We had a student administrated computer systems lab at my high school. It consisted of over 30 dual celeron 433 workstations running linux and a 16 node cluster running mosix, in addition to the web server for the entire school. They also took care of the file server and the mail server for the lab. It wasn't a problem because there were 6 student sys-admins who were held accountable for their actions.
This has been going on for over 10 years now and if we had had any significant problems they surely would have put an end to it, but it has really worked out well and puts the knowledge of the system administrators in a much more accesable place for the rest of us to learn from.
Do you have people at your school that are into the same sort of thing you are with computers? I just graduated, but I went to a sort of "special" high school and three of my best friends (in addition to myself) are computer science majors and have been Linux users for the past 3 years. Do you have these kind of people around or are you kind of isolated in your geekdom? Also, are you involved in any other activites that would give you a common bond with some people for social interaction? I found rowing to be a very important part of my social development in high school, and I can't imagine how different I would be without the comraderie that I had with those guys. Just curious...
The AP exam is written... Time isn't really an issue when you're doing multiple choice and free response answers to programming questions.
I think the move to Java isn't so great. I took the AP CS exam two years ago, right after they switched from pascal to C++. That switch was warranted I think. I don't know two many people who are very into pascal, albeit I am young. But IMO C++ is a much better language to learn first, especially in high school. Despite all the language arguments, there's the simple issue of classtime. C++ is relatively quick to compile, and you can run it under dos on old, old machines. Java isn't quite so nice and takes longer, especially on old machines. Just a few thoughts....
Possible benefits for Linux? Lets see, security and stability come to mind. Security is something that is coming more and more into the spotlight, especially with Virus/Privacy issues. Stability is something that every Windows user knows about. In all honesty a new Linux user coming over from windows wouldn't notice that it never crashed normally because they wouldn't concern themselves with uptime, etc, but if they ever went back to windows they would suddenly realize how few crashes they had had with Linux, and really how much better things can be than Windows. I don't know if this all came together coherently.
I believe that in general people wouldn't realize how good Linux was when they started using it. They would say "What's the big deal?" after having some experience with it. They still wouldn't recognize what was going on underneath the hood, and in general people don't realize when things are good because they veiw things like crashes, lock-ups, system insecurities and viruses with the "won't happen to me" mentality until it happens.
People don't realize the day to day good until things get bad again.
Everyone can keep their ease of use with napster, while relocating their activities, whether legal or not, to other napster server clones. Personally I usually connect to opennap servers using napigator, and it works fine with the exception of the hotlist. The plus side here is that they are privately hosted servers and not controlled by a centralized entity like napster. Another thing that would be interesting to see is an integration of napigator like features into the napster client, removing the need for napigator altogether.
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We had a student administrated computer systems lab at my high school. It consisted of over 30 dual celeron 433 workstations running linux and a 16 node cluster running mosix, in addition to the web server for the entire school. They also took care of the file server and the mail server for the lab. It wasn't a problem because there were 6 student sys-admins who were held accountable for their actions. This has been going on for over 10 years now and if we had had any significant problems they surely would have put an end to it, but it has really worked out well and puts the knowledge of the system administrators in a much more accesable place for the rest of us to learn from.
Do you have people at your school that are into the same sort of thing you are with computers? I just graduated, but I went to a sort of "special" high school and three of my best friends (in addition to myself) are computer science majors and have been Linux users for the past 3 years. Do you have these kind of people around or are you kind of isolated in your geekdom? Also, are you involved in any other activites that would give you a common bond with some people for social interaction? I found rowing to be a very important part of my social development in high school, and I can't imagine how different I would be without the comraderie that I had with those guys. Just curious...
The AP exam is written... Time isn't really an issue when you're doing multiple choice and free response answers to programming questions. I think the move to Java isn't so great. I took the AP CS exam two years ago, right after they switched from pascal to C++. That switch was warranted I think. I don't know two many people who are very into pascal, albeit I am young. But IMO C++ is a much better language to learn first, especially in high school. Despite all the language arguments, there's the simple issue of classtime. C++ is relatively quick to compile, and you can run it under dos on old, old machines. Java isn't quite so nice and takes longer, especially on old machines. Just a few thoughts....
Possible benefits for Linux? Lets see, security and stability come to mind. Security is something that is coming more and more into the spotlight, especially with Virus/Privacy issues. Stability is something that every Windows user knows about. In all honesty a new Linux user coming over from windows wouldn't notice that it never crashed normally because they wouldn't concern themselves with uptime, etc, but if they ever went back to windows they would suddenly realize how few crashes they had had with Linux, and really how much better things can be than Windows. I don't know if this all came together coherently. I believe that in general people wouldn't realize how good Linux was when they started using it. They would say "What's the big deal?" after having some experience with it. They still wouldn't recognize what was going on underneath the hood, and in general people don't realize when things are good because they veiw things like crashes, lock-ups, system insecurities and viruses with the "won't happen to me" mentality until it happens. People don't realize the day to day good until things get bad again.
Everyone can keep their ease of use with napster, while relocating their activities, whether legal or not, to other napster server clones. Personally I usually connect to opennap servers using napigator, and it works fine with the exception of the hotlist. The plus side here is that they are privately hosted servers and not controlled by a centralized entity like napster. Another thing that would be interesting to see is an integration of napigator like features into the napster client, removing the need for napigator altogether.