"You need MS Office. You can't operate a home computer without basic functionality and communication with all your friends and collegaues who ALL USE OFFICE."
I didn't know MS Office included communication between installed copies. OpenOffice can save to ms office formats in everything (.doc for word processing,.xls for spreadsheets,.ppt for presentations).
The only function the word processor doesn't have when compared to officeXP that I use frequently is the readability statistic widget. There are all sorts of other functions, like speech to text - but who really uses these functions for something besides a novelty?
MS Office opens files saved in Open Office with a >90% success rate, usually failing when some of the really dynamic content abilities in MS Office were used.
In fact, just recently I took some charts a colleague emailed me that they had made in excel, embedded them into an open office document, along with some other advanced content, saved it as a.doc and sent it on to my super. They never knew I didn't use MS Office.
The universities in north carolina pooled their money and set up a website called NCLIVE, which has a humongous database of scholarly journals, news, magazines, et cetera. It doesn't have whole reference books - but you can easily find those anyway. Using NCLIVE, I could look up articles about old SGI IRIS machines from the 80s. For free, because I'm a student at a state university here in North Carolina.
Now, if Michigan's school system has something so incredibly useful, I can understand why they'd want all their kids to be able to access it and stuff. However, I can understand your point that the regular internet has 99% crap and 1% useful information, if that - which is why the kids need to be educated on how to perform searches for information on the internet which will give them credible sources, which can many times be more up to date and diverse than any library can provide.
The major issue I have with this is they're giving them to 6th graders. Personally, I think they should be going to at least high school freshmen instead. They're much more responsible, and much less likely to break it. They are, however, more likely to load games on it (or porn, or file sharing mp3s). But if they're being used in the classroom, this shouldn't matter much - if the teachers can instruct them on how to properly maintain their computer. Which is exactly why they should go with osx instead of windows, because the kids have a much lower chance of royally screwing the computer up with spyware, virii, and games for that matter. Not to mention it'd be much less of a headache for the schools' IT personel to make sure their computers are up to date.
As for them going absolete after a few years - I don't really understand what's obsolete about a 4 year old computer. You can do everything important with it, like word process and do internet research. You may not be able to watch DVDs or play Doom 3 on it, but who needs to do that for middle school work anyways?
If Michigan public school computer labs are anything like Raleigh, NC public school computer labs (keep in mind these are magnet schools also, so they get more funding), they will be running either windows 98 or something less sophisticated. Up until my senior year in high school (2 years ago), the computer science lab used an IBM Token Ring network.
It's not a network thing, it's something in the bootloader. They have a similar application on the lab computers at school, and everyone finds it really freaking annoying, especially since we don't all have an individual shared folder to stick stuff when we're working in the lab.
Yay for trucking around diskettes. (I just ssh home and stick em on my home computer.)
Or other, relatively low-bandwidth server applications - like a MUD, or a small 8user, private game server? These are relatively low bandwidth, especially the MUD example, and do not interfere with legit research access to the internet.
You say they can't possibly be legit if they're running a server that would be caught by Icarus. Think of this:
-You're a student running a cvs tree off your box for an open source project. You get shut down because of the ports being used.
-You're a student writing some kind of server application for a computer science degree. You decide that it works well enough to run it on your own box so you can more easily monitor it. You get bumped off the 'net for doing research.
-You set up a private Natural Selection server and only give the password to people on campus. While this isn't "legit" like the other two examples, it does not use the external bandwidth of the university - only the internal LAN bandwidth. They pay for the hardware to accomplish this, not the bandwidth used like an external connection. While it's not "legit" per se, it really isn't that harmful either.
-You decide to run SSH on your box in your dorm room, so you can access files and applications on your personal computer from anywhere on the university, with your ssh client diskette. Even though I commute to college, I use this method to truck files back and forth to class without the headache of an ftp server or using an external storage space, like a web server. Not to mention, it's faster than uploading it to a web server.
All of these are actions which would result in your network rights revoked at this university. While it fixes one problem, it creates many, many more. It's not viable, and I'm just glad I didn't decide to transfer to Florida;)
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"You need MS Office. You can't operate a home computer without basic functionality and communication with all your friends and collegaues who ALL USE OFFICE."
.xls for spreadsheets, .ppt for presentations).
.doc and sent it on to my super. They never knew I didn't use MS Office.
I didn't know MS Office included communication between installed copies. OpenOffice can save to ms office formats in everything (.doc for word processing,
The only function the word processor doesn't have when compared to officeXP that I use frequently is the readability statistic widget. There are all sorts of other functions, like speech to text - but who really uses these functions for something besides a novelty?
MS Office opens files saved in Open Office with a >90% success rate, usually failing when some of the really dynamic content abilities in MS Office were used.
In fact, just recently I took some charts a colleague emailed me that they had made in excel, embedded them into an open office document, along with some other advanced content, saved it as a
The universities in north carolina pooled their money and set up a website called NCLIVE, which has a humongous database of scholarly journals, news, magazines, et cetera. It doesn't have whole reference books - but you can easily find those anyway. Using NCLIVE, I could look up articles about old SGI IRIS machines from the 80s. For free, because I'm a student at a state university here in North Carolina. Now, if Michigan's school system has something so incredibly useful, I can understand why they'd want all their kids to be able to access it and stuff. However, I can understand your point that the regular internet has 99% crap and 1% useful information, if that - which is why the kids need to be educated on how to perform searches for information on the internet which will give them credible sources, which can many times be more up to date and diverse than any library can provide. The major issue I have with this is they're giving them to 6th graders. Personally, I think they should be going to at least high school freshmen instead. They're much more responsible, and much less likely to break it. They are, however, more likely to load games on it (or porn, or file sharing mp3s). But if they're being used in the classroom, this shouldn't matter much - if the teachers can instruct them on how to properly maintain their computer. Which is exactly why they should go with osx instead of windows, because the kids have a much lower chance of royally screwing the computer up with spyware, virii, and games for that matter. Not to mention it'd be much less of a headache for the schools' IT personel to make sure their computers are up to date. As for them going absolete after a few years - I don't really understand what's obsolete about a 4 year old computer. You can do everything important with it, like word process and do internet research. You may not be able to watch DVDs or play Doom 3 on it, but who needs to do that for middle school work anyways?
If Michigan public school computer labs are anything like Raleigh, NC public school computer labs (keep in mind these are magnet schools also, so they get more funding), they will be running either windows 98 or something less sophisticated. Up until my senior year in high school (2 years ago), the computer science lab used an IBM Token Ring network.
It's not a network thing, it's something in the bootloader. They have a similar application on the lab computers at school, and everyone finds it really freaking annoying, especially since we don't all have an individual shared folder to stick stuff when we're working in the lab.
Yay for trucking around diskettes. (I just ssh home and stick em on my home computer.)
And the most sensible and simplist way to limit abuse of bandwidth is through bandwidth quotas and caps, not through shutting down servers.
Hear hear. The simplist solution is usually the best.
Or other, relatively low-bandwidth server applications - like a MUD, or a small 8user, private game server? These are relatively low bandwidth, especially the MUD example, and do not interfere with legit research access to the internet.
;)
You say they can't possibly be legit if they're running a server that would be caught by Icarus. Think of this:
-You're a student running a cvs tree off your box for an open source project. You get shut down because of the ports being used.
-You're a student writing some kind of server application for a computer science degree. You decide that it works well enough to run it on your own box so you can more easily monitor it. You get bumped off the 'net for doing research.
-You set up a private Natural Selection server and only give the password to people on campus. While this isn't "legit" like the other two examples, it does not use the external bandwidth of the university - only the internal LAN bandwidth. They pay for the hardware to accomplish this, not the bandwidth used like an external connection. While it's not "legit" per se, it really isn't that harmful either.
-You decide to run SSH on your box in your dorm room, so you can access files and applications on your personal computer from anywhere on the university, with your ssh client diskette. Even though I commute to college, I use this method to truck files back and forth to class without the headache of an ftp server or using an external storage space, like a web server. Not to mention, it's faster than uploading it to a web server.
All of these are actions which would result in your network rights revoked at this university. While it fixes one problem, it creates many, many more. It's not viable, and I'm just glad I didn't decide to transfer to Florida