As with all things in the UK, the education system was doomed as soon as the government, in the form of T. Blair, declared it's improvement to be a benchmark of New Labour's success. As soon as a politician makes a statement like that, showing improvement via statistics becomes infinitely more important to those in power than actually improving anything.
This has led to the situation where A levels, exam's initially designed to filter star pupils for University, are being passed by in numbers that render them useless for that purpose. If you ever get the chance, compare A level papers from now and ten years ago and you'll see the difference in knowledge required to pass and with GCSE's, the lower grade exams aimed at 16 year old's passable without any prior study of the subject they cover things are only going to get worse. And yes, you read that right, you can pass the vocational GCSE without any real need to study the subject and A level's are planned to head the same way.
And here lies the truth behind "improving" standards. It will always be easier to lower the bar than train the athlete to jump higher and when a government stakes it reputation on success in a field the bar will drop as low as is necessary to make sure it gets shown in the best light and re-elected.
Another telling quote as to the shape of things to come is from a long term physics teacher stating that education is now being re-shaped to produce a society of "critically aware" consumers. Whereas in 20th century industrial Britain it was considered desirable to have people that were multi-skilled and capable of looking after themselves, 21st century "New" Britain is a land of consumption where lots of highly qualified people who are totally incapable of doing anything beyond the one trick pony career they train for after school pay other one trick ponies to do anything more mentally taxing than changing a fuse thus pushing money from hand to hand and fuelling the service economy. The Chinese on the other hand need people who are capable of using their hands and their education will reflect that fact.
and rest assured that when selective schools are finally scrapped and the government's flagship Building Schools for the Future program replaces current schools with privately run bland, identi-kit, centres of mediocrity the dumbing down of Britain will be complete.
"That is highly unrealistic. The biggest reason is that as soon as Microsoft pushes Starlight as a 'critical update' (as they did for IE 7) its market share will take a massive jump to over 60%. The best Linux/OSS could manage in an initial stage would be 10% and that is a WILDLY OPTIMISTIC estimate."
Sounds like using an existing monopoly to leverage your way into another market to me. Can't wait to see what the EU does with this one.
"You cannot honestly think the level of Windows support necessary for the average computer user is ANYWHERE near comparable to the level of support that would be necessary for Linux, can you?"
Yes, I support both.
"The first time a technician has to explain to grandma how to manually edit a.conf file is the last time anyone in that person's sphere of influence would ever buy from that company. Linux is simply not ready to be a widespread desktop OS."
Well, I've built Linux boxes for people and installed and configured it on laptops. By the time I've finished setting it it up on a machine, it's in the same state that a pre-installed setup would be if you bought it from Dell or whoever and you know what; I've never had to tell grandma how to edit a.conf file because the people I've set the machine up for aren't doing things that require you to edit.conf files. They do things things like pick OpenOfiice writer from the start menu when they want to write a document, when they plug their digital camera in up pops digikam so they don't have to find the camera program. Plugging in a memory stick automatically pops up a file manager window and on the whole things just work. Firefox for the web and kmail/evolution/thunderbird for email and most grandmas sorted.
Even if you did want the option of giving newbs the tool to edit.conf files you could stick a button on the desktop that pops up a box asking what file do you want to edit so that a technician can then say open file x....0, "hold down ctrl and f, find this line in and hit enter, now where it says parameter=1, change that to a 0 and then click file and save. Is that really any different to saying click start, run, type regedit, hit enter, click on hkey_local_machine an hit ctrl and f, put parameter in the search box and hit enter, when you find parameter in such and such a section, right click on it and change dword value, and then change the 1 to a nought. Actually, having read that back, the Linux side sounds a bloody sight simpler, and yes, I have had mainly virus checker companies running me through the registry when someone's phoned me up because an update screwed their AV software.
And their lies the nub. Supporting Linux will only be a pain in cases where people make a special effort to screw it up, something that doesn't tend to happen unless people log in as root. Grandma will probably not have problems because gramdma's going to follow the instructions in the Kmail setup wizard rather than set it up by open up $HOME/.kde/share/apps and editing kmail's.conf files directly. No doubt if Dell or HP standardised on a particular distro, e.g. Ubuntu, a community wiould spring up providing additional software tailored to Dell's Ubuntu install with a convinient link to a repository so that Grandma can use synaptic to install stuff.
If anything has held desktop Linux back it's the lack of commercial apps, Autocad, Adobe stuff etc. Once a demand for these is detected the availabilty of one should feed the other.
The thing that amazes me is that when I grew up 1960's-70's we were told that the Eastern Block was evil because everyone there was watched, their phone calls were listened to, their mail was read etc.. We were also and that above all, Britain was a land of freedom.
At the same time, the Soviet countries told their populations that anything like that was done to protect them from the big bad evil capitalists who envied their perfect Soviet way of life yet Blair and crew use the exact same mechanisms on us with the same style justification. The only attempt at a guarantee against abuse offered is a promise that this power won't be abused from a Prime Minister whose definition of honesty is so flexible that silly putty looks rigid in comparison.
I've always thought that the hardest part of building an oppressive regime is installing the mechanisms of oppression. Even if the current government is honest they have created the tool required for anyone who isn't to step in and make it happen with minimal effort.
Having said all this all this, it's us that's let it happen. We've gone from Churchill's: "it is better to perish than to live as slaves" to a nation who are pacified to a sheep like state by soap operas and cheap consumer goods. So sad........
has to be that this is a Microsoft price reducing move but I'd just love to see MS have the balls for once to call their bluff so we can see what happens.
DoT: We're looking at Linux
MS: Go on then!
DoT: Huh?......
MS: Go on then, piss off if you think your up to it.
"A few state government industries aren't even a drop in the bucket for the number of licenses M$ has out there."
This is true, but if companies have to deal with regulators and other statutory authorites in ODF format then they'll be forced to OO.org or MS will have to make Office ODF capable. If everyone who has any dealing with the tax authorities or other government departments then has ODF capable software then the old excuse of needing MSOffice because everyone else uses it goes out of the window and Microsoft are stuffed.
There was a "consultation" as to whether the British wanted ID cards. Something like 80% were against so the government declared that the online part would be ignored because it had obviously been hijacked by the "anti brigade". After this, ID cards were sledge hammered through.
I suspect at the end of the petition period there's a shortcut on some government lackey's desktop marked "Send to Trashcan" that you can just drag and drop results you don't want onto.
Sorry if I sound a bit cynical but for all the banging on about democracy, Blair has proved, if nothing else, that he can turn a deaf ear at a seconds notice.
I've got to say that the problem isn't Windows itself, it's the lack of curriculum software that causes us headaches.
On the plus side, OpenOffice is fine for use in schools and it's feature complete for the UK national curriculum. Even ooBase is up to the task or MySQL could fill in for database use. Linux is stable and secure enough and I can easily find scanners and printers that are compatible and have had no hardware incompatibility problems so far.
I have 4 servers running Mandriva 2007 Powerpack+, one as a PDC, LDAP DNS and DHCP server, a BDC with slave LDAP and DNS both of which share files. A third runs Postfix with egroupware and a fourth runs a seperate NT domain to segregate the kids from school admin staff. In fact as far as servers are concerned we haven't had any downtime in the last year apart from a fragged power supply that took out a motherboard. Clients on the other hand are a problem. We dual boot Ubuntu on some machines and I'm considering a terminal server for Windows to allow us to run the many and varied programs we have that are only available for Windows.
I must say though that I sometimes wonder why BECTA exists. Years back they were making statements regarding Open Source and cost savings but nothing seems to have happened. On the one hand Becta sing its praises and on the other the government are trying to farm out school ICT to Windows-centric third party companies. If BECTA really want to make a difference they'd have to force 3rd party software vendors to be platform neutral with their software and I can't see that actually happening with BSF on the horizon.
Personally, I'd love to have a 100% Linux network as the Linux boxes we run don't cause any problems and are solidly stable. We'd save a fortune in licencing and I'd be able to divert all the savings into hardware and infrastructure.
If you run a small business put a heading saying "Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox or Opera" and put "Get Firefox" and "Get Opera" buttons at the top. You can also add a bit text explaining that while the page will work in IE, it'll be improved by the other two.
You could always add a bit of blurb on how dodgy IE is if you want to rub salt in.
They're talking about a preparatory school populated with children with names like Sebastian.
This suggests well off middle class parents who are financially secure and have little or nothing of any real consequence to worry about on a day to day basis. This leads them to go out searching for things to worry about and the paradox of having cordless phones in the home and not being worried about them, while at the same time seeing Wi-Fi at school as a cancer causing evil doesn't enter into it.
At the end of the day you can point out the statistical probabilities of the various ways their kids could die, e.g. car crash, struck by lightning, death by evil Wi-Fi rays all you like but it'll make no difference. No wonder the papers love a good health scare story.
£500,000 on 200 PCs. Assuming that each PC cost £250 which is believable we can assume £450,000 for non-hardware related stuff. £40-£50 an hour is what you'd pay for contrators around here so we'll go for £45 an hour which is enough for 10,000 hours and, I imagine, more than a full time council employee earns unless they're paid £80,000 a year. At 8 hours a day that's 1250 days which is 3.4 man-years.
It'd therefore take a three man Birmingham City IT dept team 1.14 years to install and image an OS, deliver and install 200 PCs to librarys and get them working.
As I imagine even the best frontline IT person in a council would be paid half the £50 an hour used in the calculation above you could easily double the size of the team or the time.
These people are being paid too much (or I'm not paid enough).
Yep, you got it. 50% of the price of each desktop PC we build is Win XP pro.
The problem we have is that companies like Crocodile Technology who make the best educational DT software won't make a Linux version unless there's enough demand. Of course there won't be enough demand until they make it so it's catch 22.
Worse still, the governments Building Schools for the Future program will tender school ICT provision out on a county wide basis to private companies. As the only people big enough to provide this are Microsoft and Sun and Microsoft have a significant majority of the schools market anyway there's pretty much no motive for any current educational software vendors to port anything.
I always believed that it was not the place of government to favour any single private vendor over another but BSF effectively seals Microsoft's educational monopoly in the UK.
Education, education, education was Blair's election slogan but I didn't realise he meant screwing it.
Yep, sure did. The guy in charge is shit hot on licencing. The initial batch (2005 build) were replacing 3 IT suites and admin machines. Since then, we buy OEM licences at £57 each with new machines and pay the Windows tax with laptops.
Having said that though, if a few educational software companies ported there apps to Linux we'd happily switch.
We deployed 120 new desktop pc's which we built ourselves from parts purchased from a trade supplier. Spec was AMD 2800 Semprom, 512MB RAM, 40 GB IDE drive with no CD-ROM as we're trying to encourage the use of USB sticks. Each PC came in at £105 and the build took place in summer 2005.
We installed XP Pro on a volume licence (£35) and then duel booted with Ubuntu Breezy.
Total cost £16800 + the time to build. Without XP these would have been £12600.
Installation of XP consisted of install, update, install all applications and create disk image to be rolled out using Dolly. Install of Ubuntu consisted of popping the disk in, booting, clicking a couple of buttons, upgrading and imaging. The Ubuntu install took much less time as all the apps and drivers were installed at the same time. At the time of building a script was added to run a prompt for a machine name followed by winbinding to the domain.
The image is easy to roll out via our Gigabit LAN using Dolly. Network wide software installs can be done on Linux using a script that checks a directory on the server and after doing an md5 check uses apt to install whatever we want it to.
Given the ease of all this, the Birmingham thing just has to be down to incompetence. Excluding people who know what they're doing from helping is an arrogant act but ultimately one that probably caused the laughably huge bill.
I think that writing to the National Audit Office would be a good move by those Open Source Organisations involved as someone really needs to be held accountable for such a blatant waste of public money. Then again, maybe it was an overtime fiddle by those involved with or, more likely, another public body using Linux to beat Microsoft down on price.
Politicians have been complaining about increasing cynicism amongst the plebs regarding their behaviour but they already know what's wrong they're just unwilling and/or unable to do anything about it.
Years back before the onset of globalisation, politicians actually wielded real power and could make decisions that would have real effects but the world has changed to the point where elected representatives have been demoted to the effective status of middle managers within a global corporation.
In the UK, the national Health Service is considered sacred by the population but is also pretty much illegal under world trade law as its public ownership status excludes foreign companies from getting a slice of the cake. Any UK politicain knows that saying "sorry we're going to have to flog the NHS off to the private sector due to the WTO" would be political suicide so they disguise the sell off as "modernisation" claiming it's all for the public good. Similarly, the UK govs building schools for the future program basically involves floggin ICT provision and many other educational services off to large corporations a move they know would be unpopular so don't mention.
Add to this the insane and often pathetically sad levels of political correctness, the willingness to dive into a war that the British public wanted nothing to do with, lying to the public on all fronts and refusing to apoligise when caught out, the creation of 3000+ new mainly ineffective laws, ID cards that no one wants, surveillance on a scale that Stalin never matched and all the other arrogant, pig headed behaviour that Tony has pulled off in the last ten years and I would think that the internet is the last thing to blame for the breakdown in public trust; In fact, I would go as far as to say that the internet is probably the one thing that is propping up what's left of democracy and free speech.
Historically, the British have been a people tolerant of their rulers poor behaviour but when pushed the backlash is rarely pretty. Maybe that's the reason we're the most watched people on the planet and when calling Tony Blair a twat, it's important to realise that it's the twats like the one who's quoted in the TFA that give him his ideas.
Surely fraud could be defined as lying for the benefit of the liar or the liars comnany.
Seriously, Linux contains MS patented code is a serious allegation of IP theft and if untrue, claiming such a situation exists is an act of fraud in it's own right. Hence if the SCO case collapses, McBride and Co. are guilty of fraud, If Ballmer can't provide evidence he's also guilty of fraud or at best, making fraudulent claims.
Agreed, but the problem we have is that USB memory sticks are too useful. They mean we don't have to fit a CD/DVD Rom saving £15 a PC and pupils can still bring work to and from school without a technician having to log in with admin rights to copy files over. What we really need is some way of stopping files on memory sticks from being executed.
I have an 800 user network (750 pupils, 50 teachers) and we run Redhat and Mandriva 2006 servers and XP clients.
First thing is lock the bios with a password and then lock the cases with tamperproof screws or suitable locks. Set the boot sequence to hard disk first and then either CD-ROM or floppy or disable the latter altogether. Our kids aren't stupid and can find bootable tools for overcoming the stupidly weak LM password hashed passwords.
You can use local or group policies to remove roaming profiles from the client C drives when users log out or even better set mandatory profiles. One kid got lucky and managed to get a local admin account on a client PC that a teacher had been using allowing him to access her locally stored roaming profile.
The big problem is USB memory sticks. There's a USB stickable program that will exploit a hole in XP's autorun program which then allows it to rip the password hash table for later hacking, creates a local admin account and a remote access config. We're working on that one at the moment:)
We also have a local policy on our PCs that hides C and prevents access to C via run in the start menu. This also affects the administrator account but a couple of reg files on the admin desktop allows us to enable and disable them with a single click.
On one of our Linux servers we have a disk image of a clean install which we can roll if need be and we can do a whole room overnight via gigabit. We also use the veto files line in samba which allows us to specify file types which can't be saved onto shares and Dansguardian running on a Mandriva box filters incoming content and stops certain file types being downloaded in the first place.
In order to log activity on the net we can't use transparent proxying as that stops you logging usernames in the filters access log. This means locking IE's proxy settings via local policies. We also blocked 80 and 3128 on the firewall so we can deploy firefox although each user has to set their own proxy settings.
Ultimately, USB memory sticks are the big problem. As long as you can subvert the security in XP via these you're pretty much stuffed whatever happens as a kid could install a keylogger via the local admin account he creates and call you over to fix a problem. As soon as you put your admin credentials in you're stuffed regardless of whatever you do.
Thin clients? Maybe, or maybe some other mechanism of abstraction will help. The only advice I can give with 100% certainty is don't underestimate the abilities of teenagers. They can seem thick one second and then pull of an act of supreme cunning the next.
Yep, Tesco are a Public Limited Company(PLC) meaning their shares are traded on the open stockmarket.
As for their behaviour, they seem no better/worse than anyone else. More expensive than Asda (Walmart) and cheaper than their main competitor (Sainsburys) they sell groceries and, in their bigger stores, clothing and domestic goods. As you'd imagine, made in China is the order of the day and as with most supermarkets, wages are kept as low as possible to keep prices down. Aside from that, I can't say that much negative PR leaks out although I seem to remember they cut Sunday pay rates for staff on the grounds that Sunday is no different to any other day.
Their value range is the usual no-frills stuff, plain packaging, basic stuff.
As for software I can't wait for Tescux, not so much through some zealous desire to plug Linux but just to see the irritating characters from their TV ads go through the indignity of having to dress as Penguins.
To a certain extent Microsoft only have themselves to blame. After 15 odd years of bad behaviour and general skullduggery it takes a lot of effort and time to convince people you are actions are genuine.
Open source developers were warned to not even look at leaked win2k code as it'd lead to accusations of contamination of FOSS with Microsoft source.
I wonder.......
Now gentlemen if you'll just look at the wall sized plasma screen over there you'll see "IE7 SOURCE CODE!!!!! That's right, IE7 source code! You have been contaminated and must now cease development of your precious Firefox product! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, it sure is.
e ws/2007/04/15/nalevels15.xml
As with all things in the UK, the education system was doomed as soon as the government, in the form of T. Blair, declared it's improvement to be a benchmark of New Labour's success. As soon as a politician makes a statement like that, showing improvement via statistics becomes infinitely more important to those in power than actually improving anything.
This has led to the situation where A levels, exam's initially designed to filter star pupils for University, are being passed by in numbers that render them useless for that purpose. If you ever get the chance, compare A level papers from now and ten years ago and you'll see the difference in knowledge required to pass and with GCSE's, the lower grade exams aimed at 16 year old's passable without any prior study of the subject they cover things are only going to get worse. And yes, you read that right, you can pass the vocational GCSE without any real need to study the subject and A level's are planned to head the same way.
And here lies the truth behind "improving" standards. It will always be easier to lower the bar than train the athlete to jump higher and when a government stakes it reputation on success in a field the bar will drop as low as is necessary to make sure it gets shown in the best light and re-elected.
Another telling quote as to the shape of things to come is from a long term physics teacher stating that education is now being re-shaped to produce a society of "critically aware" consumers. Whereas in 20th century industrial Britain it was considered desirable to have people that were multi-skilled and capable of looking after themselves, 21st century "New" Britain is a land of consumption where lots of highly qualified people who are totally incapable of doing anything beyond the one trick pony career they train for after school pay other one trick ponies to do anything more mentally taxing than changing a fuse thus pushing money from hand to hand and fuelling the service economy. The Chinese on the other hand need people who are capable of using their hands and their education will reflect that fact.
Check here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
and rest assured that when selective schools are finally scrapped and the government's flagship Building Schools for the Future program replaces current schools with privately run bland, identi-kit, centres of mediocrity the dumbing down of Britain will be complete.
"That is highly unrealistic. The biggest reason is that as soon as Microsoft pushes Starlight as a 'critical update' (as they did for IE 7) its market share will take a massive jump to over 60%. The best Linux/OSS could manage in an initial stage would be 10% and that is a WILDLY OPTIMISTIC estimate."
Sounds like using an existing monopoly to leverage your way into another market to me. Can't wait to see what the EU does with this one.
"You cannot honestly think the level of Windows support necessary for the average computer user is ANYWHERE near comparable to the level of support that would be necessary for Linux, can you?"
.conf file is the last time anyone in that person's sphere of influence would ever buy from that company. Linux is simply not ready to be a widespread desktop OS."
.conf file because the people I've set the machine up for aren't doing things that require you to edit .conf files. They do things things like pick OpenOfiice writer from the start menu when they want to write a document, when they plug their digital camera in up pops digikam so they don't have to find the camera program. Plugging in a memory stick automatically pops up a file manager window and on the whole things just work. Firefox for the web and kmail/evolution/thunderbird for email and most grandmas sorted.
.conf files you could stick a button on the desktop that pops up a box asking what file do you want to edit so that a technician can then say open file x....0, "hold down ctrl and f, find this line in and hit enter, now where it says parameter=1, change that to a 0 and then click file and save. Is that really any different to saying click start, run, type regedit, hit enter, click on hkey_local_machine an hit ctrl and f, put parameter in the search box and hit enter, when you find parameter in such and such a section, right click on it and change dword value, and then change the 1 to a nought. Actually, having read that back, the Linux side sounds a bloody sight simpler, and yes, I have had mainly virus checker companies running me through the registry when someone's phoned me up because an update screwed their AV software.
.conf files directly. No doubt if Dell or HP standardised on a particular distro, e.g. Ubuntu, a community wiould spring up providing additional software tailored to Dell's Ubuntu install with a convinient link to a repository so that Grandma can use synaptic to install stuff.
Yes, I support both.
"The first time a technician has to explain to grandma how to manually edit a
Well, I've built Linux boxes for people and installed and configured it on laptops. By the time I've finished setting it it up on a machine, it's in the same state that a pre-installed setup would be if you bought it from Dell or whoever and you know what; I've never had to tell grandma how to edit a
Even if you did want the option of giving newbs the tool to edit
And their lies the nub. Supporting Linux will only be a pain in cases where people make a special effort to screw it up, something that doesn't tend to happen unless people log in as root. Grandma will probably not have problems because gramdma's going to follow the instructions in the Kmail setup wizard rather than set it up by open up $HOME/.kde/share/apps and editing kmail's
If anything has held desktop Linux back it's the lack of commercial apps, Autocad, Adobe stuff etc. Once a demand for these is detected the availabilty of one should feed the other.
Yep, exactly the sentiments I'd go with.
The thing that amazes me is that when I grew up 1960's-70's we were told that the Eastern Block was evil because everyone there was watched, their phone calls were listened to, their mail was read etc.. We were also and that above all, Britain was a land of freedom.
At the same time, the Soviet countries told their populations that anything like that was done to protect them from the big bad evil capitalists who envied their perfect Soviet way of life yet Blair and crew use the exact same mechanisms on us with the same style justification. The only attempt at a guarantee against abuse offered is a promise that this power won't be abused from a Prime Minister whose definition of honesty is so flexible that silly putty looks rigid in comparison.
I've always thought that the hardest part of building an oppressive regime is installing the mechanisms of oppression. Even if the current government is honest they have created the tool required for anyone who isn't to step in and make it happen with minimal effort.
Having said all this all this, it's us that's let it happen. We've gone from Churchill's: "it is better to perish than to live as slaves" to a nation who are pacified to a sheep like state by soap operas and cheap consumer goods. So sad........
has to be that this is a Microsoft price reducing move but I'd just love to see MS have the balls for once to call their bluff so we can see what happens.
DoT: We're looking at Linux
MS: Go on then!
DoT: Huh?......
MS: Go on then, piss off if you think your up to it.
DoT: ?!?!?!
"A few state government industries aren't even a drop in the bucket for the number of licenses M$ has out there."
This is true, but if companies have to deal with regulators and other statutory authorites in ODF format then they'll be forced to OO.org or MS will have to make Office ODF capable. If everyone who has any dealing with the tax authorities or other government departments then has ODF capable software then the old excuse of needing MSOffice because everyone else uses it goes out of the window and Microsoft are stuffed.
Reports of Clippy's death earlier were exaggerated?
Dell's ad line "we build it just for you" has never seemed so intimidating.
There was a "consultation" as to whether the British wanted ID cards. Something like 80% were against so the government declared that the online part would be ignored because it had obviously been hijacked by the "anti brigade". After this, ID cards were sledge hammered through.
I suspect at the end of the petition period there's a shortcut on some government lackey's desktop marked "Send to Trashcan" that you can just drag and drop results you don't want onto.
Sorry if I sound a bit cynical but for all the banging on about democracy, Blair has proved, if nothing else, that he can turn a deaf ear at a seconds notice.
I've got to say that the problem isn't Windows itself, it's the lack of curriculum software that causes us headaches.
On the plus side, OpenOffice is fine for use in schools and it's feature complete for the UK national curriculum. Even ooBase is up to the task or MySQL could fill in for database use. Linux is stable and secure enough and I can easily find scanners and printers that are compatible and have had no hardware incompatibility problems so far.
I have 4 servers running Mandriva 2007 Powerpack+, one as a PDC, LDAP DNS and DHCP server, a BDC with slave LDAP and DNS both of which share files. A third runs Postfix with egroupware and a fourth runs a seperate NT domain to segregate the kids from school admin staff. In fact as far as servers are concerned we haven't had any downtime in the last year apart from a fragged power supply that took out a motherboard. Clients on the other hand are a problem. We dual boot Ubuntu on some machines and I'm considering a terminal server for Windows to allow us to run the many and varied programs we have that are only available for Windows.
I must say though that I sometimes wonder why BECTA exists. Years back they were making statements regarding Open Source and cost savings but nothing seems to have happened. On the one hand Becta sing its praises and on the other the government are trying to farm out school ICT to Windows-centric third party companies. If BECTA really want to make a difference they'd have to force 3rd party software vendors to be platform neutral with their software and I can't see that actually happening with BSF on the horizon.
Personally, I'd love to have a 100% Linux network as the Linux boxes we run don't cause any problems and are solidly stable. We'd save a fortune in licencing and I'd be able to divert all the savings into hardware and infrastructure.
If your average, not understand IT user pays attention to MS Anti-Phishing tool you may already have lost them when the address bar stays white.
If you run a small business put a heading saying "Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox or Opera" and put "Get Firefox" and "Get Opera" buttons at the top. You can also add a bit text explaining that while the page will work in IE, it'll be improved by the other two.
You could always add a bit of blurb on how dodgy IE is if you want to rub salt in.
They're talking about a preparatory school populated with children with names like Sebastian.
This suggests well off middle class parents who are financially secure and have little or nothing of any real consequence to worry about on a day to day basis. This leads them to go out searching for things to worry about and the paradox of having cordless phones in the home and not being worried about them, while at the same time seeing Wi-Fi at school as a cancer causing evil doesn't enter into it.
At the end of the day you can point out the statistical probabilities of the various ways their kids could die, e.g. car crash, struck by lightning, death by evil Wi-Fi rays all you like but it'll make no difference. No wonder the papers love a good health scare story.
LOL.....
Incidentally, lets put this in context.
£500,000 on 200 PCs. Assuming that each PC cost £250 which is believable we can assume £450,000 for non-hardware related stuff. £40-£50 an hour is what you'd pay for contrators around here so we'll go for £45 an hour which is enough for 10,000 hours and, I imagine, more than a full time council employee earns unless they're paid £80,000 a year. At 8 hours a day that's 1250 days which is 3.4 man-years.
It'd therefore take a three man Birmingham City IT dept team 1.14 years to install and image an OS, deliver and install 200 PCs to librarys and get them working.
As I imagine even the best frontline IT person in a council would be paid half the £50 an hour used in the calculation above you could easily double the size of the team or the time.
These people are being paid too much (or I'm not paid enough).
Yep, you got it. 50% of the price of each desktop PC we build is Win XP pro.
The problem we have is that companies like Crocodile Technology who make the best educational DT software won't make a Linux version unless there's enough demand. Of course there won't be enough demand until they make it so it's catch 22.
Worse still, the governments Building Schools for the Future program will tender school ICT provision out on a county wide basis to private companies. As the only people big enough to provide this are Microsoft and Sun and Microsoft have a significant majority of the schools market anyway there's pretty much no motive for any current educational software vendors to port anything.
I always believed that it was not the place of government to favour any single private vendor over another but BSF effectively seals Microsoft's educational monopoly in the UK.
Education, education, education was Blair's election slogan but I didn't realise he meant screwing it.
Yep, sure did. The guy in charge is shit hot on licencing. The initial batch (2005 build) were replacing 3 IT suites and admin machines. Since then, we buy OEM licences at £57 each with new machines and pay the Windows tax with laptops.
Having said that though, if a few educational software companies ported there apps to Linux we'd happily switch.
We deployed 120 new desktop pc's which we built ourselves from parts purchased from a trade supplier. Spec was AMD 2800 Semprom, 512MB RAM, 40 GB IDE drive with no CD-ROM as we're trying to encourage the use of USB sticks. Each PC came in at £105 and the build took place in summer 2005.
We installed XP Pro on a volume licence (£35) and then duel booted with Ubuntu Breezy.
Total cost £16800 + the time to build. Without XP these would have been £12600.
Installation of XP consisted of install, update, install all applications and create disk image to be rolled out using Dolly. Install of Ubuntu consisted of popping the disk in, booting, clicking a couple of buttons, upgrading and imaging. The Ubuntu install took much less time as all the apps and drivers were installed at the same time. At the time of building a script was added to run a prompt for a machine name followed by winbinding to the domain.
The image is easy to roll out via our Gigabit LAN using Dolly. Network wide software installs can be done on Linux using a script that checks a directory on the server and after doing an md5 check uses apt to install whatever we want it to.
Given the ease of all this, the Birmingham thing just has to be down to incompetence. Excluding people who know what they're doing from helping is an arrogant act but ultimately one that probably caused the laughably huge bill.
I think that writing to the National Audit Office would be a good move by those Open Source Organisations involved as someone really needs to be held accountable for such a blatant waste of public money. Then again, maybe it was an overtime fiddle by those involved with or, more likely, another public body using Linux to beat Microsoft down on price.
Politicians have been complaining about increasing cynicism amongst the plebs regarding their behaviour but they already know what's wrong they're just unwilling and/or unable to do anything about it.
Years back before the onset of globalisation, politicians actually wielded real power and could make decisions that would have real effects but the world has changed to the point where elected representatives have been demoted to the effective status of middle managers within a global corporation.
In the UK, the national Health Service is considered sacred by the population but is also pretty much illegal under world trade law as its public ownership status excludes foreign companies from getting a slice of the cake. Any UK politicain knows that saying "sorry we're going to have to flog the NHS off to the private sector due to the WTO" would be political suicide so they disguise the sell off as "modernisation" claiming it's all for the public good. Similarly, the UK govs building schools for the future program basically involves floggin ICT provision and many other educational services off to large corporations a move they know would be unpopular so don't mention.
Add to this the insane and often pathetically sad levels of political correctness, the willingness to dive into a war that the British public wanted nothing to do with, lying to the public on all fronts and refusing to apoligise when caught out, the creation of 3000+ new mainly ineffective laws, ID cards that no one wants, surveillance on a scale that Stalin never matched and all the other arrogant, pig headed behaviour that Tony has pulled off in the last ten years and I would think that the internet is the last thing to blame for the breakdown in public trust; In fact, I would go as far as to say that the internet is probably the one thing that is propping up what's left of democracy and free speech.
Historically, the British have been a people tolerant of their rulers poor behaviour but when pushed the backlash is rarely pretty. Maybe that's the reason we're the most watched people on the planet and when calling Tony Blair a twat, it's important to realise that it's the twats like the one who's quoted in the TFA that give him his ideas.
Surely fraud could be defined as lying for the benefit of the liar or the liars comnany.
Seriously, Linux contains MS patented code is a serious allegation of IP theft and if untrue, claiming such a situation exists is an act of fraud in it's own right. Hence if the SCO case collapses, McBride and Co. are guilty of fraud, If Ballmer can't provide evidence he's also guilty of fraud or at best, making fraudulent claims.
Agreed, but the problem we have is that USB memory sticks are too useful. They mean we don't have to fit a CD/DVD Rom saving £15 a PC and pupils can still bring work to and from school without a technician having to log in with admin rights to copy files over. What we really need is some way of stopping files on memory sticks from being executed.
I have an 800 user network (750 pupils, 50 teachers) and we run Redhat and Mandriva 2006 servers and XP clients.
:)
First thing is lock the bios with a password and then lock the cases with tamperproof screws or suitable locks. Set the boot sequence to hard disk first and then either CD-ROM or floppy or disable the latter altogether. Our kids aren't stupid and can find bootable tools for overcoming the stupidly weak LM password hashed passwords.
You can use local or group policies to remove roaming profiles from the client C drives when users log out or even better set mandatory profiles. One kid got lucky and managed to get a local admin account on a client PC that a teacher had been using allowing him to access her locally stored roaming profile.
The big problem is USB memory sticks. There's a USB stickable program that will exploit a hole in XP's autorun program which then allows it to rip the password hash table for later hacking, creates a local admin account and a remote access config. We're working on that one at the moment
We also have a local policy on our PCs that hides C and prevents access to C via run in the start menu. This also affects the administrator account but a couple of reg files on the admin desktop allows us to enable and disable them with a single click.
On one of our Linux servers we have a disk image of a clean install which we can roll if need be and we can do a whole room overnight via gigabit. We also use the veto files line in samba which allows us to specify file types which can't be saved onto shares and Dansguardian running on a Mandriva box filters incoming content and stops certain file types being downloaded in the first place.
In order to log activity on the net we can't use transparent proxying as that stops you logging usernames in the filters access log. This means locking IE's proxy settings via local policies. We also blocked 80 and 3128 on the firewall so we can deploy firefox although each user has to set their own proxy settings.
Ultimately, USB memory sticks are the big problem. As long as you can subvert the security in XP via these you're pretty much stuffed whatever happens as a kid could install a keylogger via the local admin account he creates and call you over to fix a problem. As soon as you put your admin credentials in you're stuffed regardless of whatever you do.
Thin clients? Maybe, or maybe some other mechanism of abstraction will help. The only advice I can give with 100% certainty is don't underestimate the abilities of teenagers. They can seem thick one second and then pull of an act of supreme cunning the next.
Good Luck.......
It's true....
It's the weight of those those SUVs parked in Texas that's causing it. All Bush'd fault as usual..
Yep, Tesco are a Public Limited Company(PLC) meaning their shares are traded on the open stockmarket.
As for their behaviour, they seem no better/worse than anyone else. More expensive than Asda (Walmart) and cheaper than their main competitor (Sainsburys) they sell groceries and, in their bigger stores, clothing and domestic goods. As you'd imagine, made in China is the order of the day and as with most supermarkets, wages are kept as low as possible to keep prices down. Aside from that, I can't say that much negative PR leaks out although I seem to remember they cut Sunday pay rates for staff on the grounds that Sunday is no different to any other day.
Their value range is the usual no-frills stuff, plain packaging, basic stuff.
As for software I can't wait for Tescux, not so much through some zealous desire to plug Linux but just to see the irritating characters from their TV ads go through the indignity of having to dress as Penguins.
To a certain extent Microsoft only have themselves to blame. After 15 odd years of bad behaviour and general skullduggery it takes a lot of effort and time to convince people you are actions are genuine.
Open source developers were warned to not even look at leaked win2k code as it'd lead to accusations of contamination of FOSS with Microsoft source.
I wonder.......
Now gentlemen if you'll just look at the wall sized plasma screen over there you'll see "IE7 SOURCE CODE!!!!! That's right, IE7 source code! You have been contaminated and must now cease development of your precious Firefox product! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!