All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows
It's an odd school that allows the pupils decide what applications to use.
"The licensing agreements are alright - we're looking at about £28/workstation/year for ~450 machines, "
I thought you said earlier that that it was about 350 machines total the last time.
"There isn't enough scope in the Curriculum to let kids even learn about alternative operating systems. I use Linux at home exclusively for desktop use, yet at work we're using 450ish XP clients, 5 Windows-based servers and 1 Linux server (for internet caching/filtering)"
I thought you said earlier that you used Linux on three of your backend servers.
"It annoys me that there isn't much I can do personally to let them know there are alternatives out there without running my own after school class or something, which I can't see many people wanting to attend (and I'm not the teaching type)"
Why don't you get a teacher to set up an Open Source club, you know, the one who showed the pupils the Knoppix bootable CD once. I don't know of any kid of school age who is not interested in novelty, in my experience you can't keep them out of the computer room. How difficult can Open Source be after all you mother can use it. She even does her own updates.
"getting the teachers to put time in learning the new interface so they can teach the kids is the hard part!"
But you just said that there wasn't 'scope' in the curriculum teachers for learning new things and you didn't have the time or the inclination and weren't the teaching type.
"unless you get the application developers to start making things cross platform, we can't move to Linux/[other alternative]"
As the main article pointed out, it is a bad getting locked in to the one platform. How about teaching them computing instead of Windows.
was: I'm a sysadmin at a school in the UK... (Score:5, dis-Informative)
"it seems that their universities are actually much more Windows-centric than US schools. Could this be because they networked later - the US has a strong Unix base dating from the days of ARPANet"
Actually it was all Unix/VaxVMS/Novell until the PHBs decided over the heads of their own IT dept to 'upgrade' to NT. The UK universities have a long history of involvement with the developement of the Internet.
1973 Peter Kirstein at University College London (UCL) established the first transatlantic packet network link - Rutherford Laboratory IBM 360/195 in the UK linked through UCL and satellite link from Norway to ARPAnet. In November the RL machine is the most powerful on the ARPAnet
the total legal justification (from the US viewpoint) for running the network services between Arpanet and the UK networks between 1973 and 1988 was the need to test these developments with real traffic
"I'm just pondering here not seriously implying anything, but that sounds similiar to something MS did with OS's and media players/browsers etc"
Considering people have a choice as to what search engine to use and Google don't have a desktop monopoly I don't think it is at all similar. No doubt once Microsoft embed search directly in the apps that anomaly will soon be corrected.
Um, hate to rain on your ideological parade, but the AK-47 is not a western-made firearm. I imagine you'll see rather a lot of them in these troubled regions
The reason it's 'troubled' is that it is full of diamands, gold and OIL. You don't have to be on an 'ideological parade' to oppose the international arms trade. Top Arms Exporters: United States, Russia, China
Never mind that, though. Much more important to demonize the West than to actually try to, you know, educate people
Don't need to demonize the west. It's doing a good enough job of that already. And it is the west who is the top exporter of arms to the third world, the same place that the other poster accuses the OLPC of stealing food from.
"The fact that you are here, writing that, means they are democracies, or at least you have free speech. Go say that in China, or another real regime, and watch what happens"
We have free speech as long as we don't excercise it.
"One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded"
He didn't actually say discarded, what he said they would be repaired at government depots or replaced.
"There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant"
You're kidding right?.. So projects like Computer Aid International should be banned. Incidentally the cost of these free computers usually works out at around £10,720 per 20ft container.
"a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies"
But then again neither is the US or its satellite in Europe, GB ltd. For decades protests were allowed across the road from the House of Commons, but not any more. It took the party of the workers to sneek in the leglisation, over the weekend and while parliament was on holiday. Eight arrested in Iraq protest
"There is one aspect of the OLPC that really worries me: the software"
I thought OLPC was based on Fedora Core sponsored by Red Hat Inc. so I wouldn't worry.
"Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
If they won't be seeing a network then how would security be a problem.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
With two more betas to go before the summer, Bletsas was unfazed by the glitches. He also called the current state of the software "barely useable," but again was confident that it would be where it needed to be by launch.
Do you have any links or citations that quotes Bletsas as saying this?
"I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day"
The people of Sudan and elsewhere are starving because of continual civil war brought on by the use of other technology sold them by the west, namely GUNS. Providing them with the OLPC and a meal are not necessarly mutually exclusive.
"Even more baffling, the current moderation is "40% Insightful, 30% Informative". Funny maybe, but what "insight" or "information" does the parent post provide? Ridiculous"
It's called mod trolling where a good comment gets modded down while an obvious attempt at astroturfing gets modded up. You see the same thing happening over on DIGG.
"Notes was a pretty cool product, but they chose to work on the OS/2 version of 123 instead of the Windows version"
Do you have any citation that Lotus only choose to develop for OS/2 and what timeframe are we talking here..
"4 He goes on to say, on the other hand, we are in a real struggle versus Notes. What's Notes?"
"8 I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes -- that is Lotus Notes -- WordPerfect to achieve,and which will give Office a real advantage"
"It's the use of the undocumented API's that is the main source of the 'Blue screen of death' that has been attributed to Windows instability"
So Notes failed because it ran on OS/2 and used undocumented API calls. The reason they have to use undocumented API's is that MS keeps hiding them and using them only in its own applications.
was: The actual recollections of someone that was there
"The last big Windows worm was quite a while ago. They are still alive thanks to the unaware"
`The 'big one' is coming. A major worm attack is just days away. It's no drill, say the security experts.. The bug in question is one of 23 patched Tuesday by Microsoft, and one of 16 tagged by the software developer as "critical.".. It affects all currently-supported versions of Windows, can be exploited without end users lifting a finger, and in some experts' eyes, rivals the bug that led to 2003's destructive MSBlast attack.`
"Windows has a lot of ports open compared to other machines mostly because it was designed to operate in a operate in an Active directory enviornment...and because RPC is overally relied upon"
Is it possible to design a directory service and still be secure. For instance where are all the in-the-wild exploits for Novell eDirectory.
"Yes you can get a virus delivered by email, but this is true of any OS where the user is running as root ( admin ( if the os even supports it ) ) and opens up an attachment.. Linux and Mac OSx have had plenty of exploits to get a file install things."
The typos are a nice touch. Opening an attachment in Linux or OS X is not the dangourious activity it is on Windows as open does not equate to execute. Even running as root, which you don't have to do, unlike Windows where running as non-admin makes the machine unusable.
"Nobody likes to mention that Windows file security is far more advanced then Linux's will be for quite sometime"
The reason 'nobody likes to mention' it is that it isn't even true. 'User Account Control' was know as SUDO on Linux long before it put in an appearance in Vista. The rest of the Vista 'security' features are not even needed under Linux.
"I won't be suprised to see a mac mode in Vista sometime soon. It wouldn't really be that hard for Windows to stick the file menu up on the top of the screen when a Window takes focus"
The Linux Mac lookalike desktop is called Xfce and has been out for years. What is it with this computer innovation begins and ends with Vista.
"The fact of the matter that no ones wants to talk about is MS is becoming fairly secure if installed with it's patches and stuck behind a firewall"
Who are these people who don't want to talk about MS becoming fairly secure and why would this be deemed worthy of mention.
"Imagie you installed Redhat 3.0 and then put yourself on the network. I'm sure someone out there could right a worm for Redhat 3.0 right?"
ROFL..
"ActiveX has as well which was a stupid idea to compete with Java which was poorly executed"
It's Javas' fault that ActiveX is so insecure..;)
"The NYT guy could say Mac OSx and Linux have less threats so switching to them is a solution, but getting yourself a firewall is the best. Go to Bestbuy and pay the whatever fee for the geek squad to come install it.
I don't know what he could have said only what he actually said:
"Using a non-Windows-based PC may be one defense against these programs, known as malware"
"Use a firewall program that warns you about outgoing connections that botnets make to communicate with control software"
And with dot.NET and it's JIT compiler and COM over HTML, a firewall isn't going to be of much use.
was: MS Should have put out Windows XP Second Edition (Score:5, Excuses)
Galaxys clump more than they should or even form never mind keep their distinctive shape given the current theory of gravitation. Rather than update Newton they invent dark matter. There is also the case of that probe that is leaving the solar system faster that it should. Does dark matter account for that too. Why don't they just bring back the aether.
"Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a theory that explains the galaxy rotation problem without assuming the existence of dark matter"
Is there really any proof that 'the cough' is caused by the oil plant, besides 'the locals' saying it is?
"Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children"
"The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it"
It's the negligent PC owners. As long as the general Internet-connected public is dumb enough to let this kind of crap continue the bad guys will prevail"
As long as the manufacturers are allowed to sell such defective product botnets, phishing and viruses will be a problem. Incidentally what indemnification does the software maker or the AV vender give us against getting compromised with a 'virus'.
"Nothing will solve this problem other than having the users educated and responsible"
"the dialog boxes for self-signed certificates and such signed by an CA look quite similar to the normal user"
"Guiding the users to more responsibility is the only thing which can help - in all security affairs"
Nonsence, the root cause of the problem is the vast numbers of Windows computers out there hijacked into the service of some botnet. As such it is up to the manufacturers to make them secure. Relying on the user to click or not click in a box is futile in the extrame.
was: It is not a hardware or software Problem! (Score:1)
"Technical superiority doesn't mean as much when you can't get vendor support"
What vendor support? A while back I set up a wireless/dell/btinternet laptop. I have been back in three times since for unpaid for tech support. The talking CD wasn't configured to pick up wireless connections. Sound doesn't work except under admin, Talk/Talk as stopped working for no reason. The spam blocker freezes on downloading of email. The call center in India wrongly advises me a) the router is incompatible with BT b)to replace the NIC card and/or c) reinstall.
"This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere"
Gates regularly changes directions and is good at predicting things after the fact. How soon will Encarta show him predicting robots in 2002. His book the Road Ahead barely mentioned the Internet, the updated version had more.
was Gates has changed direction. This is significant. (Score:5, Informative)
"Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell"
I would like to see the robot industry so as Microsoft and a few niche players will have total control of the sector. Of course the niche players won't have any real choice in the matter. If you bozos let us we will run it like we run the Windows franchise achieving total lockin. Anyone disagrees, bugs in the software will cause the robots to pour hot coffee all over them;)
Slashdot Mirror
"This does not come as a surprise for people having worked in IT and with OSS for some time."
..
Stand by for a least one patent-imdemnification-fud post in this thread
Hey Steve, why not just call it the íPhone
I thought the deal with HavenCo fell through because Sealand isn't recognised by any other country.
'Would you like to see the menu?' he said,
'or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?'
'Huh?' said Ford.
All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows
It's an odd school that allows the pupils decide what applications to use.
"The licensing agreements are alright - we're looking at about £28/workstation/year for ~450 machines, "
I thought you said earlier that that it was about 350 machines total the last time.
"There isn't enough scope in the Curriculum to let kids even learn about alternative operating systems. I use Linux at home exclusively for desktop use, yet at work we're using 450ish XP clients, 5 Windows-based servers and 1 Linux server (for internet caching/filtering)"
I thought you said earlier that you used Linux on three of your backend servers.
"It annoys me that there isn't much I can do personally to let them know there are alternatives out there without running my own after school class or something, which I can't see many people wanting to attend (and I'm not the teaching type)"
Why don't you get a teacher to set up an Open Source club, you know, the one who showed the pupils the Knoppix bootable CD once. I don't know of any kid of school age who is not interested in novelty, in my experience you can't keep them out of the computer room. How difficult can Open Source be after all you mother can use it. She even does her own updates.
"getting the teachers to put time in learning the new interface so they can teach the kids is the hard part!"
But you just said that there wasn't 'scope' in the curriculum teachers for learning new things and you didn't have the time or the inclination and weren't the teaching type.
"unless you get the application developers to start making things cross platform, we can't move to Linux/[other alternative]"
As the main article pointed out, it is a bad getting locked in to the one platform. How about teaching them computing instead of Windows.
was: I'm a sysadmin at a school in the UK... (Score:5, dis-Informative)
Actually it was all Unix/VaxVMS/Novell until the PHBs decided over the heads of their own IT dept to 'upgrade' to NT. The UK universities have a long history of involvement with the developement of the Internet.
Maybe the advertising collapse happened because one company owns the entire market?
.. ;)
Yea, Google is the new Übersoft
"I'm just pondering here not seriously implying anything, but that sounds similiar to something MS did with OS's and media players/browsers etc"
Considering people have a choice as to what search engine to use and Google don't have a desktop monopoly I don't think it is at all similar. No doubt once Microsoft embed search directly in the apps that anomaly will soon be corrected.
was: Re:Unemployment? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um, hate to rain on your ideological parade, but the AK-47 is not a western-made firearm. I imagine you'll see rather a lot of them in these troubled regions
The reason it's 'troubled' is that it is full of diamands, gold and OIL. You don't have to be on an 'ideological parade' to oppose the international arms trade. Top Arms Exporters: United States, Russia, China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry
Never mind that, though. Much more important to demonize the West than to actually try to, you know, educate people
Don't need to demonize the west. It's doing a good enough job of that already. And it is the west who is the top exporter of arms to the third world, the same place that the other poster accuses the OLPC of stealing food from.
"The fact that you are here, writing that, means they are democracies, or at least you have free speech. Go say that in China, or another real regime, and watch what happens"
..s age.php
s -in-jail-with-saint-john.html
4 5-20050513FrenchBloggerArrestedThenSued.html
d -of-the-story/
We have free speech as long as we don't excercise it.
Jailed for blogging
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/27/opinion/ed
Blogger arrested at Atlantica conference
br> http://oldmaison.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-few-hour
French Blogger Arrested Then Sued
http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-
Canadian blogger arrested trying to enter the US.
http://www.ensight.org/archives/2005/03/17/the-en
"One thing that I notices when I read the article is that the distributors were suggesting that for most failures other than an LCD failure the thing would probably just be discarded"
.. So projects like Computer Aid International should be banned. Incidentally the cost of these free computers usually works out at around £10,720 per 20ft container.
He didn't actually say discarded, what he said they would be repaired at government depots or replaced.
"There is no mention of whether this has been considered, or if these devices may be RoHS compliant"
You're kidding right?
was: Toss em in the dump? (Score:1)
"a good deal of the so called third world countries that will need it aren't democracies"
But then again neither is the US or its satellite in Europe, GB ltd. For decades protests were allowed across the road from the House of Commons, but not any more. It took the party of the workers to sneek in the leglisation, over the weekend and while parliament was on holiday. Eight arrested in Iraq protest
was: I don't think the OLPC is a good idea
I thought OLPC was based on Fedora Core sponsored by Red Hat Inc. so I wouldn't worry.
"Those machines may not see a network connection after they are sold, so the software has to be right first time. It also has to be secure.
If they won't be seeing a network then how would security be a problem.
However, the OLPC folks seem unworried:
Do you have any links or citations that quotes Bletsas as saying this?
was: Software (Score:5, Interesting)
"I would imagine that starving people in the Sudan, or wherever they end up distributing these things, will pass them of in a heartbeat if it gets them a meal for a day"
The people of Sudan and elsewhere are starving because of continual civil war brought on by the use of other technology sold them by the west, namely GUNS. Providing them with the OLPC and a meal are not necessarly mutually exclusive.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/sudan1103/
http://www.ecosonline.org/back/aboutus.html
Is this really the best idea (Score:1)
"Even more baffling, the current moderation is "40% Insightful, 30% Informative". Funny maybe, but what "insight" or "information" does the parent post provide? Ridiculous"
It's called mod trolling where a good comment gets modded down while an obvious attempt at astroturfing gets modded up. You see the same thing happening over on DIGG.
was: Score 5, Insightful? (Score:-1, Offtopic)
Do you have any citation that Lotus only choose to develop for OS/2 and what timeframe are we talking here..
"It's the use of the undocumented API's that is the main source of the 'Blue screen of death' that has been attributed to Windows instability"
So Notes failed because it ran on OS/2 and used undocumented API calls. The reason they have to use undocumented API's is that MS keeps hiding them and using them only in its own applications.
was: The actual recollections of someone that was there
Diskless workstations or partition restored from hidden image.
was: Deep Freeze (Score:5, Advert)
"Windows has a lot of ports open compared to other machines mostly because it was designed to operate in a operate in an Active directory enviornment...and because RPC is overally relied upon"
Is it possible to design a directory service and still be secure. For instance where are all the in-the-wild exploits for Novell eDirectory.
"Yes you can get a virus delivered by email, but this is true of any OS where the user is running as root ( admin ( if the os even supports it ) ) and opens up an attachment
The typos are a nice touch. Opening an attachment in Linux or OS X is not the dangourious activity it is on Windows as open does not equate to execute. Even running as root, which you don't have to do, unlike Windows where running as non-admin makes the machine unusable.
"Nobody likes to mention that Windows file security is far more advanced then Linux's will be for quite sometime"
The reason 'nobody likes to mention' it is that it isn't even true. 'User Account Control' was know as SUDO on Linux long before it put in an appearance in Vista. The rest of the Vista 'security' features are not even needed under Linux.
"I won't be suprised to see a mac mode in Vista sometime soon. It wouldn't really be that hard for Windows to stick the file menu up on the top of the screen when a Window takes focus"
The Linux Mac lookalike desktop is called Xfce and has been out for years. What is it with this computer innovation begins and ends with Vista.
"The fact of the matter that no ones wants to talk about is MS is becoming fairly secure if installed with it's patches and stuck behind a firewall"
Who are these people who don't want to talk about MS becoming fairly secure and why would this be deemed worthy of mention.
"Imagie you installed Redhat 3.0 and then put yourself on the network. I'm sure someone out there could right a worm for Redhat 3.0 right?"
ROFL
"ActiveX has as well which was a stupid idea to compete with Java which was poorly executed"
It's Javas' fault that ActiveX is so insecure
"The NYT guy could say Mac OSx and Linux have less threats so switching to them is a solution, but getting yourself a firewall is the best. Go to Bestbuy and pay the whatever fee for the geek squad to come install it.
I don't know what he could have said only what he actually said:
And with dot.NET and it's JIT compiler and COM over HTML, a firewall isn't going to be of much use.
was: MS Should have put out Windows XP Second Edition (Score:5, Excuses)
Galaxys clump more than they should or even form never mind keep their distinctive shape given the current theory of gravitation. Rather than update Newton they invent dark matter. There is also the case of that probe that is leaving the solar system faster that it should. Does dark matter account for that too. Why don't they just bring back the aether.
"Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a theory that explains the galaxy rotation problem without assuming the existence of dark matter"
"'Ether' returns in a bid to oust dark matter"
"She's also harmful to Second Life's culture."
..
Then why not start your own virtual reality freedom fighters group
It's the negligent PC owners. As long as the general Internet-connected public is dumb enough to let this kind of crap continue the bad guys will prevail"
As long as the manufacturers are allowed to sell such defective product botnets, phishing and viruses will be a problem. Incidentally what indemnification does the software maker or the AV vender give us against getting compromised with a 'virus'.
It's not the PC's being targeted... (Score:1)
"Nothing will solve this problem other than having the users educated and responsible"
"the dialog boxes for self-signed certificates and such signed by an CA look quite similar to the normal user"
"Guiding the users to more responsibility is the only thing which can help - in all security affairs"
Nonsence, the root cause of the problem is the vast numbers of Windows computers out there hijacked into the service of some botnet. As such it is up to the manufacturers to make them secure. Relying on the user to click or not click in a box is futile in the extrame.
was: It is not a hardware or software Problem! (Score:1)
"Technical superiority doesn't mean as much when you can't get vendor support"
What vendor support? A while back I set up a wireless/dell/btinternet laptop. I have been back in three times since for unpaid for tech support. The talking CD wasn't configured to pick up wireless connections. Sound doesn't work except under admin, Talk/Talk as stopped working for no reason. The spam blocker freezes on downloading of email. The call center in India wrongly advises me a) the router is incompatible with BT b)to replace the NIC card and/or c) reinstall.
was Vendor support (Score:3, You're kidding)
"This is a significant change in direction for Bill Gates. Up until 2000 or so, he'd publicly stated that robotics wasn't going anywhere"
Gates regularly changes directions and is good at predicting things after the fact. How soon will Encarta show him predicting robots in 2002. His book the Road Ahead barely mentioned the Internet, the updated version had more.
was Gates has changed direction. This is significant. (Score:5, Informative)
"Imagine being present at the birth of a new industry. It is an industry based on groundbreaking new technologies, wherein a handful of well-established corporations sell"
;)
I would like to see the robot industry so as Microsoft and a few niche players will have total control of the sector. Of course the niche players won't have any real choice in the matter. If you bozos let us we will run it like we run the Windows franchise achieving total lockin. Anyone disagrees, bugs in the software will cause the robots to pour hot coffee all over them