You're making two dubious assumptions:
1. American Fundamentalist Christian behavior is rooted in rationality.
Probably not. Like the moslems who kill people over cartoons they don't like, our mid-American fundamentalist Christians are all feeling. Facts and logic need not apply. They'll invent any facts they need to support what their hearts tell them is right. And they think pornography is not right. Very not right. So just don't bring the subject up in any way including acknowleging pornography's existence with a.XXX domain... unless of course you fancy being targeted by a cruise missile... OK?
2. Pornography peddlers don't want a.XXX domain.
I haven't asked the porn dealers, but I doubt most care one way or the other about being shunted off to a.XXX red light district. They are mostly interested in presenting images of naked ladies and or gentlemen (plus the occasional domestic animal) performing certain natural acts. They (most of them) presumably want to be paid for said images. The probable result of a.XXX domain is that their audience will contain fewer people who find said images offensive, and also fewer people (teenagers) who find the images interesting, but can't easily pay. As long as the paying customers can still get to the site and.XXX doesn't add significantly to their cost of doing business, why should they care?
You could be right, but I suspect not. If -- and I emphasize if -- there is a problem, it seems more likely to be caused by the relatively high powered radiation from the cell phone antenna, not the probably relatively low powered leakage from the cell phone circuits. As far as I know, newer phones don't put much, if any, less power into their antennas than older phones. If they did, their range would probably be shorter which cell phone companies and cell phone users would regard as undesirable.
It's true that the wiring in the cell phone could be emiting radiation at different frequencies than the RF link to the cell phone tower. But few people really think that we know of any danger from any radiation that is likely to be coming out of a cell phone -- whether intentional or accidental -- that is likely to be dangerous to users.
That's why this study is possibly important. If cell phones can cause any physiological change -- whether rare tumors or increased sexual potency -- it is important to understand how. Who knows, if cell phone radiation can really affect physiology, cell phone users might be cooking the neurons in their brains. That might be a problem as it seems to me that an awful lot of cell phone users don't have all that much cranial capacity to spare.
***Actually it's perfectly possible for things to work better in an emulated environment. You no longer have the issue of applications A, B, C, D, E, etc wanting the same computer set up in mutually incompatable ways. Since each application can be given its own virtual machine.***
It's possible, and sometimes that will be the result. The problem is that some programs will probably run worse or not at all. It's not like software written for Windows does all that great a job of telling you why it has exited to the OS, or locked the keyboard, or somehow propelled the monitor into some wierd graphics mode. You have to debug this stuff -- with thoroughly inadequate tools.
What you have here is basically a people dynamics problem. A fair percentage of your teachers are going to either not give a damn about computers or will genuinely dislike them. Mostly, these folks have come to terms with the PC they have running the way it now runs. So we have Mrs Techsucks in Kindergarten. As far as she's concerned the computer is a nuisance that IT and the administration use primarily to add aggravation to her life which already comes with sufficient aggravation thank you very much. The last four "process improvements" they have tried to impose on her have failed dismally and she has ended up wasting a lot of hours then reverting to the same manual solution she has been using since 1990. She thinks the computer is good for generating soem classroom materials, writing and printing notes to parents, running about six educational "games" like Millie's Math House, and conducting eMail exchanges from time to time with a few parents. Windows does all that stuff fine
Now you install Linux and an emulator. Two of the games actually run better. But no one notices because they ran well enough before. Two don't work anymore. (As it happens, two of them didn't work under Windows either, but someone six or eight years ago tweaked Windows until they did. The games that the tweaker couldn't get to run are long since forgotten and no longer exist in the teacher's worldview). You will have to spend time -- a lot of it maybe -- getting these oddball programs to run under Linux... which may not be possible. (After all, it's not like you know what was tweaked to get the thing to run.) If you don't get the games to run, the teacher has lost a third of her "educational game" capability.
You may think that she's better off without those games. I might think so also. But let me assure you that is not going to be her view of things. On average, this is a negative gain proposition. The very best you can hope for is that you will not aggravate the customer. Sometimes you won't. But sometimes, you will. There better be some significant pluses elsewhere to make up for the inevitable ill-will that will be generated in the classrooms where things don't go well. I don't see some modestly reduced software and maintenance costs downstream as being sufficient to cover the changeover costs and likely credibility loss.
Microsoft licensing costs for a school are the least of the problems. But the time and effort required to find someone who will sell academic Microsoft licenses and deliver the proper materials is a lot more than one would expect. Yes, one can find folks who on the Internet who will claim to sell the licenses. And eventually one will find a vendor who will actually sell them and will -- after filling out reams of stupid forms -- take the school's paper (schools in the US and I expect in most developed countries use Purchase Orders and generally won't just write a check). Plan on spending more hours than it is worth upgrading.
But then, why bother to upgrade? If Windows 95 or 98 worked when the machine was purchased, it'll still work.
Also, if the system is networked, Windows NT in any guise places an outrageous load on the system in order to download the student's desktop in the same shape it was previously last seen in. This more often than not is the last thing you want to do since the kids, and many of the teachers for that matter, are constantly trashing their configurations. This is broken in Windows 9 unless you turn on profiles which -- I guarantee you -- a sane administrator will do only once. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory way the emulate Windows 9's behavior -- revert to a standard desktop at login with the user's directory assigned a drive letter -- in NT.
But, we're getting afield here...
I actually worked in an elementary-middle school for a number of years doing IT, and I'd have moved the place over to Linux if I thought it was remotely possible. Windows -- any flavor -- is a mess, and quite costly to maintain. If one were in some remote country and starting from scratch, Linux would be worth considering. But no one these days is.
The biggest plus at this point for Linux isn't cost of product, it's relative freedom from viruses and adware. which are costly to filter and even more costly to remove. I personally think that spending a fortune to connect schools to the Internet so that you can spend another fortune trying to keep the kids from downloading the stuff they are really interested in (porn, music, games) is sort of dumb. But I seem to be the only living
human that feels that way.
Reasons you can't easily switch to Linux:
1. Most of the educational software -- games, grading software, etc -- already in place has no Linux equivalent. Much of it barely runs under Windows, and lot of it probably won't run at all under WINE or an emulator (I didn't try that. I could be wrong. But probably not.)
2. The external world is full of people who deliver paperwork and products in formats that are only supported by the latest version of Windows. Often this is material that the school HAS to use or respond to. So at least a few of the PCs have to stay on XP.
3. Every teacher has different needs and computer practices and few of them are computer savvy. Switching them to a new environment is a LOT of work since every new classroom will present new and different challenges. It will not, in the perception of the users, buy them much since their old Windows installation did what they needed.
4. Network printing -- which doesn't work all that well under Windows -- is even worse with Linux. (CUPS = Can't Usually Print Stuff isn't entirely fair anymore, but it still has some basis in fact). Trust me, with the polygot mix of computers and printers that schools tend to have, one will probably see a broad selection of known printer problems as well as some that have never been described.
Things that can be done:
1. Use Linux servers wherever possible.
2. Use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. I actually installed Open Office on many of the school machines along with MS Office. The only complaints I got were that it took forever to start (I think that is fixed now) and that it generally didn't do any better with screwed up.DOC and
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You're making two dubious assumptions: 1. American Fundamentalist Christian behavior is rooted in rationality. Probably not. Like the moslems who kill people over cartoons they don't like, our mid-American fundamentalist Christians are all feeling. Facts and logic need not apply. They'll invent any facts they need to support what their hearts tell them is right. And they think pornography is not right. Very not right. So just don't bring the subject up in any way including acknowleging pornography's existence with a .XXX domain ... unless of course you fancy being targeted by a cruise missile ... OK?
2. Pornography peddlers don't want a .XXX domain.
I haven't asked the porn dealers, but I doubt most care one way or the other about being shunted off to a .XXX red light district. They are mostly interested in presenting images of naked ladies and or gentlemen (plus the occasional domestic animal) performing certain natural acts. They (most of them) presumably want to be paid for said images. The probable result of a .XXX domain is that their audience will contain fewer people who find said images offensive, and also fewer people (teenagers) who find the images interesting, but can't easily pay. As long as the paying customers can still get to the site and .XXX doesn't add significantly to their cost of doing business, why should they care?
You could be right, but I suspect not. If -- and I emphasize if -- there is a problem, it seems more likely to be caused by the relatively high powered radiation from the cell phone antenna, not the probably relatively low powered leakage from the cell phone circuits. As far as I know, newer phones don't put much, if any, less power into their antennas than older phones. If they did, their range would probably be shorter which cell phone companies and cell phone users would regard as undesirable. It's true that the wiring in the cell phone could be emiting radiation at different frequencies than the RF link to the cell phone tower. But few people really think that we know of any danger from any radiation that is likely to be coming out of a cell phone -- whether intentional or accidental -- that is likely to be dangerous to users. That's why this study is possibly important. If cell phones can cause any physiological change -- whether rare tumors or increased sexual potency -- it is important to understand how. Who knows, if cell phone radiation can really affect physiology, cell phone users might be cooking the neurons in their brains. That might be a problem as it seems to me that an awful lot of cell phone users don't have all that much cranial capacity to spare.
It's possible, and sometimes that will be the result. The problem is that some programs will probably run worse or not at all. It's not like software written for Windows does all that great a job of telling you why it has exited to the OS, or locked the keyboard, or somehow propelled the monitor into some wierd graphics mode. You have to debug this stuff -- with thoroughly inadequate tools.
What you have here is basically a people dynamics problem. A fair percentage of your teachers are going to either not give a damn about computers or will genuinely dislike them. Mostly, these folks have come to terms with the PC they have running the way it now runs. So we have Mrs Techsucks in Kindergarten. As far as she's concerned the computer is a nuisance that IT and the administration use primarily to add aggravation to her life which already comes with sufficient aggravation thank you very much. The last four "process improvements" they have tried to impose on her have failed dismally and she has ended up wasting a lot of hours then reverting to the same manual solution she has been using since 1990. She thinks the computer is good for generating soem classroom materials, writing and printing notes to parents, running about six educational "games" like Millie's Math House, and conducting eMail exchanges from time to time with a few parents. Windows does all that stuff fine
Now you install Linux and an emulator. Two of the games actually run better. But no one notices because they ran well enough before. Two don't work anymore. (As it happens, two of them didn't work under Windows either, but someone six or eight years ago tweaked Windows until they did. The games that the tweaker couldn't get to run are long since forgotten and no longer exist in the teacher's worldview). You will have to spend time -- a lot of it maybe -- getting these oddball programs to run under Linux ... which may not be possible. (After all, it's not like you know what was tweaked to get the thing to run.) If you don't get the games to run, the teacher has lost a third of her "educational game" capability.
You may think that she's better off without those games. I might think so also. But let me assure you that is not going to be her view of things. On average, this is a negative gain proposition. The very best you can hope for is that you will not aggravate the customer. Sometimes you won't. But sometimes, you will. There better be some significant pluses elsewhere to make up for the inevitable ill-will that will be generated in the classrooms where things don't go well. I don't see some modestly reduced software and maintenance costs downstream as being sufficient to cover the changeover costs and likely credibility loss.
But then, why bother to upgrade? If Windows 95 or 98 worked when the machine was purchased, it'll still work.
Also, if the system is networked, Windows NT in any guise places an outrageous load on the system in order to download the student's desktop in the same shape it was previously last seen in. This more often than not is the last thing you want to do since the kids, and many of the teachers for that matter, are constantly trashing their configurations. This is broken in Windows 9 unless you turn on profiles which -- I guarantee you -- a sane administrator will do only once. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory way the emulate Windows 9's behavior -- revert to a standard desktop at login with the user's directory assigned a drive letter -- in NT.
But, we're getting afield here ...
I actually worked in an elementary-middle school for a number of years doing IT, and I'd have moved the place over to Linux if I thought it was remotely possible. Windows -- any flavor -- is a mess, and quite costly to maintain. If one were in some remote country and starting from scratch, Linux would be worth considering. But no one these days is.
The biggest plus at this point for Linux isn't cost of product, it's relative freedom from viruses and adware. which are costly to filter and even more costly to remove. I personally think that spending a fortune to connect schools to the Internet so that you can spend another fortune trying to keep the kids from downloading the stuff they are really interested in (porn, music, games) is sort of dumb. But I seem to be the only living human that feels that way.
Reasons you can't easily switch to Linux:
1. Most of the educational software -- games, grading software, etc -- already in place has no Linux equivalent. Much of it barely runs under Windows, and lot of it probably won't run at all under WINE or an emulator (I didn't try that. I could be wrong. But probably not.)
2. The external world is full of people who deliver paperwork and products in formats that are only supported by the latest version of Windows. Often this is material that the school HAS to use or respond to. So at least a few of the PCs have to stay on XP.
3. Every teacher has different needs and computer practices and few of them are computer savvy. Switching them to a new environment is a LOT of work since every new classroom will present new and different challenges. It will not, in the perception of the users, buy them much since their old Windows installation did what they needed.
4. Network printing -- which doesn't work all that well under Windows -- is even worse with Linux. (CUPS = Can't Usually Print Stuff isn't entirely fair anymore, but it still has some basis in fact). Trust me, with the polygot mix of computers and printers that schools tend to have, one will probably see a broad selection of known printer problems as well as some that have never been described.
Things that can be done:
1. Use Linux servers wherever possible.
2. Use Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. I actually installed Open Office on many of the school machines along with MS Office. The only complaints I got were that it took forever to start (I think that is fixed now) and that it generally didn't do any better with screwed up .DOC and