I'll keep my land line at my house active as long as possible.
I have three small kids and I need something absolutely reliable in case of an emergency.
While I do absolutely love modern mobile tech (Droid!), I prefer using a land line while at home. I simply don't enjoy having long conversations on a mobile phone. The newest phone at my house is a Nortel Meridian M9616CW which was (for me) the ultimate geek phone in the mid 90s. They seem to fetch a good price:
The rest are all Western Electric, Automatic Electric and ITT phones from the early 40s - 70s that I've collected and repaired. They all work perfectly (even rotary dialing) on the Cox Digital phone service.
As the article mentioned, POTS is preferable in disaster areas. I live in an area of New Orleans that didn't flood in Katrina. The only way I was able to contact people in my neighborhood who stayed for the storm was on their land lines.
In the area of New Orleans where I live (and didn't flood), the only way for people to communicate with the outside world was with land lines and old phones which are powered completely off the line (no wall warts).
Much of the cellular system didn't work. The remaining working systems were nearly impossible to use.
I hate using cell phones for more than a few minutes and always use a land line for long conversations. I also need to keep the land line for our alarm systems.
I was amazed to discover that my collection of 40s - 70s rotary dial phones dial perfectly on the Cox Digital phone system.
As someone else mentioned, how about a Commodore 64, Apple II or Atari 400/800 with a floppy drive?
You can get these machines very cheap on Ebay or free if you look around. They're extremely durable and easy to fix. Best of all, they're easy to understand. You insert a disc, apply power and the desired software runs. No complicated OS gets in the way. Gobs of quality edutainment software available.
I've got a stack of Apple//e's ready for my kids when they're older.
I'm a network admin at a school that has a mostly LTSP based network. 58% of our machines (76) are Linux only.
We still have about 25 Apple//e machines in use that the administration wishes to remove because they look old. I keep fighting this because I believe the 20+ year old software is better than most of the so-called educational software in use on the Windows machines. The Apples are also easy to maintain... they almost never fail.
I'll eventually be forced to replace them, but I'll do it with Mac Mini's that will allow me to run both new software and Apple II software via emulation.
I currently teach Logo to 80 something 7th graders a week using UCBLogo on Linux (LTSP).
I start them off with basic turtle graphics and gradually introduce concepts such as variables, loops, etc. There are five or six kids in each class that ask me how to do the same stuff at home.
You'll find vast numbers of old phones that don't require AC power on Ebay, at flea markets, garage sales, etc.
I have a small collection of Western Electric 302 and 500 rotary phones. The WE 302 was made in 1947. It rings, dials and works perfectly with the Cox digital phone service.
I have a nice collection of Apple II 5.25 floppies from the early 80s that still work perfectly. They don't hold much, but they are far more reliable than brand new 3.5 floppies that seem to develop bad sectors after a single use.
I teach Berkeley Logo to 7th graders. It works with Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, etc.
I think Logo is great for kids of that age because it provides them with instant gratification at the early stages. Once they get past seeing what the commands do at the Logo prompt, I have them write short programs using a text editor.
As the IT person at a local school, I accept any Pentium based machine with PCI slots. Add one 100Mb NIC, disable the hard drive, make a boot floppy and I've got myself a perfectly good X terminal to connect to my LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) server.
The slowest machine I have like this is an old AST Pentium 75.
Runs Mozilla, OpenOffice and most everything else perfectly. Even runs our Windows based reading software via Wine.
I am fortunate to work at a school where most of the administration supports me and trusts my judgement. They also seem to like the money I save by not using Microsoft products on every computer.
Schools can save an incredible amount of money using the LTSP. The K12LTSP distro makes installation very easy.
I do this for a PK3-8th grade school on 80 or so machines of P200 vintage.
The administration likes the money saved, the kids like it better than Win 9x and some of the teachers like it. The rest of the teachers either tolerate it or hate it.
As for the teachers that hate it, they're lazy and hate anything that's different. I actually had a science "teacher" object to using an OpenOffice book as she didn't like reading.
While we've got all this great technology, teachers simply don't make good use of it. They prefer to "train" students for the job market (this school goes to 8th grade...) by making them do presentations (OpenOffice Impress) rather than teaching them to WRITE.
I teach 7th grade very basic programming using Logo. Better than teaching them to simply click buttons...
I see a big void out there waiting for the Open Office crowd to step in: offering "Schoolwork CDs."
First you'll have to overcome teachers who hate OpenOffice because the menus are not exactly like the ones in MS Office and then you'll have to deal with principals who think that moving a window around the screen is "too advanced."
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I'll keep my land line at my house active as long as possible.
I have three small kids and I need something absolutely reliable in case of an emergency.
While I do absolutely love modern mobile tech (Droid!), I prefer using a land line while at home. I simply don't enjoy having long conversations on a mobile phone. The newest phone at my house is a Nortel Meridian M9616CW which was (for me) the ultimate geek phone in the mid 90s. They seem to fetch a good price:
http://www.telephonegenie.com/customer/product.php?productid=16149
The rest are all Western Electric, Automatic Electric and ITT phones from the early 40s - 70s that I've collected and repaired. They all work perfectly (even rotary dialing) on the Cox Digital phone service.
As the article mentioned, POTS is preferable in disaster areas. I live in an area of New Orleans that didn't flood in Katrina. The only way I was able to contact people in my neighborhood who stayed for the storm was on their land lines.
Um.... use one of my many touch tone phones.
In the area of New Orleans where I live (and didn't flood), the only way for people to communicate with the outside world was with land lines and old phones which are powered completely off the line (no wall warts).
Much of the cellular system didn't work. The remaining working systems were nearly impossible to use.
I hate using cell phones for more than a few minutes and always use a land line for long conversations. I also need to keep the land line for our alarm systems.
I was amazed to discover that my collection of 40s - 70s rotary dial phones dial perfectly on the Cox Digital phone system.
I use DansGuardian in a school setting. Works extremely well.
As someone else mentioned, how about a Commodore 64, Apple II or Atari 400/800 with a floppy drive?
You can get these machines very cheap on Ebay or free if you look around. They're extremely durable and easy to fix. Best of all, they're easy to understand. You insert a disc, apply power and the desired software runs. No complicated OS gets in the way. Gobs of quality edutainment software available.
I've got a stack of Apple //e's ready for my kids when they're older.
I'm a network admin at a school that has a mostly LTSP based network. 58% of our machines (76) are Linux only.
We still have about 25 Apple //e machines in use that the administration wishes to remove because they look old. I keep fighting this because I believe the 20+ year old software is better than most of the so-called educational software in use on the Windows machines. The Apples are also easy to maintain... they almost never fail.
I'll eventually be forced to replace them, but I'll do it with Mac Mini's that will allow me to run both new software and Apple II software via emulation.
I currently teach Logo to 80 something 7th graders a week using UCBLogo on Linux (LTSP).
I start them off with basic turtle graphics and gradually introduce concepts such as variables, loops, etc. There are five or six kids in each class that ask me how to do the same stuff at home.
You'll find vast numbers of old phones that don't require AC power on Ebay, at flea markets, garage sales, etc.
I have a small collection of Western Electric 302 and 500 rotary phones. The WE 302 was made in 1947. It rings, dials and works perfectly with the Cox digital phone service.
I have a nice collection of Apple II 5.25 floppies from the early 80s that still work perfectly. They don't hold much, but they are far more reliable than brand new 3.5 floppies that seem to develop bad sectors after a single use.
I think Logo is great for kids of that age because it provides them with instant gratification at the early stages. Once they get past seeing what the commands do at the Logo prompt, I have them write short programs using a text editor.
As the IT person at a local school, I accept any Pentium based machine with PCI slots. Add one 100Mb NIC, disable the hard drive, make a boot floppy and I've got myself a perfectly good X terminal to connect to my LTSP (http://www.ltsp.org) server. The slowest machine I have like this is an old AST Pentium 75. Runs Mozilla, OpenOffice and most everything else perfectly. Even runs our Windows based reading software via Wine. I am fortunate to work at a school where most of the administration supports me and trusts my judgement. They also seem to like the money I save by not using Microsoft products on every computer.
I do this for a PK3-8th grade school on 80 or so machines of P200 vintage.
The administration likes the money saved, the kids like it better than Win 9x and some of the teachers like it. The rest of the teachers either tolerate it or hate it.
As for the teachers that hate it, they're lazy and hate anything that's different. I actually had a science "teacher" object to using an OpenOffice book as she didn't like reading.
While we've got all this great technology, teachers simply don't make good use of it. They prefer to "train" students for the job market (this school goes to 8th grade...) by making them do presentations (OpenOffice Impress) rather than teaching them to WRITE.
I teach 7th grade very basic programming using Logo. Better than teaching them to simply click buttons...
You install the software (written in perl) on your Linux, BSD, OSX, Windows whatever machine and tell it where your collection is located.
That's it.
You may control the device from either the provided remote control or via web interface (http://localhost:9000).
First you'll have to overcome teachers who hate OpenOffice because the menus are not exactly like the ones in MS Office and then you'll have to deal with principals who think that moving a window around the screen is "too advanced."