If you do sufficiently lock a computer down to prevent this, you often break some functionality (yes, even in Linux).
The typical user off the won't miss the shell (useradd -s/bin/false -c "User's Name" -g cafeusers handleforuser), and KDE's Kiosk Framework allows you to shut down everything else in one convenient GUI. RDesktop, FreeNX, PuTTY and VNC give you all the remote access you can eat, sans shell.
Admittedly, KDE is a fairly heavy WM, but the users like it.
It would be a perfect time to teach them computer skills, instead of Windows/Office skills, but that has been shot down by administration every time I suggest it.
Start with the applications, then. Teach them OpenOffice and FireFox and GIMP because they're very much like the MS apps on the surface, you can legitimately send a CD home with them for free, and Microsoft's own Slate magazine recommends it. Then shimming a real OS in underneath is pretty much painless.
The German philosopher Johann Fichte was a key contributor to the formation of the German school system. It was Fichte who said that the schools "must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will." [...goes on to quote JTG, see my tagline...] A small number of very passionate American ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century; fell in love with the order, obedience, and efficiency of its education system; and campaigned relentlessly thereafter to bring the Prussian vision to these shores. Prussia's ultimate goal was to unify Germany; the Americans' was to mold hordes of immigrant Catholics to a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that, children would have to be removed from their parents and from [<finger-quote>]inappropriate[</finger-quote>] cultural influences.
It all sounds very Microsoft. Is that compatibility?
...put in a lab of 20 Mandrake Linux boxes for a special class centred around indigenous students. They loved it. They get extra street cred from their peers for using something different, and dragged other kids in to have a go.
The room's teacher hated it, because he only knew one system and this wasn't it. That caused immense problems when it came time for the school to pay for setup but doesn't appear to have hobbled the students at all.
In a related situation, I've just set up a Linux-and-thin-clients Internet not-cafe (can't call it a cafe 'coz it has no cafe licence) in a budget accommodation place in Perth. Some users whine about no IE (or no MIRC), most of them are delighted by the games and such. Many guests edit up things like CVs on OpenOffice Writer or KWord and never even notice that they're not using MS-Word. The only FAQ which causes them to blink is using Kopete for their Instant Messenger stuff, but the ones with accounts on several different IM providers are again delighted that they only need to run one program to deal with all of them. They also find having config tied to the user rather than the machine to be odd, but again are very happy with the implications (mostly privacy, permanency of storage (think Sheriff card), and not having to set up, tear down or otherwise muck around with settings every time on the way in and out).
Another local high school, not very far from where I live but which otherwise shall remain nameless, went from all-MS-clients all-Linux-servers to 100% MS sitewide on the advice of a Favoured Son. It cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars and has yet to work properly. For the same amount of money as they've so far spent on that white elephant, they could have completely re-equipped the school at least twice over with brand new whitebox PCs running Linux.
Microsoft wants a piece of everyone. That's how their business works, it's their entire ethos - all of it, the whole package, anything else is just decoration. What you're seeing here is an example of a classic reaction to that.
Just like Linux, PHP didn't set out to "beat" anybody. It just happened, grew "like Topsy" but more to fill specific needs rather than at random. Its eventual total annihilation of the corresponding Microsoft product will, as always, "just be a completely unintentional side effect." (-:
PostgreSQL has now grown enough features to pretty much outclass MS-SQL-Server across the board, and by years' end will have grown even more. This, too, is "a completely unintentional side effect" since their target - if any, maybe "benchmark" would be a better word - seems to be Oracle.
It's hard to point to a serious Open Source web browser without pointing to a nail in the coffin of Internet Explorer. At the other end of the link, Apache - not backed by any particular company, just a product which stands on its own merits - absolutely 0wn3rz the webserver market.
What makes the difference?
On one side, we have a company which hoards code and doles it out to users in carefully measured (and paid for) amounts. Any support etc done by the company is simply to increase the perceived value of the doled-out item, and often it's charged for too. This has bred a generation of Minesweeper Consultants and Solitaire Experts.
On the other side, we have people solving their own problems, and not hoarding the solutions. Because it's their own code, they take pride in it, and some of them support it for that reason. Much other support is done in passing; someone's reading a list to find out more about their pet project, a question appears which is either easy to answer or an interesting challenge, and so an answer happens. That kind of responsiveness is difficult to buy.
I am setting up a Linux-based thin-client Internet cafe yesterday, and in strolls a dude from the cafe next door (this place will have its own cafe in a day or two) who wants some Internet access to show a client their Internet cafe software.
He likes the setup, doesn't care what technologies lie behind it, and is absolutely flabbergasted to discover that coding the glue logic to turn Mandrake Terminal Server into a viable Internet cafe including time accounting is under two man-days. Look for a project named "lincaf" in a month or so.
One card-swap later and I'll probably have tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in business out of this one tiny installation, which in turn was made possible only by the unhindered availability of a broad swathe of software, and especially the sources for functional items that I can tweak instead of having to create from scratch.
only whites, in my experience, have such a neurotic view of race.
You need to get out and about more, work on that experience a bit.
Not a few Asian cultures look down on Negro people, or for that matter different kinds of Asians. Negro culture, in turn, often looks down on Asians. Indians (as in, the big pointy bit hanging off the bottom of the Himalayas) and occasionally Arabs have wars amongst themselves over racial differences a typical Westerner would be struggling to pick - the Indians especially typically have a tremendous and overlapping range of skin colours within a racial sub-group, so they squabble over different racial differences. Various groups in China and Russia waste time looking down their noses at one another, and Japan looks down its collective nose at both. Which is a somewhat gentler approach than their historical one.
It's pandemic. Get used to it - which is not to say that you have to accept it, just acknowledge that it's there and plan for it.
Full disclosure: I am a male Caucasian Australian. I have meet-in-person friends who are from Zambian, Indonesian, Australian Aboriginal, Chinese, Singaporean, Japanese, Rhodesian, Russian, Romanian, Inuit, AmerIndian, Phillipino, Thai and other cultural and racial groups, and think nothing of it. We fostered an African-Negro/Chinese-Indonesian toddler for a year while his mum recovered from a back injury (dad was stuck in Africa until he could work up to getting a new visa). I have on-line friends all over the planet and no real clue (in most cases) as to what their race might be.
In the spirit of FOSS - to wit, building a working one to back up your specifications - try this. If 50% of websites got a clean bill of health there, the world would be a better place.
Sometimes I'm just baffled at what they want me to do.
The error messages there recently got much better. See if you can spot which explicatory message I contributed to the list. The takeaway message is, don't just whine - fix it.
They may be a bunch of meeting-bound administrators, but W3C do produce working code to their own specifications.
Going by the current offerings from the website, I'm not going to hold my breath.
I always think of the S3 Virge (and similar) cards when I hear "S3". Every one slightly different and incompatible, and undocumented, which meant that the Linux drivers for them were never much chop. And "hardware acceleration" which was actually slower even under MS-Windows, where most of their market was. S4 comes across as constantly underpowered, even compared to the likes of the Intel 8X5 chipsets.
They pulled the team back out of maintenance mode a month or two ago and and are now in panic mode as they survey what the FOSS community has been doing while they slept.
forms didn't always work-click on submit and nothing happened
I suspect that this is at least partially the fault of clueless moron web-so-called-designers building "Submit" buttons which are absolutely dependent on dodgy JavaScript for their operation. Often so absolutely dependent that if you do sneak a marginal field value past the JavaScript, the script dies from lack of data validation (and in at least one case I saw, it reliably brought down the db, too).
Slashdot Mirror
TANSTAAFL, y'know.
...or anything else even slightly familiar to the users.
Admittedly, KDE is a fairly heavy WM, but the users like it.
Start with the applications, then. Teach them OpenOffice and FireFox and GIMP because they're very much like the MS apps on the surface, you can legitimately send a CD home with them for free, and Microsoft's own Slate magazine recommends it. Then shimming a real OS in underneath is pretty much painless.
Knoppix boots without touching the HDD, unless you type arcana to tell it to.
Yes, as a matter of fact I am <grinning/ducking/running> (-:
You came that close. (-:
...put in a lab of 20 Mandrake Linux boxes for a special class centred around indigenous students. They loved it. They get extra street cred from their peers for using something different, and dragged other kids in to have a go.
The room's teacher hated it, because he only knew one system and this wasn't it. That caused immense problems when it came time for the school to pay for setup but doesn't appear to have hobbled the students at all.
In a related situation, I've just set up a Linux-and-thin-clients Internet not-cafe (can't call it a cafe 'coz it has no cafe licence) in a budget accommodation place in Perth. Some users whine about no IE (or no MIRC), most of them are delighted by the games and such. Many guests edit up things like CVs on OpenOffice Writer or KWord and never even notice that they're not using MS-Word. The only FAQ which causes them to blink is using Kopete for their Instant Messenger stuff, but the ones with accounts on several different IM providers are again delighted that they only need to run one program to deal with all of them. They also find having config tied to the user rather than the machine to be odd, but again are very happy with the implications (mostly privacy, permanency of storage (think Sheriff card), and not having to set up, tear down or otherwise muck around with settings every time on the way in and out).
Another local high school, not very far from where I live but which otherwise shall remain nameless, went from all-MS-clients all-Linux-servers to 100% MS sitewide on the advice of a Favoured Son. It cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars and has yet to work properly. For the same amount of money as they've so far spent on that white elephant, they could have completely re-equipped the school at least twice over with brand new whitebox PCs running Linux.
You still lose under any of these circumstances in which a page adhering to the base standards won't lose:
Microsoft wants a piece of everyone. That's how their business works, it's their entire ethos - all of it, the whole package, anything else is just decoration. What you're seeing here is an example of a classic reaction to that.
Just like Linux, PHP didn't set out to "beat" anybody. It just happened, grew "like Topsy" but more to fill specific needs rather than at random. Its eventual total annihilation of the corresponding Microsoft product will, as always, "just be a completely unintentional side effect." (-:
PostgreSQL has now grown enough features to pretty much outclass MS-SQL-Server across the board, and by years' end will have grown even more. This, too, is "a completely unintentional side effect" since their target - if any, maybe "benchmark" would be a better word - seems to be Oracle.
It's hard to point to a serious Open Source web browser without pointing to a nail in the coffin of Internet Explorer. At the other end of the link, Apache - not backed by any particular company, just a product which stands on its own merits - absolutely 0wn3rz the webserver market.
What makes the difference?
On one side, we have a company which hoards code and doles it out to users in carefully measured (and paid for) amounts. Any support etc done by the company is simply to increase the perceived value of the doled-out item, and often it's charged for too. This has bred a generation of Minesweeper Consultants and Solitaire Experts.
On the other side, we have people solving their own problems, and not hoarding the solutions. Because it's their own code, they take pride in it, and some of them support it for that reason. Much other support is done in passing; someone's reading a list to find out more about their pet project, a question appears which is either easy to answer or an interesting challenge, and so an answer happens. That kind of responsiveness is difficult to buy.
I am setting up a Linux-based thin-client Internet cafe yesterday, and in strolls a dude from the cafe next door (this place will have its own cafe in a day or two) who wants some Internet access to show a client their Internet cafe software.
He likes the setup, doesn't care what technologies lie behind it, and is absolutely flabbergasted to discover that coding the glue logic to turn Mandrake Terminal Server into a viable Internet cafe including time accounting is under two man-days. Look for a project named "lincaf" in a month or so.
One card-swap later and I'll probably have tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in business out of this one tiny installation, which in turn was made possible only by the unhindered availability of a broad swathe of software, and especially the sources for functional items that I can tweak instead of having to create from scratch.
You need to get out and about more, work on that experience a bit.
Not a few Asian cultures look down on Negro people, or for that matter different kinds of Asians. Negro culture, in turn, often looks down on Asians. Indians (as in, the big pointy bit hanging off the bottom of the Himalayas) and occasionally Arabs have wars amongst themselves over racial differences a typical Westerner would be struggling to pick - the Indians especially typically have a tremendous and overlapping range of skin colours within a racial sub-group, so they squabble over different racial differences. Various groups in China and Russia waste time looking down their noses at one another, and Japan looks down its collective nose at both. Which is a somewhat gentler approach than their historical one.
It's pandemic. Get used to it - which is not to say that you have to accept it, just acknowledge that it's there and plan for it.
Full disclosure: I am a male Caucasian Australian. I have meet-in-person friends who are from Zambian, Indonesian, Australian Aboriginal, Chinese, Singaporean, Japanese, Rhodesian, Russian, Romanian, Inuit, AmerIndian, Phillipino, Thai and other cultural and racial groups, and think nothing of it. We fostered an African-Negro/Chinese-Indonesian toddler for a year while his mum recovered from a back injury (dad was stuck in Africa until he could work up to getting a new visa). I have on-line friends all over the planet and no real clue (in most cases) as to what their race might be.
You'd expect the purveyors of PHP tools to answer developer requests, and they have.
There are several alternates around.
If you want to try something a bit different, there's this or this.
In the spirit of FOSS - to wit, building a working one to back up your specifications - try this. If 50% of websites got a clean bill of health there, the world would be a better place.The error messages there recently got much better. See if you can spot which explicatory message I contributed to the list. The takeaway message is, don't just whine - fix it.
They may be a bunch of meeting-bound administrators, but W3C do produce working code to their own specifications.
Now on file here, give us a whistle if the attribution needs improving (or, of course, change it yourself).
Gaussian blur, anybody?
NEXT! (-:
...if your browser IDs itself at MSIE.
...dunno how to break this to you... Linus still runs around in shorts.
I wonder who's carrying the coconut halves?
...add this to one or more of the new computers?
Dunno about block, as such, but point your IE (or suitable UserAgent string) here and compare it with (say) Konqueror or FireFox.
Tip for Konq users: Tools, Change Browser Identification, any of the first 8. Afterwards: T, CBI, Default Identification.
I have seen protest sites blocking IE (you get a popup and then a redirect to mozilla.org).
They pulled the team back out of maintenance mode a month or two ago and and are now in panic mode as they survey what the FOSS community has been doing while they slept.
I suspect that this is at least partially the fault of clueless moron web-so-called-designers building "Submit" buttons which are absolutely dependent on dodgy JavaScript for their operation. Often so absolutely dependent that if you do sneak a marginal field value past the JavaScript, the script dies from lack of data validation (and in at least one case I saw, it reliably brought down the db, too).