Actually, I think that most teachers and staff at public school DO give a damn about what goes on there. However, many of them are tasked with jobs that they don't have enough time (or experience) to do because the school district itself doesn't have the funds to hire more staff.
For instance, at a small school district the "IT person" is likely to be one of the math or science teachers "because they understand computers". At one school district I have been involved with, it's the janitor who has set up a Novell system with NAT. At the school my kids went to the IT guy was the HS math teacher who knew he was out of his depth and came to me for help (I was probably the only networking engineer in the area and off work on a disability at the time).
I understand that you need to work but schools need competent volunteers with new ideas and the ability to get things done without just throwing money at the problem. So do what you must, but find a small school and let them know you are at least available to answer questions about Linux and Unix and routing, etc.
Then volunteer to help teach the teachers, to configure the classroom computers, the lab computers, do cabling. You don't have to be the network administrator to volunteer... you just have to present yourself and say, "I'll do anything you need a hand with."
not to the program. I have been involved with E-Rate at a small, rural school district for years.
1. The equipment has to be infrastructure (servers, telephone PBXs, fiber or wiring, and telephone and internet connectivity.
2. The schools must share the costs. How much they share depends, generally, on the number of students who qualify for free lunches.
3. Not all schools that apply receive the aid.
4. Companies which furnish the equipment must be certified as qualified to do so.
If schools are using these funds for repairing rugs and floor after installation of cabling then they are committing fraud. My school district has updated its antiquated telephone system (including the use of VOIP to take advantage of the fiber that we installed prior to the E-Rate program and a voice-mail system so that one staff person did not have to always answer the phone), updated email servers and web servers, created servers for elementary students to share lesson plans, and more.
This program has been instrumental in helping this agricultural community educate its students better and I'm proud to have been involved.
My girlfriend work for public schools in MA. The state of IT in her schools is simply pitiful. They have the oldest technology, and virtually no help.
Ok... so why don't you volunteer a few hours a week to help them? It should be more rewarding than watching old ladies try to remove dirty pictures.
Ten years ago, when both of my children were in public school in a rural, mostly agricultural, school district I was contacted by the teacher who also had little experience with computers and networking. On my recommendation they ran fiber between all the buildings and used Linux (Redhat 4 and then early SuSE) for email, web, and - at least later - web proxy (and filtering). That teacher told the school board that my help had saved them over $50,000 and countless hours of fruitless effort.
I also became a reading volunteer on a program that helped younger students - especially hispanics - learn to read.
In addition, I nstalled Linux on several computers inherited by the Schools by the Public Utility District and put them into the library for kids to check out and take home. One student (mind you, the graduating class of the HS was around 40 in any typical year) used Linux as his senior project as a direct result of puzzling out how to make that Linux computer do what he wanted 6 years earlier.
Now my company does engineering services for this school district under the E-Rate program. But if that were gone I would still volunteer my time as a parent and member of the community. It's an easy way to make a difference.
when my 4-year-old Handspring Edge does everything I need a PDA for so well. Plus, if I need to replace it I just go to Ebay and buy another one for $50. The Achille's Heel of the high tech industry is the "upgrade" cycle because if people fail to upgrade then those products will fail. Unfortunately for the PDA industry there is not much need to upgrade because the basic niche the early units filled is still the same niche. And anyway... what is so bad about sellling only a billion dollars of PDAs a year?
Back when we had to actually solve equations without the use of any tool other than our brains and a slide rule, we learned to solve from the "inside out". When HP brought out the "electronic slide rule" nothing changed except that the accuracy was improved immeasurably. The HP35 had little on it that wasn't on a good slide rule; it was just very very accurate. We still solved from the "inside out".
Yup... the Simpson's - perhaps the most biting commentary on American life - now has credits for offshore production. From the name of the manager it's likely India or Malaysia. The voices are still American but the graphics are probably done in a country where the sarcasm will not likely be noticed as sarcasm. Nothing is sacred and I'm seriously reconsidering my Simpson's habit.
According to this logic we should encourage drunks to drive more often in order to expose poor automotive design. Or ignore overweight trucks on the highways to test bridge construction. Virus writers serve no useful purpose at all except to create windfall profits for networking people who are paid to clear the damn things; oh, and the virus protection people.
because of the special nature of eyesight over 40, only those of us with the proper corrective lenses (which you poor fools don't think you need... yet) can read it.
I'm old enough to have never played with Lego bricks as a kid but my kids had tons of them. My wife and I felt that Lego was the perfect toy to foster creativity in a child. When our daughter got married in 2002 she and her new husband both had a large collection of Legos that they plan to give to their kids. This, of course, presents a dilemma for Lego. How do you sell more to people who already have a lot?
This is compounded by the Lego collections that are offered for sale at Goodwill and yard sales. Lego bricks are not cheap and if you already have a bunch and can buy more on ebay what is the incentive to spend $20 at a toy store?
Even so, I must admit that Lego's decision to return to basics makes a certain amount of sense. Our kids never liked the "pre-made" objects much; the pieces would soon just be incorporated into the overall collection. Certainly if I were buying new Lego sets I would just buy the classics. Of course, we have lots of them from various Goodwill trips waiting for the grandkids to appear.
But if Lego is going to discontinue Mindstorms then it should be open-sourced to allow other companies to continue the line without the software investment. It's too good a learning tool to just disappear!
Carly Fiorina says that there is a lack of educated people willing to work for "minimum wage or less" here in the USA. I have no doubt that this is true. But I think that her Directors should explore going to India for their management team. Surely there is an equal lack of supply of upper-level management people willing to work for minimum wage... or less.
Valenti is, in my opinion, an idiot. Maybe it's time for all those high-profile directors to create an awards system that is meaningful and not just political payback for favors done.
Anyway, I think movies are much more enjoyable in a theater with a cute girl next to me. Ripping movies is just one more way to keep yourself from getting a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Next time you want to rip the latest flick stifle it and call up a cutie and rub shoulders for a few hours. Hell, even the popcorn is better at the cinema.
Is the author of a book entitled to "damages" if I read it after having found it? Or how about if I buy it at a used book store? The only "damages" under copyright are those from the person copying the material, not someone who merely has access to it.
No traffic problems (if I see ten cars in a 20 mile segment of my commute it's a busy day), cheap housing (3br,2ba homes for well under US$100k), good schools with committed teachers, generally only 2 hours to a major metro area by car... the list now includes relative immunity from surveillance because population density is too low to justify the expense.
Combine this with deployment of fiber across many rural counties along with the ability to telecommute for many jobs techies do and you have an ideal living environment.
Downsides? Not a lot of parties to go to, conservative politics prevail, and if they decide they want to watch you (in particular) they don't have to weed through the crowds to find you.
The reason MS settled was that they were clearly in the wrong. MS tried every trick in the book to block DRDOS from being useful on PCs in general and in particular PCs used to run Windows (which at that time was just a GUI that ran on top of DOS). Also, at the time of settlement, the Justice Department's antitrust investigation was just getting into motion and MS undoubtedly wanted to put the DRDOS debacle behind them in case it, too, ended up part of that case.
There is little doubt in my mind that SCO/Canopy wants to settle and settle quickly before the cadres of open source advocated uncover some really damning piece of evidence that can be used against them by IBM in court. The OS community is providing new evidence every day which IBM attorneys could not, in their wildest dreams, have even suspected was there. In addition to providing timelines and other information only available by experts. And for free, just because SCO/Canopy has pissed the community off big time.
Because I'm sick to death of the constant "why isn't the Internet free" comments from people who should know better. Houses aren't free, cars aren't free, food isn't free. Neither is bandwidth. Catch a clue here, someone.
You don't understand what I'm trying to say here... RH and SuSE are producing dandy workstation systems with their $80 distros (or downloadable ISOs). What they're not doing is putting any effort into making these good server OSs. For that they want you to move up to their $800 to over-$1,000 distributions which are NOT offered in ISO form (or are downloadable). Yes, they are bundled with services, but if you don't need the services you have to buy them anyway.
So, for servers, I've moved to FreeBSD which is quite happilyl putting all their resources into distributing the type of operating system I need most: for servers.
and to other BSD operating systems. The major players in the Linux community (RH and SuSE) seem to be moving away from the free software model (where they only get paid for the "bundle" of utilities and applications plus the installation sequence). RH has moved to a model in which they've bundled "services" but then have created a pricing structure in which the services cannot be separated from the software.
I don't see how they can justify this pricing under the GPL but the next question is, "who is going to sue Red Hat?" The most likely outcome if RH doesn't change their licensing is that they will try to sue a customer and the court will then decide if they have the grounds under the GPL to do that.
Maybe the EFF should buy one license and then install it on a dozen machines and let RH know what they've done. That should be interesting.
It also seems to me that both RH and SuSE have been making their inexpensive distros less and less suitable for use in a server environment (focusing on the desktop). We do a lot of server installs and with the advent of the workstation focus in Linux last year I began changing to FreeBSD where I'll stay until the SCO thing is over and/or I need to do something that only Linux will do.
since there was little budget for big iron we did lots with Linux (web pages, mail server, ftp server, dhcp, even a commercial student database called Schoolmaster) and the Library teacher told me about a young kid (then in the 7th grade) whose family couldn't get him a computer of his own. I took a 486/120 and installed Linux with no gui on it and we allowed kids to check it out like a library book. I included just the basics to get on... how to login, how to use Lynx, where to find more information, the "man" pages, etc.
As far as I know this 7th grader was the only student who checked out the box. I got a few questions relayed to me by the library teacher and answered them. I lost track of him until my son told me that he turned up at a County Fair at the "internet cafe" my son was running and he was heavily into Llinux!
Last month my contact at the school district told me that the kid, now a junior in HS, is planning a senior project: a Beowolf cluster! He is now trying to round up a few dozen machines to use in his cluster.
This is a small school system in a farming community and turns out only one really good natural engineer/computer scientist every 4 or 5 years but I like to think that my idea of creating a "library book" computer using Linux helped turn out this one.
The price of the Handspring and Palm PDAs (especially on Ebay) makes these devices a good idea for corporations. For company use the lack of features is arguably a plus. No waste of time downloading MP3s or games. The battery life is wonderful (I can get a week out of my Edge and then I simply recharge it), the form factor is outstanding (the Edge is very slender). There is clearly a large market for these devices just in replacements (I've broken one Visor and lost one Edge).
So if there is a market but not enough of a market to justify two companies competing in it, and it looks like that to me, then this merger makes plenty of sense. There will be some elimination of products but they need to focus on the low-cost, easy-to-use, long-life corporate niche they've dominated for years.
And Palm devices are easy to synch with both Windows and Linux (I use it with Evolution) desktops. I just hope they keep a product that will be low in cost and slender.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... well let's lower taxes a little more and see if they do any better.
Actually, I think that most teachers and staff at public school DO give a damn about what goes on there. However, many of them are tasked with jobs that they don't have enough time (or experience) to do because the school district itself doesn't have the funds to hire more staff.
For instance, at a small school district the "IT person" is likely to be one of the math or science teachers "because they understand computers". At one school district I have been involved with, it's the janitor who has set up a Novell system with NAT. At the school my kids went to the IT guy was the HS math teacher who knew he was out of his depth and came to me for help (I was probably the only networking engineer in the area and off work on a disability at the time).
I understand that you need to work but schools need competent volunteers with new ideas and the ability to get things done without just throwing money at the problem. So do what you must, but find a small school and let them know you are at least available to answer questions about Linux and Unix and routing, etc.
Then volunteer to help teach the teachers, to configure the classroom computers, the lab computers, do cabling. You don't have to be the network administrator to volunteer... you just have to present yourself and say, "I'll do anything you need a hand with."
not to the program. I have been involved with E-Rate at a small, rural school district for years.
1. The equipment has to be infrastructure (servers, telephone PBXs, fiber or wiring, and telephone and internet connectivity.
2. The schools must share the costs. How much they share depends, generally, on the number of students who qualify for free lunches.
3. Not all schools that apply receive the aid.
4. Companies which furnish the equipment must be certified as qualified to do so.
If schools are using these funds for repairing rugs and floor after installation of cabling then they are committing fraud. My school district has updated its antiquated telephone system (including the use of VOIP to take advantage of the fiber that we installed prior to the E-Rate program and a voice-mail system so that one staff person did not have to always answer the phone), updated email servers and web servers, created servers for elementary students to share lesson plans, and more.
This program has been instrumental in helping this agricultural community educate its students better and I'm proud to have been involved.
Good for you!!! Congratulations for getting involved and making a difference. :)
My girlfriend work for public schools in MA. The state of IT in her schools is simply pitiful. They have the oldest technology, and virtually no help.
Ok... so why don't you volunteer a few hours a week to help them? It should be more rewarding than watching old ladies try to remove dirty pictures.
Ten years ago, when both of my children were in public school in a rural, mostly agricultural, school district I was contacted by the teacher who also had little experience with computers and networking. On my recommendation they ran fiber between all the buildings and used Linux (Redhat 4 and then early SuSE) for email, web, and - at least later - web proxy (and filtering). That teacher told the school board that my help had saved them over $50,000 and countless hours of fruitless effort.
I also became a reading volunteer on a program that helped younger students - especially hispanics - learn to read.
In addition, I nstalled Linux on several computers inherited by the Schools by the Public Utility District and put them into the library for kids to check out and take home. One student (mind you, the graduating class of the HS was around 40 in any typical year) used Linux as his senior project as a direct result of puzzling out how to make that Linux computer do what he wanted 6 years earlier.
Now my company does engineering services for this school district under the E-Rate program. But if that were gone I would still volunteer my time as a parent and member of the community. It's an easy way to make a difference.
when my 4-year-old Handspring Edge does everything I need a PDA for so well. Plus, if I need to replace it I just go to Ebay and buy another one for $50. The Achille's Heel of the high tech industry is the "upgrade" cycle because if people fail to upgrade then those products will fail. Unfortunately for the PDA industry there is not much need to upgrade because the basic niche the early units filled is still the same niche. And anyway... what is so bad about sellling only a billion dollars of PDAs a year?
Back when we had to actually solve equations without the use of any tool other than our brains and a slide rule, we learned to solve from the "inside out". When HP brought out the "electronic slide rule" nothing changed except that the accuracy was improved immeasurably. The HP35 had little on it that wasn't on a good slide rule; it was just very very accurate. We still solved from the "inside out".
Yup... the Simpson's - perhaps the most biting commentary on American life - now has credits for offshore production. From the name of the manager it's likely India or Malaysia. The voices are still American but the graphics are probably done in a country where the sarcasm will not likely be noticed as sarcasm. Nothing is sacred and I'm seriously reconsidering my Simpson's habit.
who MS stole this product from.
According to this logic we should encourage drunks to drive more often in order to expose poor automotive design. Or ignore overweight trucks on the highways to test bridge construction. Virus writers serve no useful purpose at all except to create windfall profits for networking people who are paid to clear the damn things; oh, and the virus protection people.
because of the special nature of eyesight over 40, only those of us with the proper corrective lenses (which you poor fools don't think you need... yet) can read it.
I'm old enough to have never played with Lego bricks as a kid but my kids had tons of them. My wife and I felt that Lego was the perfect toy to foster creativity in a child. When our daughter got married in 2002 she and her new husband both had a large collection of Legos that they plan to give to their kids. This, of course, presents a dilemma for Lego. How do you sell more to people who already have a lot?
This is compounded by the Lego collections that are offered for sale at Goodwill and yard sales. Lego bricks are not cheap and if you already have a bunch and can buy more on ebay what is the incentive to spend $20 at a toy store?
Even so, I must admit that Lego's decision to return to basics makes a certain amount of sense. Our kids never liked the "pre-made" objects much; the pieces would soon just be incorporated into the overall collection. Certainly if I were buying new Lego sets I would just buy the classics. Of course, we have lots of them from various Goodwill trips waiting for the grandkids to appear.
But if Lego is going to discontinue Mindstorms then it should be open-sourced to allow other companies to continue the line without the software investment. It's too good a learning tool to just disappear!
Carly Fiorina says that there is a lack of educated people willing to work for "minimum wage or less" here in the USA. I have no doubt that this is true. But I think that her Directors should explore going to India for their management team. Surely there is an equal lack of supply of upper-level management people willing to work for minimum wage... or less.
Valenti is, in my opinion, an idiot. Maybe it's time for all those high-profile directors to create an awards system that is meaningful and not just political payback for favors done.
Anyway, I think movies are much more enjoyable in a theater with a cute girl next to me. Ripping movies is just one more way to keep yourself from getting a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Next time you want to rip the latest flick stifle it and call up a cutie and rub shoulders for a few hours. Hell, even the popcorn is better at the cinema.
Is the author of a book entitled to "damages" if I read it after having found it? Or how about if I buy it at a used book store? The only "damages" under copyright are those from the person copying the material, not someone who merely has access to it.
No traffic problems (if I see ten cars in a 20 mile segment of my commute it's a busy day), cheap housing (3br,2ba homes for well under US$100k), good schools with committed teachers, generally only 2 hours to a major metro area by car... the list now includes relative immunity from surveillance because population density is too low to justify the expense.
Combine this with deployment of fiber across many rural counties along with the ability to telecommute for many jobs techies do and you have an ideal living environment.
Downsides? Not a lot of parties to go to, conservative politics prevail, and if they decide they want to watch you (in particular) they don't have to weed through the crowds to find you.
the "You're Not Trusted Computing" initiative.
The reason MS settled was that they were clearly in the wrong. MS tried every trick in the book to block DRDOS from being useful on PCs in general and in particular PCs used to run Windows (which at that time was just a GUI that ran on top of DOS). Also, at the time of settlement, the Justice Department's antitrust investigation was just getting into motion and MS undoubtedly wanted to put the DRDOS debacle behind them in case it, too, ended up part of that case.
There is little doubt in my mind that SCO/Canopy wants to settle and settle quickly before the cadres of open source advocated uncover some really damning piece of evidence that can be used against them by IBM in court. The OS community is providing new evidence every day which IBM attorneys could not, in their wildest dreams, have even suspected was there. In addition to providing timelines and other information only available by experts. And for free, just because SCO/Canopy has pissed the community off big time.
Because I'm sick to death of the constant "why isn't the Internet free" comments from people who should know better. Houses aren't free, cars aren't free, food isn't free. Neither is bandwidth. Catch a clue here, someone.
What in the world is a question this stupid doing on Slashdot?
You don't understand what I'm trying to say here... RH and SuSE are producing dandy workstation systems with their $80 distros (or downloadable ISOs). What they're not doing is putting any effort into making these good server OSs. For that they want you to move up to their $800 to over-$1,000 distributions which are NOT offered in ISO form (or are downloadable). Yes, they are bundled with services, but if you don't need the services you have to buy them anyway.
So, for servers, I've moved to FreeBSD which is quite happilyl putting all their resources into distributing the type of operating system I need most: for servers.
and to other BSD operating systems. The major players in the Linux community (RH and SuSE) seem to be moving away from the free software model (where they only get paid for the "bundle" of utilities and applications plus the installation sequence). RH has moved to a model in which they've bundled "services" but then have created a pricing structure in which the services cannot be separated from the software.
I don't see how they can justify this pricing under the GPL but the next question is, "who is going to sue Red Hat?" The most likely outcome if RH doesn't change their licensing is that they will try to sue a customer and the court will then decide if they have the grounds under the GPL to do that.
Maybe the EFF should buy one license and then install it on a dozen machines and let RH know what they've done. That should be interesting.
It also seems to me that both RH and SuSE have been making their inexpensive distros less and less suitable for use in a server environment (focusing on the desktop). We do a lot of server installs and with the advent of the workstation focus in Linux last year I began changing to FreeBSD where I'll stay until the SCO thing is over and/or I need to do something that only Linux will do.
since there was little budget for big iron we did lots with Linux (web pages, mail server, ftp server, dhcp, even a commercial student database called Schoolmaster) and the Library teacher told me about a young kid (then in the 7th grade) whose family couldn't get him a computer of his own. I took a 486/120 and installed Linux with no gui on it and we allowed kids to check it out like a library book. I included just the basics to get on... how to login, how to use Lynx, where to find more information, the "man" pages, etc.
As far as I know this 7th grader was the only student who checked out the box. I got a few questions relayed to me by the library teacher and answered them. I lost track of him until my son told me that he turned up at a County Fair at the "internet cafe" my son was running and he was heavily into Llinux!
Last month my contact at the school district told me that the kid, now a junior in HS, is planning a senior project: a Beowolf cluster! He is now trying to round up a few dozen machines to use in his cluster.
This is a small school system in a farming community and turns out only one really good natural engineer/computer scientist every 4 or 5 years but I like to think that my idea of creating a "library book" computer using Linux helped turn out this one.
The price of the Handspring and Palm PDAs (especially on Ebay) makes these devices a good idea for corporations. For company use the lack of features is arguably a plus. No waste of time downloading MP3s or games. The battery life is wonderful (I can get a week out of my Edge and then I simply recharge it), the form factor is outstanding (the Edge is very slender). There is clearly a large market for these devices just in replacements (I've broken one Visor and lost one Edge).
So if there is a market but not enough of a market to justify two companies competing in it, and it looks like that to me, then this merger makes plenty of sense. There will be some elimination of products but they need to focus on the low-cost, easy-to-use, long-life corporate niche they've dominated for years.
And Palm devices are easy to synch with both Windows and Linux (I use it with Evolution) desktops. I just hope they keep a product that will be low in cost and slender.