No surprise there. After all she's already proven to NOT be friendly to IT by using her own e-mail server. Even if you put all the legal implications aside with the confidential information, she was working for an organization (the government) and gave their IT dept the finger when she decided to use her own e-mail server.
As a network admin who just migrated the organization I work for to a new e-mail server (not the government, but it doesn't have to be), I take it personally. How can I NOT take it personally when the action she took basically says MY work is meaningless? This also extends to everything else I work on as well. IT workers work very hard to keep existing systems up and running and the developers work very hard on moving things forward. How can we all NOT be offended by that.
Even if you're not an IT worker, how can you NOT be questioning her authenticity when she breaks the rules and somehow isn't held accountable for it?
Also, most people in IT I know, live paycheck to paycheck and they aren't maintaining that middle-class life style we saw our parents have or talk about. How the hell can somebody who has no respect for IT help us? They can't.
Factory workers, minors, teachers, and hell even fast food employees asking "do you want fries with that" get more respect from Clinton than IT people do. For me, Bernie Sanders all the way. He was one of 10 senators that asked for a formal investigation into H1-Bs taking IT jobs away from Americans.
I wonder if the reason why nuclear weapons aren't accurately represented in Hollywood is because there are some bridges that even Hollywood will not cross for entertainment and no I don't think it's because of some moral high ground either since it's been repeatedly shown that there's no such thing in Hollywood.
I'm thinking that besides the fact that no CG animator actually knows what a real nuclear explosion looks like (it's not like they have current HD footage of it or set one off to see what it looks like and no, simulations and science class do NOT count because you're not going to get the sense of hopelessness from it) it's because afterwards there's no much left to animate or show at ground zero. In Hollywood logic, people ALWAYS survive the big explosions to keep things going. In actuality, there's nothing left at ground zero, no people, no buildings, nothing but rubble and silence. They'd be left with showing how people die slow painful deaths from radiation or inhaling a lot of dust that was kicked up from it and that's not something that can sell movies. People want to see big boom and destruction that's flashy and over and done with quick, not slow tragic suffering that's not in the least bit flashy.
So basically it amounts to real thing not being able to sell so they tone it down to where they can make a movie with it.
A good find. Too bad they haven't found any dragon skeletons yet. May help explain how different civilizations around the world all have dragon myths and legends without having contact with each other. At least with this find out more about our own history.
Who will take responsibility for fixing bugs when they realize a mistake was made? This isn't so much of an 'Industrial' revolution as it as Bureaucracy revolution. It won't even take a major zero-day exploit before the finger pointing starts and patches (assuming they come out at all) take months to years to come out.
They've removed the shadows, flattened it out, and now they've removed the serifs so that it'll look good on more devices....Brilliant! Now my Windows 3.1 PC with NCSA Mosaic can load Google faster and not get bogged down with what would otherwise be a resource hog of a logo! Thank you Google for being so considerate.
Google you have now almost caught up with Microsoft for a flat uninspired logo that takes me back to the DOS days with monochrome monitors. All you have to do now is make it one color. Come on, you can do it! I'm sure that there's some mono-chrome screens still in use on some devices somewhere that could benefit from this.
I've worked for some big companies (100,000+ employees) and some small companies (less than 150 employees) and I have seen the same problems when it comes to IT workers. Regardless of the size of the company, the non-IT folks don't know how to deal with the IT folks with their 'smug sense of superiority' when it comes to handling computer problems and many IT folks don't understand no non-IT workers can tie their shoes if they're stupid enough to call the computer tower a 'hard drive' or use the recycle bin to store files (yes I saw someone using the recycle bin to save files earlier this year, 15 years into the 21st centurary...).
We've all seen the fallout from this divide. IT people are fed up with telling the masses to not click those email links and having to tell the dumb user how to use the tools they have available to them, and the non-IT people are fed up with hearing about how they're doing things wrong or how 'smart' the IT people are when they don't know the first thing about the industry that the company competes in. As a result decisions get made without IT input and things break, data gets breached, and it's always IT's fault and responsibility to fix it.
The problem needs to be looked at from the top C-level down so it can spread throughout the company. While the C-level people known the ins and outs of their industry (finance, automotive, health care, etc) they'll still fail without a solid understanding of how to correctly use IT to move forward. That's that the CIO is for.
Just having someone with the job title is useless as well and unfortunately appears to be pretty common. They take someone they like (or don't like) with no IT understanding and put them there for political reasons and then wonder why nothing changes. The good CIO may not know the industry the company is in to the extent of the other C-level people, BUT will know enough to be able to help them make good decisions while understanding how IT works in that industry (and it's going to be different depending on the industry). In addition to that, the good CIO will listen to the IT workers and try and address their needs. If they are respected on both sides then the good CIO can get more IT people hired to let IT workers have normal work days, get IT workers included in the company picnics or other social events, competitive wages, etc, while balancing their needs with the needs of everyone else.
The not for profit I work for is pretty good about not totally alienating IT workers without having a CIO (we're included in the social events, get back office rewards when the front line staff exceed expectations, etc), but we're still pretty isolated and the internal politics and decision making still ends up with decisions being made without us that we have to somehow magically make work and still pass IT audits. While no CIO, I'm still happy there and unfortunately it's a very rare thing to find, but I can still see the need for a good CIO to fix the shortcomings we have to get caught up to what the non-IT people get.
I grew up with DOS and Windows 3.1 and while while some Apple IIs were accessible to me at the local library, I stuck with DOS and Windows 3.1 since my father was a debugger at IBM and this was back before the failed OS/2. I was also exposed to MVS on mainframes through my father, but unless you're insanely rich and just really want to run a mainframe, you're not going to be running a mainframe at home. Also in high school, I was exposed to UNIX for the first time which blew me away with how different it was. They had a small UNIX setup in the computer room that the computer club could play with but my exposure was still pretty limited. I can't say for certain which UNIX it was, but given that the high school was very IBM centric (there was an IBM campus across the river that employed most if not all the IT people in the area) the high school got a lot of equipment from IBM and had a tie in to an IBM mainframe, I'm thinking it was probably AIX.
Since it was what I primarily had access to, I pretty much used the latest Microsoft OS (except WinME...that..shouldn't have existed) as my primary OS up until Windows XP.
While Windows XP was getting all it's praise and so on for working as well as it did, there was one glaring "feature" in it that I found unacceptable and will find unacceptable today...The online activation and then having to call them if you use up all your activations to essentially get "permission" to use your computer again if you had to reformat and reinstall Windows. I know it's not as bad today for the number of activations you have, but at no time should you EVER have to call a company to ask for PERMISSION to use something you BOUGHT a VALID license for.
I don't care if they're having trouble with piracy, the whole issue is trust and you can't trust a company that doesn't trust you even when you do everything correctly and legally and that's what online activation implied to me. I can't stand it. Now looking at the state of DRM and all the licensing hoops I have to jump through at work just to get things up and running on a Windows platform, it's clear that I was right to question it back then.
Anyway, as soon as I saw that issue with online activation with Windows XP, I started looking around and found Linux in 2001. I was in college back then when I got my first experience with Linux on a PC I was hooked. I had regained control over my PC even if I had a lot of work to do to get it running (my first main distro was Slackware while I was playing with Red Hat and Debian on another PC). Since I had control over my PC again I didn't mind if I had to do extra work to get X running or recompile the kernel. The main thing was that I had control again. It also reminded me of the UNIX system I saw back in high school that intrigued me so much so it was a win-win situation.
Now when I see the mess that is Windows 10 where you have even less control of your PC (Microsoft collecting data when you tell them not to, forced driver updates you can't stop, etc) I've never been so glad to run a Linux distro for my primary OS. I also love it when I can put up a Linux server instead of a Windows server at work. We have complete control over it and we don't have to constantly reboot it for every patch that comes out which maximizes uptime.
It depends on how many PCs per classroom you have and how much time is spend in Photoshop VS coding.
Assuming 20 students per classroom and most time is spent on coding, you can probably go with 5 Windows PCs per classroom with Photoshop on them to allow enough access to it while the others do coding so 20 Linux PCs per classroom with 5 Windows PCs. So if you end up with 200 students max spread out into 20 student classrooms you'd only need 50 Windows PCs with Photoshop. I don't recommend using a centralized location over an ADSL connection. Windows in my experience, likes to lag a lot over remote connections that aren't synchronous (ex: 20Mb down and 20Mb up instead of 20Mb down and 1Mb up).
As for distribution, Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu or Mint would work for a desktop depending on your desktop GUI preferences. No matter which Gnu/Linux distro you pick you'll have no shortage of editors to use for coding so if it were me, it would really boil down to what would get out of the end user's way and give an environment for getting work done so choose accordingly.
I wouldn't worry about rolling out Windows 10 as a free upgrade since you have an aggressive PC redeployment schedule which inherently means at some point you'll be deploying new hardware, and Photoshop is Photoshop whether it's on Windows 8 or Windows 10. If you want students to see if their websites work correctly in the new Edge browser you could have a cheap Surface Pro or other Windows tablet do that for you. Also Surface Pros can use regular monitors when they're docked and USB keyboards and mice so that may or may not be an option for keeping costs down for the Windows side of things instead of having regular PCs. We have some employees setup at work like this so they're mobile and able to work as if they're at a regular PC at work.
Also for your redeployments you probably already have an imaging solution in place, but since you're asking about Linux, you may want to consider setting up a FOG server. We have one running on Ubuntu server at work and we use it image all our Windows and Linux PCs.
A: Teachers are end users and should NOT be local admins on their PCs OR have network admin rights EVER. Yes, even the computer teachers.
B: A password policy in which teachers are allowed to use their last name should not be allowed in the first place.
C: When the hell are the END USERS going to be held responsible for their OWN stupidity? This is the 21st century. Computers are a part of everyone's life now. Ignorance is NOT an excuse. It's slowly getting better but no where near where it should be as this situation shows.
D: The kid isn't innocent, but at most he should be getting detention or some other punishment that would actually teach why using someone else's account is a no-no. Kids will be kids and they need to have boundaries, but not the overreaction he got. I seriously doubt that the people that are overreacting to this and throwing the book at him were perfect saints when they were kids and some of them may have been doing something worse than changing a desktop wallpaper.
E: The ONLY real crime here is that this school district is supposed to be teaching and preparing their kids for life in the 21st century and they are severely unqualified as shown by their bad security habits.
F: I don't care of the school doesn't have a lot of money to spend on having a proper IT setup. Find a way to make it work. It's inexcusable for any entity (especially a school) to not have the basics covered now that we're 15 years in to the 21 century. If you need equipment cheap, reach out to businesses in the area. Many (like the organization I work for) donate old hardware. If you need software, Microsoft has options specifically for schools and even if that is too expensive, there are other platforms that will work (Linux, Mac, etc).
Thinking back to when I was in high school I knew I wanted to do something in the IT field, but I was largely undecided on what I wanted to do. Thankfully, I went to a vocational school during last two years in high school to help me make up my mind and then I went to college and got a couple degrees in computer science and network administration.
That being said, even though deciding to go to a vocational school was one of the best decisions of my life as I got to learn a bit about both high and low level programming, digital circuitry, pc repair, and networking before I decided where I wanted to go, I did miss out on a few things from normal high school life. I spent half the day in the vocational school and half at high school and was an automatic social outcast because of it. I got so detached from high school that I didn't even go to my senior prom and dropped out of the track team because it didn't feel right anymore.
In my opinion, it's about time that we finally have something that lets young students pursue something like this AND still have the high school life that every kid should have. For those that are unfamiliar with New York State, all high school students still need to pass state regents exams for math, science, etc, so as since this isn't a vocational school they won't be able to skip out on those things.
If they don't go in to software development after school it doesn't mean that they aren't learning anything useful. It's not unheard of for scientists to know a little bit about programming when doing research, or a graphics arts person might go ahead and build themselves a unique web site to showcase their work to prospective clients.
The only major issue I see, is loosing touch with the "other world" outside of computers and high school. It won't be hard to forget about how things work on the outside and how to relate to the average person (even regular public high schools forget about this when all you hear is "get ready for college" over and over again). Many high school students are already in for a big shock when they get out of high school and adding more to that with expecting to get hired right away or into the the college of their choosing right away just because they know something about programming isn't going to help anything.
I used to work in Level3 for a cable company and I can tell you that most of the techs don't even check the RF power levels on the lines half the time. Heck, I've had to send a FOREMAN out just to get someone that would actually unplug a modem to trace a simple RF problem to a splitter and have it fixed in 5 minutes or less. Forget about even expecting them to know how to check the IP address the customer was getting if they can't even take care of an RF issue that "technically" they should be experts in for all the checks they do on the lines for regular TV service all the time.
The fatal flaw of the article is that the techs they mention in it are all foreman level or supervisors. NONE of which are the regular cable techs that we all know and loath. Install techs are also better trained and have higher expectations placed on them so they are (generally) at least a little better than the average tech but still no where near being called a "Specialist" given that many of them still needed one of us to tell them how to put in a wireless key on a MAC or PC.
That being said though, the cable industry itself is changing. Gradually all cable techs will have no choice but to actually learn something or take a hike thanks to the newer technologies coming out (ex DOCSIS Set-top Gateway).
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No surprise there. After all she's already proven to NOT be friendly to IT by using her own e-mail server. Even if you put all the legal implications aside with the confidential information, she was working for an organization (the government) and gave their IT dept the finger when she decided to use her own e-mail server.
As a network admin who just migrated the organization I work for to a new e-mail server (not the government, but it doesn't have to be), I take it personally. How can I NOT take it personally when the action she took basically says MY work is meaningless? This also extends to everything else I work on as well. IT workers work very hard to keep existing systems up and running and the developers work very hard on moving things forward. How can we all NOT be offended by that.
Even if you're not an IT worker, how can you NOT be questioning her authenticity when she breaks the rules and somehow isn't held accountable for it?
Also, most people in IT I know, live paycheck to paycheck and they aren't maintaining that middle-class life style we saw our parents have or talk about. How the hell can somebody who has no respect for IT help us? They can't.
Factory workers, minors, teachers, and hell even fast food employees asking "do you want fries with that" get more respect from Clinton than IT people do. For me, Bernie Sanders all the way. He was one of 10 senators that asked for a formal investigation into H1-Bs taking IT jobs away from Americans.
I wonder if the reason why nuclear weapons aren't accurately represented in Hollywood is because there are some bridges that even Hollywood will not cross for entertainment and no I don't think it's because of some moral high ground either since it's been repeatedly shown that there's no such thing in Hollywood.
I'm thinking that besides the fact that no CG animator actually knows what a real nuclear explosion looks like (it's not like they have current HD footage of it or set one off to see what it looks like and no, simulations and science class do NOT count because you're not going to get the sense of hopelessness from it) it's because afterwards there's no much left to animate or show at ground zero. In Hollywood logic, people ALWAYS survive the big explosions to keep things going. In actuality, there's nothing left at ground zero, no people, no buildings, nothing but rubble and silence. They'd be left with showing how people die slow painful deaths from radiation or inhaling a lot of dust that was kicked up from it and that's not something that can sell movies. People want to see big boom and destruction that's flashy and over and done with quick, not slow tragic suffering that's not in the least bit flashy.
So basically it amounts to real thing not being able to sell so they tone it down to where they can make a movie with it.
A good find. Too bad they haven't found any dragon skeletons yet. May help explain how different civilizations around the world all have dragon myths and legends without having contact with each other. At least with this find out more about our own history.
Who will take responsibility for fixing bugs when they realize a mistake was made? This isn't so much of an 'Industrial' revolution as it as Bureaucracy revolution. It won't even take a major zero-day exploit before the finger pointing starts and patches (assuming they come out at all) take months to years to come out.
They've removed the shadows, flattened it out, and now they've removed the serifs so that it'll look good on more devices....Brilliant! Now my Windows 3.1 PC with NCSA Mosaic can load Google faster and not get bogged down with what would otherwise be a resource hog of a logo! Thank you Google for being so considerate.
Google you have now almost caught up with Microsoft for a flat uninspired logo that takes me back to the DOS days with monochrome monitors. All you have to do now is make it one color. Come on, you can do it! I'm sure that there's some mono-chrome screens still in use on some devices somewhere that could benefit from this.
I've worked for some big companies (100,000+ employees) and some small companies (less than 150 employees) and I have seen the same problems when it comes to IT workers. Regardless of the size of the company, the non-IT folks don't know how to deal with the IT folks with their 'smug sense of superiority' when it comes to handling computer problems and many IT folks don't understand no non-IT workers can tie their shoes if they're stupid enough to call the computer tower a 'hard drive' or use the recycle bin to store files (yes I saw someone using the recycle bin to save files earlier this year, 15 years into the 21st centurary...).
We've all seen the fallout from this divide. IT people are fed up with telling the masses to not click those email links and having to tell the dumb user how to use the tools they have available to them, and the non-IT people are fed up with hearing about how they're doing things wrong or how 'smart' the IT people are when they don't know the first thing about the industry that the company competes in. As a result decisions get made without IT input and things break, data gets breached, and it's always IT's fault and responsibility to fix it.
The problem needs to be looked at from the top C-level down so it can spread throughout the company. While the C-level people known the ins and outs of their industry (finance, automotive, health care, etc) they'll still fail without a solid understanding of how to correctly use IT to move forward. That's that the CIO is for.
Just having someone with the job title is useless as well and unfortunately appears to be pretty common. They take someone they like (or don't like) with no IT understanding and put them there for political reasons and then wonder why nothing changes. The good CIO may not know the industry the company is in to the extent of the other C-level people, BUT will know enough to be able to help them make good decisions while understanding how IT works in that industry (and it's going to be different depending on the industry). In addition to that, the good CIO will listen to the IT workers and try and address their needs. If they are respected on both sides then the good CIO can get more IT people hired to let IT workers have normal work days, get IT workers included in the company picnics or other social events, competitive wages, etc, while balancing their needs with the needs of everyone else.
The not for profit I work for is pretty good about not totally alienating IT workers without having a CIO (we're included in the social events, get back office rewards when the front line staff exceed expectations, etc), but we're still pretty isolated and the internal politics and decision making still ends up with decisions being made without us that we have to somehow magically make work and still pass IT audits. While no CIO, I'm still happy there and unfortunately it's a very rare thing to find, but I can still see the need for a good CIO to fix the shortcomings we have to get caught up to what the non-IT people get.
I grew up with DOS and Windows 3.1 and while while some Apple IIs were accessible to me at the local library, I stuck with DOS and Windows 3.1 since my father was a debugger at IBM and this was back before the failed OS/2. I was also exposed to MVS on mainframes through my father, but unless you're insanely rich and just really want to run a mainframe, you're not going to be running a mainframe at home. Also in high school, I was exposed to UNIX for the first time which blew me away with how different it was. They had a small UNIX setup in the computer room that the computer club could play with but my exposure was still pretty limited. I can't say for certain which UNIX it was, but given that the high school was very IBM centric (there was an IBM campus across the river that employed most if not all the IT people in the area) the high school got a lot of equipment from IBM and had a tie in to an IBM mainframe, I'm thinking it was probably AIX.
Since it was what I primarily had access to, I pretty much used the latest Microsoft OS (except WinME...that..shouldn't have existed) as my primary OS up until Windows XP.
While Windows XP was getting all it's praise and so on for working as well as it did, there was one glaring "feature" in it that I found unacceptable and will find unacceptable today...The online activation and then having to call them if you use up all your activations to essentially get "permission" to use your computer again if you had to reformat and reinstall Windows. I know it's not as bad today for the number of activations you have, but at no time should you EVER have to call a company to ask for PERMISSION to use something you BOUGHT a VALID license for.
I don't care if they're having trouble with piracy, the whole issue is trust and you can't trust a company that doesn't trust you even when you do everything correctly and legally and that's what online activation implied to me. I can't stand it. Now looking at the state of DRM and all the licensing hoops I have to jump through at work just to get things up and running on a Windows platform, it's clear that I was right to question it back then.
Anyway, as soon as I saw that issue with online activation with Windows XP, I started looking around and found Linux in 2001. I was in college back then when I got my first experience with Linux on a PC I was hooked. I had regained control over my PC even if I had a lot of work to do to get it running (my first main distro was Slackware while I was playing with Red Hat and Debian on another PC). Since I had control over my PC again I didn't mind if I had to do extra work to get X running or recompile the kernel. The main thing was that I had control again. It also reminded me of the UNIX system I saw back in high school that intrigued me so much so it was a win-win situation.
Now when I see the mess that is Windows 10 where you have even less control of your PC (Microsoft collecting data when you tell them not to, forced driver updates you can't stop, etc) I've never been so glad to run a Linux distro for my primary OS. I also love it when I can put up a Linux server instead of a Windows server at work. We have complete control over it and we don't have to constantly reboot it for every patch that comes out which maximizes uptime.
It depends on how many PCs per classroom you have and how much time is spend in Photoshop VS coding. Assuming 20 students per classroom and most time is spent on coding, you can probably go with 5 Windows PCs per classroom with Photoshop on them to allow enough access to it while the others do coding so 20 Linux PCs per classroom with 5 Windows PCs. So if you end up with 200 students max spread out into 20 student classrooms you'd only need 50 Windows PCs with Photoshop. I don't recommend using a centralized location over an ADSL connection. Windows in my experience, likes to lag a lot over remote connections that aren't synchronous (ex: 20Mb down and 20Mb up instead of 20Mb down and 1Mb up). As for distribution, Ubuntu/Lubuntu/Xubuntu or Mint would work for a desktop depending on your desktop GUI preferences. No matter which Gnu/Linux distro you pick you'll have no shortage of editors to use for coding so if it were me, it would really boil down to what would get out of the end user's way and give an environment for getting work done so choose accordingly. I wouldn't worry about rolling out Windows 10 as a free upgrade since you have an aggressive PC redeployment schedule which inherently means at some point you'll be deploying new hardware, and Photoshop is Photoshop whether it's on Windows 8 or Windows 10. If you want students to see if their websites work correctly in the new Edge browser you could have a cheap Surface Pro or other Windows tablet do that for you. Also Surface Pros can use regular monitors when they're docked and USB keyboards and mice so that may or may not be an option for keeping costs down for the Windows side of things instead of having regular PCs. We have some employees setup at work like this so they're mobile and able to work as if they're at a regular PC at work. Also for your redeployments you probably already have an imaging solution in place, but since you're asking about Linux, you may want to consider setting up a FOG server. We have one running on Ubuntu server at work and we use it image all our Windows and Linux PCs.
A: Teachers are end users and should NOT be local admins on their PCs OR have network admin rights EVER. Yes, even the computer teachers.
B: A password policy in which teachers are allowed to use their last name should not be allowed in the first place.
C: When the hell are the END USERS going to be held responsible for their OWN stupidity? This is the 21st century. Computers are a part of everyone's life now. Ignorance is NOT an excuse. It's slowly getting better but no where near where it should be as this situation shows.
D: The kid isn't innocent, but at most he should be getting detention or some other punishment that would actually teach why using someone else's account is a no-no. Kids will be kids and they need to have boundaries, but not the overreaction he got. I seriously doubt that the people that are overreacting to this and throwing the book at him were perfect saints when they were kids and some of them may have been doing something worse than changing a desktop wallpaper.
E: The ONLY real crime here is that this school district is supposed to be teaching and preparing their kids for life in the 21st century and they are severely unqualified as shown by their bad security habits.
F: I don't care of the school doesn't have a lot of money to spend on having a proper IT setup. Find a way to make it work. It's inexcusable for any entity (especially a school) to not have the basics covered now that we're 15 years in to the 21 century. If you need equipment cheap, reach out to businesses in the area. Many (like the organization I work for) donate old hardware. If you need software, Microsoft has options specifically for schools and even if that is too expensive, there are other platforms that will work (Linux, Mac, etc).
End of line
Thinking back to when I was in high school I knew I wanted to do something in the IT field, but I was largely undecided on what I wanted to do. Thankfully, I went to a vocational school during last two years in high school to help me make up my mind and then I went to college and got a couple degrees in computer science and network administration.
That being said, even though deciding to go to a vocational school was one of the best decisions of my life as I got to learn a bit about both high and low level programming, digital circuitry, pc repair, and networking before I decided where I wanted to go, I did miss out on a few things from normal high school life. I spent half the day in the vocational school and half at high school and was an automatic social outcast because of it. I got so detached from high school that I didn't even go to my senior prom and dropped out of the track team because it didn't feel right anymore.
In my opinion, it's about time that we finally have something that lets young students pursue something like this AND still have the high school life that every kid should have. For those that are unfamiliar with New York State, all high school students still need to pass state regents exams for math, science, etc, so as since this isn't a vocational school they won't be able to skip out on those things.
If they don't go in to software development after school it doesn't mean that they aren't learning anything useful. It's not unheard of for scientists to know a little bit about programming when doing research, or a graphics arts person might go ahead and build themselves a unique web site to showcase their work to prospective clients.
The only major issue I see, is loosing touch with the "other world" outside of computers and high school. It won't be hard to forget about how things work on the outside and how to relate to the average person (even regular public high schools forget about this when all you hear is "get ready for college" over and over again). Many high school students are already in for a big shock when they get out of high school and adding more to that with expecting to get hired right away or into the the college of their choosing right away just because they know something about programming isn't going to help anything.
I used to work in Level3 for a cable company and I can tell you that most of the techs don't even check the RF power levels on the lines half the time. Heck, I've had to send a FOREMAN out just to get someone that would actually unplug a modem to trace a simple RF problem to a splitter and have it fixed in 5 minutes or less. Forget about even expecting them to know how to check the IP address the customer was getting if they can't even take care of an RF issue that "technically" they should be experts in for all the checks they do on the lines for regular TV service all the time.
The fatal flaw of the article is that the techs they mention in it are all foreman level or supervisors. NONE of which are the regular cable techs that we all know and loath. Install techs are also better trained and have higher expectations placed on them so they are (generally) at least a little better than the average tech but still no where near being called a "Specialist" given that many of them still needed one of us to tell them how to put in a wireless key on a MAC or PC.
That being said though, the cable industry itself is changing. Gradually all cable techs will have no choice but to actually learn something or take a hike thanks to the newer technologies coming out (ex DOCSIS Set-top Gateway).