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Software Monoculture in Schools? 819

Posted by Cliff from the a-blindspot-for-today's-schools dept.
The World Is Not Microsoft asks: "I've been worried by changes my school has made over the past year or so to the general computer setup we have. The school is a City Technology College, and as a result of this there are an abundance of computers around the building which everyone is free to use. When I first started there (almost six years ago now) there were approximately even numbers of Windows and Mac machines. As happens over time these machines got out of date and had to be replaced, and the school has spent a lot of money buying replacements. What I'm bothered about is that when they did this they completely eliminated the Mac population, and by the time school starts again in September the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000. What's the situation like in other schools? Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?"
"There have been security problems with these systems in the past (mostly IE toolbars which requested content from sites which were blocked by the content filters, which caused problems for everyone), and with all the recent IE security problems I'm surprised that the people in charge aren't considering alternative systems (I know Linux would be too much to ask, but rolling out some OS X machines would be good). In addition to this, those who actually study ICT are required to use MS Office for spreadsheet and database tasks; no OpenOffice allowed."
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Software Monoculture in Schools? More

Software Monoculture in Schools?

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  • Be a rebel! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SeanTobin ( 138474 ) * <byrdhuntr AT hotmail DOT com> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:02PM (#9764400)
    Seriously.. Rebel! Grab yourself a Knoppix CD and outperform everyone else. Now, you have to be smart about this. It'll probably involve some after-school time practicing and making sure you can do absolutely everything your particular course requires without problems. Knoppix by itself is a very eye-appealing distro but you can do some things to spruce it up (i.e. School logo's where appropriate. Set proper homepages. Setup any printers and other networking quirks.) Having the one computer in the class that looks the nicest will quickly draw the attention of your fellow stu^H^H^Hrebels.

    Now, Your teachers depending on their level of expertise will probably either ask you to remove that theme or actually wonder what the heck is going on. This can be a good thing if your teachers are smart - getting them to join the rebellion will help you in your fight.

    Now, this being a technical school of sorts, you probably have other enlightened persons hanging around. Polish your CD up a bit, make a funky logo to print on it and start handing it out to your fellow rebels. Having 3-4 people in a class running something different will immediately draw the attention of everyone else in the classroom (the innate nature of teenagers to all be different in roughly the same way :). The fact that it is something you "shouldn't" be doing will only help you here.

    Now, you have a few possible endgame scenarios. First off, the administration can come down hard on you for violating their acceptable use policy. Not much you can do in this case without ending up as a martyr.

    Secondly, you could get the teachers more or less on your side. As long as you get your work done, they shouldn't have much of a problem. The more converts you get, the more points you score :) Just don't ask them for support when your sound stops working.

    Finally you could achieve total victory against the software monopolist throughout the galaxy (or at least your classroom). This is when every student carries around his/her own Knoppix CD or you get a Linux-based installation on a few computers. This is a tough one, but you can always shoot for it.

    So my advice is don't try and convince anyone. Show them that you can do the same job faster, cheaper, better, and somehow learn more out of it. Administrators like the first three benefits, and teachers especially like that last bit!

    • Windows is the more common system, and there are more applications, particularly educational applications. More hardware is supported, and people have more experience with Windows.

      I fail to see why it's so surprising the school went to Windows. I have yet to come across a high school or college that wasn't this way.
      • One that isn't- University of Illinois Urbana-Champain. For those who don't know, its a very well respected Engineering school. Its public computer labs tend to be 3 PC:1 mac. All of its engineering courses, with few exceptions, are taught on Unix. We run two varieties of Unix: Solaris and HPUX. They probably have some linux bouncing around by now, I haven't been there for 3 years.
        • Let us not forget when Apple did the same thing 10-15 years ago. They flooded the elementary and high schools with machines, hoping students would be indoctrinated as they graduated and go with the flow. Why is everyone so hell-bent now that Microsoft is doing the same thing?
      • And windows computers are cheaper than Mac's.

        If you're driven by the price of the computer (and most budget-crunched schools are), Windows PC's are an easy choice.

        The reason Mac's were in the schools in the first place was that Apple HEAVILY discounted them to get them into the schools, those days are past unfortunately.

        • Re:Why is this such a surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by itistoday ( 602304 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @08:04PM (#9765434) Homepage
          And windows computers are cheaper than Mac's.

          There have been many surveys done by independent groups that have shown Macs to be cheaper in the long run. At my school, for example, we have the same situation--all PCs. While it sickens me every day to use them, I get a certain sadistic kick when certain "unfortunate" events happen. Example:

          My school also recently installed grading software on ALL the teachers computers, effectively whiping out the old pen-and-notebook grading system. Well, turned out that this wasn't a very smart move because for over two whole weeks, all grading systems were unusable because of the Blaster worm, and seriously degraded classroom productivity. The school had to pay lots of money to call in the "Alpha Team" (no joke) to come in and repair their lousy system.

          I'm sure that our school isn't the only that's experienced similar situations because of the counter-switch from the Mac, and there are always those windows-centric quirks that I see happening all the time too like "blue screens". The problem is tripled when 90% of the staff population barely understands the concept of a mouse (and this is in a school that's somewhere in the top 30 public schools in America).

          • Re:Why is this such a surprise? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by alatesystems ( 51331 ) <chris AT chrisbenard DOT net> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @08:30PM (#9765627) Homepage Journal
            As your school to install Software Update Services(SUS) [microsoft.com]. Free to run on windows servers running IIS (also free). I dislike Microsoft as much as the next *nix guy, but at work, I set up Software Update Services and it keeps all the boxen up to date with 0 user intervention. Your administrators aren't that bright if they don't keep their windows boxen up to date with software that is freely available.

            Then again, that's the same school system that taught you to spell "whiping".

            Chris
        • No, crappy white-box Windows PCs are cheaper than Macs.

          SomeGuy needed a computer. Just for fun, SomeGuy bought two machines, a Mac and a white box PC. Two years later, the white box starts crashing constantly because of its no-name motherboard. The machine gets replaced. Two years later, the fan fails (but nobody notices) and it takes the hard drive down with it after a few days of overheating and constant hangs. Two years later, something else goes wrong. SomeGuy replaces the PC and the Mac looks a

        • The reason Mac's were in the schools in the first place was that Apple HEAVILY discounted them to get them into the schools, those days are past unfortunately.

          Past? Right now I can get an iBook (combo drive) with Airport Extreme and iPod from Harvard for $1066. That is $411 under retail. Last week I bought a 17" Powerbook with Applecare for $2559. That is a $589 discount. Had I been buying it as personal, rather than departmental purchase, I could have thrown in an iPod for another $67 (after rebate).

          A

        • also add the cost reductions in only having to support one platform. runing 2 sets of file servers, managment stations etc is an unessasary expense.

          Also windows techs are a dime a dozen. mac or linux techs cost more. a tech who does both well is rare and expensive (i know, i am one)

          when your organization runs one or two apps that dont run on the mac, and realize that supporting 2 platforms is an unnessasry expense, the writing is on the wall.
      • If the school is a 'City Technology College', then a lot of people will go into 'mainstream' technology jobs.

        The mainstream uses Windows.

        The school is there to provide you with the skill necessary in today's workforce. They need to use their dollars wisely, and addressing the largest segment of technology, for as little money as possible, is the responsible thing for them to do.

      • Re:Why is this such a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) * on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:13PM (#9765071) Homepage Journal
        Congratulations, citizen! You have correctly answered the question: the sole purpose of education is to train everyone to do what everyone else is doing, exactly the way they've always done it, forever! Your cooperation is appreciated.

      • My school did not (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @08:21PM (#9765556)
        I was hired to be the computer teacher in the bush in northern Canada. The lab had decent hardware but we had to re-boot hourly to keep crashes at a "tolerable" level. I could not tolerate it and installed a Linux terminal server for peanuts. The whole lab then ran as thin clients. One decent machine running Linux was able to satisfy all the users in the lab at once. No data was lost all winter. See the .pdf report on the installation:http://www.skyweb.ca/~alicia/report.p df [skyweb.ca]

        My students loved Linux. They could do more faster and more reliably. A gui is a gui. A gui that does not crash is better. Favourite apps were OpenOffice, the GIMP, and Mozilla. Students learned to set up simple servers in 5 minutes or less on some of the doorstops laying around. The grade 12 students set up dynamic webpages using LAMP. Not one student had a bad thing to say about Linux because they had seen what the other OS would do. They definitely had marketable skills and many of them are prepared to use computers more effectively at home and work because of Linux. Of course, they did express their opinions about their decrepit, old, ugly, over-the-hill teacher.

      • ...put in a lab of 20 Mandrake Linux boxes for a special class centred around indigenous students. They loved it. They get extra street cred from their peers for using something different, and dragged other kids in to have a go.

        The room's teacher hated it, because he only knew one system and this wasn't it. That caused immense problems when it came time for the school to pay for setup but doesn't appear to have hobbled the students at all.

        In a related situation, I've just set up a Linux-and-thin-clients I

      • Re:Why is this such a surprise? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by miskatonic alumnus ( 668722 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @09:55PM (#9766114)
        Now I know this is heresy, especially on Slashdot, but there was a time in the not so distant past when people somehow (I know it's hard to believe), yes somehow managed to learn the three R's without the aid of computers. Don't shoot me! It's true.

        So, exactly WHICH applications that run exclusively on WINDOWS are of such importance that the high schools cannot fulfill their mission statement without them?

        As for the rest of your comment ...

        Windows is the more common operating system -- irrelevant. We should be teaching the applications, not the operating system. If the students absolutely need Windows specific information, they can get their MCSE after graduation. Next please.

        More hardware is supported -- irrelevant. Do these boxen need to be able to support every conceivable graphics/sound card combination, SCSI, RAID, and 3-dimensional printing? No. Determine which widely supported hardware will do the job for the least amount of money, and purchase as many of these identical machines as necessary.

        Don't get me wrong, Windows absolutely should be in the school. But, in the name of diversity and fairness (and the fact that the graduates never know which type of box they may end up sitting at) the schools should also have *nix boxen as well.

        After all, the day may come when Windows is NOT more common OS.

    • Re:Be a rebel! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by brokencomputer ( 695672 )
      That will be fine and dandy if the computer tech guys actually set up the computers so that anyone without a password can boot from a cd or a floppy, but sometimes the tech guys disable this and then your plan won't work. If I were you, I would just bring your laptop and use that. That way you won't have to worry about waiting for a computer to boot while everyone else is already started with their timed test.
    • Take it a step further, invest the $20 if you can into a bulk amount of CDs burn knopix or morphix on them with some cool theme and pass them out to everyone that happens to be around. Perhaps just wonder around and boot systems with them and leave them that way. Report boot and hardware problems back to knopix and morphix developers as I'm sure you will have several old systems that are sketchy on the support.

    • Re:Be a rebel! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 )

      Doesn't work, trust me.

      We tried. We actually have to work with Linux, on the desktop, as part of our ICT course. ( Think of remocable HDs here ) Half of the crap doesn't work. We can't access out network drives under Linux because no one has a clue how to log in to the AD network. Even if we do manage that and write up a report, then what? Print it? No printers in the classes, so we go to the library, boot up a PC with Knoppix, get thrown out for doing something that the library staff doesn't understand

      • Re:Be a rebel! (Score:3, Informative)

        by imroy ( 755 )

        Wow, what a clueless rant. Here's some suggestions:

        • OpenOffice can write both MSWord files and PDF files. Where's the supposed incompatability?
        • Just about every Linux distro nowadays uses DHCP to find network parameters.
        • Local proxy problems are an issue with the local network setup. Any competant network admin should set up transparent HTTP proxying and/or allow direct connections anyway.
        • Here's a recent eWeek article [eweek.com] about setting up Samba to work in an AD domain. Admittedly, it is hard to find docs fo

    • Re:Be a rebel! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jonathan_atkinson ( 90571 ) * <<jonathana> <at> <cleanstick.org>> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:05PM (#9765015) Homepage
      So, what, you've created a Linux monoculture? Why is that any better?

      From any point of view (virus attacks, security compromises, usefulness of older hardware etc), having software diversity is a good thing. And yes, this includes Windows, just like it includes Linux, MacOS, BSD, BeOS and suchlike.

      --Jon

    • Re:Be a rebel! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bgfay ( 5362 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @09:46PM (#9766068) Homepage
      I'm a teacher in a very small school with ten computers in our little lab. All but two of the computers run WinMe while the last two run XP and are administered by a tech staff off-site. We usually have one or two machines down at any time due to different software problems. Currently, one of the XP machines refuses to connect to the web though it will print to the networked printer and talk to the other computers on the network. Odd.

      I got tired of this but don't have a lot of power to make changes. Beyond that, I'm not willing to become a pro-bono sys admin for my school. I'm underqualified and too poor. Instead of tending to all of the machines I claimed computer #1 and ran Knoppix off a cd for a week. All of the kids wanted to try it and liked it except that it was slow running off the cdrom.

      Two kids and I installed Knoppix to the hard drive and it has been running without a problem since April. No problems at all. The two kids started making it look good and then got to see that they could do a lot with it including play games that the tech folks won't allow on the Windows machines. They introduced kids to it and I, in turn, introduced them all to having their own accounts on the machine. They loved that. (The windows machines are single user machines used by forty different people, ugh.)

      The only people unhappy with the situation are the tech folks offsite. One of them asked what was wrong with computer number one. Nothing, I said. It doesn't look right, she said. I told her it was running Linux. She said that she had heard of it. I gave her a Knoppix cd and told her to try it. "I'm not supposed to have pirated software," she said. I told her that I thought it would be okay just this once. Geez.

      Anyway, the point of this long-winded post is this: None of the kids has missed MS Word or IE. They asked about both and I said that Computer #1 doesn't run those any more. Instead, I showed them OpenOffice and Firefox. The kids showed them the games. Another teacher discovered The Gimp. Two kids moved the scanner from a non-functioning Windows box to the Knoppix one and got it working in no time.

      I'm still not willing to switch them all over, but Computer #1 works and works all the time. I have a feeling that one or two kids might want to make some changes to Computer #2 this year.

      How long before we get our hands on the server locked in the closet down the hall?

  • Its all about money (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jojowasher ( 656125 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:02PM (#9764404) Homepage
    When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac. Jojo

    • Re:Its all about money (Score:4, Insightful)

      by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:09PM (#9764497) Homepage Journal
      Exactly the comment I was going to make. Even at educational discounts, you can't beat a PC for hardware.

      The plus side of that hardware commitment is this: the software investment for Linux may be considerably cheaper. With schools (at least, around here) so strapped for cash, selling them on Linux may be easier than you think. Of course, there are probably support agreements in place that may work against such a move.

      In my high school, I watched the Macs take over - after a few security blips, not to mention the frustrated staff not being able to figure out how to do basic tasks, they saw it as a necessary move.
    • When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac.

      This might be true for the home consumer, but when in the business world, you use the best tool for the job. The cost of the hardware and operating system really hasn't been significant in the purchasing decision (all within reason of course), at least by my experience. Schools should be responsible enough to provide a variety of hardware/software/operating systems to properly prepare it's students.
    • When you can pick up a cheap windows desktop for $500, its hard to justify a Mac.

      If you've ever used and tried to maintain a $500 cheap Windows desktop, it's hard to justify not using a Mac.

      • Re:On the other hand... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jjeff1 ( 636051 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:26PM (#9764681)
        The school I consult for will be purchasing over 1000 PCs (with monitor) for 750$ each. Per seat costs for anti-virus and remote imaging bring the price up to 780$ per machine.

        We manage spyware and patches by remotly reimaging the machines. It's scheduled and completely hands-off. I can reimage a lab of 30 machines in an hour. As long as everyone remembers to save their files to their network drive, they'll never know anything happened to the PC.

        Schools generally get grants and capital project money which they can use to purchase NEW stuff. Rarely will they get money to maintain the old. This means the primary educational app my 1000 new 3 Ghz PCs will run was written for a Windows 3.11 peer to peer network, and it shows.

        As a result, you can imagine how very pleased I am to see students running knoppix or lugging in their own laptops or anything else that threatens the pathetic security I'm forced to setup just to make some of these apps work.

        Finally, I've worked with a fair number of students, including the smart ones who were permitted to take the cisco academy course. The vast majority have never even attempted to manage a network of a dozen PCs, let alone several hundred or thousand. I can only see huge problems with a classroom of kids playing BOFH on a production network they barely understand.
    • But universities don't buy cheap $500 PCs. Working at a university I see whole departments overhaul their computers every two years with brand new Dells. Do they need them? Nope. A little spring cleaning would make them work just fine, but no, they need new computers with all the bells and whistles just to use Word, Excel, and Outlook. Dell has a great scam going with huge markups for these institutional PCs.

      Yes, a home user or even a student can buy a brand new PC for $500, but for some reason unive
      • The reason this is done is because installing brand new hardware is a lot cheaper than getting 500 PCs retrofitted with RAM/HDD/burner whatever.. Say a technician costs $50/hour, and it takes 15 minutes to fit new RAM per machine (unscrew case, fit RAM, test RAM, screw case back up), it's just not worth it when you can buy brand new machines.

        While I'm willing to admit that they won't get them for $500, it won't be long before they do. PC hardware is getting really, really dirt cheap now and therefore it's
    • My kids went to a private school. The school mostly had Macs so old you could see Eve's teeth marks on the apple. A company donated their old PCs running W98, that were at least newer than the (abysmally slow) Apples, and "Voila!" - an all Windows school. (I think the guy who corrdinated the donation helped convert all the data, too.)

    • Re:Its all about money (Score:4, Insightful)

      by allgood2 ( 226994 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:05PM (#9765013)
      If you think these Universities are paying $500 for a PC, your sadly mistaken. For the various university departments that we provide support for a basic machine configuration is around $1100. Typically a Dell Optiplex GX260 or GX270, in the mini-Tower chasis so we can upgrade, and not have parts burn out as quickly, a 3 or 4 year service plan, and if the data on the machine is considered mission critical then also the keep hard drive option for failed drives.

      We've occasionally gone cheaper for some of the machines in open areas (getting a Celeron processor and skimpy on memory and hard drive size). But if your talking "Dude your getting a Dell", which most universities are, then the costs are equivalent to that of an eMac. In fact the eMac often comes out cheaper when your shooting for that combination of power and affordability.

      You could go for the Dell Dimension, and it would save you lots of money upfront, making it seem like power and affordability or in your reach. But from our perspective... anecdotally, we had two professors who didn't take our purchase recommendation and purchased five Dell Dimensions for a new project three years ago. All five machines have already been surplus. Two experienced so many hardware issues during their first year that they were basically unusable (failed motherboards, fried hard drives, dead fans, even the CD-RW drive stop working without a paper clip. Meanwhile every Optiplex purchased during the same time period, and even a year beforehand are still in use.

      For faculty and staff most universities pay for longevity in their computer systems, student work areas of course they often go for the cheapest since they expect the items to be trashed anyway.

      • Re:Its all about money (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rosyna ( 80334 )
        Yes, the school district I worked for paid about $1100 for each dell and maybe $200 for the software on each dell+support. But they also had to hire 26 part time technicians at about 20 grand a year. That is $520,000 a year just to pay the people to support the PCs. When the district was mostly/all macs, no school had a dedicated support technician, the teachers did all the fixing themselves.

        The math didn't quite work out. Buy 200 macs for the district per year (rotating replacement schedule), maybe pay $2

  • poor you (Score:5, Funny)

    by YetAnotherDave ( 159442 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:02PM (#9764405)
    your school website even has an MS colour scheme

    you're doomed, drop out now ;)

  • Better Off Dead... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cmstremi ( 206046 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:03PM (#9764417) Homepage
    When I first started there (almost six years ago now)...

    Lane, I've been going to this high school for 7 and a half years. I'm no dummy.

  • Microsoft's "generosity" (Score:5, Funny)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) * on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:03PM (#9764419) Homepage
    I think you'll find the disproportionate number of Windows PCs is the direct result of MS' selfless donations to cash starved educational establishments. It's true altruism; the fact the children will grow up with no experience of anything other than MS products is a completely unintentional side effect, and must be a complete surprise to Bill and his merry men...

    • Re:Microsoft's "generosity" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by i_r_sensitive ( 697893 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:14PM (#9764566)
      The best part of that is we all remember the halcyon days when Educators, Educational Institutions and Students could get Mac's at *STEEP* discounts.

      The funny thing is that it worked *so* well for Apple, they now have less than 3% of the desktop share...

      Of course, the funniest thing is that M$, in true fashion, is copying their competitors once again.

      But the punchline of this whole fiasco is that M$ is probably moving from the same unproved assumptions that Apple did. Hopefully when the strain of dealing with the OS becomes too much to bear, these folks will also vote with their wallets when the freebies come to an end.

  • Where I am... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tuxedo Jack ( 648130 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:04PM (#9764426) Homepage
    At my office (elementary school), I'm stuck with a network made up of 98, 2K, and XP machines, and they're 95% Dell.

    At UH-D, where I go to school, it's _all_ Dell and Windows XP or 2K unless you're in a high-level CS class and you've got Linux.

    I blame Dell and their cheap, bulk PCs - sell them cheap, throw in Windows, ensure a monoculture and continued upgrades from their company.

    On the plus side, they're now notoriously easy to reghost if something goes wrong.
    • And this kinda describes it, too.

      http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&dat e= 2004-07-14

    • Re:Where I am... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by QuantumRiff ( 120817 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:13PM (#9764551)
      I work at a small college, there are 3 of us in the IS dept, and probably about 1000 students. We buy dells for the reason you blame them for, their cheap, however there optiplex line is all hardware compatible. Meaning, if I order a GX270 at the start of the year, at the end of the year, I can still order the GX270 with the same parts.. (most companies will change the sound card, or no longer offer the same motherboard chipset, something small like that.) Because were a small college, I use Symantec ghost constantly. I've even tought the LRC staff how to force a machine to re-ghost itself over the network, without any intervention. (The click a button, and put in a password) Saves alot of time compared compared to them submitting a support case becuase "its broken" and me slogging over to that building and finding theres just a bunch of spyware..
      • That's cool and all, but maybe you could just use an OS that doesn't require constant ghosting? Sounds like you've automated the task, so that means it must happen fairly often.

        If that's the case, are you really getting bang for your buck? I dunno, but in our linux shop we don't reghost the machines, or reinstal the OS. They just don't break. I've never had to ghost/reinstall the few OS X boxes either.

        A car that breaks often and is easy to replace or a car that doesn't break. I know which one saves me mor
        • That's cool and all, but maybe you could just use an OS that doesn't require constant ghosting? Sounds like you've automated the task, so that means it must happen fairly often.

          When you have computers in public areas that are not sufficiently locked down, they will need to be wiped periodically. If you do sufficiently lock a computer down to prevent this, you often break some functionality (yes, even in Linux). It is *much* easier (regardless of OS) to leave permissions overly permissive and ghost it wh

      • Re:Where I am... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Monkelectric ( 546685 )
        You should be running a domain and using the security facilities of the domain to *prevent* users from screwing up their machines in the first place.

        Of course thats in a fantasy land where IT budgets are well funded. When I worked at a mid sized university (15,000 students), our IT budgets were often "Zero" and the management/staff would constantly demand new services and features. My main servers ran at a load average of 4 - 5 (an insanely high load average).

  • The free computers aren't the ones you want? Such a shame you're prevented from choosing a different college to attend.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:05PM (#9764434)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • needs to be said (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by adamruck ( 638131 )
    You need a hobby, or a girlfriend, or something. I cheer for non windows alternatives as loud as the next person, and I use linux at home. But what OS my school uses doesn't really matter to me.

  • Open Sourcing (Score:2, Informative)

    by muzik ( 748780 )
    At my school (University of Regina) they are actually going in the opposite direction. When I started 3 years ago, all of the public computers were Windows 98 or Windows 2000 - Now they have a complete Linux lab, another restricted lab that is 50/50 between Mac and windows. I really thing that going towards open source is a good idea, just based on the cost of licensing both windows and macintosh OSes.
  • is a fairly well-split mix -- some school sites have mostly PCs, some school sites have mostly Macs. It's around 50/50.

    The server room is a heterogeneous environment including FreeBSD, Netware, NetBSD, Linux, Solaris, MacOSX Server, and Windows Server 2003. Hooray for the computer equivalent of biodiversity, it means we have to choose software based on cross-platform availability and standards. It also doesn't hurt that most of the administrators use Macs.

  • That's entropy for ya (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:07PM (#9764463) Homepage
    Seriously, there was only one bad decision I can see here, and that was to go with windows, and I'm sure we can attribute this to laziness.

    Financially, it makes more sense to ditch apple's stuff. It's considerably more expensive than pc hardware, and in your enviroment, I can't see a real use for it.

    Once the decision was made to go with windows, the rest follow suit as common sense. Of course they are going to recommend against Open office, that's like adding moving parts to an already complicated machine.

    Same with IE, to a limited extent. Through the use of group policies, I've managed to, at several sites, neuter it, to protect the users from themselves, and with a SUS server in place, their risk is effectively reduced. Not that I wouldn't love to hook them up on firefox and the like, but some customers won't even consider the possibility.

    So..yay for entropy.
  • Why is Linux too much to ask? You know it comes in a box now. Granted I'm a MacOS X user to the core- but if the school has all X86 hardware Linux is a more viable option than MacOS X.

    Why they have all X86 is more on topic though. At my school it was a short sighted Principal who likes to pretend he's big into computers. I think that's the case most of the time. There was no evidence that price/upkeep was even evaluated for Macs, it was just assumed that they were more expensive.

  • Mostly MS and Unix (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Omega1045 ( 584264 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:08PM (#9764470)
    Where I went to school, almost every machine outside of the CompSci dept was a PC/Windows machine. In the compsci dept there were a number of linux, unix and pc workstations. Of course I went to a science and engineering school, which explains the lack of Macs. I think the Metalurgy department had some Macs as there were a few met programs that we Mac based. Also, the mining & geology departments had some old unix workstations that they were replacing with linux and windows 2000.

    In my professional life the only places I have ever encountered Macs were graphics designers and journalists. SO for my career, the college environment emulated the real world. That isn't meant to be flame bait, but there really are not a lot of Macs in use compared to Windows machines.
    • When I went to school, almost every machine outside the CS dept was a VT220 terminal hooked into the mainframe. And no, the mainframe did not run UNIX (but most of the CS computers did). There were a few Macs in depts that needed some kind of PC, and one or two DOS machines, but that was it. Hell, in some computer rooms, you had to use the teletypes. Count yourself lucky.

    • Re:Mostly MS and Unix (Score:5, Informative)

      by GregAllen ( 178208 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:07PM (#9765026) Homepage
      I went to a science and engineering school, which explains the lack of Macs.

      Science and engineering was traditionally one of the Mac's strong markets. When I was an EE undergrad (87-91), there were far more Macs than PCs in the labs, and some software development classes were done only on Macs. I got to learn Unix, too. As other posters have mentioned, free PC donations from Dell and Intel (with the requirement to run Windows) quickly replaced anything else. It's hard to compete with FREE. Now the fresh grads are all Windows users, and surprised there's anything else.

      When Mathworks cancelled MATLAB for the Mac, there was enough outcry that they eventually brought it back. Wolfram had enough sense to keep Mathematica on the Mac all along. There are plenty of people in science, engineering, research, and higher education that are still using Macs [apple.com]. I think MacOS X has begun a Mac resurgence with lots of geeks. It's nice to have Unix and productivity apps on the same box. LOTS of OSS programs just run on MacOS X.

      there really are not a lot of Macs in use compared to Windows machines

      And that means what, exactly? Linux Insider has definitive proof [linuxinsider.com] that scientists should use Macs. :) Are you a lemming, or a scientist? :)
  • ... it's in the Student Newspaper office. Quite frankly, I can understand the decision ... it's a LOT cheaper to get PCs than Macs, and when you're on a budget, you err on the side of getting MORE computers, not less.

    Quite frankly, it's a smart decision from a practicality standpoint as well. College isn't about your preference, it's about training you for the "real world" (theoretically, anyway), and that means that in a world where over 90% of computers are running Windows, that's what you should learn

  • Come on (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:08PM (#9764481) Journal
    Maybe I'm missing something, but how would adding a few Macs make the Windows systems any more secure? The monoculture issue is important for the worldwide spread of viruses and whatnot, but it's irrelevant to your point.

    At least be honest -- Windows sucks and you'd rather use something else.

    • Re:Come on (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:18PM (#9765107)
      Maybe I'm missing something, but how would adding a few Macs make the Windows systems any more secure? The monoculture issue is important for the worldwide spread of viruses and whatnot, but it's irrelevant to your point.

      Yes, you're missing something MAJOR here. The point is not to make Windows secure, but to make the USERS and their data secure.

  • I don't think they're all out to get us (Score:3, Informative)

    by thewldisntenuff ( 778302 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:09PM (#9764501) Homepage
    At my school (Univ. of Arizona), there are definitely more MS-PCs more than Macs. I would assume this isn't some sort of takeover, but rather, simply because most people use Windows-running PCs. I wouldn't call this some sort of anti=(insert OS of your choice here) plan,but it just makes more sense. Simple economics also apply in this case. Most manufacturers do offer educational discounts, but I would assume under most circumstances, the PC is cheaper than the Mac....Consider

    PC - $999 vs Mac - $1399

    Now, don't mod me down or call my prices stupid/inaccurate/flamebaity, but just use those numbers as an example. For any college in these cash-strapped times (public or private), saving money where needed is mighty important, and if there is money to be saved somewhere, upgrading at lowest cost is probably one of the best ways to do so....Hell, if they had it their way, they'd probably not upgrade at all......

    • Re:I don't think they're all out to get us (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sparkster812 ( 670872 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:54PM (#9764923)
      Under most circumstances? Simple economics? Bullocks. Cheaper purchase price doesn't mean that it's cheaper in general, think about TCO and the frustration you'll have to deal with when faculty get up in your face because their machines are down because of the latest Windows virus... And of course, those numbers in your comment aren't a good example. It's comparing a cheap PC to a more expensive Mac. Do a little bit of research.

      A base-model eMac starts at $799 retail, $749 educational and i'm fairly sure Apple gives a bigger discount for purchasing larger quantities. Yes, there are base configuration PCs that start out lower, but the hardware in the eMac is more bang for your buck. The machines are also better for classrooms since everything is built-in, along with a great 17" display. I can't speak much on the side of 'educational' software as I've never really used any. I do know however that there are some applications that do need a decent video card to run well - you won't get that with cheap bargain basement PCs - the eMac comes with a Radeon 9200 and 32MB dedicated video memory. The last time I looked at a newer Dell purchased by a school at a cheap price - integrated Intel video chipset that was sharing the system's RAM. Talk about slowing down the GUI.

      Also, consider this - cheap PCs come with anti-virus demoware [the majority of the time], not full versions, so the school is going to have to invest in that if they don't want to worry about infecting their entire network. That costs money. I can almost safely say they could set up OS X machines and not have a virus problem, unlike Windows which can get infected just by being out on the internet. Viruses = downtime. When my college got Norton Anti-virus Corporate Edition, it wasn't cheap. With Macs, viruses aren't such a high priority on the worry list and it's generally safe to run them without virus protection. With a limited user account for students, the worst that could happen is that the student could trash that account's home folder. No big deal, really.

      I can also say that upgrading MacOS versions is a hell of alot cheaper than Windows versions. An individual copy of OS X 10.3 retails for $129, and education drops that to $69. It can be used for clean installations or upgrades. The full version of Windows XP Professional [retail, none of that OEM crap] catches around $300, an upgrade costs about $200. A friend of mine purchased hers through an education site for $99. And then of course, no upgrading Windows without a previous version.

      I won't even get started on how much easier the OS is to manage either. When was the last time you set up Windows without needing a bunch of drivers to go along with it? Yet another problem avoided by switching to Mac.

      I do believe that schools should do what is best for them, so I'm not just pushing for the Mac, but as far as I'm concerned they look at the short-term costs instead of how much better things would be in the long run if they just spent the money upfront and got it over with.
      • Don't forget the other fun TCO calculation often overlooked in the frequent back-and-froth Win vs. Mac debate: Electrical consumption.

        Macs need less juice courtesy of the more efficient PPC architecture, and subsequently also put off less heat (which thus requires more AC). In a single computer/home PC environment, we're talking maybe $4 or $5 a month, depending on electrical cost in the area. In a larger-scale, 100 computer installation, we start talking about a savings of $500 per month.

  • Why is Linux too much to ask? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:10PM (#9764516) Homepage
    It's cheap, can be locked up neatly, and doesn't require hardware prone to theft.

    All the single function machines on our campus (like the library catalogue) run KDE/Konqueror in Kiosk mode now, because the cost per unit is >>$200+screens.

    Multi use machines are migrating to dual boot to allow the curious to get some experience and to get infrastructure sorted out, at the cost of about a week of two people's time. Compare and contrast to hardware migration cost. (Replaced machines just get the dual boot image, no fuss.)

    Eventually when apps are deamed feature complete for 90% of use the default will be switched to Linux. It might take a while, but it can be done slowly, and if a urgent move is ever required (hello, licensing 7?) it'll all be in place and ready to go.
  • I talked to a person who was wanting to intern as a web developer and the school she went to only tought IIS, a little javascript, a little Visual basic and no real server side language or database skills.

    I told her in an industry where Apache is dominant, they set her up to fail by only teaching her IIS. I told her to go back to her school and demand some server side scripting language in a cross platform compatible language, demand database administrator/developer courses and demand they start teaching a
  • Yeah the CS department at my school is phasing out the pretty Sun Workstations and replacing them with crappy Red Hat machines. These crappy Red Hat machines can't do NFS worth squat and because of that everything is 5x faster on the Suns.
  • I just graduated from UVic [www.uvic.ca].

    In the main computer labs, you could choose from over 200 Macs. These were generally used for surfing, email, and word processing.

    In the Engineering building, we had Solaris boxes. These were really old and clunky, but they had AutoCAD and MATLAB installed.

    In a few of the labs(including the final project labs), you could find Windows boxes. There weren't that many, and the priviledges were too low to be useful. (Have fun doing any development if you're not an administrator!)

    S
  • At my LARGE public university, we have a few mac labs... maybe 3-4 out of around 50. We do have an active mac user group... but it seems to me.. that macs are losing out. Especially as ppl dont understand how to use macs or they dont want to. Surprisingly scary!!! I work in our campus labs... and I see that ppl would rather not use a comp than use macs.

    On top of that... MS sells us win XP for like 5$ whereas apple sells us panther for 50$ (Through the school). As a result... most ppl buy win XP pro and use

  • Macs in schools (Score:3, Informative)

    by thefultonhow ( 702889 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:20PM (#9764616)
    I work in the Computer Services department at a private school from which I graduated this June. As we speak, we are looking at ways to phase out our remaining Macs. When I started nearly four years ago, we were buying new Macs like crazy -- for multimedia and art in the upper school and for all purposes in the lower school. Now we're phasing them out. We took delivery of Dells to replace the Macs in our multimedia lab this spring, and we're getting a delivery of twelve new Dells with 17" flat panels tomorrow afternoon to replace the Macs in upper school art. In two year's time, the only Macs on campus will be ones in the lower school classrooms that we will have rigged up to run Citrix and connect to a Windows server.

    Why are we doing this? There are several reasons.

    1. Administration. Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory, hard-drive-based backup of network storage, web caching and filtering, and the like, we're having to jump through hoops to get our Macs to work with these new systems. Instead of hiring three Mac specialists to maintain the machines, it's cheaper to move to an all-PC environment.

    2. Administration again. We've implemented RIS of all PC machines that can PXE boot, which is most of the ones on campus. If a machine is acting funky, we just PXE boot and walk away, and two hours later, all of the OS components and applications are restored to their original state -- the hard drive has been wiped clean and redone. Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps. We can't afford that.

    3. Cost. Macs cost a lot. The machines that are getting delivered tomorrow are Dell Dimension 4600s with 2.8 GHz processors, 512 MB of dual-channel RAM, 80 GB hard drives, and 17" Dell UltraSharp flat panels. We got them for $800 a pop. You just can't compare a $900 eMac to that kind of value.

    4. Upgrade cycle. This ties in with cost. We buy most of our PCs from Dell Refurb. We generally get them for about $400, upgrade them for another $100, and we have cheap, capbable machines. That means we can upgrade twice as often as if we buy $1000 Macs, and that translates to better experiences for students.

    5. Compatibility. It's true -- there are more applications for PC and those that are cross-platform often run better on a PC. Even my die-hard Mac friends admit this. That means that if we buy PCs, we get an assurance that they will meet our needs. Also, our student-coded ColdFusion-based website barely runs on Macs -- so it's a no-brainer. PCs for all.
    • Macs don't play well with PC networks, even with OS X on them. As we are implelmenting things like Active Directory,...

      Your choices for network infrastructure are the reason "Macs don't play well," which weakens most of your points. Why not choose open standards like NFS, LDAP, IMAP, etc.? Even samba can be useful across UNIX and Windows machines. You could have a Sun Fire server, a Linux server, a Mac server, whatever, and the other computers on the network would really not care one bit.

    • Re:Macs in schools (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MadMacSkillz ( 648319 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @08:18PM (#9765540) Homepage
      Your background knowledge is in Windows, not OS X, and that is painfully obvious. I can restore an OS X machine with NetRestore (free) in 15 minutes, not two hours. You don't know what you're doing with OS X because you lack the background knowledge. PC's win on hardware costs and compatibility but the rest of your argument is based on your ignorance. I'd say the bottom line on which platform to choose is support. If you have a support staff that only knows Windows, you might ought to choose Windows. If your support staff knows OS X, you should choose OS X.

    • Oh, stop the FUD. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EvilStein ( 414640 )
      What problems have you had getting the Mac working with Active Directory?

      Did you even *try* to resolve the issue? Maybe not, because the second "point" illustrates a total lack of understanding.
      You most certainly *CAN* boot a Mac from the network and re-image it. In fact, that's been a feature in OS X Server for a while now..both Netbooting and remote installations. Just read the documentation - it's actually pretty darn simple.

      If it's taking "several hours of valuable IT time" then perhaps you should tak
  • When I was in all profs were pushing IBM 360/OS and PL/I, wile the students wanted to work on the sexy little PDP machines.
    (Opps, showing my age.:-)
  • We have a lot of Windows machines in ee labs that use Windows software for things like programming boards as well as in labs that are free for general use such as in the main library. In the cs/software area on the other hand, there are almost entirely Solaris machines as well as a few Linux machines. This does not seem to be changing very much at all. I know that Microsoft tries as hard as they can to offer cs students free software, but at least the school has not caught on with it because well, lets f

  • Windows is Perceived Low Cost Standard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:21PM (#9764631) Homepage Journal

    ...by people in charge of budget.

    They use Excel, Access, Word, Powerpoint and Internet Explorer all day, curse "the hackers" responsible for their computer's failings and pay MS like they pay their utility bills, for another essential facility.

    They regard Windows as a standard.

    At MyCorp, the training rooms are full of Windows boxes. But the hardcore technical people use Mac laptops that give them applications "that just work", full UNIX, and compatibility with the beancounters that send them MS file formats. Lately, various directors and VP's have been getting Mac laptops, too.

    It'll be interesting to see how far down the corporate hierarchy Macs migrate: the managers acquire some cachet by mimicking the choice of IT professionals, but if their secretaries and training rooms start to fill up with Macs the exclusivity will have worn off. OTOH, aspiring middle-level managers will want to keep up with the big cheeses...

  • I've seen this at two Unvs I've worked at. The first was about 50/50 in the labs when I first started there (that's 50% Mac and 50% everything else). That was due mainly to the guy that hired me being a Mac fan, as was I. The Mac labs consistently had more people in them than the PC labs. Few people knew how to use the Sparcs so they were usually barren. After he transfered to another dept the Macs started getting replaced. There are still a handful of colleges within the Unv that are exclusively Macs
  • were the IT geniouses decided to replace 3 perfectly functional iMacs which were used by students in the student Union building to check their email real quick in between classes(there aren't even any chairs) with dual 2Ghz G5s with a gig of ram and apple 17" LCD.
    Meanwhile, the few macs available in the general purpose labs are slow and still are using OS X 10.2
    Brilliant I say.
  • For a long time, outside of academia, Mac's were a rarity. Business' use PC's. MACs were used in multimedia and little else.

    What has happened is that Technical colleges have been turning out students that prefered to use the easier mac to get work done -- once they tried entering into the workplace, they were essentially worthless unless re-trained how to use pc's.

    By law, in order to get federal funding for student loans, a certain percentage of graduates must get a job in the career that they studied fo
  • We have staroffice and we have some games,
    but as a technology coordinator for an elementary
    school the lack of educational programs for linux has been a serious impediment to adoption. The secret to getting linux adopted in schools is educational courseware with SITE licenses and technical support.

    The reason why macs are dying in education is because is because a brand new Dell is $800 while a brand new mac is $1200. Mac is a niche product like the people who own bose stereos. Whether that Dell/Gateway/Ibm
  • I'm not surprised that as the Macs go, they are not replacing them, because as a "technology school" they will of course want to teach what is being used in business (helps get the grads jobs...). Regardless if it is right or wrong, Microsoft is the primary technology is business these days. It would make more sense to replace the Mac machines with MS, or barring that, some widely used flavor of Linux such as Red Hat, or SuSE. Or even some *BSD of one kind or another. The only places I see Macs these days i

  • Windows = Learning (Score:5, Funny)

    by Beek Dog ( 610072 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:32PM (#9764730)
    Caution: burning karma ahead

    They have windows because you're in a technology school! If you had Macs, you wouldn't learn as much because they would work! You wouldn't have to spend time learning how to troubleshoot Windows, which is what you're there for anyway, right? If all the computers worked, how would they teach you how to fix it? I'm guessing they don't have a 'If-it-ain't-broke...' class.


    Now before you reply, it's called 'humor' and 'sarcasm'. Not to be confused with zealotry.

    Speaking of Macs, I managed to crash mine the other day. If you count the time I tried and succeeded to get a blue(black on Mac)screen on the OS X Public Beta, that makes twice.
  • At the community college I used to work for the CIS department had removable hard-drives that were checked out to students. The ubiquitous installation of Microsoft products is just a byproduct of their legally proven monopolistic tendencies.

    Schools have very little to gain by switching to Linux. Those familiar with the way a computer operates and who are open to experimentation can utilize linux in a variety of different ways.

    During the Operating Systems courses students were encouraged to demonstrate
  • Jeez, I'm not even that old, but y'all are making me want to get a walker...

    When I went to school it was pretty clear breakup:

    Faculty of Education - Apple & VAX/VMS

    Faculty of Math/Comp Sci - Unix (SunOS) & VAX/VMS

    Faculty of Management - Microsoft

    Other Faculties - various or timeshare.

    Now the CPSC labs I worked in were all dumb terminals, every last one. Multi-screen terminals (the secret of actually using them came 2nd year...) were on every desk. The only exception were the 4th y

  • A school full of win98 machines? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@@@gaynor...org> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @06:51PM (#9764897) Homepage

    "the only machines we will have will either be Windows 98 or Windows 2000"

    Lemme know what your ARIN range is. I'm running low on remailer zombies.

  • Lack of diversity? (Score:3, Informative)

    by don.g ( 6394 ) <don&dis,org,nz> on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @07:10PM (#9765049) Homepage
    I'm personally disgusted by the lack of diversity of operating systems here at the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences [vuw.ac.nz] at Victoria University of Wellington [vuw.ac.nz]. All the new workstations are Dells with Windows XP stickers on them running NetBSD. The old machines are either other x86 boxes running NetBSD, or rapidly ageing iMacs. Undergraduates are forced to use NetBSD; graduates are limited to using Windows via terminal services, and can only get a windows box on their desk if they beg for it.

    The servers used to be a diverse collection of Alphas and Sparcs running Digital's and Sun's unices, but now they're being replaces with - you guessed it - more Dells running NetBSD. A monoculture like this can only mean trouble.

  • Raised on Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DrDebug ( 10230 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @09:36PM (#9766007) Journal
    At the technical college I teach at, I am the only Unix (Linux) instructor on staff. I get to teach very low level intro to UNIX and elementary UNIX systems admin classes, but nothing higher than that. There are about 8 Microsoft Operating Systems instructors who teach every aspect of systems admin, and several other instructors who are well versed in (and teach) most major Microsoft applications.

    Microsoft is well aware that that people who learn on Microsoft products in school (especially college) will continue to use those products once they graduate to the real world, as paying customers. A *BIG* reason why many colleges use Microsoft products is because the colleges get these products at a highly discounted rate; and Microsoft is always glad to subsidize computer hardware purchases (of boxes that will run their product) so they can propogate their own dominance of the market.

    At times I feel I am the only voice of reason in the crazed Microsoft controlled world at my school. I feel redeemed, though, when students (and those Microsoft instructors) see how cool Unix/Linux really is. Another thing I like is that just my presence as a Unix/Linux instructor gives our college bargaining power with Microsoft to get even more discounts on Microsoft products, as we threaten to move entirely to Linux. (Yeah, I can only dream...).

    -------

    As for MAC hardware and software-- unless Apple gets a program going like Microsoft has (and I think they did at one time) they won't ever compete with Microsoft.

    In the past, MacOS8 was a great desktop/consumer interface, but it would not stand up to the rigors of an Enterprise level system. Microsoft is moving in that direction, as they are trying to displace the heavy UNIX (Solaris/AIX/HPux) top ends. Now that Apple has moved to a BSD (UNIX) based OS (i.e. OSX) they are now in a position to move to the Enterprise level also. But again, Apple must free up some hardware and software to schools to keep in the game.

    -------

    Why is this hard on Apple? Because the hardware is sole-source (their own hardware) while Microsoft is a software company mostly. As every hacker knows, making another copy of software is a LOT cheaper than acquiring another machine. Still, I would LOVE to see a lab of MAC gear in my college. (Are you listening, APPLE???)

    Just my humble opinion.

  • City College Of San Francisco (Score:3)

    by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @09:40PM (#9766034) Homepage
    While the Instructional Computing Lab tends to have more Windows machines than UNIX or Macs (and the Windows machines are networked using Novell, interesting enough), they do have a fair number of Macs (mostly for the multimedia courses) and at least two dozen Linux machines.

    There is also a UNIX/Open Systems Certificate to be had here which involves introductory courses to UNIX, UNIX System Administration, UNIX Network Administration, UNIX Systems Programming, and Oracle Database Administration. (That last is actually not part of the certificate.)

    We have a "UNIX guru" here - Abbas Moghtanei - who has been teaching here for many years (as well as running his own consulting firm with clients such as Oracle and Wells Fargo, for whom he has worked in the past), and he's not about to let the college go "Windows only".

    When the college set up a Computer Security Certificate program, most of the teachers were Windows oriented. So this fall we have "Advanced Computer Security for Network Administrators" - which he will teach and will be undoubtedly oriented to UNIX. It's a class on preventing hacking and no doubt will involve teams of class members trying to hack into some reserved ICL machines and others trying to prevent them. He likes class projects like that.

    When I took Network Security this past spring, I demo'd the Knoppix STD (Security Tools Distribution) to the class. Somebody asked if the tools on the CD were all command line oriented, and I pointed out that while some (such as Ethereal) were GUI oriented, most network security involves servers and many servers are UNIX-based and servers tend not to have GUI interfaces, so a lot of security tools tend to be CLI based.

    The college does participate in the Microsoft program where free copies of Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP Professional, Project Planner, and Visio are downloadable free by computer class students. MS has obviously discovered that many college students use Linux because it's cheap, and want to increase student exposure to MS products.

    You'll notice the cash cow, Microsoft Office, is NOT on the list.

    I'd like to see CCSF have an "Introduction to Linux" course which would take parts of the Introduction to UNIX course but instead concentrate on the Linux desktop, Linux applications, and enough about the CLI to allow students to be comfortable in both the CLI and GUI environments. Students could be taken from installation through tweaking and package management and given some introduction to home and small business uses such as Samba and Apache in one semester, including perhaps a couple sessions on integrating Linux with Windows in a small business (such as email servers to shield Windows machines from viruses). I think such a course would be well attended and valuable.

  • The Best Thin Client (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NtroP ( 649992 ) on Wednesday July 21, 2004 @11:04PM (#9766482)
    We are up against this same situation at our school. A "friggin' bean counter" is bought and paid for by Microsoft and wants us to only buy Dells with XP on them district-wide. We have about 18,000 people using about 8,000 computers in 36 different locations. To service this we have 3 network techs, 6 computer techs and me (SysAdmin). There's no way to manage that many computers (especially if they were all windows).

    So our optimum solution is this: Each location will have one or more Windows 2K3 Terminal Servers (for Windows-specific apps) and one or more Linux Terminal Services Servers [ltsp.org] (LTSP and TAO-tc [taolinux.org]). The building file/print server is an Apple Xserve which can serve AFP/SMB/NFS home directories to all our clients. Those classes which need "special" computers (G5's for Graphics and Video, PCs for AutoCAD, etc.) get high-end standalone computers - everyone else gets a "thin-client".

    The thin-clients net-boot off one of the Linux or Xserve boxes and start either an X-session with the LTSP server for a Gnome/KDE desktop (home directories NFS-mounted from the Xserve) or they start a full-screen rdesktop/rdp session to one of the Windows TS serves for Win2K3 desktops. You literally can't tell that it didn't just boot off the hard drive (except it only takes about 20 seconds).

    So at each location (barring the few high-end standalones) we have maybe 2 windows servers to manage, secure and patch and maybe 1 or 2 Linux boxes to manage. All the clients have no moving parts and never need to be upgraded or touched - they are literally disposable. They get their configuration from our centralized dhcp server and all accounts are single-signon with kerberos through Active Directory (PeeCees won't play well with OpenLDAP :-\ ).

    The only downside is that these workstations can't run the myriad mac software titles the schools have invested in. Our solution to that is to use the new CD-ROM-less eMacs. For $599 we have a bullet-proof all-in-one workstation that we net-boot off an Xserve to OS X. Home directories are auto-mounted on the desktop using Apple's Active Directory Plugin. For those users who want/need to access Linux software they can click an icon in the dock to open an X session to the Linux server and run Gnome full-screen. If they need to use windows apps they can click an icon and instantly have their desktop replaced with a windows RDP session. Same credentials, same home directories, same printers, cross-platform.

    When it comes right down to it, the eMac as a terminal is the BEST choice. It can function as both a Linux and Windows desktop and run Mac apps as well and costs $599. An Intel-based thin-client costs about $200 plus a monitor ($150) = $350. It is about half the price and can "do" both Linux and Windows (and never needs to be replaced) it just can't run Mac Apps. Whereas a low-end Dell workstation with monitor runs about $600 + virus subscription + patchlink license = $630 and can ONLY run windows (I haven't found a good FREE X11 "client" app for windows yet). On top of that, assuming we don't turn it into an expensive thin-client in 4 years, it will have to be upgraded or replaced. Not to mention the headache and overhead administering stand-alone Windows boxes with their ad/spy/virus/warez problems. There's no contest.

    My philosophy is you should use the best tool for the job. My primary workstation at work is a low-end Fedora Core 1 box. I don't need much because I always have multiple sessions going to the LTSP/WinTS servers (which are really fast). I also have a G4 TiBook with OS X for my mobile solution, because, again, I can literally open a fullscreen session to Linux or Windows as well as run ARD to admin Xserves.

    Our students will graduate knowing how to use Macs, Linux and Windows, and be ready for ANY market. Meanwhile we are able to better manage and can afford to upgrade only a few servers. This will give our students and faculty a much better experience and, who knows, maybe even give them the courage to go home, blow away their windows box and install Linux.

    Hey, it COULD happen :-)

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