The trouble with what you are asking for is that for a game to be interesting there must be an objective. For the objective to be meaningful there must be problems to overcome.
Violence is a part of life, defining it is tough, artificially removing it is just dumb. You need clarification from the people in power. Do you want games with NO violence, or games which encourage problem solving without violence?
As one person pointed out, you can smash cities in Sim City. Big deal. We've all done it. We're not all axe-murderers. The problem you're going to come up against, in my opinion, is not the person playing the games, nor the social workers laying down the law as to what is 'constructive' or 'violent', but the people with the I.T. budget who think they know anything about what the correctional institution is doing.
Get the O.K. from your Boss to call in the people making the decisions. Otherwise you'll take the fall for some guy committing suicide because his city crumbled. Get each and every game 'rubberstamped' and be sure to point out to them how the game can be abused.
If you want to make a difference in what kind of software these people are exposed to, you won't be able to do it from the tech department... at least not without some help.
The authors hold the copyright. It is released under GPL. If you violate the GPL and use the code of the authors, you are either acting under their special permission (likely paid for) or you are breaking copyright law.
If VA is writing extensions to Source forge, I can't comment... it's a complex issue. Are they or are they not derrivative works?
More information?
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've heard all sorts of rumours about this thing. Now whenever I hear people talk about "Code Red III", I give up asking them what it is. It doesn't exist. If it does, it is about time.
The media seems to think that Code Red 1 was July 19, Code Red 2 was Aug 1, Code Red 3 is the one with the back door. In otherwords, they're only figuring out now how bad Code Red II is.
Yes, despite what the most vocal MS critics say, NT is quite stable, third party drivers do kill it.
Linux doesn't have this problem because there aren't too many vendors writing kernel modules.
IMHO, it is a harsh solution for a bad problem. But I can't fault them -- I can't think of any other way of doing it... except maybe a "I forfeit support from MS, and accept the risks of running this driver" button.
Remember too that MS has been responding to industry requests for privacy and control over updates. I imagine this will be among those tools with an option to point towards a privately run server. If not, corporate customers would have a fit. Just imagine being an IT manager finding out that Windows XP purged the video drivers from half your users in North America.
On the other hand, the worse MS gets, the more sense Linux makes.
Hello "Don't Spam JeffSketch's hotmail address", what's that address? JeffSketch@hot... hmmm something.com... JefSkatch@hotmail.com? no... that's not it. I wonder why it would be so dangerous to post an email address on a web forum.
Maybe I should forward you the contents of my Hotmail account. It is up to 540 pieces of filtered spam. Only about 50% of my spam gets successfully blocked. This renders my occasional-use Hotmail account nearly useless.
But wait, that's a free account. I guess that means that nobody is paying for it. Neither in my time nor Microsoft's money.
Alas dear troll, if indeed you were not afraid of spam you would not be hiding your email address at all.
Vector graphics for 32bit-600dpi colour displays, fewer compromises in voice recognition, some of those cumbersome comp-sci alorithms to deal with stuff like process starvation, richer GUI programming environments, condensing server clusters into single machines, real-time dvd-quality video compression, games games and more games...
Most importantly perhaps for the short term, lower energy comsumption in Notebooks, fanless silent desktops, stuff like that.
Finally it can be used for the ultimate user interface... specialized devices which are cheap, disposable, portable and secure. The high end of technology pulls the low end with it.
But once you have received the binary, not only are they obligated to provide the source, but you can redistribute it without any obligation to them. Your only obligation is to the GPL.
They can only control reverse engineering and distribution of their code. In other words, code which is not a derivative of any GPL software. Their calendars, address books, perhaps even their handwriting recognition can all be theirs, but the kernel and the kernel's port to the hardware is certainly GPL, ditto for gcc cross compilers, special implementations of languages etc. I won't however get into the thorny issue of binary modules. That's a whole other mess.
This may mean that all the good stuff is legitimately protected... like how to flash your palm, handwriting recognition or the conduit sync software.
In my opinion Linux has a long way to go before it can make it to the home desktop. Ease of use is one of the greatest inhibitors. However, the corporate desktop has very different requirements. Security, remote management, reliablility, simple license management and at the same time, a corporate desktop requires only a handful of very clearly defined employee responsabilities.
As I see it, the greatest limitation Linux experiences on the corporate desktop is interfacing with customers running MS Office, and secondly, Linux lacks a corporate email package. That requirement could be filled quite perfectly by Lotus Notes.
Is IBM taking steps to sell Linux on the corporate desktop as a simple and secure alternative to Microsoft's mindboggleingly complex Licensing and questionable security? If so, what is being done to address the lack of MS Office document compatability, and the lack of a client email/database package such as Lotus Notes?
Yes, but Intel doesn't license the Socket 8/Slot 1/(What's that new socket called?). That as I understand is why AMD went with the Alpha bus in the first place. Despite the technical advantages, the marketplace had to adapt to the new bus, and manufacturers had to create boards and chipsets to use it.
If it didn't have technical advantages, it would have been a serious problem for AMD. I assume the boards are currently more expensive because of supply and demand...
If Intel locks down the new bus, they'll have pulled the rug out from AMD. I doubt the existing agreements between AMD and Alpha/Compaq include a perpetual offer to license the bus at a reasonable cost.
Will the EV6 bus be the Socket 7 all over again? Stretched to an absurdly long life until a new technology is introduced to the market? Are there any technologies left?
A Desktop client should not take 3-4 days to set up(!). It should only take six to eight hours of semi-attended work. Assuming of course that all the media is at hand.
If you properly script things or use Drive Image, you can fully automate the process and have the ability to recover the system in case of emergencies in a small fraction of the time.
Of course these advanced imaging techniques are not covered by the OEM license of your Windows machines. You need to subscribe to a MS Select or Enterprise license for your corporation, else you must purchase a new full license for your OEM machines:
I suggest you spend some time (and perhaps a few dollars on a lawyer) to review the Microsoft corporate licensing briefs which may or may not apply to your company. If you're spending as long as you say you are configuring machines, it may save money in the long run to explore your options.
A skilled Linux admin should be able to set up a bare-bones Linux system in little more time than it takes to get the machine off the loading dock and onto the user's desk. All the apps can run remotely without much pain. No local data, smooth backups... it's a tradeoff though, your Network will take a beating and your servers will be big.
Of course, the same argument could be made for Terminal Server, with a multi-k$ price tag thrown atop per workstation.
Alas, as long as MS holds their proprietary document formats, such an option is not at all practical.
An LCD has distinctly addressable colours within each pixel. There is a red, a green and a blue. Each pixel (unless under screen-expansion or something else stupid) uses one and only one red, one and only one green, one and only one blue. The geometry of these is clearly defined and immutable.
A CRT on the other hand depends on the angle at which each electron beam penetrates the shadow mask. The position is not clearly defined (just adjust the width or height of your image and tell me otherwise). Each pixel is comprised of multiple phosphors. The shape of the electron beam defines the shape of the pixel. That shape is not very complex either.
If you see a bennefit from subpixel rendering on a CRT it is probably the colourful antialiasing you are noticing more than anything else. Although straight antialiasing would work better.
There is no super-precise alignment of individual phosphors to the electron gun.
If you establish a point to point tunnel using SSH, I don't see how it is trivial to then configure the inside point to route all the traffic across the tunnel throughout the network.
Even if that is done, then only the one host on the outside can access the internal network. To do otherwise would require configuring it as some kind of gateway...
So an end-user sets up NAT on an internal machine, opens an SSH connection to a machine on the internet and sets up a Socks5 server. I don't see how that is trivial...
I agree with your sentiment, but you're not right about IIS... per-seat agreements do not apply to anonymous web connections.
I'm fairly certian if you gave all those people logins and authenticated them through SSL, then you would be in trouble. I've never done it so I've only read that part of the EULA in enough detail to know it does not apply to me.
It is in Sudbury's Creighton mine. Technically, it is in a suburb of Sudbury. Despite working for the project, I don't recall it's name. Just outside Lively I think... And although Queens is a major participant, Universities all over North America are contributing to one degree of another. IIRC there was quite a bit of U.S. hardware lying around, the University of Pennsylvania provided computer hardware, Oxford did some heavy computer programming during the engineering phase, they may have gone beyond. Laurentian in Sudbury provided labour and communications, that was my 'in'.
It is an active nickel mine. The bulk of the mining was ocurring at the 7200/7400 ft level, it may have gone deeper, or fluctuations in Nickel prices may have moved them to another drift. The observatory is at 6800 ft.
The observatory is a barrel-shaped cavity. They extended a drift into granite. It is 2km underground to achieve passive sheilding from radiation. When I was there they were working on the problem of building a bottle in a cavity.
That doesn't take into account a few different scenarios.
You are right that if the software was developed in a closed box, and they simply said "from day one, this is GPL", then there is no reason for them to stick to the GPL. They own the copyright, and are the only holders of the software. It doesn't matter under what license it was never distributed under... but it doesn't matter how much writing there was -- you were never authorized to distribute the code. If you were a private entity, you would have never seen the code. You have just spilled corporate secrets.
If the software was developed in a corporate environment and they said "from day one, this is GPL", then so long as they did not fold any non-employee contributions into the code, they could license it under whatever mechanisms they desired.
If the software was developed in a corporate environment and they said "hey, if you can shave a year off the project by using existing GPL works, then go ahead, we'll abide". Then unless they get the permission of every author who touched the code, they're paralyzed. That's where the written document comes into play, it protects you as a developer from being kicked in the butt by upper management for their own forgetfulness. "What do you mean we don't own the code we paid you to write!!!"
Yeah, I can just imagine it now.. some fellow carrying a server walks out of the room. In doing so, some shoplifting-type sensor picks up this little detail, discharging an arc-welder into a thick coil wrapped around the doorframe.
The fellow notices a loud "wooosh", kind of a rapid tinkling as wiring squeezes about the doorframe and shifts in its mountings, fine ferrous dust immediately sucks towards the extremeties of the door, instantly forming a fine iron fur. All zippers, key rings, watch springs, and other iron sundries jolt imperceptably. The case of the computer is torn through inches of open space and slammed into the door frame. Anybody within 30 yards with a pacemaker dies instantly. The hard drive jumps as its magnets align to the strong magnetic field.
Then great capacitor in the arc welder fades, and only the smell of melted insulation and positive ions is left in the air.
I bet the data would still be intact... if not, easily recovered using advanced techniques.
A uniform magnetic field would probably leave the ferrite in a predictable alignment... anything which isn't is part of the old data structure.
Encryption and writing random data acros the drive would probably work better. Maybe even mounting a coil near the platters then using a garage-door-opener type device to trip a battery inside the case to send crazy fields through the platters.
Ditto for Netscape. Neither will really stop if the site does one of those old push-style animations to rotate banners on the fly...
Fullscreen is something I have wanted in Netscape since 2.0 All this wasted screen real estate telling me what application I'm running, what site I'm on, etc.
I wonder if the memory utilization is down on Mozilla yet... I guess I'll have to give it a shot.
Does anybody know if Mozilla can be coaxed into fullscreen?
I speak my pictures by the names of their files. They're given the name which the artist assigned to them. Something about painting being poor at communicating a unique label.
In relation to the axis of rotation, one side of the disk is further away than the other. When you spin up the disk, the angular momentum on the far side of the disk is greater than that of the near side.
If you position the disk perpendicular to the centre of gravity, the station will take on a slight rotation... until the disk is stopped. You could however dampen this by creating a DVD player which spun an equal mass in the opposite direction.
If it weren't for pesky things such as mortality, you could sit on a frictionless chair in a vacuum, and by waving your arms such that you thrust them outward, fling them backward, then bring them back inward you could build up rotational velocity. It has nothing to do with air friction.
Actually moving around however is quite impossible, unless you start flinging clothes away from the direction you intend to move.
I bet the whole station has gyroscopes to deal with this sort of thing. It would be too complex and unreliable to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
I agree that it isn't all that good if you can't pay for college. In Canada, I didn't have enough money, so I took out student loans.
While post secondary education might not be possible in the U.S., there is still nothing to prevent a person from scrounging the components of a P.C. They're quite cheap these days. When I was in highschool I built a 286 system for under $200 (CDN). The comperable power today would be a low end Pentium... a much more useful system. I still use a 486 for Linux and as a firewall at home.
If you're so financially strapped that as a student your guardians rely on your part time income to pay for your home.... that's really terrible. I have no idea what to do for those kids.
On that note, for a while there was a great group in Toronto called CLUE, the Centre for Linux Excellence. They would take donations of old hardware from companies (486's) and build systems from it. They would then drop a standard build of Debian onto the machines, teach kids how to use them, then give them to the kids... recommended donation of $25. They eventually buckled under... I think they had problems with rent.
Slashdot Mirror
But some of them do...
The trouble with what you are asking for is that for a game to be interesting there must be an objective. For the objective to be meaningful there must be problems to overcome.
Violence is a part of life, defining it is tough, artificially removing it is just dumb. You need clarification from the people in power. Do you want games with NO violence, or games which encourage problem solving without violence?
As one person pointed out, you can smash cities in Sim City. Big deal. We've all done it. We're not all axe-murderers. The problem you're going to come up against, in my opinion, is not the person playing the games, nor the social workers laying down the law as to what is 'constructive' or 'violent', but the people with the I.T. budget who think they know anything about what the correctional institution is doing.
Get the O.K. from your Boss to call in the people making the decisions. Otherwise you'll take the fall for some guy committing suicide because his city crumbled. Get each and every game 'rubberstamped' and be sure to point out to them how the game can be abused.
If you want to make a difference in what kind of software these people are exposed to, you won't be able to do it from the tech department... at least not without some help.
And what about embedded systems? Many of them still use 8 bit microprocessors.
The authors hold the copyright. It is released under GPL. If you violate the GPL and use the code of the authors, you are either acting under their special permission (likely paid for) or you are breaking copyright law.
If VA is writing extensions to Source forge, I can't comment... it's a complex issue. Are they or are they not derrivative works?
I've heard all sorts of rumours about this thing. Now whenever I hear people talk about "Code Red III", I give up asking them what it is. It doesn't exist. If it does, it is about time.
The media seems to think that Code Red 1 was July 19, Code Red 2 was Aug 1, Code Red 3 is the one with the back door. In otherwords, they're only figuring out now how bad Code Red II is.
Yes, despite what the most vocal MS critics say, NT is quite stable, third party drivers do kill it.
Linux doesn't have this problem because there aren't too many vendors writing kernel modules.
IMHO, it is a harsh solution for a bad problem. But I can't fault them -- I can't think of any other way of doing it... except maybe a "I forfeit support from MS, and accept the risks of running this driver" button.
Remember too that MS has been responding to industry requests for privacy and control over updates. I imagine this will be among those tools with an option to point towards a privately run server. If not, corporate customers would have a fit. Just imagine being an IT manager finding out that Windows XP purged the video drivers from half your users in North America.
On the other hand, the worse MS gets, the more sense Linux makes.
Hello "Don't Spam JeffSketch's hotmail address", what's that address? JeffSketch@hot... hmmm something.com... JefSkatch@hotmail.com? no... that's not it. I wonder why it would be so dangerous to post an email address on a web forum.
Maybe I should forward you the contents of my Hotmail account. It is up to 540 pieces of filtered spam. Only about 50% of my spam gets successfully blocked. This renders my occasional-use Hotmail account nearly useless.
But wait, that's a free account. I guess that means that nobody is paying for it. Neither in my time nor Microsoft's money.
Alas dear troll, if indeed you were not afraid of spam you would not be hiding your email address at all.
Vector graphics for 32bit-600dpi colour displays, fewer compromises in voice recognition, some of those cumbersome comp-sci alorithms to deal with stuff like process starvation, richer GUI programming environments, condensing server clusters into single machines, real-time dvd-quality video compression, games games and more games...
Most importantly perhaps for the short term, lower energy comsumption in Notebooks, fanless silent desktops, stuff like that.
Finally it can be used for the ultimate user interface... specialized devices which are cheap, disposable, portable and secure. The high end of technology pulls the low end with it.
But once you have received the binary, not only are they obligated to provide the source, but you can redistribute it without any obligation to them. Your only obligation is to the GPL.
They can only control reverse engineering and distribution of their code. In other words, code which is not a derivative of any GPL software. Their calendars, address books, perhaps even their handwriting recognition can all be theirs, but the kernel and the kernel's port to the hardware is certainly GPL, ditto for gcc cross compilers, special implementations of languages etc. I won't however get into the thorny issue of binary modules. That's a whole other mess.
This may mean that all the good stuff is legitimately protected... like how to flash your palm, handwriting recognition or the conduit sync software.
In my opinion Linux has a long way to go before it can make it to the home desktop. Ease of use is one of the greatest inhibitors. However, the corporate desktop has very different requirements. Security, remote management, reliablility, simple license management and at the same time, a corporate desktop requires only a handful of very clearly defined employee responsabilities.
As I see it, the greatest limitation Linux experiences on the corporate desktop is interfacing with customers running MS Office, and secondly, Linux lacks a corporate email package. That requirement could be filled quite perfectly by Lotus Notes.
Is IBM taking steps to sell Linux on the corporate desktop as a simple and secure alternative to Microsoft's mindboggleingly complex Licensing and questionable security? If so, what is being done to address the lack of MS Office document compatability, and the lack of a client email/database package such as Lotus Notes?
Yes, but Intel doesn't license the Socket 8/Slot 1/(What's that new socket called?). That as I understand is why AMD went with the Alpha bus in the first place. Despite the technical advantages, the marketplace had to adapt to the new bus, and manufacturers had to create boards and chipsets to use it.
If it didn't have technical advantages, it would have been a serious problem for AMD. I assume the boards are currently more expensive because of supply and demand...
If Intel locks down the new bus, they'll have pulled the rug out from AMD. I doubt the existing agreements between AMD and Alpha/Compaq include a perpetual offer to license the bus at a reasonable cost.
Will the EV6 bus be the Socket 7 all over again? Stretched to an absurdly long life until a new technology is introduced to the market? Are there any technologies left?
Does this mean that Intel has the patent on the EV6 bus AMD is using?
A Desktop client should not take 3-4 days to set up(!). It should only take six to eight hours of semi-attended work. Assuming of course that all the media is at hand.
If you properly script things or use Drive Image, you can fully automate the process and have the ability to recover the system in case of emergencies in a small fraction of the time.
Of course these advanced imaging techniques are not covered by the OEM license of your Windows machines. You need to subscribe to a MS Select or Enterprise license for your corporation, else you must purchase a new full license for your OEM machines:
http://www.microsoft.com/business/downloads/lice ns ing/reimaging.doc
I suggest you spend some time (and perhaps a few dollars on a lawyer) to review the Microsoft corporate licensing briefs which may or may not apply to your company. If you're spending as long as you say you are configuring machines, it may save money in the long run to explore your options.
http://www.microsoft.com/business/licensing/volume /briefs.asp
A skilled Linux admin should be able to set up a bare-bones Linux system in little more time than it takes to get the machine off the loading dock and onto the user's desk. All the apps can run remotely without much pain. No local data, smooth backups... it's a tradeoff though, your Network will take a beating and your servers will be big.
Of course, the same argument could be made for Terminal Server, with a multi-k$ price tag thrown atop per workstation.
Alas, as long as MS holds their proprietary document formats, such an option is not at all practical.
Pesky innovators.
I'm surprised nobody said this sooner.
An LCD has distinctly addressable colours within each pixel. There is a red, a green and a blue. Each pixel (unless under screen-expansion or something else stupid) uses one and only one red, one and only one green, one and only one blue. The geometry of these is clearly defined and immutable.
A CRT on the other hand depends on the angle at which each electron beam penetrates the shadow mask. The position is not clearly defined (just adjust the width or height of your image and tell me otherwise). Each pixel is comprised of multiple phosphors. The shape of the electron beam defines the shape of the pixel. That shape is not very complex either.
If you see a bennefit from subpixel rendering on a CRT it is probably the colourful antialiasing you are noticing more than anything else. Although straight antialiasing would work better.
There is no super-precise alignment of individual phosphors to the electron gun.
Legacy bloat in a product which has never been released?
If you establish a point to point tunnel using SSH, I don't see how it is trivial to then configure the inside point to route all the traffic across the tunnel throughout the network.
Even if that is done, then only the one host on the outside can access the internal network. To do otherwise would require configuring it as some kind of gateway...
So an end-user sets up NAT on an internal machine, opens an SSH connection to a machine on the internet and sets up a Socks5 server. I don't see how that is trivial...
I agree with your sentiment, but you're not right about IIS... per-seat agreements do not apply to anonymous web connections.
I'm fairly certian if you gave all those people logins and authenticated them through SSL, then you would be in trouble. I've never done it so I've only read that part of the EULA in enough detail to know it does not apply to me.
It is in Sudbury's Creighton mine. Technically, it is in a suburb of Sudbury. Despite working for the project, I don't recall it's name. Just outside Lively I think... And although Queens is a major participant, Universities all over North America are contributing to one degree of another. IIRC there was quite a bit of U.S. hardware lying around, the University of Pennsylvania provided computer hardware, Oxford did some heavy computer programming during the engineering phase, they may have gone beyond. Laurentian in Sudbury provided labour and communications, that was my 'in'.
It is an active nickel mine. The bulk of the mining was ocurring at the 7200/7400 ft level, it may have gone deeper, or fluctuations in Nickel prices may have moved them to another drift. The observatory is at 6800 ft.
The observatory is a barrel-shaped cavity. They extended a drift into granite. It is 2km underground to achieve passive sheilding from radiation. When I was there they were working on the problem of building a bottle in a cavity.
That doesn't take into account a few different scenarios.
You are right that if the software was developed in a closed box, and they simply said "from day one, this is GPL", then there is no reason for them to stick to the GPL. They own the copyright, and are the only holders of the software. It doesn't matter under what license it was never distributed under... but it doesn't matter how much writing there was -- you were never authorized to distribute the code. If you were a private entity, you would have never seen the code. You have just spilled corporate secrets.
If the software was developed in a corporate environment and they said "from day one, this is GPL", then so long as they did not fold any non-employee contributions into the code, they could license it under whatever mechanisms they desired.
If the software was developed in a corporate environment and they said "hey, if you can shave a year off the project by using existing GPL works, then go ahead, we'll abide". Then unless they get the permission of every author who touched the code, they're paralyzed. That's where the written document comes into play, it protects you as a developer from being kicked in the butt by upper management for their own forgetfulness. "What do you mean we don't own the code we paid you to write!!!"
Yeah, I can just imagine it now.. some fellow carrying a server walks out of the room. In doing so, some shoplifting-type sensor picks up this little detail, discharging an arc-welder into a thick coil wrapped around the doorframe.
The fellow notices a loud "wooosh", kind of a rapid tinkling as wiring squeezes about the doorframe and shifts in its mountings, fine ferrous dust immediately sucks towards the extremeties of the door, instantly forming a fine iron fur. All zippers, key rings, watch springs, and other iron sundries jolt imperceptably. The case of the computer is torn through inches of open space and slammed into the door frame. Anybody within 30 yards with a pacemaker dies instantly. The hard drive jumps as its magnets align to the strong magnetic field.
Then great capacitor in the arc welder fades, and only the smell of melted insulation and positive ions is left in the air.
I bet the data would still be intact... if not, easily recovered using advanced techniques. A uniform magnetic field would probably leave the ferrite in a predictable alignment... anything which isn't is part of the old data structure.
Encryption and writing random data acros the drive would probably work better. Maybe even mounting a coil near the platters then using a garage-door-opener type device to trip a battery inside the case to send crazy fields through the platters.
Ditto for Netscape. Neither will really stop if the site does one of those old push-style animations to rotate banners on the fly...
Fullscreen is something I have wanted in Netscape since 2.0 All this wasted screen real estate telling me what application I'm running, what site I'm on, etc.
I wonder if the memory utilization is down on Mozilla yet... I guess I'll have to give it a shot.
Does anybody know if Mozilla can be coaxed into fullscreen?
I speak my pictures by the names of their files. They're given the name which the artist assigned to them. Something about painting being poor at communicating a unique label.
How do you paint a verb?
In relation to the axis of rotation, one side of the disk is further away than the other. When you spin up the disk, the angular momentum on the far side of the disk is greater than that of the near side.
If you position the disk perpendicular to the centre of gravity, the station will take on a slight rotation... until the disk is stopped. You could however dampen this by creating a DVD player which spun an equal mass in the opposite direction.
If it weren't for pesky things such as mortality, you could sit on a frictionless chair in a vacuum, and by waving your arms such that you thrust them outward, fling them backward, then bring them back inward you could build up rotational velocity. It has nothing to do with air friction.
Actually moving around however is quite impossible, unless you start flinging clothes away from the direction you intend to move.
I bet the whole station has gyroscopes to deal with this sort of thing. It would be too complex and unreliable to deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
But it should push down the demand and price of LCDs.
I agree that it isn't all that good if you can't pay for college. In Canada, I didn't have enough money, so I took out student loans.
While post secondary education might not be possible in the U.S., there is still nothing to prevent a person from scrounging the components of a P.C. They're quite cheap these days. When I was in highschool I built a 286 system for under $200 (CDN). The comperable power today would be a low end Pentium... a much more useful system. I still use a 486 for Linux and as a firewall at home.
If you're so financially strapped that as a student your guardians rely on your part time income to pay for your home.... that's really terrible. I have no idea what to do for those kids.
On that note, for a while there was a great group in Toronto called CLUE, the Centre for Linux Excellence. They would take donations of old hardware from companies (486's) and build systems from it. They would then drop a standard build of Debian onto the machines, teach kids how to use them, then give them to the kids... recommended donation of $25. They eventually buckled under... I think they had problems with rent.
http://centre.linux.ca/
IMHO widespread work like that would be far more helpful than the schools.
There is also a "Free University" movement in Toronto.
http://www.utoronto.ca/acc/freeu/