Hey, look. Slackware is fine if you like it -- which, as it happens, I do. But installing anything other than the subset of frequently used applications that are available as slackware packages is often somewhere between annoying if./configure,make,make install works and do it yourself dentistry without anesthetic painful if it doesn't. Slackware simply isn't for everyone.
There's a lot to be said for apt-get. I sometimes wish I could tolerate Ubuntu for the convenience of apt-get. But I've tried it several times and it's never been remotely satisfactory. And trying to fix/work around problems... my God. I'd rather deal with the *&^*$ Windows Registry.
If memory serves me correctly, there's nothing all that new here. Back around 1960, the USAF was flying radio controlled WWII bombers out over the Gulf of Mexico to use in interception tests. Same thing, today? Better technology.
The days when desktop environments improved as time went by seem to have gone. Now they just get more and more annoying with every iteration.
I have no mod points (I rarely post here anymore). But I think this nails a very real and quite annoying problem. Software of all sorts tends to start off simple, easy to use, but buggy and limited. As time goes by, problems get fixed, disconnects are resolved, obvious missing capabilities are provided. Then crap creeps in. And eventually the product becomes mostly crap. Bloated, slow, clunky, and -- too often -- virtually or actually unusable. Doesn't always happen. Windows (and Unix) hardware detection and driver installation seems finally to have reached the levels we were promised in 1995... and 1996... and 1997... and.... But it does happen often.
I've never used Icewm except for maybe 15 minutes to see if it looked usable. As I recall, it did. But does is really need much fixing? Would fixing it make it better? Would "fixing" it risk ending up with an incoherent, increasingly incomprehensible, shambles as has happened with Internet user interfaces, the Microsoft Windows UI, and a multitude of other software? If all Icewm needs is a few modest fixes, maybe it really doesn't need anything more than finding a student or enthusiast looking for a project.
If it needs extensive serous work, that's a different issue and probably does involve money.
And is Icewm really better/more useful than Fluxbox or Openbox or other more or less OK windows managers that may already provide all the capabilities the OP needs?
I think, and I'm not as smart as I once was, so this an opinion, not a statement of fact, that a geosynchronous satellite would be eclipsed by the Earth for a significant percentage of the time. There's probably an orbit that maximizes energy collection, but I don't have the slightest idea what it looks like.
I agree that putting a solar collector in orbit would be extraordinarily expensive using any currently extant technology. As would be maintaining it. On top of which, what would the point be? Solar energy can be collected on the surface at a small fraction of the cost and a technician can drive or walk to any component needing repair, Sure, a ground based facility might have to be larger than a space based facility, because of atrmospheric and sun angle losses. But not enough to make much difference?
BTW, I have to believe that a solar collector in orbit would probably constitute mankind's largest ever solar sail Is there some simple, cost effective, way to keep it from departing orbit on a journey in the general direction of Betelgeuse?
It won't be collected until the end of the tax year... just that you have to back-date it to the six-days-from-now mark.
Not that I know squat about how sales taxes are collected in Massachusetts, but across the border in Vermont, you pay them, as I recall, quarterly and the amount isn't as much a problem as the fact that many clients -- schools, local governments, etc are tax exempt but you still need to report the sale and their tax exempt certificate number. Which means one more piece of data to collect and one more piece of paper to send to someone periodically along with a check. OTOH, most resellers would presumably already be set up to handle this stuff if they ever resell hardware.
I'd say this is mostly a marketing issue, not a knowledge issue. In 50 years including a number of years working on missiles and satellites, I really never needed to know much beyond trigonometry and algebra. The occasional (and they were rare) forays into linear algebra (for non-mathematicians that's using matrices to solve systems of linear equations). and statistics were stuff I could look up if I knew where to look which I did. I'd venture to say that operating systems programmers, database programmers, etc probably don't need any math they didn't know when they were eleven.
But there is a problem with selling yourself. Your problem is how to do that.
On the bright side. I didn't come close to understanding calculus. For the most part I still don't understand calculus beyond a vague idea of what it is trying to do -- at least not integral calculus. But I discovered early on that most of the budding engineers and scientists in my classes didn't understand the subject any better than I did. So I managed to squeak out Cs.
Not only have I never needed integral calculus, no one has ever asked me what sort of grades I got in any of my classes.
If I were to create an account on LivingSocial, it would get my "disposable" password, the password for accounts I just don't care about at all. Only gradually do accounts and services migrate into the category where I bother remembering a specific and hard password for them.
That's rational.
Frankly, most password security "thinking" seems to me demented. There is no way I or most anyone else could possibly keep track of hundreds of different strong passwords with arbitrary characters, random case, etc without writing them down. And maybe not then.
And there is no practical way that I could secure that password list.
Neither is it likely that information providers can secure password information -- strong, weak or non-existent -- on their end. That's why massive password breaches are a daily event.
Bluntly, the industry's attempts at security can't and don't provide much security and are more a massive usability problem than anything else. How is "user education" supposed to overcome faulty engineering?
Look folks, the method you want to use to secure stuff simply doesn't work very well. Never has. Never will. Forget about "educating" users, and start thinking seriously about how to secure stuff, and whether most of what you are trying to "secure" actually needs securing. Maybe in decade or three you'll come up with something that works.
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
You wouldn't. Nor would I. This is an expensive toy for people with a lot of money (and perhaps not overmuch sense), it is not, and was never intended to be, practical transportation for the masses. If you happen to live someplace with abundant electricity and no gasoline or diesel and need something more than a golf cart, I believe Nissan will sell you something resembling a car that might satisfy your needs. It'll be expensive compared to a compact car. And probably idiosyncratic as well, but it might work out OK.
"So you are saying that Microsoft is not the prime mover behind UEFI Secure Boot? I don't think so."
I think (and I could be way wrong) that Secure Boot is something that Microsoft found already present in UEFI and has twisted to try to gain a competitive advantage. My increasingly faulty memory tells me the UEFI has a loooong history and in its present form is the misbegotten love child of several 1990s efforts to design a BIOS replacement for PCs. My impression (which also could be way wrong) is that it is an unlovely thing whose single virtue is that it can handle very large disks.
Feel free to research the situation and correct me if I'm wrong
Not an expert, but my impression is that UEFI is (yet another) bad idea poorly implemented from Intel and a committee of camels.
Exactly how booting an OS can permanently cripple purportedly secure firmware eludes me, but after the past two decades of watching strange ideas become accepted wisdom, I don't find it all that surprising. (OK, OK, I guess bricked is pretty secure. Not very damn useful, but very secure.)
By no means a dumb idea, but not especially likely. The Ediacarian/Vendian faunas don't seem closely related to the mainstream faunas of arthropods, echinoderms,brachiopods,vertebrates,etc that appeared a few tens of millions of years later although there are a few tenuous proposed relationships. In all likelihood, the Ediacarians were not ancestoral to the conventional forms. So sure, they could have lived on land (or, one supposes, freshwater lakes) while the conventional forms were evolving in the seas.
On the other hand, it's a little difficult to explain why the ediacarians seem to disappear shortly after the conventional critters arrive on the scene.... Unless one assumes that the often mobile, and sometimes toothy, conventional critters ate the presumably more or less sessile Ediacarians -- which is only possible if both types lived in the same medium
Actually, it is a bit worse than that. Let us assume that eating Twinkies has no affect whatsoever on toenail cancer (TNC) rates. Let us assume that 20 groups set out to measure the affect of Twinkies on TNC. Since "proof" levels are traditionally set at p=.0.05 levels of significance, it is quite possible that not one, but two groups will get "significant" results. One group proves that Twinkies cause TNC. The other that Twinkies prevent TNC. Both groups will try to publish. They will likely succeed. The remaining groups move on to some other worthy effort.
(For the non-North American readers, Twinkies are an artificial pastry. They have a shelf life probably measured in millenia and are thought to be indestructible. Taste? Taste tests show that most people think that the product tastes better than the cellophane wrapper. Their manufacturer has filed for banruptcy, but the Twinkie franchise is probably considered to be an asset rather than a liability ).
Look mate. If you think that the school can use eMail and other technology more, your first step is to trot yourself down to the school and talk to the teacher. But you work? Many schools have occasional parent's nights so that folks who have day jobs can meet the staff and have face to face discussions.. Better, if you can get time off during the day, put in some hours volunteering in the classroom. If there are technical issues (e.g. computers are in a lab whereas teachers spend almost all their time in a classroom), talk to the principal. If that fails, take them to the school board. Most likely they have public meetings from time to time where you can push your agenda -- once you know enough to have an agenda.
Having spent a lot of hours in a K-8 school, I have some strong opinions on technology and schools. Mostly they come down to computers and technology have some uses, but far fewer than most techies assume. And to a great extent, technology in schools needs to be simple and bulletproof. Things that a lot of it isn't remotely.
(And, Oh yeah. Windows sucks and is a pathetic platform that negatively affects the use of computers in education because of the high cost of making anything run reliably on it across a range of computers)
But back to you. I'm skeptical about the general utility of eMail to communicate most stuff with parents (or anyone else). For starters, not all households have computers -- or reliable internet connections. And some living arrangements are unconventional. e.g. The kid spends Monday and Tuesday nights with grandma because mom is working an out of town job and dad is in some central Asian hellhole courtesy of your tax dollars. Who do emails go to? And teachers probably can't maintain 15 to 35 or more running e-mail threads with parents without it cutting into classroom time or numerous meetings, or homework review, or other parts of their job. But there are likely some exceptions.
Mostly, try understanding the problem (if there actually is a problem) before you try to solve the problem.
Aren't hagfish (technically Agnatha) related? Yes, but probably not too closely? They are about as old. But the fossil information on early vertebrates and similar critters is very sparse. It's hard to tell all that much about them. For example, there is a phylum of critters called Chaetognaths whose fossils somewhat resemble both fish and conodonts. They have eyes, fins, teeth. But unlike the conodonts, they survived until the present allowing biologists to determine that internally, the chaetognats don't look even remotely like fish. For example Chaetognaths have neither a respiratory system nor a circulatory system. Based only on fossils, the Chatognatha would probably incorrectly be thought to be closely related to fish and conodont.s The hypothecated resemblence of conodonts to fish may be equally imaginary.
The obvious answer -- and one selected by many millions of Americans -- is never to buy a GM vehicle. GM sold me a really badly designed and crafted vehicle 50 years ago, and I resolved never to buy another car from them. Based on occasional rentals and friend's experiences with GM's cars, it's one of the wiser decisions I've made in life.
I know it's a radical suggestion, but you could try reading the linked pdf. It's really quite interesting.
IIRC Windows got sniped at because manufacturer's diagnostic software runs on Windows. So, all that needs to happen is that a compromised vehicle gets hooked up in the dealer's shop. The car then compromises Windows which then cheerfully reflashes the ECUs in every car it is subsequently hooked up to.
If it will make you feel better, Unix also got criticized because some ECUs ship with live Telnet interfaces and tools like vi, nc, ftp, etc available.
My only experience with Library software was with Follett's package in a school library with about 8000 items. I do not recommend Follett. It runs fine and user complaints were minimal. As I recall, the database self destructed a couple of times, but reviving the DB was fairly straightforward. On the other hand installation and upgrade were unpleasant. The maintenance instructions verged on incomprehensible and one upgrade required rebuilding the entire data base -- a process that turned out to be appallingly slow. I had to wait for a vacation to do that. And from I'm told it is expensive. Fortunately, it didn't come out of my budget.
On my last visit to our local library, the librarian -- who was not a fan of Follett either -- told me that they had just upgraded from Follett to an open source product of some sort thereby saving a bundle of money. She was quite enthused about the new software. I didn't have a lot of time, but I did look at the screens a user would encounter and they looked fine. It looks like the program they changed to is Koha. Here's a link to their catalog on line http://brownell.kohavt.org/
I worked for a number of years in a K-8 school. My opinion. Computers aren't useless, but for the current state of things, there are plenty of things for which they are not an answer. First of all, the teachers need computers as do the administrators. As a practical matter, teachers are tied to their classrooms for much of the day. They need a networked computer and a printer.
Students? Computers are somewhat of a challenge to kids who do not know their alphabet and can not read. OTOH computers can be very useful in 2nd-4th grade. There are a gazillion little programs (Many of which are MSDOS or Windows 3 based and will not run on "Modern Computer Hardware" without an incredible amount of tinkering) that teach basic stuff like arithmetic, English grammar, some basic science, some history. Allowing students to spend part of their day exploring this stuff at their own pace is probably a good idea.
Older students? With rare exceptions, the only thing computers provide is word processing, spell checking, and a refuge from reality. Nothing wrong with any of that -- within limits.
And for the one student in 10 or 20 with exceptional skills/interest in some specific area -- computers, chemistry, physics, art, literature... anything but playground skills -- computers can be (but often aren't) a gateway to knowledge. That's especially true I think in schools systems with large class sizes and limited resources. I don't think this is being adequately explored.
But handing everyone an ipad or kindle or whatever and expecting technology to work miracles. That's ludicrous.
They should be encouraged, but they need a bit of supervision. They don't lack brains. But they very likely do lack judgment. Trust me on this. You don't need to stomp on them as long as what they are doing is more or less harmless. But you really, really want to know what they are up to.
As for your other ideas. If you spend some time in a school, you'll find that they take all take loads of time and resource. If you are prepared to donate a lot of your time for free, you might be able to implement one of them... maybe... Which one?
Didn't bother to read all the comments so maybe this has been covered. But just in case:
Speaking from experience. Make sure that there is a comfortable place in the room from which you, or whoever is watching over the lab can see every monitor. Do not depend on tools that allow you to look at the screens one by one. You want to know what is going on in your lab, who is having trouble, what forbidden conduct is going on, etc. You don't have to pounce on every transgression BTW. If an otherwise OK student wants to play Freecell toward the end of the lab period, maybe it's OK to overlook it. Your call.
But you want to try to make sure that the "troublemakers" -- who may well be smarter and more computer savvy than you are -- have not bypassed the firewall and are not adding pornography as an optional feature on the school's website.
"I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works."
For the most part it doesn't work all that well. Trapped somewhere inside of Slashdot is a simple, minimally featured, bulletin board that would allow an exchange of ideas without breaking browsers and otherwise impeding communication. But they keep it sedated, and the chances that it will escape are slimmer every year.
Exactly. I don't encrypt e-mail for the same reason that I don't weld my car doors shut to prevent theft when it is parked in the dooryard. Encryption is not needed for my eMail and it would be a nuisance for me and for the recipient if I used it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, look. Slackware is fine if you like it -- which, as it happens, I do. But installing anything other than the subset of frequently used applications that are available as slackware packages is often somewhere between annoying if ./configure,make,make install works and do it yourself dentistry without anesthetic painful if it doesn't. Slackware simply isn't for everyone.
There's a lot to be said for apt-get. I sometimes wish I could tolerate Ubuntu for the convenience of apt-get. But I've tried it several times and it's never been remotely satisfactory. And trying to fix/work around problems ... my God. I'd rather deal with the *&^*$ Windows Registry.
If memory serves me correctly, there's nothing all that new here. Back around 1960, the USAF was flying radio controlled WWII bombers out over the Gulf of Mexico to use in interception tests. Same thing, today? Better technology.
Like 16-bit DOS applications and Windows XP, all things eventually reach end of life.
Get over it and move on to something else.
T'aint broke so it's time to discard it?
Might want to consider the remote possibility that progress and motion are not always synonymous
The days when desktop environments improved as time went by seem to have gone. Now they just get more and more annoying with every iteration.
I have no mod points (I rarely post here anymore). But I think this nails a very real and quite annoying problem. Software of all sorts tends to start off simple, easy to use, but buggy and limited. As time goes by, problems get fixed, disconnects are resolved, obvious missing capabilities are provided. Then crap creeps in. And eventually the product becomes mostly crap. Bloated, slow, clunky, and -- too often -- virtually or actually unusable. Doesn't always happen. Windows (and Unix) hardware detection and driver installation seems finally to have reached the levels we were promised in 1995 ... and 1996 ... and 1997 ... and .... But it does happen often.
I've never used Icewm except for maybe 15 minutes to see if it looked usable. As I recall, it did. But does is really need much fixing? Would fixing it make it better? Would "fixing" it risk ending up with an incoherent, increasingly incomprehensible, shambles as has happened with Internet user interfaces, the Microsoft Windows UI, and a multitude of other software? If all Icewm needs is a few modest fixes, maybe it really doesn't need anything more than finding a student or enthusiast looking for a project.
If it needs extensive serous work, that's a different issue and probably does involve money.
And is Icewm really better/more useful than Fluxbox or Openbox or other more or less OK windows managers that may already provide all the capabilities the OP needs?
I think, and I'm not as smart as I once was, so this an opinion, not a statement of fact, that a geosynchronous satellite would be eclipsed by the Earth for a significant percentage of the time. There's probably an orbit that maximizes energy collection, but I don't have the slightest idea what it looks like.
I agree that putting a solar collector in orbit would be extraordinarily expensive using any currently extant technology. As would be maintaining it. On top of which, what would the point be? Solar energy can be collected on the surface at a small fraction of the cost and a technician can drive or walk to any component needing repair, Sure, a ground based facility might have to be larger than a space based facility, because of atrmospheric and sun angle losses. But not enough to make much difference?
BTW, I have to believe that a solar collector in orbit would probably constitute mankind's largest ever solar sail Is there some simple, cost effective, way to keep it from departing orbit on a journey in the general direction of Betelgeuse?
It won't be collected until the end of the tax year... just that you have to back-date it to the six-days-from-now mark.
Not that I know squat about how sales taxes are collected in Massachusetts, but across the border in Vermont, you pay them, as I recall, quarterly and the amount isn't as much a problem as the fact that many clients -- schools, local governments, etc are tax exempt but you still need to report the sale and their tax exempt certificate number. Which means one more piece of data to collect and one more piece of paper to send to someone periodically along with a check. OTOH, most resellers would presumably already be set up to handle this stuff if they ever resell hardware.
I'd say this is mostly a marketing issue, not a knowledge issue. In 50 years including a number of years working on missiles and satellites, I really never needed to know much beyond trigonometry and algebra. The occasional (and they were rare) forays into linear algebra (for non-mathematicians that's using matrices to solve systems of linear equations). and statistics were stuff I could look up if I knew where to look which I did. I'd venture to say that operating systems programmers, database programmers, etc probably don't need any math they didn't know when they were eleven.
But there is a problem with selling yourself. Your problem is how to do that.
On the bright side. I didn't come close to understanding calculus. For the most part I still don't understand calculus beyond a vague idea of what it is trying to do -- at least not integral calculus. But I discovered early on that most of the budding engineers and scientists in my classes didn't understand the subject any better than I did. So I managed to squeak out Cs.
Not only have I never needed integral calculus, no one has ever asked me what sort of grades I got in any of my classes.
If I were to create an account on LivingSocial, it would get my "disposable" password, the password for accounts I just don't care about at all. Only gradually do accounts and services migrate into the category where I bother remembering a specific and hard password for them.
That's rational.
Frankly, most password security "thinking" seems to me demented. There is no way I or most anyone else could possibly keep track of hundreds of different strong passwords with arbitrary characters, random case, etc without writing them down. And maybe not then.
And there is no practical way that I could secure that password list.
Neither is it likely that information providers can secure password information -- strong, weak or non-existent -- on their end. That's why massive password breaches are a daily event.
Bluntly, the industry's attempts at security can't and don't provide much security and are more a massive usability problem than anything else. How is "user education" supposed to overcome faulty engineering?
Look folks, the method you want to use to secure stuff simply doesn't work very well. Never has. Never will. Forget about "educating" users, and start thinking seriously about how to secure stuff, and whether most of what you are trying to "secure" actually needs securing. Maybe in decade or three you'll come up with something that works.
In the meantime. Get real.
Why the fuck would I ever want to buy one of these cars?
You wouldn't. Nor would I. This is an expensive toy for people with a lot of money (and perhaps not overmuch sense), it is not, and was never intended to be, practical transportation for the masses. If you happen to live someplace with abundant electricity and no gasoline or diesel and need something more than a golf cart, I believe Nissan will sell you something resembling a car that might satisfy your needs. It'll be expensive compared to a compact car. And probably idiosyncratic as well, but it might work out OK.
"So you are saying that Microsoft is not the prime mover behind UEFI Secure Boot? I don't think so."
I think (and I could be way wrong) that Secure Boot is something that Microsoft found already present in UEFI and has twisted to try to gain a competitive advantage. My increasingly faulty memory tells me the UEFI has a loooong history and in its present form is the misbegotten love child of several 1990s efforts to design a BIOS replacement for PCs. My impression (which also could be way wrong) is that it is an unlovely thing whose single virtue is that it can handle very large disks.
Feel free to research the situation and correct me if I'm wrong
Not an expert, but my impression is that UEFI is (yet another) bad idea poorly implemented from Intel and a committee of camels.
Exactly how booting an OS can permanently cripple purportedly secure firmware eludes me, but after the past two decades of watching strange ideas become accepted wisdom, I don't find it all that surprising. (OK, OK, I guess bricked is pretty secure. Not very damn useful, but very secure.)
By no means a dumb idea, but not especially likely. The Ediacarian/Vendian faunas don't seem closely related to the mainstream faunas of arthropods, echinoderms,brachiopods,vertebrates,etc that appeared a few tens of millions of years later although there are a few tenuous proposed relationships. In all likelihood, the Ediacarians were not ancestoral to the conventional forms. So sure, they could have lived on land (or, one supposes, freshwater lakes) while the conventional forms were evolving in the seas.
On the other hand, it's a little difficult to explain why the ediacarians seem to disappear shortly after the conventional critters arrive on the scene. ... Unless one assumes that the often mobile, and sometimes toothy, conventional critters ate the presumably more or less sessile Ediacarians -- which is only possible if both types lived in the same medium
Actually, it is a bit worse than that. Let us assume that eating Twinkies has no affect whatsoever on toenail cancer (TNC) rates. Let us assume that 20 groups set out to measure the affect of Twinkies on TNC. Since "proof" levels are traditionally set at p=.0.05 levels of significance, it is quite possible that not one, but two groups will get "significant" results. One group proves that Twinkies cause TNC. The other that Twinkies prevent TNC. Both groups will try to publish. They will likely succeed. The remaining groups move on to some other worthy effort.
(For the non-North American readers, Twinkies are an artificial pastry. They have a shelf life probably measured in millenia and are thought to be indestructible. Taste? Taste tests show that most people think that the product tastes better than the cellophane wrapper. Their manufacturer has filed for banruptcy, but the Twinkie franchise is probably considered to be an asset rather than a liability ).
Look mate. If you think that the school can use eMail and other technology more, your first step is to trot yourself down to the school and talk to the teacher. But you work? Many schools have occasional parent's nights so that folks who have day jobs can meet the staff and have face to face discussions.. Better, if you can get time off during the day, put in some hours volunteering in the classroom. If there are technical issues (e.g. computers are in a lab whereas teachers spend almost all their time in a classroom), talk to the principal. If that fails, take them to the school board. Most likely they have public meetings from time to time where you can push your agenda -- once you know enough to have an agenda.
Having spent a lot of hours in a K-8 school, I have some strong opinions on technology and schools. Mostly they come down to computers and technology have some uses, but far fewer than most techies assume. And to a great extent, technology in schools needs to be simple and bulletproof. Things that a lot of it isn't remotely.
(And, Oh yeah. Windows sucks and is a pathetic platform that negatively affects the use of computers in education because of the high cost of making anything run reliably on it across a range of computers)
But back to you. I'm skeptical about the general utility of eMail to communicate most stuff with parents (or anyone else). For starters, not all households have computers -- or reliable internet connections. And some living arrangements are unconventional. e.g. The kid spends Monday and Tuesday nights with grandma because mom is working an out of town job and dad is in some central Asian hellhole courtesy of your tax dollars. Who do emails go to? And teachers probably can't maintain 15 to 35 or more running e-mail threads with parents without it cutting into classroom time or numerous meetings, or homework review, or other parts of their job. But there are likely some exceptions.
Mostly, try understanding the problem (if there actually is a problem) before you try to solve the problem.
Aren't hagfish (technically Agnatha) related? Yes, but probably not too closely? They are about as old. But the fossil information on early vertebrates and similar critters is very sparse. It's hard to tell all that much about them. For example, there is a phylum of critters called Chaetognaths whose fossils somewhat resemble both fish and conodonts. They have eyes, fins, teeth. But unlike the conodonts, they survived until the present allowing biologists to determine that internally, the chaetognats don't look even remotely like fish. For example Chaetognaths have neither a respiratory system nor a circulatory system. Based only on fossils, the Chatognatha would probably incorrectly be thought to be closely related to fish and conodont.s The hypothecated resemblence of conodonts to fish may be equally imaginary.
Ward Moore -- Bring the Jubilee
The obvious answer -- and one selected by many millions of Americans -- is never to buy a GM vehicle. GM sold me a really badly designed and crafted vehicle 50 years ago, and I resolved never to buy another car from them. Based on occasional rentals and friend's experiences with GM's cars, it's one of the wiser decisions I've made in life.
I know it's a radical suggestion, but you could try reading the linked pdf. It's really quite interesting.
IIRC Windows got sniped at because manufacturer's diagnostic software runs on Windows. So, all that needs to happen is that a compromised vehicle gets hooked up in the dealer's shop. The car then compromises Windows which then cheerfully reflashes the ECUs in every car it is subsequently hooked up to.
If it will make you feel better, Unix also got criticized because some ECUs ship with live Telnet interfaces and tools like vi, nc, ftp, etc available.
My only experience with Library software was with Follett's package in a school library with about 8000 items. I do not recommend Follett. It runs fine and user complaints were minimal. As I recall, the database self destructed a couple of times, but reviving the DB was fairly straightforward. On the other hand installation and upgrade were unpleasant. The maintenance instructions verged on incomprehensible and one upgrade required rebuilding the entire data base -- a process that turned out to be appallingly slow. I had to wait for a vacation to do that. And from I'm told it is expensive. Fortunately, it didn't come out of my budget.
On my last visit to our local library, the librarian -- who was not a fan of Follett either -- told me that they had just upgraded from Follett to an open source product of some sort thereby saving a bundle of money. She was quite enthused about the new software. I didn't have a lot of time, but I did look at the screens a user would encounter and they looked fine. It looks like the program they changed to is Koha. Here's a link to their catalog on line http://brownell.kohavt.org/
I worked for a number of years in a K-8 school. My opinion. Computers aren't useless, but for the current state of things, there are plenty of things for which they are not an answer. First of all, the teachers need computers as do the administrators. As a practical matter, teachers are tied to their classrooms for much of the day. They need a networked computer and a printer.
Students? Computers are somewhat of a challenge to kids who do not know their alphabet and can not read. OTOH computers can be very useful in 2nd-4th grade. There are a gazillion little programs (Many of which are MSDOS or Windows 3 based and will not run on "Modern Computer Hardware" without an incredible amount of tinkering) that teach basic stuff like arithmetic, English grammar, some basic science, some history. Allowing students to spend part of their day exploring this stuff at their own pace is probably a good idea.
Older students? With rare exceptions, the only thing computers provide is word processing, spell checking, and a refuge from reality. Nothing wrong with any of that -- within limits.
And for the one student in 10 or 20 with exceptional skills/interest in some specific area -- computers, chemistry, physics, art, literature ... anything but playground skills -- computers can be (but often aren't) a gateway to knowledge. That's especially true I think in schools systems with large class sizes and limited resources. I don't think this is being adequately explored.
But handing everyone an ipad or kindle or whatever and expecting technology to work miracles. That's ludicrous.
They should be encouraged, but they need a bit of supervision. They don't lack brains. But they very likely do lack judgment. Trust me on this. You don't need to stomp on them as long as what they are doing is more or less harmless. But you really, really want to know what they are up to.
As for your other ideas. If you spend some time in a school, you'll find that they take all take loads of time and resource. If you are prepared to donate a lot of your time for free, you might be able to implement one of them ... maybe ... Which one?
Didn't bother to read all the comments so maybe this has been covered. But just in case:
Speaking from experience. Make sure that there is a comfortable place in the room from which you, or whoever is watching over the lab can see every monitor. Do not depend on tools that allow you to look at the screens one by one. You want to know what is going on in your lab, who is having trouble, what forbidden conduct is going on, etc. You don't have to pounce on every transgression BTW. If an otherwise OK student wants to play Freecell toward the end of the lab period, maybe it's OK to overlook it. Your call.
But you want to try to make sure that the "troublemakers" -- who may well be smarter and more computer savvy than you are -- have not bypassed the firewall and are not adding pornography as an optional feature on the school's website.
"I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works."
For the most part it doesn't work all that well. Trapped somewhere inside of Slashdot is a simple, minimally featured, bulletin board that would allow an exchange of ideas without breaking browsers and otherwise impeding communication. But they keep it sedated, and the chances that it will escape are slimmer every year.
Exactly. I don't encrypt e-mail for the same reason that I don't weld my car doors shut to prevent theft when it is parked in the dooryard. Encryption is not needed for my eMail and it would be a nuisance for me and for the recipient if I used it.