Educational Service District 101/STEP Star Network in Spokane Washington has been broadcasting educational/distance learning television for years over satellite - and this school year (2004-2005) they are offering the programming for free to anyone who can pick it up.
A colleague of mine in another agency has posted an article online outlining some of the problems in bringing Linux into a K12 environment.
In the district I work in, I've had some success in bringing OSS software onto the network - namely Apache, Mozilla, Star/Open Office, and PHP.
Getting Linux onto the desktop outside of the network support staff will never happen though unless many software manufacturer have a change of heart - many pieces of software that is required in my district are not available on Linux, such as Photoshop, FileMakerPro, MealTime, GradeMachine and a whole host of other programs in addition to the trouble it can be to get Java installed onto Linux and working properly with Mozilla so the staff would be able to use the online state software - so my district for the forseeable future will be using Windows 2000 and OS X on the desktops.
Microsoft put out a few unix commands for Windows NT in the resource kit. Vi is one of them.
Search Microsoft's site for "POSIX utilities" or snag a copy of the resource kit CD. On the CD I have, the commands are both precompiled and in source code.
Care to explain then when I first showed up here, I found someone had tried to install a porn server onto one of the library computers (which in this school, is a very public place)?
Not to mention the fact that a school and I'm assuming a library's criteria is if they are located in a poor rural area, they can only get e-rate funding if 80% or more of the school is on free or reduced lunch. Spokane County Public Libraries would not qualify for e-rate funding since it is located in the 2nd largest city in the state.
Where I work, we have to deal with the filtering BS since 1 of the elementary schools here qualify for e-rate and the teachers want their new shiny toys (and believe me, I hate the filtering box even though it does a half-assed job at it).
The libraries and schools are not hurting for internet access either thanks to a state that dearly loves technology.
About MS licensing, if the Gates Foundation does not give money for them, Washington State public schools can buy them dirt cheap .
a framed plane of core memory from an IBM 360 mainframe....
OK, enough with that. My earliest personal memory is from when I was around 1 1/2. That was when the Navy sent my family to Butte, MT. I remember the gas station down the road from the apartments we lived in, what apartment we lived in, the field behind the apartments were full of baby's breath, the snow, and the people who lived in the apartments below us who did my hair.
The memory is not manufactured since my family never really spoke about Butte.
May want to go and have a look at the thousands of college kids over at U-Dub and Wazzu with their personal pages on state provided bandwidth. The only thing my box does is run rrdtool and whatever perl script I hacked togther that week to generate graphs.
The only people I provide support on their personal machines are my parents.
A while ago, one person decided to accuse me after fixing her laptop of locking her out of some silly ass program that she uses - it turned out that she was playing with the settings and set a password on her program and forgot the password.
So fuck em. If they ask for computer advise from me, I tell them to go to Dell or Gateway. If they ask for me to fix their PCs, they get told depending on my mood one of the following:
I do Linux and Windows Server only, not Windows 9x
If I touch your machine, I will void the warrenty
If you bring your machine to me, I will stick one of my employer's inventory stickers on it and assign it to someone other than you
I'll do it for $150 an hour, minumin one hour
I'm sorry, I work on BIG computers, not little ones.
I'm sorry, I am a network admin, I don't know anything about $foo
From the Navy Fact File on Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines:
Ohio-class/Trident ballistic missile submarines provide the sea-based "leg" of the triad of U.S. strategic deterrent forces. The 18 Trident SSBNs (each carrying 24 missiles), carry 50 percent of the total U.S. strategic warheads. Although the missiles have no pre-set targets when the submarine goes on patrol, the SSBNs are capable of rapidly targeting their missiles should the need arise, using secure and constant at-sea communications links.
When I was living in Bremerton, Washington, a few years ago, the subs at Bangor were always refered to as "nuclear trident subs" by the Navy. Which is approperiate if you think of what SSBN (Ship, Submersible, Ballistic, Nuclear) means and what type of warheads they carry.
If you can prove that you are a US citizen and are in the Seattle area, Bangor once did occasionally has open houses and showed off their subs. I'm not sure if they still do after 9/11, but check on on Navy Region NW's page and see if there is any events listed.
We dumped Exchange 5.5 and went to 2000 after a rash of troubles with 5.5 filling up 10GB of disk space with logs and just stopping and refusing email.
2000 just sits there and does what it is supposed to do (not crashing, smartass). I haven't had to look at it since installing it a year ago.
Where do those people work? I make less than that to admin around 650 wintel boxes (mixed Win9x and Win2K), 20 Win2K servers and a lone linux box. The 2K servers run IIS, Exchange, MS SQL and a bunch of crap networked programs the end users want and the linux box runs MRTG.
How do I do it? POLEDIT, login scripts, Group Policies, VBScript, Citrix, Win2K Resource Kit and a LART (for the users, not the machines).
And look, I have enough free time to post on slashdot and read fark.
No, don't donate it to schools
on
Crushing Experience
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Too many people see public schools as a dumping ground for old computers for tax writoffs and it is very annoying to get a lot of old 286 computers that cannot be used because they won't run the apps we are using or are broken and are not worth repairing. The myth that school districts always need new computers and are too poor to get them is in the past thanks to e-rate (that means a school district pays 17 cents on the dollar for equipment - thats how my employer afforded a PBX and some really nice Proliant servers) and educational discounts (for example with Microsoft's contract with Washington State school districts, SQL Server Standard/1 Processor costs $1800 as compared to around $10,000 for a company to purchase a license) and grants given by the government and companies. So please instead of donating them to your local school district, give them to charities who fix them up and give them to communities overseas who can really use them
Save your breath and don't suggest installing Linux on them, I do not have the time to train a bunch of teachers to use it nor will it run the apps we use - unless of course somehow a decent gradebook program, Dreamweaver, AutoCAD 2000, Adobe Photoshop and a bunch of other programs all of a sudden magically decided to run on linux overnight.
I find this hilarious,./ers whining because Red Hat made KDE looks like XP and if I'm not mistaken, this is the same group that wants Linux to be easy enough for Grandma to use.
If Red Hat wants their window manager to resemble XP, I say more power to them. If the desktop looks familar enough to them, maybe a few more Windows users will switch.
Washington State's K-20 network is also connected to I2. Run a traceroute to the border router at my workplace (colville-k12.wa-k20.net) and if you're on I2, your packets will go through Abilene before they get routed to K-20 at the WestinBuilding in Seattle.
It is nice to be able to download a ISO of the latest distro in 10 minutes (we only have 2 T-1's at work).
Well I tried to boot with Red Hat, Slack, Windows 2000 and Windows 98 CD's and it booted straight into XP. Was this a homebuilt machine or a pre-built? The dozen or so boxes I had to deal with were Gateways that were bought for some teachers and I went through every possible setting in the BIOS to get them to boot off a CD before I did some searching on Microsoft's site.
Then again, maybe Microsoft is letting just FreeBSD boot and not Linux and previous versions of Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Educational Service District 101/STEP Star Network in Spokane Washington has been broadcasting educational/distance learning television for years over satellite - and this school year (2004-2005) they are offering the programming for free to anyone who can pick it up.
A colleague of mine in another agency has posted an article online outlining some of the problems in bringing Linux into a K12 environment.
In the district I work in, I've had some success in bringing OSS software onto the network - namely Apache, Mozilla, Star/Open Office, and PHP.
Getting Linux onto the desktop outside of the network support staff will never happen though unless many software manufacturer have a change of heart - many pieces of software that is required in my district are not available on Linux, such as Photoshop, FileMakerPro, MealTime, GradeMachine and a whole host of other programs in addition to the trouble it can be to get Java installed onto Linux and working properly with Mozilla so the staff would be able to use the online state software - so my district for the forseeable future will be using Windows 2000 and OS X on the desktops.
http://www.edtech.wednet.edu/purchasing/
Link to the WSIPC price list for Microsoft products is somewhere on that site.
Prices are for Washington State school districts though.
They already do.
Look closely at railroad cars, you will see a large grey RFID tag on them.
Microsoft put out a few unix commands for Windows NT in the resource kit. Vi is one of them.
Search Microsoft's site for "POSIX utilities" or snag a copy of the resource kit CD. On the CD I have, the commands are both precompiled and in source code.
Kids don't do porn in public places?
Care to explain then when I first showed up here, I found someone had tried to install a porn server onto one of the library computers (which in this school, is a very public place)?
Not to mention the fact that a school and I'm assuming a library's criteria is if they are located in a poor rural area, they can only get e-rate funding if 80% or more of the school is on free or reduced lunch. Spokane County Public Libraries would not qualify for e-rate funding since it is located in the 2nd largest city in the state.
Where I work, we have to deal with the filtering BS since 1 of the elementary schools here qualify for e-rate and the teachers want their new shiny toys (and believe me, I hate the filtering box even though it does a half-assed job at it).
The libraries and schools are not hurting for internet access either thanks to a state that dearly loves technology.
About MS licensing, if the Gates Foundation does not give money for them, Washington State public schools can buy them dirt cheap .
WSDOT does this for the Puget Sound region as well as highway web cams all across the state.
a framed plane of core memory from an IBM 360 mainframe....
OK, enough with that. My earliest personal memory is from when I was around 1 1/2. That was when the Navy sent my family to Butte, MT. I remember the gas station down the road from the apartments we lived in, what apartment we lived in, the field behind the apartments were full of baby's breath, the snow, and the people who lived in the apartments below us who did my hair.
The memory is not manufactured since my family never really spoke about Butte.
May want to go and have a look at the thousands of college kids over at U-Dub and Wazzu with their personal pages on state provided bandwidth. The only thing my box does is run rrdtool and whatever perl script I hacked togther that week to generate graphs.
My site is located on my box (as in I own the box, not my employer) which is located at work.
My connection? A dual T-1 connection provided by the State of Washington Educational Network.
The only people I provide support on their personal machines are my parents.
A while ago, one person decided to accuse me after fixing her laptop of locking her out of some silly ass program that she uses - it turned out that she was playing with the settings and set a password on her program and forgot the password.
So fuck em. If they ask for computer advise from me, I tell them to go to Dell or Gateway. If they ask for me to fix their PCs, they get told depending on my mood one of the following:
I use it on my employer's site for a central feedback form that sends feedback to the proper person based upon what the refering page was
From the Navy Fact File on Fleet Ballistic Missile Submarines:
Ohio-class/Trident ballistic missile submarines provide the sea-based "leg" of the triad of U.S. strategic deterrent forces. The 18 Trident SSBNs (each carrying 24 missiles), carry 50 percent of the total U.S. strategic warheads. Although the missiles have no pre-set targets when the submarine goes on patrol, the SSBNs are capable of rapidly targeting their missiles should the need arise, using secure and constant at-sea communications links.
When I was living in Bremerton, Washington, a few years ago, the subs at Bangor were always refered to as "nuclear trident subs" by the Navy. Which is approperiate if you think of what SSBN (Ship, Submersible, Ballistic, Nuclear) means and what type of warheads they carry.
If you can prove that you are a US citizen and are in the Seattle area, Bangor once did occasionally has open houses and showed off their subs. I'm not sure if they still do after 9/11, but check on on Navy Region NW's page and see if there is any events listed.
I've seen far too many of those old beasts at work.
It also looks like Word Perfect on the screen. I seem to recall that WordPerfect Corp used to have a version of WP for Macs.
5.5 was a real piece of work all right.
We dumped Exchange 5.5 and went to 2000 after a rash of troubles with 5.5 filling up 10GB of disk space with logs and just stopping and refusing email.
2000 just sits there and does what it is supposed to do (not crashing, smartass). I haven't had to look at it since installing it a year ago.
Where do those people work? I make less than that to admin around 650 wintel boxes (mixed Win9x and Win2K), 20 Win2K servers and a lone linux box. The 2K servers run IIS, Exchange, MS SQL and a bunch of crap networked programs the end users want and the linux box runs MRTG.
How do I do it? POLEDIT, login scripts, Group Policies, VBScript, Citrix, Win2K Resource Kit and a LART (for the users, not the machines).
And look, I have enough free time to post on slashdot and read fark.
Too many people see public schools as a dumping ground for old computers for tax writoffs and it is very annoying to get a lot of old 286 computers that cannot be used because they won't run the apps we are using or are broken and are not worth repairing. The myth that school districts always need new computers and are too poor to get them is in the past thanks to e-rate (that means a school district pays 17 cents on the dollar for equipment - thats how my employer afforded a PBX and some really nice Proliant servers) and educational discounts (for example with Microsoft's contract with Washington State school districts, SQL Server Standard/1 Processor costs $1800 as compared to around $10,000 for a company to purchase a license) and grants given by the government and companies. So please instead of donating them to your local school district, give them to charities who fix them up and give them to communities overseas who can really use them
Save your breath and don't suggest installing Linux on them, I do not have the time to train a bunch of teachers to use it nor will it run the apps we use - unless of course somehow a decent gradebook program, Dreamweaver, AutoCAD 2000, Adobe Photoshop and a bunch of other programs all of a sudden magically decided to run on linux overnight.
I find this hilarious, ./ers whining because Red Hat made KDE looks like XP and if I'm not mistaken, this is the same group that wants Linux to be easy enough for Grandma to use.
If Red Hat wants their window manager to resemble XP, I say more power to them. If the desktop looks familar enough to them, maybe a few more Windows users will switch.
So, it looks kinda like XP. Maybe now Grandma can use Linux without being lost because "it doesn't look like Windows".
Washington State's K-20 network is also connected to I2. Run a traceroute to the border router at my workplace (colville-k12.wa-k20.net) and if you're on I2, your packets will go through Abilene before they get routed to K-20 at the Westin Building in Seattle.
It is nice to be able to download a ISO of the latest distro in 10 minutes (we only have 2 T-1's at work).
Well I tried to boot with Red Hat, Slack, Windows 2000 and Windows 98 CD's and it booted straight into XP. Was this a homebuilt machine or a pre-built? The dozen or so boxes I had to deal with were Gateways that were bought for some teachers and I went through every possible setting in the BIOS to get them to boot off a CD before I did some searching on Microsoft's site.
Then again, maybe Microsoft is letting just FreeBSD boot and not Linux and previous versions of Windows.
Another use for floppies. If you try to boot with a CD (RH or Win2K), XP and your computer will just ignore it and boot straight into Windows.
To remove XP, you got to fdisk the drive with a floppy.
Even the shitty sub-standard wiring job by AT&T* I spent the last two weeks repairing looked better than that.
* The only details I'll give is whoever did it had to have been color-blind.