. I'm in the robotics department, and no one runs their robots with Windows. (If any CMU RI peeps know some counter-examples, now I'm kind of curious...)
If these are actually gifted students, they're likely to go into non-Windows fields, or at least appreciate learning multiple platforms. Otherwise then I'd admit Windows would probably make more sense so they wouldn't have to learn as much before getting some MS certification they can wave around. Either way running these extremely out of date OS versions is practically malpractice. (fine, XP might have some arguments in its favor for business use, but for education it's time to move on so the students will be prepared. But there's no good excuse to still be at OS X 10.3, and if Linux was in the mix, it's easy and free to stay up to date.)
SUSE Linux. Lots of telecom work is on a linux platform these days.
Going to one system solves nothing. In fact, we can assume that IT wants the answer to be Microsoft, simply because they are asking the question.
All their research will be cherry-picked, in three years IT will have quadrupled in size and students will have less options and less real learning experiences, and IT will declare success when the last non-Microsoft machine is shipped out to the recycling center.
I work in a fairly high tech CNC machine shop, we use windows and so do all of our customers. Many of our customers are very large companies that deal on the world market. Even aircraft companies that we deal with are making their product with Solidworks/CATIA on windows platforms. I can't speak for other "engineering" fields, but the the Mechanical Engineering field from my perspective seems to be dominated solely by the windows platform.
By, not Mac- or Linux-based, do you mean that what is on the Mac or on Linux also tends to be available on MSWindows?
Because there are definitely HS-level science programs out there for both Mac and *nix.
Much of the good stuff for Mac or *nix is easy to miss. The old graphing calculator on the Classic Mac, for instance, that finally was reborn as "Grapher" in Mac OS 10.4 (and I don't have a more recent Mac OS, so I don't know if Apple has kept it in their current product). There are several simular, but different programs, not quite as elegant, not quite as powerful from the simple UI programs for *nix that allow you to graph equations in two and three dimensions. But the stuff I see the math teachers in the jhs where I teach use on their MSWindXXX machines, well, the *nix stuff beats it all hollow.
Personally, if they are trying to get rid of Macs to save money on IT support, well, somebody is trying to sell them a bill of goods.
Choosing the right OS to match the industry is an impossible task. But I'll suggest a few avenues you might want to explore.
First you want to know which industry. If your scope is wide (as I expect it would with students and teachers using 5000 computers), then the industry range is wide too - which muddies the waters some.
I currently work for a bank, I have worked on defence, communications, air traffic control, embedded systems, both as a supplier and as a client - so quite a range of industries.
I found that large institutions try to use as few platforms as possible, which means that they only upgrade their systems as a whole somewhere between once every 3 to 6 years or so - add to that that generally corporations do not buy the latest out on the market, they buy a proven product. So while one corporation's systems might all be more or less the same for desktop applications they might lag by up to 10 years behind the leading edge if you're at the tail end of the update cycle. Or they might be reasonably up to date.
On the other end of the spectrum are small organisations. Quite a few of those will not have a standard policy and might use a multitude of systems.
So by and large for desktop use (office applications - which everybody needs in their daily work), but alos frequently for development, I believe the most common are variants on the Microsoft theme ranging from the oldest possible to the newest possible.
I am not very connected with any industry that puts the Apple solutions forward, so I cannot comment on this.
But for production and development systems I have seen and used a whole range and mix of Windows, Linux, proprietary Unix, and other older beasts (mainframes and similar dinosaurs).
So personally, what I would suggest is to equip your teachers and students with basic computers (choose one platform only, the one that is the easiest for the IT support group to work with), pick a cheap platform that you can easily multiply and scale to as many users as possible and for specialist applications use large server boxes to host virtual servers to access remotely. My personal choice would be for a cheap multi-screen intelligent terminal based on some Linux solution with VNC, X-Windows, or all sorts of "remote desktop" type applications, with a few large servers to offer a variety of Windows (95, 98, NT, XP, XP Pro, 2000, Vista, 7) and a variety of Linux systems (I don't know how to virtualise Apple solutions, I'll let you look that up). That way you have the best of both worlds (with a few snags). A large but simple network of computers to administer with basic and standard functionality. And a few tricky virtual servers that require specialised expertise, but being virtual they can a lot more easily be backed-up, a snap-shot taken, restored to a previous state... Plus you can probably hire expertise as and when required for those once in while situations when one of those systems you don't know so much about gives trouble.
Only my two cents,
w.
Given the shortage of manpower, it would be insane to try to run the whole thing MSWindows.
There is no reason in the world to go monoculture in schools. If IT wants to play minesweeper all day, get rid of them and go hire people who know what they are doing.
Does it still come with the OS in the current Mac OS?
As a University researcher with strong ties to GSFC and Langley I agree that somewhere between 305 and 40% of desktops at my institution and my colleagues at NASA are OSX based, the rest are OpenSolaris based. The clusters that I have built AND use are Solaris based simply because of the robustness of the OS (linux crashes too much for multi-day simulations) and the compilers. SunStudio compilers give me anywhere from 15%-25% better performance than any of the gnu compilers and 10% - 20% better than the commercial linux compilers
For an Apple zealot, you sure seem to know a lot more about MSWindXXX than about Macs.
Ask the students.
I know I'm highjacking your thread, but if these students are gifted, what's the idea trying to feed them pap like Microsoft?
It depends on the field as tuxidriver said. In engineering I see all three OS. In computer science it's mainly Linux and OSX. In Electrical Engineering (Digital Design, ASIC, FPGA, etc) it goes from Windows to Linux mainly, but a lot uses OSX and connect to the Linux or Sun server to run their tools (as I do, when I'm not on windows). In the Physics Department, they are wild on OSX (especially Nuclear Physics), some computer run Windows when capturing data since the captor driver are for windows only. In Mechanical they use Windows and sometime Linux. For the rest, I don't know but it seems to me to be mainly Windows. There is no good answer, but Windows and Linux are the best bet for now, if they want to use some specialized tool. In a lot of case (Electrical Engineering) the tool are develop on linux and ported to windows. So those tool are way more powerful on linux. But the reverse is true for Mechanical. Ask what they want to do and from there you can choose a better answer.
Thanks for that.
I am a research scientist at a DOE National Laboratory. I do most of my programming on Dell workstations running Linux, using the Intel C and FORTRAN compilers for Linux. I also write scientific software for supercomputers which are essentially a bunch of workstations, all running Linux, connected by a high-speed network. Older workstations run great with Linux.
It's the simplest admin model. It's a no-brainer for security. You can serve up multiple OSes from it. If the client end sustains damage, it's cheap to replace.
This is repeating one of the same mistakes I see over and over in these education technology arguments. The idea that somehow by restricting the students to one software platform, the one that they're supposedly most likely to find in 'the real world', that they're somehow teaching them computers better. If you're asking which is better for the students, then the answer is "both, all of the above, everything". The more they learn about the different ways to interact with computers, the more they'll learn about >>computers instead of about software-x. Especially for a highschool class. The software that's on those computers now is NOT going to be the same software as is on the systems they'll use when they get out of college. Certainly not if they go to pursue advanced degrees. And the idea that XP should be considered as being the real world system they'll eventually get to is especially laughable. As many people have said, XP SP2 is already getting EOL on support this summer. So the question itself is flawed. The IT department is making an argument to make things easier on themselves, using 'the students' as an excuse. If you're asking what the best thing to do is for the students, the answer is keep both, and maybe throw some linux systems in there as well. If you're asking what's easier for the tech support guys, then that's up to them.
Whatever you run for an OS, as a screensaver, get them to run a distributed computing project - the easiest and most automatic of which would probably be the World Community Grid -- at very least this will start some interesting discussions, tie the students to and possibly interest them in a number of different scientific projects, allow for many possible lesson plans about science and scientific computing applications, etc.
Then, assuming that your current computers are owned by the school and not just leased... if/when you replace them with new hardware -- assuming you're not just adding a third lab, take the old systems and let the students play with them.. as people have suggested.. let the students play and learn various systems -- linux, bsd, etc. etc. perhaps do some independent study or afterschool type programs.. encourage them to build a cluster, and experiment with different projects... etc.
windows XP is a dead-end why o why would you seriously want to invest more in a dead-end?? at least use windows 7 -- but you probably cant, because you have old machines.
as gabe newell said in a slashdot story yesterday -- "We need to target platforms that do a better job of looking like where we want to be in a few years." (Gabe Newell, 5BY5.TV Interview)
you'd be doing your students a real disservice if you stuck them with XP while the applications they're going to be using in the field are moving away from XP.. at least to windows7 (and beyond) -- but windows XP is a dead and sorry past.. good riddance.
if you want your students to be able to learn -- dont force an operating system on them that cripples them with the hood bolted shut -- science is about learning how things work, and this spirit requires access to source code -- now the osx crown jewels are far from open, but the darwin kernal, and the fact that XCode comes with every copy of OSX make it much more friendly to inquisitive science minded folk that like to be able to do it themselves -- OSX has a stable, cleanly implemented unix underbelly, and also a lot of independent development. its got a good balance of: i) much of the linuxy openess -- and ii) commercial application development and support (like MS Office, and Adobe CS, and yes, quite a lot of scientific development apps) -- more, at least than you may find on Linux.
if you cant afford new machines with windows7 or OSX -- and you're stuck with your old machines -- well, Ubuntu has got to be a better world to live in for a scientist than windows XP.. anything anything except windows XP.. please dont force that $%it on them.. and keep them stuck in the digital dark-ages. ugh. :-P
Aside from some purpose specific tools peculiar to their job, for which you can't make an reasonable prediction; Most of what your students will be doing in industry in the future is generating paper reports and presentations, which will inevitably have to be transferred to/from a Windows environment. Curse the MS hegemony if you like, but it's a heck of a lot easier to do team editing when everyone is using the same tools. I am tired of having newbies fresh out of grad school attempting to foist their LaTeX stuff or Open Office on me when I have to produce the final report in MS Word. No, I don't want to have to reformat everything and redo the equations. That is *their* job.. and they will whine and whine about being made to produce MSWord documents until they realize that their employee review depends on how easy they make their customer's/boss's job, not how much value they attempt to bring to society by advocating F/OSS.
THAT is the difference between a "job" and academia.. and as much as you'd like to think all those bright students are going to live their lives in the halls of academe, the reality is (particularly for engineering) that you'll be working for someone else in some large company.
By the way, a lot of test equipment these days has windows embedded in it, so being able to put in that (windows compatible) USB stick to pull the data off is a good thing. (having just bought a bunch of hp 2GB sticks as throwaways, and found they don't work on my Mac)
I'd say exposure to a unix-like environment is important. You can get that with OS X.
oh - and that is only thinking about usability, openness, and cost.
the other factor is.. you're running a computer lab in a high school -- and you do know that is the worst-case scenario for getting all the viruses and malware and bloatware you can imagine..
such a lab is a breeding ground for such things -- just make sure the lab is running Windows XP and IE, and you're going to have to have your IT staff regularly wipe and reinstall XP everytime they bog down with too much crap -- IT will be spending their days plugging holes in the firewall with security updates, and disinfecting trojaned XP boxxen.. and they'll be as busy as bees, and feeling real productive.. doing crap they wouldn't have to deal with if it was a Mac with OSX. yeah, and you know it. :-P
or use ubuntu linux -- as any time a machine gets owned (which too is less likely than under windows).. you can wipe and reinstall ubuntu with less clicks than it takes to reinstall with the (prehistoric) XP installer.
In education, Macs dominate. Apple will give all kinds of discounts to you to get you to go Mac. Also, Mac is the only solution that permits ANY platform, virtually. On a Mac you can now virtualize OS X 10.6, any flavor/version of linux, BSD, or Windows. Legally, you can't virtualize OS X on linux or Windows. I realize it's a weak point, but the stronger point is that Macs allow more variety, even if all you have is Macs. Initially, the investment in Mac is slightly higher, but the hardware is also designed better, and it has been shown to last last longer (up until 2 weeks ago, my 2003 powerbook was my main machine, now it's my secondary), and remain useful longer, with less OS maintenance. You will likely never get a virus using OS X or linux (or, hell, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD). You will very likely get lots of infiltrations if you use Windows. Windows is a fine OS, and has many strong suits, but the cost of maintaining an OS that is the biggest target for malware, viruses, and security infiltrations, vandalism and theft, far outweighs any benefit that might be gained from using it as opposed to another OS. Windows 7 is no better, as it will soon become the major target. It's an accident of fate, I think, and not entirely Microsoft's fault, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. If you choose Windows you will be wasting a considerable portion of all the proc cycles that hardware will ever put out on protecting yourself instead of doing science. Linux or Mac will likely not even have a hiccup in this regard.
So with Windows, you can effectively use Windows and Linux (virtually), but you will have many tasks associated with covering your ass, in regards to security. i.e. PITA that never goes away.
With linux, you can run linux and Windows (virtually), and probably mitigate any security issues with WIndows by using virtualization and intelligent practices.
And with Mac OS X you can use OS X, linux, and Windows, and your students will have the opportunity for a far more rounded computer education, and can say they learned UNIX, and all the other OS's, with the Macs at school.
The Admin and the Engineer
I have yet to see any significant use of Mac's, except as clients to log into Linux workstations. Almost all IC design and verification is done on some POSIX compliant OS because of the the requirements of the tools.
Mac OS X is POSIX compliant.
1) Go all OS X
2) Move the freed up support staff to teaching programming
Does anyone else here get sick of IT staff making decisions about restricting computer access based upon the sole purpose of making their lives easier? Businesses and educational institutions need to wake up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around some lazy, uneducated IT staff, but instead the people who actually make the company money or research valuable things. /rant
Most of us where I work use Linux because the IT staff is thankfully too stupid to get their hands on it and break it for us. It's the only way we get any real work done. Not everyone uses a computer to write documents and waste people's time with powerpoint.
It's about time the IT staff learn that they're overhead and who they actually work for. And yes, I used to be a system administrator, but I hate to admit it.
> I teach at a high school program for gifted students
You mean privileged students.
If you really do care about the students, you should go with OS X.
XP is already ~8 years out of date, and so when they graduate university it will be ~15 years out of date. You're not doing them any favours by going with XP.
The thing with OS X is that is what the other guys are copying. Todays OS X is tomorrow's Windows 7+N.
That makes it the closest thing we have now to what they will run into when they enter the workforce.
Or whatever the most recent version of the most popular OS is.
Now stop wasting our time with your stupid questions and go take a shower, you filthy hippy.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You're thinking of getting XP? Mac Os X 10.3 was released October 24, 2003; 6.5 years ago. Microsoft is retiring their extended support for Windows XP Professional in the US on 4/8/2014; 4 years in the future. If your current Mac lab is any indication, you may be keeping whatever you get now for longer than 4 years, so you may want to rethink getting XP.
http://ftp2.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/55/iso/i386/dvd/
Your problem shouts for virtual machines. Using anything else for your solution is just plain wrong.
Sys admin for an engineering company who employ 500 or so multi-discipline engineers utilizing Autocads extensive list of applications plus many others and...we are in the process of flipping from xp x64 to 7 x64. why? autocad apps LOVE RAM and they dont develop for MAC OS.
That isn't really relevant. All you're pointing out is that you and most of the people you work with have a low level of computer literacy. You'd be willing to trade performance and overall usefulness for the ease of use of a garbage OS running in a pretty box.
You guys had to fake the moon landing. I think it's safe to conclude that you don't represent the technically expert portion of the market.
No sympathy for people who need to rely on Mac OS because they lack the general intelligence to use a better tool.
I work as a software engineer in the industrial automation industry.
We primarily work in 32-bit Windows XP and Server 2003 at my very very very large company. Visual Studio is the standard IDE, but C++, C#, and Visual Basic are all commonly used. Also a lot of SQL Server. For embedded applications, other compilers (that don't featured an IDE) are used for C and assembly programming. If it isn't included in an MSDN license, or from our company, or from the OPC Foundation, we pretty much don't use it.
Back in the 80's, we used to work in Unix and VMS, but not these days.
Emacs
If you're standardizing on a single platform, make it Unix, like the rest of the world. That means you run anything but Microsoft software. That will also increase your security, and decrease your maintenance costs dramatically.
Unix is also dominant in science. Genentech is an all-Apple shop.
If you want to teach the kids something useful for the future, iPhone/iPad programming is probably a billion times more relevant than any kind of XP programming. The Apple tools are free and include simulators for both devices.
You have to be about 40 to think Windows is relevant today. I can't imagine a worse thing to do to high school kids than saddle them with Windows. Might as well get them a Selectric and an abacus.
I appreciate your question, but I have to provide a little different response than some of the ones I'm reading here:
The science and engineering disciplines are very heterogeneous and specialized. The reality is that the best system to use for any discipline is the one that runs the applications of interest, which is largely a function of history. Many of the requirements driving these choices, however, are beyond the scope of a high-school education. I suggest you focus your search on a platform that supports key software from several disciplines.
As statistics is a cornerstone of science, it is essential that you have some kind of statistics package. Also, a computer algebra system for math, and a CAD system for engineering. Beyond that, it would be nice to have software to support biology, chemistry, or physics more specifically, but I'm not aware of any programs that have broad applicabilty and high-school relevance. I would expect that there are some good tools for studying the Human Genome data, however, for biology. For physics or chemistry, I would look for some kind of "simulation" package that could be used to model problems the student might encounter in class. I believe this "immersion" is more likely to be effective at the high-school level than more detailed, but inaccessible tools.
I have not seen it hear, but i would suggest Sun Rays. They are an awesome technology that allows you to run solar/linux windows and even mac os all on the same desktop client. They are very low maintenance as well as fairly low cost. deploying 5000 of them could be done almost as fast as you can take them out of the box and they last forever. my only concern is now that oracle owns them who knows were they are going
depends on what you want the students to learn and for what purpose. If you want them to learn about the deeper substrate of computer technology then you will support many operating systems in your network so that students can be exposed to them and the technology associated with integrating diverse systems. You certainly want some Linux systems so that those who want to learn almost all the way up from the bottom can do that while exploiting the combined benefits of open source and the tons of free information on the web. If you put it to a vote among IT support types then you are not likely to get a good end result. IT support is not computer engineering or computer science. IT support will always be biased toward restricting use of the machines to reduce their support workload for the budget that you have given them. So one thing to think about if you want to maximize the teaching opportunity is to budget for enough IT support to support multiple operating systems and to support lots of freedom for the students to experiment on their own.
Today those in a position to make decisions about computers and computer services often don't know enough and cannot rely on supposed experts to make reasonable decisions. Even deeply knowledgeable people have ridiculous biases when it comes to operating systems and other software. For this reason its better to contract the IT support. If you contract it then it is not a part of your organization's political infrastructure. That way, if they refuse to adequately support your educational needs, you can fire them much more easily and contract someone else with the willingness and expertise to do what needs to be done to allow for a more optimal educational process. If IT is an actual department with employees in your institution then may God be with you.
I go to university of Waterloo and from what I have seen their is a pretty equal ratio for WinXP, OS X, and Linux.
But if you go with XP or OS X then you better have plans for upgrading pretty soon as they are both very old and close to unsupported.
But I would say go with all three, anywhere they go the students will encounter all three OSs and if they do not know how to use all three then they will be less prepared then if they did.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I am a Mechanical Engineer and use only Linux. Students that are trained to use free software are significantly more flexible and more desirable in the work-place as there is no need to pay thousands of dollars to equip them with software. 3D CAD is the only area where Linux doesn't have the same variety of tools, however, brlcad is a very powerful tool for mechanical design and it is developing rapidly.
The real key is not XP or OSX but engagement of students. Why not go for whatever is the cheapest solution, heck netbooks might be the way to go and spend the rest on something that is really engaging, lights the creative spark etc.. . Something lego Mindstorm for example http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/history/default.aspx I am sure there are others out there as well
Brisbane Aikido Republic
Windows XP, Windows 7, OS/X, Linux, Unix, Solaris; it doesn't much matter. Researchers use all sorts of things in the real world. What matters is the software, and how much it costs your team to keep those computers going.
Figure out what software you need to run and find out what it really can run on. A lot of "PC-only" software runs fine or better under Wine and CrossOver for Linux and Mac then it does on Windows, some doesn't, but then some Windows software does not run on Windows 7, and some does if you buy the most expensive Windows 7 with the XP emulator. Forget XP, I doubt you could buy enough XP licenses anymore, regardless of the other issues with XP.
Then there's cost, what's your cost for administrative software, anything for Windows seems to be priced by the seat, Linux is free but has a learning curve, OS X is mixed, built-in is easy to understand Application control, web access controls if you only permit Safari, CD/DVD burn restrictions, email and chat controls if you only permit Mail and iChat, time limits. $500 gets you Apple Remote Desktop unlimited, no per seat license, remote software distribution, more reports then I can understand, and of course remote desktop and command line control of all machines (overkill for a home network). Alternatively with OS X Server also $500 for unlimited license ($300 extra on a Mac Mini, included with the Xserves) you can diskless boot lots of machines, each time the machine powers up it comes up clean, with all the accounts available on all machines or subsets of the machines, local or remote storage. Easy to use GUI for DHCP servers, DNS domains, Firewall, FTP server, Calendar server (for iCal and the Mozilla calendar software), chat server (for iChat & ), Mail server, mySQL server, NAT server, NFS server, Open Directory (network domains which can be linked with Windows Domains), Podcast producers, print server, QuickTime video streaming, RADUIS server, SMB/Windows and AFP file sharing server, Software update server, VPN server, Web server, WebObjects (which was highly respected under NextStep), and Xgrid server, and that's the old 10.5 OS X Server, 10.6 has more stuff. My primary expertise is with Netbooting, i.e. diskless booting (you can serve 10 machines from the plain OS X Client, but that's not acknowledged by Apple), configuring the DHCP server to support Netbooting, Open Directory to configure the accounts so the Netbooted machines have all the accounts, NFS for home directories (AFP would be preferred if people actually sit at the machines), DNS as we're off net, Firewall to restrict one net from another, and of course SSH which is no different then on Linux and BSD.
I also admin a bunch of Linux machines and I haven't seen or been able to learn quickly anything there that does everything as easily. Most Linux software can be build and installed on OS X, virtually everything below the GUI in OS X is either OSS or based on OSS. You want a newer OpenSSL, build and install, etc. I maintain an offline Linux software update server and it's not easily at all, find a working script that gets only the current stable release of Debian Linux for example. Getting only i386 and amd64 builds is easy via rsync, restricting by release is harder.
But I wouldn't recommend OS X unless you want it, it works for your software, and there is not strong opposition. We have a lot of engineering people switching to OS X but no one is pushing them. Those who want Windows stay with Windows regardless of the cost in time and money, some of those eventually switch to Linux since they can't stand the idea of using OS X. I run XP at home for one thing, games, but even there I have more Mac OS and OS X games then I have time for. I find that people who chose to switch from Windows to OS X are a lot more forgiving of flaws in OS X then I am. And I had no idea how bad XP was until I started using it, drives changing letters on there own, programs breaking for no apparent reason on one machine but not another identical machine.
Dear Sir,
I first feel it necessary to explain to you my credentials. I am a mechanical engineering undergraduate student of a top ten undergraduate engineering University. I am a senior and have many friends that do research/TA as well as myself. More often than not for labs, we are running in a Windows XP SP2 environment with Mathlab running. Recently our school has begun to transfer over to Windows 7 as Win XP SP2 has no more Microsoft support. We also make regular use of Solidworks, AutoCAD, MatLab and Simulink, and MathCAD. For the most part we use Matlab as it is very versatile to run labs and Solidworks to integrate into 3D printing.
While our engineering and science schools have PC roots our Business school receives the Mac treatment. However it is of note that our entire tech department runs in Red Hat Linux (the distro you have to pay for which is nearly identical to Fedora except Fedora is free and without tech support other than forums). Also it is of note our school does not directly have any support for Linux variants running on our computers, yet has support for Mac and Windows users. We therefore have unofficial LUGs (Linux Users Group) on campus that myself and professors are part of as Linux handles the big number crunches MUCH better and more efficiently for our University’s graduate level courses such as upper level heat transfer. So as a recap,
Undergraduate Engineering- Windows XP/7 running stated programs
Undergraduate Business- Mac (this is not to say Macs only can be used for business, just how our school is set up)
Graduate Engineering- Linux
I feel like this is what your post was looking for the raw facts of what is actually used.
Now if I might have a moment to suggest and write what I believe rather than raw facts.
I dual-boot and I think you should too. I am a Ubuntu 10.04 Linux user (started with 8.04) when I am at home or doing anything other than running programs of the above for my undergrad courses that are unable to WINE fully (a free Windows Emulator for Linux) though my roommate (who is a sys admin for both a Gentoo group and a sys admin to Solaris boxes for Verizon) insists that he could get them all working flawlessly (though he also insists X is useless for all practical purposes and he never uses it as it “confuses him” -I digress)
Anyways, I feel that you should dual boot your computers from both a Windows and a Linux partition as this would allow you the flexibility to teach the kids both standard Windows programs yet explain a basic understanding of a Linux based system which, should they continue through graduate school as an engineer, they will undoubtedly need ALL without buying 2 different types of computers (not to mention usually Macs cost more for what you really get hardware wise but I digress again). For all I care you could dual boot Ubuntu 10.04 and then skin the sucker to look like Mac OSX (trust me its not that hard, I personally skin mine so it looks and feels like Win 7 or Mac OSX and then have a separate skin for a Linux feel depending on how I feel.) Either way the kids get experience with Linux and Windows the 2 strongest/most used OSes engineers use (from my experience and what professors have told me). I read a few posts above saying it doesn’t matter what you pick times change quickly, and though I agree all this will be outdated by the time the students enter the real field, I feel it does matter because you will have brought them up to speed so that instead of trying to cross a huge technological gap they only have a smaller gap to bridge and if they kept up with technology, they shouldn’t have much trouble. There’s a path that technological evolution takes. You can, by making an educated discussion, help them bridge a smaller gap that they will run into later.
So there you have it-dual-boot -my 2 cents. I hope it helps. Good luck on everything.
The top priority is that the kids learn how to use a computer. What better platform than Windows? Take your pick between XP, Vista or 7, it doesn't really matter because once the students sit down, the learning process begins. For instance, when they plug in an external drive, they will be presented the pleasure of figuring out why the auto play scanning stopped and cannot be cancelled, leading to a hard shutdown because the Start menu fails to respond any more. Or the joys of learning what sites to avoid otherwise exploits will take over the computer. Perhaps a course on antivirus software would be in order to equip students with the understanding of why it is important to keep their signature files up to date with special instruction that focuses on techniques for uninstalling Norton Antivirus. Really, Windows provides the ideal platform for learning, and if there is time left for other curriculum, then that us wonderful! Otherwise if you just want to teach high-school science instead of CS, then I would suggest Mac.
Just a suggestion, but the MACs will allow for both operating systems to run on the same machine (and with parallels, etc both at same time). In the programming world, having a wide array of devices to test on would be better. Like when I write html/css etc. I don't only test on IE and call it a day. I have to test with a number of different browsers and OSs to make sure it looks and works for everyone. Given the education discount for Apple and the fact you still have XP licenses (as long as you remove from old machines) you may have the best of both worlds.
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
Apparently Waterloo does not require proper spelling any more. What happened to those English proficiency tests they used to have when you were learning to ride a bike...
Ogre Wedding Planners llc.
Now that Apple's market share is increasing, might not blackhats start to target that OS more? Just asking. I don't know.
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
In the CAD domain, AutoCAD and Solid Works are both working on Mac versions. This is a significant shift. My subjective take: it seems that Macs are penetrating industry more and more. Antivirus on our PCs is almost a daily performance issue on our laptops and production PCs.
All in all, the Mac provides more flexibility with POSIX and Windows emulation SW available.