It is, in that Crossley is the sole owner (principal), rather than a partner. But he has (had?) employees that we know of from the emails (one is asking for a new copy of Office, since he had to give his license to the other one).
Chances are his website wasn't internally run, however- a company his size wouldn't have had their own IT team, but would be using contractors. So my money's on a sympathetic sysadmin 'accidentally' typing the wrong thing in his terminal window. All those *nix commands look so similar, you know!
I'm reminded of a story (probably apocryphal) about the first McDonald's that was opened in Moscow. When the staff were being trained by the American reps, one of the managers put his hand up and asked, "Why do we have to be polite to the customers? WE have the hamburgers!"
Mr. Henderson is an idiot, no offense to the intellectually challenged out there. He, like everyone else in the music industry, has blinders on, and is clueless as to what the people with the money (ie, the CUSTOMERS) want.
I'd love to get Pandora here. It was brilliant while it lasted, and nothing else I've tried has been able to beat it. And here's the irony for CRIA and their ilk: since Pandora got shut off in Canada, I've simply gone back to downloading. Yes, it's still legal here, as long as we're paying the blank media levies we do. And Mr. Henderson can kiss my shiny metal ass, because I'll NEVER pay a cent for music from artists he 'represents'. Not even to a 'legal' streaming service.
Am I sad Pandora has given up on Canada? Yes, because I loved their system. And no, because it really doesn't affect me anymore. iTunes has Genius, which is pretty damn good these days, and since I can happily download tunes till I'm out of drive space.
Meh, legal, schmegal. You can now do an install off a retail Snow Leopard disc, so all you're violating is the EULA, which probably won't hold water anyhow!
I work in the tech department for a small public school district with a heavy emphasis on educational technology integration in the classroom (we have a 1:1 laptop program as well). A few years ago, we did an experiment with tablet PCs, where we purchased 5 different models from the major vendors (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Acer, and Toshiba), played around with them, and then offered them to a few teachers to try out. The only one we had any success with was the HP tc4200, which was given to a Primary teacher who used it extensively for a year.
The Thinkpad was the best unit in terms of 'feel'- it was light, solid, with a good battery life. However, both the first and second models we got were sent back because of poor performance (very slow to boot up, high latency during operation, and a tendency to run very hot). The Fujitsu was too heavy, as was the Toshiba. The Acer (Travelmate C200) was great in terms of performance (dedicated 256MB Nvidia graphics, 2GB RAM, etc), but was a bit bulky due to its built-in optical drive. In addition, Acer's method of sliding the screen up from the slate position was stupid, locking it into one angle when using the unit as a notebook. I'm using that one as a gaming platform now (three years later!). The HP tc4200 was, quite frankly, the best tablet I have ever used. It's light, sturdy (not quite as solid-feeling as the Thinkpad), and quick. The lady who used it said she never felt it was annoying to carry it around her classroom for most of the day. In addition to the tablet, we gave her a wifi-enabled projector, so she could work untethered while moving about, and this worked perfectly.
My suggestion is to get one of the tc4200's- they are dead cheap these days, and you can upgrade the RAM and hard drive easily if you wish. I have seen them for $400. Not only that, but you can even shoehorn OS X onto them if you are bored- I did that with our for shiggles and it was awesome for a few days before I missed my Macbook Pro too much!
Most projectors these days have built-in wifi for wireless projection (at least from Windows computers!), and this can really make a huge difference for instructors.
From a pedagogical perspective, you can even justify the cheap route and buy a bluetooth-enabled Wacom tablet. Sure, you don't get a screen built in, but for $250 you get the mobility of the tablet, as well as all the functionality of the penabled software such as Smart or Promethean offer. You can mark up notes, documents, etcetera and save your notes, email them to your students, and so on.
This isn't complex tech. You launch a bunch of helium-filled weather balloons from bordering countries; under each one is a payload of wifi gear that repeats a transmission from ground-based terminals. 60,000 feet is nothing for consumer-grade wifi gear. At around $1000 a pop, they are cheap (disposable), and a turn-key package can be shipped out for deployment by regional hackers (hackerswithoutborders.org, for example).
Alternatively, you spend a bit of real money and deploy Stratellites. Of course, those would probably be easier to shoot down, and the loss would sting a bit financially. Also, see "Still a Prototype".
What you are looking for is a proper archiving application. I suggest ICAAtom.
Scan your documents as TIFFs if you are going to be saving them as images; if your hardware will do OCR nicely, then you would be better off scanning them to text, as they will be more searchable. ICA Atom supports all of the standard archiving metadata protocols, of course, so you will have good searching capabilities as long as you enter proper metadata.
EXACTLY! Someone please mod this up, already. It's a bloody CONCEPT, and futhermore, hideously impractical. Moving the cartridge by hand? Come on! It's a joke, people!
All you need to do is find a closet somewhere in the school. Pile the old computers in there (it's best to just fill the closet right to the ceiling, that way there's little incentive for anyone to ever clean it out), and lock the door. If you can lock it with a padlock, and then throw the keys away, even better. In fifty or even a hundred years, your 'time capsule' will still be intact. Given the amount of money schools are given for renovations, nobody will be tearing the closet out for a good while yet; and given the lack of money for IT support, anyone who did happen to stumble across it would merely shrug and shut it back up again.
I work a public school IT department, and we find little stashes of 30-year old computer gear often enough that it's not a surprise anymore- and that's in a tiny district with only four schools!
If your closet has an electrical outlet, even better. You can build a circuit to keep the BIOS battery charging the whole time and just leave it plugged in.
For redundancy, hide a few machines in some of these locations as well:
Above the ceiling tiles in the staff lounge
On top of the furnace/boiler in the basement
Beneath the bleachers in the gymnasium
Above the ceiling of the girls' change room (on second thought, bad idea. Some nerd will find them for sure, there)
On a shelf in the custodian's closet
Between two of your Dell blade servers in the NOC
In the closet with the overhead projectors and VCRs and filmstrip players- nobody ever goes in there anymore!
A fair amount of 14- or 12-gauge wire (wire is expensive... go measure)
wire from generator switch breaker to each device
wire from generator to generator switch (needs to be underground / outdoors rated)
wire from main service to generator switch
instructions are generally with generator switch - study hard. Errors can be disastrous
A 15A or 20A socket at each power location (fridge, furnace)
A manual generator to line switch ($150 or so on Ebay)
A generator. I suggest MINIMUM 3500 watts
Even though a furnace doesn't pull a lot when running, at the time that the blower starts up, there can be a VERY large startup current. The fridge the same, to a lesser extent.
A shed -- you can't put a gas generator indoors, generally speaking - very dangerous
I strongly suggest a strong table to mount the generator on for maintenance
Some way to bolt the table down, and bolt the generator to the table
High temperature exhaust hose for the generator (actually kind of difficult to come by)
high-temperature pass through for exhaust to go thru shed wall - hot!
You can get a lot fancier than this, but this will function perfectly as long as you are there to do the switching soon enough after power fails that your building doesn't get too close to pipe-freeze (I wouldn't want to go below 40 degrees f, pipes are often in walls that are cooler than the rest of the house.)
If that won't do, you're looking at an auto-start system with an auto-generator switchover, and the only thing I can tell you about that is prepare your wallet for deep excavation.
Sorry, fyngryz; but your reply needs to be downmodded for "Overkill", and "FUD".
Step 1) Buy a genset. Get 6000 watts or better, if you can afford it. Make sure it has a 220V twist-lock outlet on it, in addition to the usual dual-120V outlets.
Step 2) Buy a nice length of fat extension cable (10AWG or bigger), with a male twist-lock on one end, and a male dryer plug on the other. Your Home Depot or local electrical supplier can make it up for you if you lack the boxcutter-and-screwdriver skills necessary to assemble it.
Step 3) Bring it all home, fill the genset with gas. It will probably hold something like 20 litres (as you're in the States, I'll convert for you: ~5 gallons).
Step 4) Go to your breaker panel, and shut off the MAIN breaker, as well as any baseboard heaters and your hotwater tank. Those will all be 220V breakers (the double kind). Leave all the rest on, if you like. If you have sensitive electronics, feel free to shut off those breakers or unplug the devices- which you've probably already done anyhow, since when your lights went out, there was an accompanying surge which melted all your power bars, right?
Step 5) Plug the large plug into your dryer outlet. Yes, it might be awkward to reach. If you have the money and time, get an electrician to install a 220V dryer outlet on the outside of your house somewhere near where you'd park the genset. Your choice.
Step 6) Start the generator. Once it's running smoothly, plug the twist-lock in. If it stalls out right away, the chances are you forgot to shut off your mains breaker and are trying to feed power back onto the grid.
Step 7) Go inside and enjoy your warm, well-lit household. By being careful, you can use all the major appliances in your house, including your range and oven. If you run out of hot water, lower the rest of your load and turn the tank back on for a while. Just don't try and bake bread while your water tank is on (typical load for a hotwater tank is 3KW). You'll get a feel for it- if the generator bogs down really bad, it means you're overloading it. Back off a bit. Worst thing you can do (provided your extension cable is properly gauged) is stall the genset.
Step 8) In about 8 hours, go outside and feed the genset some more gas.
Oh yeah, you got that right! Theoretically, Deepfreeze lets you schedule a maintenance time, so the machine automatically reboots in a thawed state and downloads updates- but it never works in practice!
I am in almost the same position as this tech coordinator (we have 520 students). We have only had a couple (less than 5, for sure) students who have attempted to circumvent the System. We've had one who figured out that Firefox stores all your passwords in plaintext, and managed to borrow a clueless teacher's laptop long enough to copy the entire list of her login, network, banking, and email passwords (um, hello, now you know why we tell you all the time to LOCK THE SCREEN!). But no, the students AREN'T falling over themselves trying to hack the network or get unrestricted web access. The only time they get creative is if we block apps like iTunes, since that pisses them off.
Besides, our laptop program isn't a tech-training program. We're treating the laptops like tools, like textbooks. Sure, you need to know how to use that tool, but that's not the focus in the classrooms. We leave that for the tech-ed teachers.
Our student sign an AUP when they register each year. It's also signed by their parent or guardian. And it's not a legal document, perhaps- but we're not going to charge them with a crime if they violate it; we'll merely take their laptop away for an appropriate amount of time, or impose some other consequence for their actions. Our AUP also says you won't use our network to send porn or spam or conduct business (could be construed to prohibit eBay), yet we only really come down on people who send spam. And they're usually our bosses...*grin*
You have a point- there are a lot better ways the money could be spent. That being said, there are sound pedagogical reasons for using the Macs, particularly with regard to literacy and numeracy. HOWEVER, if our friends at Sun ever get Open Office up to MS Office's specs, a LOT of people will migrate to OSS. The only reason we haven't is that MS Word has features that are used every day by our teachers, that OO lacks. Once those show up, we'll be the first to go to Linux!
The other things Macs have going for them are sturdier hardware and a great (better than Windows) OS. We have never had one come in with a virus or malware; and they can literally take a hell of a beating.
I tell you though- Apple is killing their education (K-12) market in a hurry by pulling stunts like dropping the 12" subnotebooks and killing firewire. When the MSI Wind is available in a 12" format, maybe we'll seriously look into going Hackintosh!
Deepfreeze actually works quite well- it allows you to set a 'thaw' partition that allows users to store files on the local machine, but keeps the c: drive locked down.
That being said, I would never in my wildest dreams think of releasing Windows laptops into the wild of a student body, if I were expected to keep them running. A lab is one thing, but mobile machines? Egad. Especially if they were allowed to take them home and connect them to the wide open cesspit of the unfiltered malwareverse!
I would suspect so, if it's on YOUR network. Especially since courts have established that users are responsible for traffic on their networks, and that connecting to an open wifi network is stealing.
Yeah, thanks for that, buddy! Good thing the government is paying our bandwidth bill...
I think there's a disconnect between what governments want and what is actually required. Too many people are scared of the Big Bad Internet and all those legions of pedophiles and cyberbullies and l33t h4x0rs just waiting to corrupt The Poor Defencless Children. They take the position of "If we protect our children from it, they won't be hurt by it", and "If they can't access it, it won't corrupt them"; which is ironically the exact opposite tact taken with regard to that other topic, Sex Ed. If you tried to tell educators that they should be simply banning sex among children, or that they should segregate schools by sex, you'd be laughed out of town. Yet when it comes to something like the Internet, they attempt to do exactly that.
In our District (SD92 Nisga'a), we apply an absolute minimum amount of filtering. Don't get me wrong- our connection is content-filtered at the gateway in Victoria where our main connection point is- that's because the Province provides all schools with broadband connections, and they use a single gateway for all of us. It's filtered by Websense, which is a pretty stupid company overall, but fortunately, we have our own set of rules, so we're not tied to what everyone else gets. If a site is blocked that we feel is legitimate, we can (and have done) request a removal, and it takes a day or two to kick in.
At a District level, we do zero content filtering. We will occasionally block a website temporarily at the request of an administrator, but at most for a couple days (if, for example, there's a case of bullying that needs to be dealt with). We do watch our squid logs for 'interesting' surfing habits, but in several years, that's only resulted in a couple of reprimands for students.
As for other restrictions, we use Apple's Workgroup manager to help with that, although I have to say, it's probably not the best thing out there. It tends to cause us headaches with mobile users. We restrict what students can install through Workgroup Manager (they get a local account on the machine, but it's very restricted), and teachers can authenticate to allow apps to be installed if needed. We had to kill Bonjour on our networks because there was too much filesharing and chatting going on during classtime- which really comes down to a classroom management issue, not a technical one, but it's easier for teachers to ask for services to be nuked than to change how they run their classrooms. (That being said, most of our teachers are awesome and really do grok the importance of open networks.)
Our students get to take their lappys home at night, and because we use an authenticating proxy for web in our schools, they need to disable their proxies outside the district. Since they can't (limited account), we provide them with Firefox on their machines, and set it for direct connection. That way, Safari uses their Network Prefs proxy, and Firefox lets them straight out. For teachers and admins, we set them up with Locations.
As for customising the laptops, we pretty much let them at it. We spend a lot of time in the summers removing stickers and Sharpie doodles, but allowing the students to personalise their machines actually has given them a higher level of ownership, which results in less willful damage to the machines.
As to the discussions around selling the units when they hit a certain age, we've decided not to go that way. For student machines, because they are almost all using G4 iBooks, we're keeping as many as we can and using them for spare parts as the warranties expire. And honestly, after four years in a high-schooler's hands, those things aren't worth much! The Elementary students are a lot easier on their machines, so those ones last longer. We talked about selling them at, say 4 years, but decided it would be better to keep them for spare parts. While you will only get $200 for a 4-year old 12" iBook, if the screen is good it's worth $600, and the logic board
We use Apple's Workgroup Manager in our district to control user rights on our ibooks and Macbooks. It's "ok", but not "great". Works well for restrictions, but not so well for un-restrictions. For remote monitoring, our teachers have Apple Remote Desktop- similar to VNC, but more feature-rich (and expensive!). For monitoring users' web activities (all we really are told to care about), we have our Squid logs. Students who take their lappys home obviously have to either a) change their proxy settings (which they need admin rights to do, so that's out); or b) run an alternative browser (we set up Firefox with no proxies for this purpose, and they use Safari in-school).
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for using "it's" correctly.
Thank you. In the 15 seconds it took me to log in, you beat me to the punch. Bloody grocer's apostrophes.
It is, in that Crossley is the sole owner (principal), rather than a partner. But he has (had?) employees that we know of from the emails (one is asking for a new copy of Office, since he had to give his license to the other one). Chances are his website wasn't internally run, however- a company his size wouldn't have had their own IT team, but would be using contractors. So my money's on a sympathetic sysadmin 'accidentally' typing the wrong thing in his terminal window. All those *nix commands look so similar, you know!
I'm reminded of a story (probably apocryphal) about the first McDonald's that was opened in Moscow. When the staff were being trained by the American reps, one of the managers put his hand up and asked, "Why do we have to be polite to the customers? WE have the hamburgers!"
Mr. Henderson is an idiot, no offense to the intellectually challenged out there. He, like everyone else in the music industry, has blinders on, and is clueless as to what the people with the money (ie, the CUSTOMERS) want. I'd love to get Pandora here. It was brilliant while it lasted, and nothing else I've tried has been able to beat it. And here's the irony for CRIA and their ilk: since Pandora got shut off in Canada, I've simply gone back to downloading. Yes, it's still legal here, as long as we're paying the blank media levies we do. And Mr. Henderson can kiss my shiny metal ass, because I'll NEVER pay a cent for music from artists he 'represents'. Not even to a 'legal' streaming service. Am I sad Pandora has given up on Canada? Yes, because I loved their system. And no, because it really doesn't affect me anymore. iTunes has Genius, which is pretty damn good these days, and since I can happily download tunes till I'm out of drive space.
Leonard Hoffsteader built one when he was a kid, because his mother wouldn't hug him. Apparently his father used to borrow it.
another tag for this article: 666
Meh, legal, schmegal. You can now do an install off a retail Snow Leopard disc, so all you're violating is the EULA, which probably won't hold water anyhow!
Am following up with an email...
I work in the tech department for a small public school district with a heavy emphasis on educational technology integration in the classroom (we have a 1:1 laptop program as well). A few years ago, we did an experiment with tablet PCs, where we purchased 5 different models from the major vendors (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Acer, and Toshiba), played around with them, and then offered them to a few teachers to try out. The only one we had any success with was the HP tc4200, which was given to a Primary teacher who used it extensively for a year.
The Thinkpad was the best unit in terms of 'feel'- it was light, solid, with a good battery life. However, both the first and second models we got were sent back because of poor performance (very slow to boot up, high latency during operation, and a tendency to run very hot). The Fujitsu was too heavy, as was the Toshiba. The Acer (Travelmate C200) was great in terms of performance (dedicated 256MB Nvidia graphics, 2GB RAM, etc), but was a bit bulky due to its built-in optical drive. In addition, Acer's method of sliding the screen up from the slate position was stupid, locking it into one angle when using the unit as a notebook. I'm using that one as a gaming platform now (three years later!). The HP tc4200 was, quite frankly, the best tablet I have ever used. It's light, sturdy (not quite as solid-feeling as the Thinkpad), and quick. The lady who used it said she never felt it was annoying to carry it around her classroom for most of the day. In addition to the tablet, we gave her a wifi-enabled projector, so she could work untethered while moving about, and this worked perfectly.
My suggestion is to get one of the tc4200's- they are dead cheap these days, and you can upgrade the RAM and hard drive easily if you wish. I have seen them for $400. Not only that, but you can even shoehorn OS X onto them if you are bored- I did that with our for shiggles and it was awesome for a few days before I missed my Macbook Pro too much!
Most projectors these days have built-in wifi for wireless projection (at least from Windows computers!), and this can really make a huge difference for instructors.
From a pedagogical perspective, you can even justify the cheap route and buy a bluetooth-enabled Wacom tablet. Sure, you don't get a screen built in, but for $250 you get the mobility of the tablet, as well as all the functionality of the penabled software such as Smart or Promethean offer. You can mark up notes, documents, etcetera and save your notes, email them to your students, and so on.
But my money's on the tc4200.
the toilets use YOU!
This isn't complex tech. You launch a bunch of helium-filled weather balloons from bordering countries; under each one is a payload of wifi gear that repeats a transmission from ground-based terminals. 60,000 feet is nothing for consumer-grade wifi gear. At around $1000 a pop, they are cheap (disposable), and a turn-key package can be shipped out for deployment by regional hackers (hackerswithoutborders.org, for example). Alternatively, you spend a bit of real money and deploy Stratellites. Of course, those would probably be easier to shoot down, and the loss would sting a bit financially. Also, see "Still a Prototype".
What you are looking for is a proper archiving application. I suggest ICAAtom. Scan your documents as TIFFs if you are going to be saving them as images; if your hardware will do OCR nicely, then you would be better off scanning them to text, as they will be more searchable. ICA Atom supports all of the standard archiving metadata protocols, of course, so you will have good searching capabilities as long as you enter proper metadata.
EXACTLY! Someone please mod this up, already. It's a bloody CONCEPT, and futhermore, hideously impractical. Moving the cartridge by hand? Come on! It's a joke, people!
All you need to do is find a closet somewhere in the school. Pile the old computers in there (it's best to just fill the closet right to the ceiling, that way there's little incentive for anyone to ever clean it out), and lock the door. If you can lock it with a padlock, and then throw the keys away, even better. In fifty or even a hundred years, your 'time capsule' will still be intact. Given the amount of money schools are given for renovations, nobody will be tearing the closet out for a good while yet; and given the lack of money for IT support, anyone who did happen to stumble across it would merely shrug and shut it back up again.
I work a public school IT department, and we find little stashes of 30-year old computer gear often enough that it's not a surprise anymore- and that's in a tiny district with only four schools!
If your closet has an electrical outlet, even better. You can build a circuit to keep the BIOS battery charging the whole time and just leave it plugged in.
For redundancy, hide a few machines in some of these locations as well:
Above the ceiling tiles in the staff lounge
On top of the furnace/boiler in the basement
Beneath the bleachers in the gymnasium
Above the ceiling of the girls' change room (on second thought, bad idea. Some nerd will find them for sure, there)
On a shelf in the custodian's closet
Between two of your Dell blade servers in the NOC
In the closet with the overhead projectors and VCRs and filmstrip players- nobody ever goes in there anymore!
At a minimum, you need:
You can get a lot fancier than this, but this will function perfectly as long as you are there to do the switching soon enough after power fails that your building doesn't get too close to pipe-freeze (I wouldn't want to go below 40 degrees f, pipes are often in walls that are cooler than the rest of the house.)
If that won't do, you're looking at an auto-start system with an auto-generator switchover, and the only thing I can tell you about that is prepare your wallet for deep excavation.
Sorry, fyngryz; but your reply needs to be downmodded for "Overkill", and "FUD".
Step 1) Buy a genset. Get 6000 watts or better, if you can afford it. Make sure it has a 220V twist-lock outlet on it, in addition to the usual dual-120V outlets.
Step 2) Buy a nice length of fat extension cable (10AWG or bigger), with a male twist-lock on one end, and a male dryer plug on the other. Your Home Depot or local electrical supplier can make it up for you if you lack the boxcutter-and-screwdriver skills necessary to assemble it.
Step 3) Bring it all home, fill the genset with gas. It will probably hold something like 20 litres (as you're in the States, I'll convert for you: ~5 gallons).
Step 4) Go to your breaker panel, and shut off the MAIN breaker, as well as any baseboard heaters and your hotwater tank. Those will all be 220V breakers (the double kind). Leave all the rest on, if you like. If you have sensitive electronics, feel free to shut off those breakers or unplug the devices- which you've probably already done anyhow, since when your lights went out, there was an accompanying surge which melted all your power bars, right?
Step 5) Plug the large plug into your dryer outlet. Yes, it might be awkward to reach. If you have the money and time, get an electrician to install a 220V dryer outlet on the outside of your house somewhere near where you'd park the genset. Your choice.
Step 6) Start the generator. Once it's running smoothly, plug the twist-lock in. If it stalls out right away, the chances are you forgot to shut off your mains breaker and are trying to feed power back onto the grid.
Step 7) Go inside and enjoy your warm, well-lit household. By being careful, you can use all the major appliances in your house, including your range and oven. If you run out of hot water, lower the rest of your load and turn the tank back on for a while. Just don't try and bake bread while your water tank is on (typical load for a hotwater tank is 3KW). You'll get a feel for it- if the generator bogs down really bad, it means you're overloading it. Back off a bit. Worst thing you can do (provided your extension cable is properly gauged) is stall the genset.
Step 8) In about 8 hours, go outside and feed the genset some more gas.
Oh yeah, you got that right! Theoretically, Deepfreeze lets you schedule a maintenance time, so the machine automatically reboots in a thawed state and downloads updates- but it never works in practice!
Besides, our laptop program isn't a tech-training program. We're treating the laptops like tools, like textbooks. Sure, you need to know how to use that tool, but that's not the focus in the classrooms. We leave that for the tech-ed teachers.
Our student sign an AUP when they register each year. It's also signed by their parent or guardian. And it's not a legal document, perhaps- but we're not going to charge them with a crime if they violate it; we'll merely take their laptop away for an appropriate amount of time, or impose some other consequence for their actions. Our AUP also says you won't use our network to send porn or spam or conduct business (could be construed to prohibit eBay), yet we only really come down on people who send spam. And they're usually our bosses...*grin*
This post is specifically about Grade 6 to Grade 12 students.
The other things Macs have going for them are sturdier hardware and a great (better than Windows) OS. We have never had one come in with a virus or malware; and they can literally take a hell of a beating.
I tell you though- Apple is killing their education (K-12) market in a hurry by pulling stunts like dropping the 12" subnotebooks and killing firewire. When the MSI Wind is available in a 12" format, maybe we'll seriously look into going Hackintosh!
That being said, I would never in my wildest dreams think of releasing Windows laptops into the wild of a student body, if I were expected to keep them running. A lab is one thing, but mobile machines? Egad. Especially if they were allowed to take them home and connect them to the wide open cesspit of the unfiltered malwareverse!
I would suspect so, if it's on YOUR network. Especially since courts have established that users are responsible for traffic on their networks, and that connecting to an open wifi network is stealing.
Speaking of Latin, our sig files are eerily similar!
I think there's a disconnect between what governments want and what is actually required. Too many people are scared of the Big Bad Internet and all those legions of pedophiles and cyberbullies and l33t h4x0rs just waiting to corrupt The Poor Defencless Children. They take the position of "If we protect our children from it, they won't be hurt by it", and "If they can't access it, it won't corrupt them"; which is ironically the exact opposite tact taken with regard to that other topic, Sex Ed. If you tried to tell educators that they should be simply banning sex among children, or that they should segregate schools by sex, you'd be laughed out of town. Yet when it comes to something like the Internet, they attempt to do exactly that.
In our District (SD92 Nisga'a), we apply an absolute minimum amount of filtering. Don't get me wrong- our connection is content-filtered at the gateway in Victoria where our main connection point is- that's because the Province provides all schools with broadband connections, and they use a single gateway for all of us. It's filtered by Websense, which is a pretty stupid company overall, but fortunately, we have our own set of rules, so we're not tied to what everyone else gets. If a site is blocked that we feel is legitimate, we can (and have done) request a removal, and it takes a day or two to kick in.
At a District level, we do zero content filtering. We will occasionally block a website temporarily at the request of an administrator, but at most for a couple days (if, for example, there's a case of bullying that needs to be dealt with). We do watch our squid logs for 'interesting' surfing habits, but in several years, that's only resulted in a couple of reprimands for students.
As for other restrictions, we use Apple's Workgroup manager to help with that, although I have to say, it's probably not the best thing out there. It tends to cause us headaches with mobile users. We restrict what students can install through Workgroup Manager (they get a local account on the machine, but it's very restricted), and teachers can authenticate to allow apps to be installed if needed. We had to kill Bonjour on our networks because there was too much filesharing and chatting going on during classtime- which really comes down to a classroom management issue, not a technical one, but it's easier for teachers to ask for services to be nuked than to change how they run their classrooms. (That being said, most of our teachers are awesome and really do grok the importance of open networks.)
Our students get to take their lappys home at night, and because we use an authenticating proxy for web in our schools, they need to disable their proxies outside the district. Since they can't (limited account), we provide them with Firefox on their machines, and set it for direct connection. That way, Safari uses their Network Prefs proxy, and Firefox lets them straight out. For teachers and admins, we set them up with Locations.
As for customising the laptops, we pretty much let them at it. We spend a lot of time in the summers removing stickers and Sharpie doodles, but allowing the students to personalise their machines actually has given them a higher level of ownership, which results in less willful damage to the machines.
As to the discussions around selling the units when they hit a certain age, we've decided not to go that way. For student machines, because they are almost all using G4 iBooks, we're keeping as many as we can and using them for spare parts as the warranties expire. And honestly, after four years in a high-schooler's hands, those things aren't worth much! The Elementary students are a lot easier on their machines, so those ones last longer. We talked about selling them at, say 4 years, but decided it would be better to keep them for spare parts. While you will only get $200 for a 4-year old 12" iBook, if the screen is good it's worth $600, and the logic board
We use Apple's Workgroup Manager in our district to control user rights on our ibooks and Macbooks. It's "ok", but not "great". Works well for restrictions, but not so well for un-restrictions. For remote monitoring, our teachers have Apple Remote Desktop- similar to VNC, but more feature-rich (and expensive!). For monitoring users' web activities (all we really are told to care about), we have our Squid logs. Students who take their lappys home obviously have to either a) change their proxy settings (which they need admin rights to do, so that's out); or b) run an alternative browser (we set up Firefox with no proxies for this purpose, and they use Safari in-school).