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School Expels PCs, Installs NCs
mirthy wrote in with this CNN story about a school in NYC that dumped individual PCs in favor of a Sun-run server/client network, and how they're oh-so-happy with their new system. And, Mirthy notes in passing, "CNN seems to be getting the 'tech beat' much better than other organizations (with articles on sendmail and now this)!" Yeah, they've been getting better lately. Kudos!
Every year, millions more people have to learn all kinds of obscure system administration tools on MS OSes when all they want to do is get their work done. There is an enormous productivity cost to making people their own sysadmins. It would be a humanitarian action to make people not need to get so familiar with the administration of MS OSes.
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
"boxes" is the correct usage in the context of the article. "boxen" is used to mean a collection of hetrogeneous but interchangable computers (typically running sophisticated operating sytems).
This is even dumber than X-terminals since the X server is residing on the Sun Server also. No move X11R6.3 libcalls not compatable with the X11R6 Xserver on the XTerminal.
Also, this is a discard and put in a new one replacement with no 200floppies needed to reinstall whatever OS & Xserver needed to bring the box back up, or the fact that your 20,000 lines script kiddie special just got lost because Bill Gate's kid just pulled the power chord out of your desktop box.
My organization recently migrated from NCDs connected to Solaris servers to NTs w/Exceed. The theory was that with Exceed, the NT would behave just like the NCD, but would also have the ability to run everything from Redmond. Sadly, reliabilty was apparently NOT a top concern.
Unlike Windows 95/98, NT pretty much requires the network to be up, at least during your login. You also have a network drive, so even accessing your own documents may be dependent on the network. So instead of relying on the Sun servers to be up, we are ALSO now dependent on an NT server being up.
In addition, our desktop PCs are now a new point of failure. It was rare for an NCD to crash, but due to NT memory leaks, you can't leave an X session running for more than about a week on NT without suffering a crash (on an NCD, the session could survive as long as the server, which was typically over 6 months).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
This story also was broadcast on CNN-I (TV) worldwide. It really warmed my heart to see this kind of story, what with all the Microsoft hoopla they report at other times.
I think you need some lessons on diversity and tolerance. :) What's wrong with network of diskless iMacs booting off a MacOSX server? For basic computing use, it's ok. Web browsers, word processors, spread sheets, databases, ftp, telnet and some chat applications. That's what the Win boxes are being used in the last two schools I've seen. Blah blah blah. BeOS rules...
As this is the first education use of the system it is only a pilot. It could turn out that the card keys are completely inappropriate for schoolchildren. The lack of campus expertise could mean that server failures take 3 days to fix, or that the server gets thrashed when timetables clash. The keyboards might break when a child thinks about a Cola and the monitors blow up at the first sign of a spit ball fight.
There's only so much you can test/think of in the lab. The real world is the only true testing ground and while Sun's system may turn out to be fantastic, they won't have much of a position until it's tried and tested.
These views are not necessarily the views of the human race
What kind of server is running to service all of these thin clients? What about the price tag for all of this stuff?
Before applauding CNN's (or others') free software coverage as impartial and deeper than usual, perhaps we should consider who is advertising there. I haven't been following CNN for some time now, but Oracle seems to have been a major advertiser... And Oracle has been flirting with Linux, agains Microsoft, for some time now. Remember the ads warning (threatening?) us that "without publicity there would be a lot less news"? I saw those on CNN first. Basically we were being reminded that we are on the hands of advertisers. Our attention is the real product, and their real customers are advertisers. Sadly, it may be only business as usual for CNN. Even if money makes them consider what we think is worthy to be considered. Read Chomsky and be careful.
Simple questions, simple answers:
1) Try telnet, or ssh... or some similar remote terminal program. It is unix, and it can do that. Or ftp to the server... (of course there's security issues and all, but it could work when done properly)
2) 24/7 isn't *really* necessary. my school (a university) has a Sun server. if it goes down after hours (about 7pm) it doesn't come back up until the next work day. (yup, monday morning for us weekend people) And this server is used for grad research (the main course for my shcool) so it is kinda critical. but they havent fired the IS crew yet.
3) Sure, it's not that hard to run a lab. it'd be kinda like a library situation, just need some people to work as monitors... extra credit?
"Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair... Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy was he?"
Linux people to help provide such support. If LUGs around the globe would reach out to their local schools (universities aren't what we're talking about; they can generally support themselves), we'd have much improved chances of getting Linux into the schools. Probably initially as test projects, but that's where it starts.
On SEUL-edu (corrected URL; sorry, Ian) we are discussing this and many other educational issues. If you're interested in this, come and join us. Also, take a look at Bill Ries-Knight's Linux Educational Needs Posting Page.what software is there on macintosh that doesn't exist or there isn't a very similar replacement for on windows or something else?
:) But, knowing a lot of ppl involved in music-related pursuits (such as recording/editing), the software for sound editing and such things are supposedly better/more plentiful on the Mac. I personally cannot attest to whether this is true or not; it could be the music types are just used to their Macs so haven't experimented as much with other platforms. Or they could be right. But such is their claim, FWIW.
Well, I'm not quite the expert in this either
A couple of jobs ago (don't ya love this industry?) I worked as senior network/unix dude for a medium sized university. I would've KILLED for something like this. In fact, I setup something not so very different, but at a much higher cost.
/incredible/ performance, and incredible reliability. I had no downtime, ever (except once caused by a cracker -- but I squished him). This setup supported about 100 simultaneous users comfortably. For the educational market, it was wonderful.
.edu setting tends to be that very few of the mainline "solutions providers" understand the market. There is one critical fact in this market that stands out: Students cannot be trusted. Students are not impacted when the machines go down, they are young and often irresponsible, and the best and brightest often cause the most trouble because they try things that shouldn't be tried (legitimately trying to learn). In a UNIX/Terminal environment, I can lock them down enough that they can't impact reliability for everyone else, but leave them open enough that the students can still see how the system works.
What I did was I bought X-terminals from HDS and backended them all on a Sun UE5000. The upshot was that I got
The problem in the
The other problem is that almost all machines are shared by almost all the users. Repeat after me: POP based email is a disaster because it downloads (by default) all the student's email to a public pc. Another persistent problem (especially on windoze) is that students load software on the PC's, change the settings, fill the browser caches with pornography, etc. etc. All this might not matter on their personal PC, but on a public PC in a computer lab is horrible.
Bluntly, if this system had been available 3 or 4 years ago, I would have probably bought a gross.
Oh yeah, don't forget the administrative costs!!! I've heard a couple of people grumbling about the cost of Sun servers. The fact is that Sun servers are a lot cheaper than the horde of administrators you have to hire to manage a couple of hundred PC's that are constantly being trashed by 3l33t h4x0rs. Bluntly, a competent PC TECH (forget networking admin, just a pc tech) is going to cost you $30K/yr time you pay benefits. It doesn't take long to buy a UE4500 at that price.
-- Slashdot sucks.
It's interesting to see (from the perspective of a dual computer science/economics major) how increased competition has caused Sun to get off its high horse. Back in the heydey of commercial Unix, the early 90's, it was considered rather declasse to pursue school districts as a viable market for computer sales. Most schools were lucky to get DOS, and people snickered at Apple and NeXT for even considering the idea.
:)
Now all the major vendors are going after schools. Microsoft is doing it in their typical monopolistic style, and Sun is doing it in its own holier-than-thou-technology style, but the fact is the competition caused by Linux (I'll get to that in the next paragraph!) has made the major vendors scramble to make computing a 'push market' again.
A lot of Slashdotters and Linux zealots treat Linux as if it were a competitor to major vendors. Those same people get confused when they say, "I don't get it: IBM is making so much off of AIX, why is it interested in Linux? Sun is making so much money off of Solaris? Why is it interested in Linux? Etc." And the ESRite zealots come out and say "Because they are hardware vendors, and Free Software is our salvation because it lowers operating costs for them and makes the consumer happy."
Well, if I may posit so boldly, maybe Linux isn't a competitor as it is an advance in technology. And from a big-iron vendor like Sun, it's foolish to ignore an increase in Technology. All of a sudden, Linux is the way to secure the low-end server market, with increasing chances of the low-end desktop market. Of course, proprietary products like Tru64/AIX/Solaris/VMS/MVS/UNICOS handle the high-end server market. This leaves the vendors free to handle the NC market.
A lot of people pooh-poohed the NC idea, saying "It will go nowhere, PC users like powerful computers," or "NC will go nowhere except in niche markets." What a few people don't know is that there is no such thing as a Bad idea in business -- there are only better ideas. And since Linux is GPL, and available to everyone, the low-end server/desktop market has been leveled for the time being. Now that the challenge of the 90's has been rendered non-time-critical (in the face of a crumbling-reputation Microsoft and free-software R&D miracles), everyone is free to pursue NC pipe dreams.
I've always thought NCs are wonderful for schools because the main problems of NC usage (namely bandwidth) are not issues -- Schools are for the most part closed entities and outside traffic is usually kept to a minimum. In K-12 anyway.
Personally I think that networked computing is going to help improve computing technology. With less to worry about with respect to i/o overhead, people can make tighter code. It's no coincidence that Windows CE is the most reliable of all the Windows programs. It's essentially the (theoretically very effective) NT/VMS core without any of the win32 cruft. Granted, the Sun Ray is little more than a dumb terminal, but as quick operation of tasks (over a network or otherwise) becomes more important, we need to get rid of cruft like Win32 and other higher level APIs. NC's provide us with a good excuse to
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I hope higher education is also paying attention...
Here at cornell you can walk into one of the many bazillions of libraries and see row upon row upon row of brand new sparkling white 400mhz PII 17-inch screen, 10Gig, 128 RAM, Gateways or Dells (because of silly educational "partnerships"), which just run a crummy telnet client to the library catalogue!!! ARGH!!! That's easily hundreds of thousands of dollars in hardware and software alone, not to mention the cost of supporting all these boxes! All this could be done with thin/dumb terminals and just one server. How hard is this to concieve? I really cannot believe the amount of money they spend on stupid frivolous things in these universities.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Also, the jargon file isn't necessarily right about everything, of course. Believing that would be like the people who state Linus' opinions as fact, simply because he is Linus.
I got a bit of a laugh when I first scanned over this and thought - The monitor in SF and the keyboard in Georgia. No wonder they need a teacher in there :-)
What privacy did the students have before? When there was no concept of login, all one kid had to do is go on any machine and start jumping into different folders.
As far as cracking the box, it is not like they don't have unix server in the universities, where students know much more about cracking boxes then
8th graders.
nowadays, a mac lab can be administered in the same fashion as a lab of NC's. Since iMacs and b/w G3's can both be netbooted, a mac lab can be outfitted with iMacs (you can buy older ones real cheap), and a decent os X server box. Then configure a single boot disk for all the imacs, and all those software problems go away. I have yet to play with the "netboot" capablities of the new macs yet, but in a computer lab environment, it's got to be a godsend.
-earl
--
I think you got this backwards. Hopeless geeks turn to OS's that are technically superior. Therefore they turn to Unix.
NT makes them productive, employed members of society.
Computer experience of any type will make you employed these days. Good people can be productive on any platform.
I strongly believe it doesn't matter what OS is being used by kids up through the high school age. These students are at least 5-10 years from the job market, and of course the entire computing landscape will be completely different. What does matter is teaching the fundamentals. Rather than learning how to do accomplish tasks a certain way with a certain GUI, they should learn logical constructs. Lego Mindstorms, for example, is probably one of the more effective teaching tools there are for younger folks.
I have no idea what high school you went to, but mine was definitely not this sophisticated. Sorry, but to me this central computing idea is DUMB!!!
When I went to school we had the same thing. It was called the Icon and ran QNX. What happened? Some hackers cracked the system and then the network was down for an entire week. This meant during the week NOBODY could do their homework or assignments.
Central computing is DUMB!!!! It is called a mainframe. What would be more intelligent is to have something like a Windows CE device (Does not need to be CE) and then have it log into the network.
I, myself, have a great admiration for Sun Microsystems and their products, and I think the solution to school funding lies in smart decisions like this Sun server setup. I wouldn't call it salvation at this time though.
Even better, maybe schools could teach students methods for figuring things out by themselves so that they can troubleshoot their own machines, and the fundamentals of critical thinking so that they can tell when a tech company is trying to sell them something that doesn't fit their needs.
...so they could make a geek-level living by knocking off their cash-register friends.
You know people, NT does not leak memory like you say. Could it maybe that Exceed is leaking memory?
Of course not then bashing MS would not be as fun!!!!
Is Sun Microsystem trying to bank on the idea that these kids will become very used to using Solaris and want to run Solaris when they grow older? This is how Microsoft did it. Kids used Windows and school thus they wanted to run the same Operating System at home. It also applies to the work world. People don't want to learn how to use multiple operating systems. They want one operating system and they want it everywhere so they know what they are doing at all terminals. Will Sun's attempt to convert our children to unix users work in making Unix/Linux a more dominant platform? Will children get fed up with Windows at home and install linux, nearly a clone of solaris? I'm curious if this is good marketing or just coincidence.
Revolutionize? Give me a break. Its just another computer.
Perhaps they mean that with the money they're saving they can afford toilet-paper for the kids now.
I'd have had 3 more years experience when I hit the job market! =)
But really... Cool. What better place to use thin clients, where you don't want the kids installing/messing with configurations and/or playing too much Quake 2 in Study Hall.
Sun's showing these 'Sun Rays' off at work this week... mebbe I should go look now. (Well... and they're bringing free pizza too)
"If this were a Linux or FreeBSD story, everyone would be jumping all over it saying that it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard of. But because it's Sun pushing a technology paradigm that's been around for ages, and apparently doing so effectively in ways that really count, many people seem down on it."
I'd rather see Sun do this than Microsoft, but the point is that centralized computing was one of the things that Sun helped tear down, and now they are coming to think that they need to move back to that model in order to protect the perception that they are a server company.
It seems to me that Sun is afraid that they will wake up one day to find that someone's gone and written them out of the loop with a clustering technology that makes fast, effective use of all those MIPS going unused on folks' desks. When that happens they fear that they will lose the server to the desktop.
They're probably right, but the way to solve that problem would be to be the first ones to get there, not to try pushing the old dumb-terminal idea. This is especially silly in a day when $500 can get you a fair machine, and another $100 will get you the crappy monitor that would be more than enough for your average high-school student. Sun needs to come up with the "Virtual Server" which looks to all the world like a Solaris server on your network, but is actually a time-slice of every client you've got.
Hmmm... Let's see -- it would take a distributed version of RAID so that losing any one desktop would not result in unaccessable files. Then you want process migration and load-sharing software. Now you need to build up a core of "central" services (e.g. daemons) which have some built-in redundancy (go ahead, waste those cycles, we'll put more junk PCs on the Guidance counselors' desks).
Heh, I'd love to log into one of those babies....
Those servers had better be armor-plated securitywise, because if client-server systems become the standard in schools, script kiddies are going to get a whole load more of targets.
"Even genius needs a competent technique."--Robert Fripp
UNIX is all about user-level commands, privs, etc... Just because they won't have Super-User
out of the box, doesn't mean there isn't plenty to learn (and will probably get root shortly, anyways!) There's a lot to be learned from the user-only side of UNIX.
This was true 3-5 years ago, but times have changed. Most sound/graphics software comes out for win32 first, second or never on mac.
domc
Yes, Novell servers crash on a regular basis. Other OS's are more reliable.
Well CNN tried but this story is pretty weak on details. They are nice enough to have links to pictures of where New York and San Francisco are.
I haven't been up on how this Sun system works (Not NC in general but this Ray thing in particular (who is Ray?)).
It's cool but, what about running all that educational software like Millie's Math House?
I worked for a k-12 district and would have loved to go to linux but all the educational software out there is Mac/Win.
So can these kids just use them to Word Process, surf the web, and maybe right some Perl scripts?
All Non OSS companies must burn and die. Trying to infirtrate the young minds before they have any information cemented into their brain. Once that cement dries, their bias will be forever there, and once they move into some management position, all they will do is push for the technology that was force fed to them when they were an infant.
We have to start teaching our babies Linux so that when Bill Gate's pack of wolves(teachers teach 'doze )try to the young minds and replace it with MicroSlosh, it would be too late since the Linux cement would have dried up by then. Of course, force feeding that Microcrap down the children's throat would not be bad since they would know how bad it is as opposed to Master Linus' creation. But they would find a feature or 2 that they find interesting and contribute it to the All Mighty All featured KDE/Enlightenment and make it even more feature filled.
The kids got to send remote L1-A to the server until Sun runs out of town in shame, then they would have to all start writing viruses for peecees and spread them via their pokemon cards so that class action suits against M$ would force Bill Gate to jump out of the window of his 200flr mansion. We'll leave apple alone since they would screw up and wilt away on their own. After al lthis, we will then crown Linus as Party chief of the Earth and go about madly contributing code to Linux.
One of the reasons given for not buying Emates was that they didn't run 'normal programs'.
What would be interesting to hear about is a followup to the Mexican Government's decision to run Linux......
Yep, console mode Quake on a VT-100 terminal.
I guess your main character is represented by a little cluster of tildes. The monsters are made up out of groups of semicolons.
Way wow radical cool!
I only hope the terminals are at 9600 baud, and not slower.
Well, these kids were in grade school but for high school, I would rather see the school give the kids a bunch of hardware and software and let them setup the computers and network themselves. The way most schools use computer is as glorified type writers. What a waste of good equipment.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
I stand corrected. Thanks. :-)
You know, I have to wonder just what kind of contract Sun has this school nailed to.
You never get something like that cheap, especially Sun's overpriced excuse for hardware, without *big* conditions. I bet the whole school district is being forced to switch to Sun equipment.
And that's just wrong. That's Microsoft-style 'discounts.' My former school district ran a very diverse, but EFFECTIVE environment. The records server was an HP9000. The workstations were underpowered 95 machines that crashed daily. (P60's) They were Gateway 2000 leftovers from the Win3.x days, still somewhat in warranty. The server's a Dell Poweredge 1000 running NetWare 4.1x. NT's serving some very limited ends. And if they ever want to change something, they can change whatever they want, however they want. They have total freedom to work with their environment.
At one point, Microsoft offered them educational discounts, on the terms that they upgraded all their workstations, and went to NT for everything, at about half retail cost. They blew Microsoft off.
I don't know about you, but I don't buy any of Sun's warm fuzzy crap, and it will be a cold day in hell before I let *any* vendor; even IBM, my favourite, lock me into their selection.
-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru
your company here.
shelby != ford
For most of the people in the US there are more challenges presented by the weather than worrying about a server crashing. For schools, if the NCs aren't working, hopefully the teachers are resourceful and flexible enough to have some other means of entertaining...er, teaching, their students. Ever have an assignment due NOW, and you can't get to work because your mode of transportation is unservicable, or you're freakin' sick? Put in the isolated context of the server dying, yes, it's bad in an NC environment while it's out. In the context of life in general, it's no different than an unexpected power outage (no school will have generators to keep the school running!), a curveball thrown at the area by Mother Nature, etc. Sure, it sucks, but hopefully the administrator would have the presense of mind to say, "well, go home for the day," and look at it as no different than a Snow Day, or the Day the AC broke and the Heat Index was 120, etc. The students aren't gonna mind one way or the other. A day out of school is a day out of school..
How much do you actually think they're going to let the kids do?, on a unix platform and a system dependent on the server for everything those NC's are going to be locked-up tighter than you could ever hope for with a win9x system. They do what they're supposed to do, but the kids won't learn squat about *inx.
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor
Spyder
Remember, these are GRADE SCHOOLS, most likely where the teacher contributes a bit out of his/her own pocket for teaching materials. Change your context a little bit... It'll be one server downloading Java apps to the NCs, probably on a 10 or 100MBPS 10-base-T network, and IF there is Internet access, it'll be through a shared 56K line (if they're lucky) shared for the whole school district, or possibly by a dialup modem on the server. Again, there will be more disruptions from external events for most schools than worrying about server uptime.
Kids are curious. They're going to start playing around with their system, try and do things - and they'll find the command prompt. Them some kid with Linux at home will show them what they can do with it. Then watch out. :-)
Regards,
Bun
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
>Unix only turns kids into hopeless geeks.
>NT makes them productive, employed members of >society
You're kidding right? Maybe productive at clicking those mouse buttons. I have a hard enough time using Window98 at my workstation, much less using it as my server. You may be productive quicker (as a point and click admin), but in the long run, you'll find that for more intense server applications, the only real solution is a unix based server.
I think that it's a really cool idea. I like the idea, although I'd probably be trying to find a hole in the gui so i could use the command line.. ahh well.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- sean a. newton nester@tacohell.org
Sounds a lot like what VNC does, this Sun Ray business. Seeing as VNC is open source, and linux has this frame-buffer thingy in development, couldn't a fusion of the two put linux into play as providing a similar environment on legacy hardware? Non trivial, I'm sure but eminently doable.
Any thoughts, folks?
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
One of the *major* benefits I see for the SunRays is convenience. Don't have to log in and out, just pop in the card -- the environment follows you. My facility has 60+ PC, many of which are in a shared manufacturing environment. Having people log in, check e-mail, log out, etc. is a REAL PAIN. Not to mention configuring configuring e-mail client profiles for each floating PC and employee (say, 30 people x 40 shared machines). Also for others who work on presentations and other group items on their PC, then have to go to a conference room to log in, etc. Then remember to save everything, log out, etc. Popping in that card on a terminal and having instant reconnect looks like a dream come true. It also saves me from having to battery-backup each PC and I can spend some money on securing/protecting the server.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
How are these thin little clients going to handle hypermedia and NLE video editing and other exotica that I do at my public school? As dumb as my friends and I think they are, the sysadmins at my high school have the right idea. Every computer is G3. Not better than a Linux box, but good nonetheless. CodeWarrior has plenty of horsepower. I wish that more schools would have this good idea. and I suggest Mac Manager for those paranoid school sysadmins who want to secure their networks. http://mtsd.k12.wi.us/ to see Homestead High School in boondock wisconsin. -- "Its not the fall that kills you, its the sudden stop, or Bill Gates." -- Anonymous
No, you are wrong. Using cards for authentication is much safer then using username/passwd. Why? What happens when I find your passwd? Do you know I know your passwd? No, you don't, so you can't do anything about it. What happens when you lose your card, or I steal it? Aha! It's gone, you don't have it, it's not there. So you go to the office, have you old card voided out and are issued another card.
Having a physical object is much more secure, then relying on something that's not "real".
-Brent--
If the ideal environment is way too expensive, it's not very ideal, now, is it?
but most of all, control over the students' use of the equipment Duh. And why not? It'll help indoctrinate them to the Working World faster...
This has to be a freakin' troll (yeah, I know I'm feeding it).
I've got Novell 3.12 at sites that have uptimes measured in years. Novell generally doesn't dgo down unless you are running it on nonstandard/generic hardware. It is those who half-ass their hardware who have unstable systems (in any environment).
"All those tubes and wires and careful notes!"
There is a way to put an idle/screen lock on it. They demoed it to us here...but yes the administrator can set up password combos etc. on these...or so the Sun rep told us.
Please tell me you don't run X on a firewall.
Not even on the interior router.... please?
Now...some drawbacks...
That said...I still liked it and we may get two thrown in to our next order just to try them out. And one might go on my desk =]
I suggest you apply your I/Q towards basic spelling and grammar before tackling Unix or its derivatives.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
My old high school has run on client/server for years. It didn't take them more than a couple of crashes for the school district to realize what the word BACKUP meant, but they finally caught on.
With client/server you don't need to upgrade the hardware as often either. Yeah your server is going to get out of date, but the clients can get a lot more mileage than a normal PC. In fact I think our school is still getting by with 286/386 clients. Unless you want your students playing Q3Test this works just fine for basic office applications, surfing the web, and our one course in Pascal.
Client/server is the way to go for larger schools. Cheap, easy to admin, and more fun to...err harder to break in to.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
'Single Point of Failure' doesn't mean that there is only one place it can fail. It means that if this One place fails then everything stops working. You can have more that one 'Single Point of Failure' in that you can have multiple critical components which can render the system unusable by failing.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Hmm... $400/box, $200 for decent 15" SVGA monitor, if that. NTWS: Would the school buy those $500 300MHz P2's, or get sucked in to buying $1500-2000 Dell or Gateway P3s? NTWS academic: about $100/client. NT kills you with the server. One for PDC. At least one for BDC. At least one for Exchange. Plus all those client licenses. And how will those NTWS boxes be installed by the school geeks, probably without converting to NTFS. Hmm... no security holes there. Will they change C:\ to be owned by Administrator, and leave another drive partition, say, D:\, to have read and write, but no execute, for anyone else? Probably not. Will they set up their file server right? Maybe. What is best for things like schools is true plug-and-play, as implemented on Atari 2600s, and even Nintendo-64s. It sounds like the SunRays are a step in this direction.
Well, these kids were in grade school but for high school,
Doesn't matter. The kids who play with computers (not those who steal mouseballs) are those who learn to use them effectively later. First they learn to destroy with programs. Then they learn to make their own destructive programs. Then they realize how stupid all that was -- but hey - they *learned* from it. They learned increadibly much from it.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The cost of maintaining a bunch of machines that don't really need maintenance is going to be lower. If the person responsible for maintaining them can spend their time concentrating on other stuff instead of re-installing windows all the time, then they are saving money. If Sun is pushing this technology heavily, they are probably throwing in some sort of training for the staff responsible for maintaining it. (if they aren't throwing in such training, then maybe it's not as cost effective as it seems)
I know for a fact that networks of M$ Windoze networks aren't easy to maintain. I worked for the CS department of the top CS school in the US, and almost every day we'd get at least one call for a machine that needed to be re-installed. And the people who used the machines were grad students and professors in the CS dept. Windoze just hoses itself sometimes, no matter how competant the users are. When you throw a little malice into the mix, a high school would be a pain in the A$$ to maintain if it were running a M$ OS.
-hangman (sloth is a virtue of a good programmer)
Sure, the real geeks and engineer types know better hardware when they see it, but MOST jobs that involve computers at the office are PCs running Windows, doing boring stuff like excel, word, with maybe an NT server for file and print sharing. This school will be SLAMMED for FAILING to teach kids REAL WORLD skills. Ans while this arrangement might make Sun happy and amuse slashdot readers, I wonder what the kids' parents will think?
Well, sorry, im just a high school student
and since school dosent teach nothing, why bother to learn
I would steal your card and use your account to look at porn sites, send death threats to the teacher, and hack the shit out of the server.
What can you do to prevent this??? Tell Sun and your administration to use a card/password combo. That way, I'll have to steal the card and torture (or trick) you into giving up the password.
Warn your kids/students to keep away from me, the evil genius no one would suspect.
As far as i know only the digital certificate is stored on the card; All other information (the state of the session, e.t.c) is stored on the server. My $.02
About a year ago my company responded to an RFP that requested a win95 pc for every student in the schooldistrict. ( about 5000 pc's ) Networked to NT servers over a 10/100 network. What a management nightmare! Managing a network that size is bad enough, but throw in the following varibles: -Large variance in computer knowlege -adolecent male's tendency for vandalism -When i was in school my friends and I took EVERYTHING apart,including the PA system. -90% of HS teachers know less about using computers than lumberjacks. (please do not try to dispute, this is an irrufutable fact. Science and math teachers make up about 10% of the faculty ) In this situation, NC's are the best solution available. think about it, our grand parents used to use chalk and a slab instead of paper.
These are NYC grade schools, where if the teachers have to put 1c out of their pocket, the whole 50,000 teachers would go on strike. Requirement for Rays is 100MB switched. I am sure no experimental program is going to skimp out on basic requirements. They even got the card readers, which is an option on it.
Again this is on the country's biggest school district, which usually have high speed connection to the headquarters. And looking at the picture, they got this caucasion kid in a school system that is 85% minority, this indicates even more that it is in a school that has more than its shares of facilities. The more urbane schools probably has to spend their money on metal detectors, bulletproof teachers mobile walking/sitting/teaching unit, a lojack for every computer/chair/seat in the school, and of course a fully armed security guard in every classroom.
These were the original "all-in-one" G3's, which predated the iMacs by about 6 months, and the b&w's by maybe a year. I think Apple finally discontinued them over the winter, which is good, because the machines were downright ugly.
Even an old iMac costs twice as much ($799?) as one of these Sun boxes (can we call them boxes?). OS X server is pretty expensive, too.
I don't know what pricing on the Sun server hardware looks like, so I'm not going to try to jump to any conclusions here, though.
If the student loses the card, they lose whatever assignment they were working in previously. So it's in the best interest of the student not to lose the card
NO!, the correct plural (even for "techies", sorry to burst your bubble - no dictionary I've ever seen draws a distinction by occupation) for "box" is quite clearly "boxes".
/doc/OxfordEnglishDictionary at your nearest library. (Natural languages have docs for a reason, too, you know...)
"Boxen" is never correct, although it is not incorrect (and pretty much irrelevant now) to refer to a plurality of DEC VAX computers as "Vaxen". Still, even in heavy-duty DEC shops, (and I've worked in several, one was 100% DEC when I arrived), "Vaxes" is the favored usage over "Vaxen", just because "Vaxen" sounds so stupid.
Direct flames to
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I know this is going to hurt my Karma, but I can only say 1 thing.
Fuck You
Take your bible and shove it up your ass, instead of down my throat.
"Binaries may die but source code lives forever"
-- Unknown
SkyHawk
Andrew Fremantle
Right now there's something like this being done at the Corbett school in Tucson Arizona. The link won't show you much other than some drawing by the students, but there's a short description in an email. It's a work in progress, done mostly by volunteers.
Really, it all comes down to making a bunch of cheap X terminals and some application servers. The X terminals can be much cheaper than $400 (refurbished 486's work well enough). Though they are hard to maintain, it's even possible with donated equipment (which, while plentiful for schools, tends to be otherwise useless). There has been a lot of discussion about this on the SEUL-edu mailing list (interested people are invited to join).
Maintenance issues as a whole are very important in schools, with public labs, occasionally malicious users, and a lack of knowlegable admins. The lack of security on Windows and Macs make them totally inappropriate for classroom use, but somehow most schools don't seem to appreciate this. As a result, school computers tend to be finicky and inflexible, and take up as much time doing dumb technical stuff as they do helping children learn.
The alternative is the laptop schools, which is to me a Very Bad Idea. But at least the computers trully are personal -- and if the kid messes up their computer, they've messed up their computer. But there's so many minuses to laptops...
Of course the Riverdale school has been using Linux for a long time on the server side, but recently there's been a lot more activity on the client side as well. I think Linux can do most of what most schools want to do right now, which doesn't make it perfect at all, but perfection is not a serious option to many schools -- or even half-way decent (I'm sorry to say).
Learnux is a Canadian volunteer effort to recycle old computers into useful Linux computers.
some people are brought up to be good only to go to the army and fight, mindless rednecks, white trash . . . Indeed, what does school serve? To keep people away from getting in trouble util they are grown up enough to put them in jail? But then some make it to a university and they discover . . . whatever, everything works that way, and maybe when you get out of kindergarten you will change it to the best, more power to u then.
At my old highschool the PCs (sx33 with Win31 I think, I'm an old old man) were always so screwed up so finally we had enough and installed some locking software ourselves, taking over control over the computer room.
Needless to say the admins were not happy, but they must have gotten the hint because after we handed over the keys they got better.
wow - Doom and Mortal Kombat flashbacks galore...
-
It makes more sense, therefore it's correct and English is wrong (but that's almost a given).
Uhhm, the dumb terminal *is* the monitor (+ keyboard, mouse, network card and video card -- that's all) so the $400 includes everything. Yes it is *much* cheaper then a bunch NT4 workstations. With NT you'd have to pay $400 just for the license + you need quite a beefy PC to run it. Each client would cost about $2000 and the way M$ goes, it would be obsolete in less then 2 years. The dumb terminals don't have any brains other then network card and video card. Hence, they don't require upgrades and can last for years. The only upgrade you need to worry about is the server. And even if it costs $20000, it's still much cheaper to buy a new $20000 box then to upgrade a few hundred of $2000 PCs. And don't even get me started on the ease of administration, reliability, and security. Oh, and since you are so concerned about M$ apps, I'll clue you in: the Sun Rays *can* run them. How? The same way they run Solaris apps. Everything runs on a remote server and gets displayed on the client. Ever heard of Wincenter? That is, in fact, what I'm using right now, just for the heck of it. I'm sitting in a lab in front of a dumb terminal (not Sun Ray, but a similar kind -- it doesn't have a "Java Card"). I'm posting this message from IE via Wincenter. I also use Wincenter to run Word 97. Sun even mentions that in their press release. In short, get a clue before you say bullshit. OK, you are sort of right on one point -- Linux dumb terminals would be even cheaper. But notice, that's dumb terminals not workstations. You can turn an old 486 into a dumb terminal running Linux. The only thing you can't do is the login via "Java card" -- but I'm not sure how useful that is anyway. The mainframe + dumb terminals set up has been used since 60's. The reason why stand-alone PCs took off is because they became significantly cheaper then the network equipment. But now that the fast network are cheap, I believe we'll see the turn of the tide -- going back to the dumb terminal / server set up. After all, it's much cheaper to buy several hundred clients for $400 and a $20k server to support them then several hundred $2000 PCs and worry about upgrades every 2 years. whew... that was a long rant
I probably should have said that the Jargon style of plural for those words is derived from that of oxen.
This is why it's a jargon reference. It's not supposed to be grammatically correct.
I agree that the jargon file is not always correct, however it is a useful reference for hacker jargon.
dave "furrfu!"
We need to work to bring that about - right now it obviously isn't happening, or we wouldn't have such shoddy and unjustified monopolies.
Most people use coins, 35 cents in most places. Lots of people use credit cards. Stores sell "pre-paid" cards which have like $10 or $20 worth of calls on them. And then there's the collect call services like 1-800-COLLECT.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I think that the Compaq Non-Stop S72000 w/4080 processors is a million times more expensive than a Sun Ultra 5 server.
Thank you so much. You took the words right out of my mouth!
If there's more than one of something, it's no longer a single object. This applies also for points of failure.
"single point of failure" is the general term for this concept. It's not a perfect term, but it seems to be the most sane arrangement of the three important words. "Point of single failure" doesn't at all convey the right concept. That is, a single component or "point" in a system that can fail and cause the entire system to fail.
For instance, on a fileserver with a single SCSI card, a single SCSI drive and a single hard drive, you have 3 single points of failure. If any single one of those points fails, the entire server will fail, effectively. (that is, it will fail in its purpose of serving files to the network.) Another single point of failure would be a CPU -- and with Intel architecture, at least, two CPUs would give you two single points of failure.
When you're analyzing a system to determine (and improve) reliability, you determine all the single points of failure and attempt to eliminate them as single points of failure.
In the above example, if you had reliability concerns, I'd suggest replacing the single SCSI drive with a RAID array of some kind, either RAID 1 or RAID 5 -- that way one hard drive could fail and everything would still be fine. Then you'd no longer have a single point of failure in the hard drive because both drives would need to fail to cause failure from that. (and hard drives, in my experience, at least, are more prone to failure than SCSI cards or network cards.)
If you're really anal about reliability for a file server you'd have dual ethernet cards on two separate network segments, two SCSI RAID cards with RAID 5 arrays attached and a software RAID 1 array made from those (to survive either SCSI card dying), dual CPUs and an architecture and OS that could handle a CPU dying and then you'd clone the box and have a hot-swap backup machine with some kind of mirroring between them... (in other words, you'd be moving towards a cluster)
Geez, I think I'd be looking at other issues to see why your NetWare servers were crashing once a week. (NT, ok, maybe once a week I could understand)
I don't work there anymore, but it was a few years ago and the copy of NetWare was already out of date, the hardware was old for the time (I think it was a 386dx33 -- Pentium 90s were just coming onto the market when I quit), I only worked there one day a week and it was a small enough office that if the server happened to need to be rebooted once a week and be down for 5 minutes, it wasn't that big a deal... Besides, it usually happened during the backup after everybody left, anyways...
I'll take your word for it that NetWare is very stable -- I'm certain the NetWare instances I dealt with were all kinda screwed up, outdated and poorly administered. (I was never really the main guy in charge of any NetWare boxen -- just somebody available to help out sometimes. Linux boxen, a Solaris box and that one NT box, yes. (BTW, the NT box that crashed several times a day later got Linux installed on it, and after a few kernel upgrades and/or patches to get the right SMP stuff for the time it ran its 1.3.x Linux kernel for several months without crashing))
The basic idea is good, but why use Sun?
There are many big advantages to a centralized architecture. But why not just take a standard PC, modify it to handle a ton of RAM, yank the FDDs, HDDs, and CDROMs; and put an OS in the BIOS?
Advantages of centralized architecture:
1) Viruses don't spread
2) Users can not steal software
3) Users can not add unauthorized software
4) Only need to backup the server - not the entire network
5) Much easier to add or upgrade software
6) Users move from one office to another without their computers
7) Less time looking for lost files
8) Only need to concern sysadms with server configuration, not every user's configuration.
9) No need to constantly upgrade hardware.
10) Everything RAM = FAST!
11) Less crashing of individual systems.
Also, if a minimal Linux or BSD OS where used, it would be more difficult for companies, like Sun or MS to monopolize computer systems.
I am sure there are more advantages than I have listed, but that is all I can think of right now.
BTW: In a secure environment, the advantages of a centralized system would be much greater.
Because of this concept of Dynamically Linked Shared Library(or DLL in 'dozespeaks) where only the relevent part of a library routine is loaded into memory, along with multiple references to the same library/routine could reside in 1 single memory location and be shared by multiple copies of the same app, or even by different programs if it is common libs provided by the OS.
That is why staticly linked (like DOS's programs) are bad.
These Sunrays are not NCs that execute code locally, whether that be Java or anything else. They are not even as smart as XTerms. They are graphical dumb terminals.
*NC's* are not stupid. They just aren't 'general purpose stand alone' computers like you want on your own personal desk at home. In a school or corporate environment, as a place to get work done, they are *GREAT*. As a tool , the NC architectures is FANTASTIC from a corporate IT point of view.. and no, it's nothing new, really.
Do you know how much of a PAIN IN THE ASS 100+ Windows NT WOrkstations are to administer, when all 90% of the people need is MS Office, but they insist on CUSTOMIZING every single workstation?
MIPS are about the least scarce thing I can think of for a network administrator at a facility like the one described in the article. (Disk space is a close second.) Every new PC has enough MIPS to choke a horse, way more than is required by the applications people want to run. And yet the average school or university computer lab is a mess due to unauthorized changes made to the systems by users, and differences between different generations of systems.
A more centralized computing environment is about delivering consistent, uniform, controlled, reliable user services. Very few people need more MIPS, but everyone except a bithead needs a consistent experience from all systems, with upgrades also happening system-wide. A centralized server delivers on these requirements. Users won't miss the MIPS.
Anyone else here remember the days when many schools were on novell networks during the push for centralized software. Not a fun sight, its really sad to see all this happening again. I'll admit centralized management is nice, but its no so nice when the entire school can get no work done just because the server crashed. And yes, servers still do crash. All too frequently servers crash and people cannot access the internet and or email. But atleast they could type up a document in a wordprocessor, or finish up thier programming assignment. Fun game to play, if your ever in an office park and you see what looks to you like way too many secretaries outside eating/smoking or whatever. Walk up to one and say "So? the network is down hu?"
But that's because schools are no longer a place of education. As witnessed in a previous post here on slashdot, it's merely a training program getting people ready for prison. You will only learn what you are told to learn, deviance will be brutally punished.
We have used thin clients a bit were I work. From my experience, there are some huge beniefits to using this at a school, and one major downfall. The downfall? I know at my high school, there was no real IT person... just a teacher who knew a good bit about computers.. but anything to do with client/server? no way. But with users who can easily mess things up in a fat client area thin clients are great. No need to go in and fix everything after the little punk kids change all teh settings or what not. I remember a few years ago..... hehe
a base compaq server runs around 50K. You could have a VERY nice SUN server for that.
I agree that a high school would be a pain to maintain, but you were at the top CS school in the country and had to reinstall almost daily? I'm sorry but Ifind this hard to believe. I support several different NT/Unix integrated networks and have yet to have to do a complete win95 reinstall in the last 3 years save one, which was because someone kept installing bad winX clients on their PC. This probably goes back to the "a system is only as good as its admin" argument but any network having that many problems in it has greater flaws than a bad OS.
This is great! Hopefully others will take the hint .. this is the first step in promoting UN*X systems after Microsoft so viciously attempted to knock them down .. No matter the deal they got with Sun, this will certainly help out other UN*X-like operating systems, such as Linux.
Roblimo, does /. try to consult with anyone at a linked site prior to publishing a link in a story? Some sites are better able, and better prepared, for the /. effect than others. Seems to me /. might be able to help less able sites by hosting mirrors, etc. of some linked pages.
A couple of years back a buddy of mine had a disk crash so while he waited for the new disk to arrive he booted on a floppy and mounted his file systems over the net. :-) couldn't you do someting similar with an old PC without too much hassle?
So if you could boot from flash (or put ducht tape over the disk drive or something
place to get work done
When will you people learn work and learning are not the same thing. I want kids to be able to learn enough that if they chooses to they can step on the asshole will be replacing Gates on the next millenium. Education is more than training kids on Office products no one ever uses after getting out of school.
If only Steve Wozniak had anything to say about it.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
...is a box client for the iPlanet web-desktop software. (i suspect the hardware is the same as for the java station. so it would have been a cheap item for sun to create, just new firmware, or else just run the original java iPlanet code) raw iPlanet has had good write ups. iPlanet renders the display into an X server, and squirts the changed pixels up the wire to the client. the X server runs on a large box. so *any* X client is available on the iPlanet platform. as that includes citrix, PC users can be happy (at 256 colors). thus the PC is rendered into middleware. given that the sunray box and the iplanet code are the same platform, you can still access your desktop using the original web client. it is a good play for sun because it is really low investment for them, and for many organisations would be a real winner.
n?
The why not use non-contract technology and let Sun fall into a black hole or some shit.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
My high school just got a generous donation from sun consisting of some Sun JavaStations (thin clients) and an Ultra 5 server. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with Sun thin clients.
The Sun website says that the thin clients load JavaOS and the Hot Java web browser.. and it doesn't seem like they load much else. I'm wondering how you do word processing and spreadsheets on the thin clients. Apperantly you can load other Java applications on these machines, but how long does it take for boot if it has to load extra applications.
Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated, it seems like an interesting topic.
...
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
Is it really cheaper than a bunch of NT4 workstations ? And since they're willing to go with non-windows software, is it really cheaper than a bunch of linux workstations ? Yes, it is probably cheaper. Don't forget that we are talking about "thin" clients versus "fat" clients. Think about system administration costs. Those clients require NO administration at all, all you have to do is setup the server. It is much easier to adminster one Solaris server than 1 NT (or linux server) + dozens of NT (or linux clients). Any clued sysadmin would opt for SUN's client-server solution. Sure, you could build this kind of solution with Linux too(or any other unix), but SUN gives you a "turn-key" solution ready to run. But in the end, what will it help the students learn ? I mean, learning an OS that's not in use anywhere else isn't very useful for the students, is it? Bullshit. They learn UNIX (Solaris, Linux, *BSD all are unix variants). UNIX is used in lots of places and now is becomming more popular than it ever was. If you teach students UNIX, they will also acquire problems solving skills which can be applied to any OS. Learning Windows means just learning Windows GUI, you still have no idea whats going on beyond that GUI or how the OS works. I wonder what kind of applications run on those machines. What will the kids do when they're thrown in real life and the wonderful proprietary Sun applications are nowhere to be found... They learn UNIX applications dude (most of which aren't available or suck on non-unix OSes). Plus, they also run StarOffice (an MS Office look-alike for Solaris, Linux, indows, etc), netscape, whole bunch of other applications...
And the guy they paid to work on it screwed it up with some really stupid misconfigurations....
But he's right. As schools discover the Internet, they get more and more frightened of it and give students less and less room to learn things like UNIX and networking./
What is this world coming to, when non-techies use techie terminology correctly? :)
--
OSX server is discounted to (scratching grizzled chin whicskers) something 200-250 dollars for educational customers --that's unlimited seats, mind.
Is it really cheaper than a bunch of NT4 workstations ? And since they're willing to go with non-windows software, is it really cheaper than a bunch of linux workstations ?
Yes, it is probably cheaper. Don't forget that we are talking about "thin" clients versus "fat" clients. Think about system administration costs. Those clients require NO administration at all, all you have to do is setup the server. It is much easier to adminster one Solaris server than 1 NT (or linux server) + dozens of NT (or linux clients). Any clued sysadmin would opt for SUN's client-server solution. Sure, you could build this kind of solution with Linux too(or any other unix), but SUN gives you a "turn-key" solution ready to run.
But in the end, what will it help the students learn ? I mean, learning an OS that's not in use anywhere else isn't very useful for the students, is it?
Bullshit. They learn UNIX (Solaris, Linux, *BSD all are unix variants). UNIX is used in lots of places and now is becomming more popular than it ever was. If you teach students UNIX, they will also acquire problems solving skills which can be applied to any OS. Learning Windows means just learning Windows GUI, you still have no idea whats going on beyond that GUI or how the OS works.
I wonder what kind of applications run on those machines. What will the kids do when they're thrown in real life and the wonderful proprietary Sun applications are nowhere to be found...
They learn UNIX applications dude (most of which aren't available or suck on non-unix OSes). Plus, they also run StarOffice (an MS Office look-alike for Solaris, Linux, indows, etc), netscape, whole bunch of other applications...
is an Emate?
Insert mind here.
This geek thinks that the affordances provided by an OS have tons to do with the direction people go with computers. If a system has only a command line, like my beloved Commodore, the user has a sink or swim experience. Those who swim quickly learn a whole lot about computers. Those who sink are in trouble. For best results there should be a bundled scripting/shell language and a programming language, ideally interpreted and with graphics.
If there is a GUI and a command line, like current Windows and Unix systems, then those who have the hacker nature will get into the CLI before long and the learning process starts. Non hackers can get by just fine.
If there is really just a GUI or menu driven interface, like MacOS or green screens, no user ever learns that much about computers from the OS, although they may have all kinds of other good learning experiences on the system. The growth of a potential hacker may be stunted.
I do agree that schools are not a useful place to have multiple platforms. Learning the details of one OS
www.seul.org/edu
>Then of course there is the problem of
>"terrorism." We had very minimal problems with
>this in previous years, but last year (my
>last year there) the problem exploded.
Thank you, I know exactly what you're talking about :-) Lots of rubbish around in the computers at school. People play games of the 6 PCs that are available all the time (at 780 pupils... we have a computer room with 40 PCs as well, but that is used primarily for whole classes, as well as outside normal school hours), while others can't get one to do their schoolwork at.
In my experience, actually messing the computers up isn't so much an `evil' act as much as somebody just being stupid. We actually had a pupil setting a PC to 110V (it's 220V here) because he believed that would fix it. POOF! There goes one PC...
The biggest problem is, as you pointed out, the total lack of security in most OSes. Change to Linux, and (most of) your problems would go away. But, as you also pointed out, it isn't easy to get support for such a thing :-(
I'm not sure if you need NCs for this. `Real' PCs will do, as long as nobody has the opportunity to mess them up. (Remove the access to bootdisks, for instance... If they REALLY need disk access, put a floppy or two at some server-like computers. Weird idea?)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Schools are a challenge, and Apples strategy did pay off. MS wants in, yet its OS is not hardened enough. recipie: Fix new MB in old XT case. Install OS (everything 600Mb). Backup, burn to CD. Loop 2nd ide connector out of case with strain relief. SPOT weld case shut (strategic allaiance with metalwork depot). I have found a hackers dislike old 386 steel boxes, no matter whats inside. Now a full restore/reimage using ghost or the like if the PC gets studentotaged. In a classroom have all '386 rebuilts' and ONE modern PC which is the decoy. It has two 640 mb disks, with a reed switch takeoff on slave/ master(deliberate conflict). Student complains 'broken' like a magician, go over turn off, and secretly plant magnet/hidden switch, and you are up and running in no time. Bios needs to be hacked/reburnt, so usual passwords don't work. A reed switch on the bios 'flash' enable is also a neat touch. The golden rule is that if it cant be fixed in 40 minutes - it is no good. Bloatware is worse. Fraid linux is the solution, until MS can shrink its image to 500 MEg or less. An infra red 'TV' remote control for school PC bios would be a nifty ideal, but in the mean time, every wantabe hacker is lined up wanting to get access to the 'special pc' which, even if hacked, instantly reimages when the teacher gives it a thump is what is required. Sunray is just another welded steel box solution, that aces the 40 minute rule
I wish I had NT experience before I hit the job market. Unix only turns kids into hopeless geeks. NT makes them productive, employed members of society.
Simple explanation for CNN getting a clue (no offense). They've obviously got someone there reading Slashdot. I've noticed a few articles on there _after_ something similar was posted on Slashdot (i.e. they're reading articles that us geeks like, then researching it and posting their own articles on CNN). I wouldn't call it plagerism. I wouldn't even call it bad. In Fact, I'd have to say that this is a pretty clever concept of satisfying geek-dom (its actually probably someone at IDG since they write a lot of CNN's tech articles).
//BEGIN RANT
Thank God they're not posting Livingston's vague and somewhat innacurate articles anymore. Anyone remember the "Microsoft Windows98 Disables Competitors Hardware"? Not sure if thats the correct title of it, but boy was that a blatent hoax to get you to click the article and increase his salary by $0.001 or whatever.
//END RANT
It's the governments responsibility to fund the schools, bottom line. Every other country in the world does, and most of the first world countries not only do it but do it better than us. If you think tax money shouldn't go towards schooling than I'd glady take away your education from first to 12th grade, since I'm sure that's how your education was funded.
- tred
I hope it does go alright for these folks. I live about 30mi outside NYC, (not like that's really related, but anyway) and two years ago we switched from a very nice Mac network to a budget, confining WinTel NT network. I don't mind the PCs themselves (they're all Dells : ) but NT? From Mac? And now our school paper is forced to do desktop publishing on these things.
For cripes sake, could they try to ruin us anymore than they already have? The conputer "teachers" all had to be retrained, and they still don't know how to log in as admin and give us internet access. Yes, we still don't have internet access.
Anyway, I'd really love for my school district to get some reliable Sun boxes, because not only do I hate NT, but it would also give the under-exposed students (such as me)...err...exposure to a different OS. I miss the Macs (and the various Apple ][s strewn about) more than ever (mainly because we had *a lot* more privs, and teachers who could actually help us at the time). Even Unix/Linux/BSD would be great (although they probably wouldn't give us access to anything outside KDE, and would have even less of an idea of what they're doing. In that case, let the students help the students. Students welcome help from other students : )
Hats off to NYC. Best of luck to them.
miyax
Possibly the best part would be the availability of information off the network from your house. There is a teacher at my school who posts not only homework assignments and class notes online, but grades from his class. It's good for the students, and the parents get to keep one eye on their kids grades if they wish. What more can you ask for?
On a similar note; this type of technology and schools are the perfect fit if only schools recieved the funding neccisary. We're spending x billion dollars on a fruitless drug war (among other things) but the government can't put down the money to get this into all the schools? Or even the majority of schools, or even just a few schools? It's really unfortunate, considering how great this could be for our educational system.
- tred
i wish my school would do this but we have more serious issues... like getting rid of the stupid uniforms (blue jumpsuits) and the dumb ID badges.
Schools should all have Macs. For creativity, the Mac can't be beat. Also, they should all have Windows computers because that's what they'll most likely see in a business setting. Of course, they should also have Unix (or Unix-like) systems so they could learn the high-end of software and basic developement, etc. So in a perfect school, there would be a heterogenous environment with computers focused toward the specific tasks they're best at. Too bad they'll never get that if they're tied to a specific hardware and/or software vendor. Sounds like the schoold are shooting themselves in the foot in order to save money.
Well, that and the fact that an ideal environment would be pretty expensive.
As a cultural phenomenon, the surge in popularity of linux is evidence of the impending end of the Microsoft monopoly.
Sure, microsoft's monopoly seems fairly unjustified, mostly because never was there any actual innovation that led to microsoft becoming such a powerful company.
The single acheivement that Microsoft has accomplished is to make tons of money. If it hadn't been Microsoft, it would have been somebody else. Microsoft just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and so when Bill Gates decided to plow into the internet market, it worked. If he had failed, then surely fewer people would be using the internet today, and slashdotters might hail Gates as a visionary who gallantly tried to shift gears and move mainstream computing into the future...
We resent success of such magnitude, but we do so unjustly, since each of us could have been in Bill's shoes (if we'd wanted to be, etc.)
I think the interesting part isn't the thin clients, we've all seen VT's or X terminals before. I'm interested in what that card the kid was sticking into the machine was. Is it a unlocking mechanism of some kind? What happens if the kid loses it?
Second, if you're really looking for something that makes sense, take the rule (box->boxes, vax->vaxes, axe->axes) and extend it to ox->oxes, instead of extending the single exception to all other words that end in 'x'.
It makes sense that way because in English, plurals end in 's', except for the exceptions. It has nothing to do with being right or wrong. It's just the way it is. English, as a whole, isn't "wrong." Of course, that entire concept of a language being wrong sounds pretty clueless, but I won't get into that.
Now excuse me, because I have some faxen of pictures of foxen and lynxen to send out. I took the pictures some time around one of the equinoxen, but I can't remember which.
By the whole "oxen/boxen" logic, that "made sense." I suppose next we'll have to "extend" that exception to all plurals.
Want to modify the rulen of the entire English language? Just find a word that doesn't follow a standard English rule, and "extend" it to all other worden. From this day forward, any group of more than one moose shall be called meese (by extension of goose->geese)! (althought I admit that even moose->moose is itself an exception, too)
Ok, enough ranting for today. If you got it, good. If not, there's no sense trying to explain it further to a person who thinks something is right just because it "makes sense." Anaximander's theory of the universe made sense in his day, but it was still wrong.
(Of course, the use of boxen as a form of Jargon, as pointed out to me earlier, isn't quite as bad, as long as you know that it's not right, and use the correct form when appropriate.)
Well, even if the kids are still able to get a shell and do a little bit of useful things that way, they'll probably be using a graphical interface (CDE, I'd bet) designed to hide the interesting Unix bits from them.
Letting your average kid loose on a Unix prompt would probably require a lot of hand-holding (that the teachers wouldn't necessarily be capable of). A nice clicky GUI interface with buttons for the most important things and menus for the slightly less important things would let those kids get stuff done. Sure, maybe a few kids could get a learning experience, but the idea at that age should be to teach them how to use a computer, in general, not anything too specific.
Dammit, I am getting old! How can this have happened to me?! Why me? I was minding my own business, not screwing with anyone, but now I am old anyway. This is not fair.
Back in my high school days, we had one computer: a mini (DEC PDP-11/34a running RSTS/E) and we liked it. The computer didn't get screwed up, because there was just one. There were two bad things that could happen:
- The VT100s' terminal settings screwed up. Solution: Press SETUP and then 0 to reset the terminal.
- The hackers who managed to subvert privvies would screw things up. Solution: Hackers don't let assholes get privvies.
It was all so simple.---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes, and you know this because you work there right? Why don't you people stop always being so negative, becuase i've notice 90% of the time your wrong.
Only if you're
1. 911
2. police
3. hospital
4. airport
And several other places I forgot, does a few minutes of downtime mean a disaster. In 99% of cases, the server crashing for 1 minute once a month is much more preferable than zillion of desktops randomly crashing, having problems with programs, getting corrupted, having all windows\system directory erased to free up more space for e-mail, et cetera. At least, in theory, one big server makes alot of sense. Think about it - for the most part, your computer is sitting there doing nothing while you're surfing or writing a text file. I'd say, perhaps, 95% of time it's not doing anything that'd warrant the processor, hd, ram you have. Thus, one server would be 20 times more effective, if it scales ideally and if you discount usage peaks (that shouldn't be discounted, really) and if you assume that server that is as powerful as 20 pcs will cost exactly like 20 pcs. This won't happen in real world where we have economy of scale and various psychological reasons. Still, it's quite quite possible that Sun will finally
win the war and as a result we'll be alot more productive on the average. We'll see. The only thing I am concerned about is that server provider will have huge control over the marketplace. Might get much worse than Microsoft.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
for those places that need to be up ALWAYS.. have a backup server. You still think that's not enough? Ok, 3. At any rate, price/reliability ratio will be higher than for desktops if Sun beats MS's economy of scale advantage.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
It makes sense, because it places all of the control on the server side, giving the schools central control over everything.
This is nothing new; universities have relied on labs of XWindow terminals for years and years, which are basically NC's. Again, the advantage there is centralization of resources and security---but most of all, control over the students' use of the equipment.
gee, thank god, i have a sparcstation idleing at home, otherwise i wouldn't be able to connect to the various accounts on pc's running linux or workstations running irix or aix, from my NeXTstation running NeXTstep.
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
The list price of the Sun Ray 1 terminal is $495. Sun gives pretty good discounts to educational institutions, so $400 is pretty reasonable.
You are jumping to conclusions far too quickly, making yourself look like a zealot. Wait a minute this is slashdot. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but they are probably running KDE as the desktop environment.
How is it better to have a card that can be lost, and has to be purchased for each student instead of a login/password?
Anything they store on the card can be in a file in the user's home directory.
My first reaction was "WHAT!?!? NCs!?!? Didn't everyone see how stupid NCs are?" But apparently not only does that not matter, no, not everyone did see it that way.
After a few minutes, I realized: As long as it's not Microsoft, although it's not the best they could have done, its a great step in the right direction.
No, it won't educate the children about *nix. Nor will it educate them about Windows (they'll more than likely learn that at home...). But they will learn that M$ is not the only way!!
I think its great and the school/district should get applause for not succumbing to the M-beast.
(Pardon my speeling, I'm taking care of the kids and they're beating on my kb.)
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
A conservative estimate for server costs on Sun Ray, using a Sun E450 server, is about $1000 per client machine. This assumes 25 users per CPU and RAID 0+1 disks. That brings the total cost to about $2000 per client, but that would be subject to an educational discount. The real cost savings come from the reduction in admin. The E450 can drive around 100 clients (conservative estimate, could drive much more in a school environment). With mirrored disks, and Automatic System Recovery, downtime is minimal. As for the apps, the primary use is web access, with multimedia (audio and video) and StarOffice as options. Sun is working with educational Application Service Providers to provide network-based applications to schools.
Actually, the correct techie pluralization of box is ``boxen'' not ``boxes''. So you can rest assured that these people are utterly clueless, and don't have to worry about what this world is coming to.
more schools wouldn't think this way, especially public schools that have a very limited supply of techs and money to pay for computer hardware. Like many people have pointed out, it's much easier and cheaper to maintain and you have real 24 hour support. Something else that I haven't seen is the fact it's also much easier to use. Now Solaris isn't the begeinners' OS but the server can be anything you'd like it to be. This means you can buy a Windows NT TSE box and use that from each of the terminals. So that means many Windows apps can be run on the servers and because NT and 98 have a very similar operating environment you can teach students Windows without ten dozen Windows boxes (if thats the sort of thing you're teaching). What Sun did was make the Sun Ray work with more than just their hardware and software, a Java mentality I suppose.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Personally, I'd be much happier seeing this school running Macs (eg., a large network of iBooks or iMacs connected by AirPort wireless networking) -- it seems at this point like a far more intelligent choice for a educational institution.
-cf
In the past I've seen Sun give some decent discounts to schools with no strings attached (a la Net Day). Heck, they could've given this stuff away for free and just put it against the advertising budget...!
If it's saving money over stand alone PC's thats good. But look at the first paragraph...
n g.shtml
"Taking part in a pilot program that could revolutionize education, Intermediate School 381 in Brooklyn has replaced personal computers with a single network server, which could change the way students read, write and research."
Revolutionize? Give me a break. Its just another computer. It is nice to see CNN give something other than wintel coverage, but as usual they ignore other underlying problems.
Another poster wondered what kind of contract Sun has this district nailed too. I wonder too. With shrinking education budgets, the people running the schools are starting to have to choose between two evils. On one hand, you make do with what you have, or, you can "sell the school" out to corporations, who will supply you with equipment, but will force you to expose advertising to the students. Getting kids to recognize your brand at a young age is a great marketing device. It's also incredibly immoral.
There is a good article about this phenomena in this weeks issue of "The Nation".
http://www.thenation.com/issue/990927/0927manni
I can say that Windows 9x has major problems with security. We had a disk image on the server so that we could rebuild stations in about 30 minutes (which was an almost daily occurrence). Along with the tendency for the Windows registry to corrupt itself, the kids would install games and regularly destroy the system (both accidentally and deliberately). We even had to glue the mouse ball covers on to keep them from stealing the
mouse balls!
Personally, I would buy a large Linux server and buy diskless PCs with lots of memory, so I could boot them and run X from the server. It's cheap and easy to maintain.
In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?
When will people realize centralized anything is a bad idea? How many bad sci-fi movies do people have to see where the underdog makes the one in a million shot and takes out the centralized control... example: Starwars (ep1 and a new hope)
In all seriousness I work for a school doing networking and we are trying desperately to get away from novell and centralization... it is much more of a hasell than it ever was worth in our opinion. They are also moving from a T1 to a cable modem for each classroom... also centralization... anything centralized on the internet tends to not work well... example: NSI
I would be -very- wary of any new technology that relies so heavy on centralization
Why the cards? Why not just a simple login?
Newton-OS-based portable, "clamshell" physical design with translucent plastic case, built-in keyboard. Didn't catch on. Newton users didn't like it, schools weren't convinced. Picture.
the books were there then too ...
Possibly the best part would be the availability of information off the network from your house. There is a teacher at my school who posts not only homework assignments and class notes online, but grades from his class. It's good for the students, and the parents get to keep one eye on their kids grades if they wish. What more can you ask for?
...I ran into this the other day. Coolest educational software I ever saw. Anybody have experience with such software (and its usefulness in the RealWorld(tm))?
Taking part in a pilot program that could revolutionize education...
One server and many clients is not revolutionary. Is it not a step back? The beauty of individual machines is redundancy. Anyone have a guess as to what the server machine(s) might cost. The article estimated the price of the terminals at $400, but what about software, And the monster machines to control all those terminals?
It does seem pretty useful that school material could be stored on a central machine for each student, but that is possible with PC's and netware or some other network volumes.
I'm all for this, but I do not want my work machine replaced with by something with no storage, yet I fear this is the future (and past)
This thing is coming more and more in the news... I was lucky enough to see the demo some time back.
It's really sweet: absolutely quiet... you could put 100s together and still have pindrop silence (there is no fan to cool off the cpu essentially).
Two modes of login are supported: the first looks like the normal solaris login, and probably works like logging in from an XTerm (or fakes this; see later)
The other is much more interesting. It uses a JavaCard. Essentially, you insert a JavaCard in an usused terminal slot, and you get back your workspace... when you're done, just remove the card, and your workspace flashes out, and the login screen reappears.
It's very neat, in the demo, they started an MP3 player, and when the song was midway, removed the card. Almost instantaneously, the login screen was up. She went up to another station, inserted the card, and the MP3 started playing from where it had been stopped!!
There were some graphical demos too... but that imho depends on the network bandwidth and how fast the server is, since all the processing is being done there.
I guess they are checkpointing various kinds of state for each user on the server... *very* server intensive, but a single point of administration (and failure!) is the plus (minus!) point, i guess...
amit
1. The article says,
How, precisely, would a school student access their schoolwork from home? (For standard word processing files without a lot of pictures, PCs allow you to copy your work to a floppy and take that home with you. Not very reliable, but you have the original at school if the disk fails.)
2. If the school provides a way to access files on the school server from home, does that entail that the school provides 24h/7d support for that server? (Or even 18h/7d support?)
3. If the school does not provide a way to access files from home, would the school provide open labs after school so that students can do their homework?
One possible answer to 1. (if the school didn't keep their servers going after hours) would be for the student to e-mail their homework to their home address (and then e-mail the file back to school the next day). A bit time-consuming for somebody with a modem connection, but possible.
(That's not to say that the NC scheme isn't workable; just that I have a few concerns about it. Naturally I think that the idea of freeing ordinary teachers from having to fix PCs after the little nits break them is a Good Thing.)
My school's got old beasts...P-100's, 486 dx-2's. There's no network, nothing fancy. No "other" OS's. But however old it is, it's a different environment than this Sun "dumb terminal" situation. The kids know that the computer is complex. They're old beasts and things go wrong with them. And there's enough technical knowledge there to satisfy a growing mind.
In fact, the students fix the computers, not the "teacher" (because she's an underqualified idio...er...ahem.)
I know that if I'd had these dumb terminals in junior high, I'd have no curiosity today to explore the intricacies of technology.
Give the kids a chance to grok technology, I say.
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
This is nice for the school, paying only 400$ per machine and all... Then again, that probably doesn't figure in the cost of the monitor, the networking equipment and the grossly overpriced servers. Is it really cheaper than a bunch of NT4 workstations ? And since they're willing to go with non-windows software, is it really cheaper than a bunch of linux workstations ?
But in the end, what will it help the students learn ? I mean, learning an OS that's not in use anywhere else isn't very useful for the students, is it ?
I wonder what kind of applications run on those machines. What will the kids do when they're thrown in real life and the wonderful proprietary Sun applications are nowhere to be found...
Getting kids to recognize your brand at a young age is a great marketing device.
Does this really matter for Sun? Kids won't be able to buy a Sun Ray, because it needs an expensive server to feed it all its applications. And I don't see Mommy and Daddy buying Junior an Ultra 5 workstation anytime soon, either.
I don't think Sun's got any incentive like that here, at least in the K-12 market.
just to clarify:
which Sun server vs. which Compaq? Both companies have high-end equipment that goes for $100,000+
--
To be honest, I think geeks overestimate the degree to which OS's influence the way people learn about computers.
A computer is a tool that is supposed to make life easier or more productive (or more fun). If you put a kid with a brain in front of a computer and let him/her use it for a while, he/she will surely think of a list of thing that could be made easier, funner (sic) or more productive.
That is the kind of thinking that drove me to abandon MacOS (hey, this system crashes way to much) and Windows (the word "active" means the machine will crash") and start using *n*x.
Kids and schools don't need platform diversity shoved down their throats... what kids need is the critical thinking skills that will enable them to decide for themselves that a particular "feature" sucks, or that a gui is poorly designed.
According to some of the comments I read on slashdot, the average person is an idiot waiting to be indoctrinated into the Microsoft groupthink.
We need to believe that human ingenuity and rationality will overpower any mindshare monopoly that we ever encounter.
cheers!
I took C++ in high school last year. We each had PII 300mhz computers. Seeing as we only used 99% of those mhz when we compiled every now and then, I'd thik a thin client solution would work well and be cost effective.
I'm sure one of those PII's could have handled all the compiling for everyone, seeing as compiles take 5 seconds and the compile jobs would be evenly distributed over time.
The rest is just text editing.
I'm glad that the story caused you some glee, but really, one would think that Bill Gates had teased you as a kid or something.
At my college the Lab of machines (Win 95)rebuild themselves using PC-Rdist after a user logs out. On the newest machines (Dell 450mhz) This process is under a minute. On some of the lower end machines it is considerably longer, but still useful. This seems much more workable to me than restoring from a ghost image which it sounds as though you are doing.
Sun's solution is not only supported by a maker of professional computing systems (which, I might add, are secure and stable), but the monitors aren't made of that annoying translucent blue color.
blah blah blah....
--
Sun Ray is something like Citrix , with the pixel interpretor/display driver interfacing into the network instead of to a actual hardware. The Ray is at the other end, reading those pixel data and drawing it on the screen.
Ray is a beam of light originating from the Sun itself. Many rays coming out of the Sun that is in the middle. Kind of like the centralized server concept.
'doze apps would run via WinTerm/WinDD/WinFrame on a single NT server and the client would reside on the Solaris box.
If they are going to do anything on that environment, they might have some app servers in the environment(maybe running database, web server, etc.) It ain't hard to hook this contraption up into a HA(I mean cluster, in 'dozespeaks) environment. Running it in a symmetric failover mode, one server could back the other up. Of course, there would be no memory transfer during the failure, so whomever was playing frogger at that time would have to restart.
Everything could be made redundant, the only thing is probably network hubs, but Rays could be staggered between different hubs so that a single outage does not bring the whole environment down.
Okay, call me a cynic, but I'm a cynic not long out of high school. If we had NC stations instead of PCs in my school, I don't think my education would be revolutionary! Now maybe it was 0LD 5K3WL, but most of my education came from teachers with blackboards and books. Sure having 5 years of 50 fulltext magazines on CD-ROM was helpful, but I don't think my education would be any lesser if I was forced to *gasp*... use paper.
Seriously, I think this is a great idea. Having PCs as workstations in a classroom environment is a little bottom-heavy, so the reduced cost and maintenance of NC stations makes a lot of sense. But these CNN journalists have to go. Doesn't anyone know what a ``revolution'' is, anymore?
My Freakin Blog
Yeah flaimbait. It holds no real content. I've walked away with a redundant, "this os is trash, use this one" sorta pov. So fine, it MAY be considered more offtopic. But then again, it's just a ranting opinion.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
--
If this were a Linux or FreeBSD story, everyone would be jumping all over it saying that it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard of. But because it's Sun pushing a technology paradigm that's been around for ages, and apparently doing so effectively in ways that really count, many people seem down on it.
What's up with that? We all have our biases, and we all like to make our voices be heard when injustices are being done in the industry, but this doesn't strike me as being something anyone should be putting Sun down for. Is the hardware and software working for this school in NYC? Sounds like it. Who are any of us to rant and rave about any company that is trying to put
quality hardware & software to work in our schools. Consider this at least, it's not Microsoft.
-phillip
--
I think Sun may have found a good niche for thin clients outside business, and more power to them.
The schools get hardware that is cheaper and better than an NT network. In addition it's simpler to administer and it grants them more control over students, they'll love that part.
So as long as we don't forget the people who all this is supposedly in benefit of, the students, it sounds great. I have some points in that regard.
This should not be taken as an opportunity to impose product marketing on on a captive audience, whether we're talking about soft drinks or operating systems. OS and program sign-on splashes, ok, but lets not get ridiculous.
I also wouldn't like to see this used as an attack on diversity by Sun. That is, this tends to bind everyone to the editor, languages, and tools that Sun decides to provide with the server. No problem with that, as long as it is possible to add more diverse third party programs at the school's discretion, without talk of voiding licenses or warranties.
This is likely to leave students with practically zero privacy. Other students may crack the server, and the administration reads what they please of course. This is not a problem if the students and their parents are explicitly warned that all school computer data is public ahead of time. Terrible precedent, but otherwise you have to implement real security, and teach adminstrators to respect student privacy, and I can't see it happening this lifetime. Good practice for work it seems anyway.
If done right, this could be very good for students, schools, and Sun. Hope it is.
Ahhhh.... now the SUN finally shines in the classrooms.
Watch out for the SUNburns, though.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Larry Ellison, not Elinson :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Brings back memories of those ICON computers we used to use. The more things change...
--The more you know, the less you know.
This would be a perfect time to re-introduce the netwinder for something similar. If priced right, it would solve a lot of problems. The principal could be the same as the Sun Boxen, but you would also be able to introduce more powerful computing (For those who want it) and you would not become a "one solution" school. All the netwinder people would need to do is add a card reader, and slash the price in half. This would be a better solution for both the schools and the kids.
--
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's where all these business plans seem to be heading. MS (already there), Sun (NCs), AOL, WebTV, Linux (slowly but steadily). I wonder how many of these will be aimed/are aimed at lower income families, the 50% of this country(US) that doesn't already have a PC? Maybe we'll see some real competition...
+&x
.... A few other things.
My mom is onth school board of a local christian school, who this is its first year, she asked me one day, about how i would setup a computer lab, my response was use Network Computers, and get a big kickass server, with tons of memory, and disk space to run them off of. My mom took the info, and well, that issue is still in the air, but i know from my high school (a public school), there not interrested in anything that is diffrent from the status quo, but the only reason is becaus ethe teachers arnt computer geniouses, i mean, a local university gave all the teachers accounts, and the university terminated them because their helpdesk was getting overloaded by people asking how to read there mail, or how to surf the web.
I mean, its nice to sit down with the network admin, and dream of this kind of stuff, but its rarely ever genna happen, with teachers being use to whatever they have at home. Anyway, with state contracts, my school would pay oh, lets see, 3 times the normal price for anything.
Atleast we dont have clear bookbags, or id tags, but were close. Sigh, i halfto goto school tommarow, maybe i will spend a class discussting unix security with the admin. i dunno, high school sucks if you have a high iq, or know more then 1 or more teacher(s).
#include LOGIN_TO_ANTIQUATED_NETWARE_BOX.H
I hope nobody goes bad-mouthing these thin-clients before thinking about how much time and energy it saves people in the schools.
When I was in high school I helped manage the computer lab, and I'd have to say that some sort of network computing system would be a godsend compared to what I had to deal with.
I went to a small private school which didn't really have a lot of money to throw around for technology. Half the room was Mac G3's, and the other half was Mac 6100/60 PPCs, since they couldn't afford to upgrade all of the old 6100's to G3s all at once. Having two totally different systems means we have to have older versions of software on half the lab since the older machines couldn't handle it.
Then of course there is the problem of "terrorism." We had very minimal problems with this in previous years, but last year (my last year there) the problem exploded. At the very least, people would come in, download games off the web, and just clog the hard drives up with garbage. One person even went so far as to make two or three nested folders inside the Extensions folder of one of our Macs to hide half a gigabyte worth of games. And on the other end of the spectrum, there's the people who drag the System file out of the System Folder, reboot the machine, and walk away, leaving us to come back and boot the machine off a CD to fix it.
After about a month and a half of this we frantically purchased Foolproof and locked down all the systems, but that only caused more problems, since a lot of programs actually didn't cooperate with Foolproof.
The sad thing is that the only things they use those computers for are classes in intro. Java, C++, web page editing, and word processing, all of which are nicely covered by Linux. I never missed an opportunity to say that if we set up an NIS/NFS server and used Linux that would be the end of all the problems, but it never really took hold.
The Sun Rays probably would have been great. People could have done development work and ran StarOffice or something like that, and admin'ing the whole system would have been a whole lot easier. Plus, compared to Mac hardware, which is prevalent in K-12, they're dirt cheap. For the price of one iMac, they can buy three thin clients. Seems to work out better for everyone.
How on earth could this be cheaper and better than a bunch of windows machines all connected together? Sun NC's aren't necessarily more difficult to maintain, but the fact that people are more familiar with M$ products that I just can envision this being cost effective. Computers cost money to maintain and that is money most schools don't have.
-- Moondog
Also notice that teacher can spy on anything the kids are doing? I can see some level of that, but that seemed a bit over the top.
After having dealt with some Sun folks, I echo your sentiments.
Current gig is HP/UX for the big stuff, a mix of NT and Novell on Compaq for the midline servers, and Compaq on the desktops.
Previous gig was IBM RS/6k for the big stuff, a mix of Dell, ALR, and AST with NT and Novell for the midline servers, and Dell on the desktops.
The Dell crashed less often. Mija Cat
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
On the one hand, this is a very good idea if one is thinking strictly security and organizing everything in a hierarchal order. On the other hand, however, not only does it lock the school into a position of being official sponsors of Sun (if I am reading the 'Cold feeling' comments correctly), but it also ties the student's hands with regards to experimentations and learning on one's own. If there is a central monitor watching all the kids movements, at one point do they get to try something outside of the normal constraints of the curriculum? For as we all know, the curriculum isn't always a stellar and challenging thing at the grade school level, nor at the High School level. And while, yes, sometimes that freedom to try things has gotten kids in trouble, it has also helped many expand their understanding and knowledge. I still don't know if I would say this is a good idea yet. I suppose it depends on how the monitoring teacher defines the rules for 'good behavior' and 'bad behavior'-- both categories of which are typically devoid of any academic evaluation.
My high school (where I graduated from a couple months back) bought a bunch of eMates for the English classes. Whenever we had to write a paper for Creative Writing or College Composition (basically one every two weeks) we got access to our own individual eMates to type our papers up.
They were little green mini-laptops, small hard drives, simple operating system, black & white touch screen (eliminating the need for a mouse) that was fine for just typing. We would connect to the printer by hand (physically plugging it in) and then print.
I didn't mind them, they were fine for just typing, but not much else. They had a typing program, a drawing program, and thats about it. Must have been pretty cheap for the school.
i dont display scores, and my threshhold is -1. post accordingly.
Discuss
We have to overthrow anybody who tries to take control of us in any way. Burn down Redmond. Destroy all servers. We have the right to choice, they cannot force any of this Closed source crap down my throat. Give me back sneaker-net. Bring back command.com and its batch files. I want to use an abacus instead.
Say no to organization, centralization, democrazation. We want anarchy.
Years ago they should have filled high schools with a bunch of vt220 terminals and written of corporate unix boxen. No point/click drag'n drop. That will teach them kids some unix.(and quake in console mode)
"you're wrong" :P
"You can never break it, so you can't press something wrong," said one student.
That's a pretty bold statement, in this day and age.
Dana
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Excuse me for perhaps coming across a little old fashioned but:
* the school is saving money. That can be spend in quality of education (books teachers ect).
* Maybe the kids need to learn something besides unix too. Judging by the cnn pics we're talking 10-15 year olds here.
* A solid network that stays up is in the benefit of most pupils. There are dedicated Unix sysadmin courses available so there is no need to compromise the network/equipment/software/TIME/money in the interest of a few diligent whizzers.
Sun is definately getting cooler!
Dennis Onstenk
Hey buddy... Here's a secret for you: Win 95/98 is for HOME USERS ONLY!! Did you hear me? HOME USERS ONLY! There is no security in these OS'es. Period. What in the Hell are you doing installing a major network with a game playing OS? If anything, you should have used NT!
Geez, over and over again, dimwits like you keep thinking of up front bait & switch cost of cheap 'doze peecees. It is TCO that is at issue. spare Rays could be plugged in for broken ones with absolutely no reconfiguration. Nobody lost any session because it fizzed out or a power cord was kicked.
Who is learning an OS at grade school? They are just clicking at the chicken icon or punching in answer to questions like "what is 1+1?" Anyway, its not like college teaches you diff eq/linear algebra/vector calculus so that you could go out and write the next Hedge fund models when you land a job stapling reports all day.
Anyway, after you leaned awk/perl/java, going batch to dos batch files is a cinch.
Apple intentionally tried to do this. They were very open about it. Didn't look like it worked too well...
I am prertty sure this is a stupid question, but this never stopped me before.
What about the load on the server ? I mean, let's say that 50 kids all want to edit their homework in some word-processor. On a PC-based system, they all run their own copy of Word, interacting with the server only when they need to save stuff. On an NC-based system, the server has to spawn off a process every time a student runs StarOffice ? Wouldn't that require the server to be extraordinarily powerful (as compared to the PCs) ? Or am I missing something ?