UK Schools Warned Off Microsoft Deal 337
rs232 sends in a BBC piece on the UK computer agency Becta advising schools against signing up for a Microsoft educational license because of alleged anti-competitive practices. "The problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licenses for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else." We have discussed Becta's role in British education here several times as they have acted as a watchdog warning of perceived Microsoft excesses.
Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
The machines bought have always had older hardware for their time, and are a nightmare to administer. Made even worse that as ad admin there is no decent install cds - all restore discs. great.
Many of these places I`m probably the only person that is aware of licensing and paying for each install etc... but unless it's some shit sent in by one of the many education software companies to review it's near on impossible to get permission to get money released. Had to laugh when we needed a server license for a network file share (cos xp max 10 limit) when all the old 95/98 did it anyway.
rant rant rant too jaded but it's all bollocks in education over here. I just can`t imagine a situation where IT would install an OS wide spread without a hardware change. Education was better off with old computers before all this funding started getting mis spent. Spending most of my times filling holes and fixing stupid crap rather than developing.
yadda yadda yadda
Re:Educational License? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
This week someone in my department had a problem reading and editing equations in a Word DOC file in OpenOffice. And then he tried genuine Microsoft Word and still had problems. Turned out the equations were done using 'Mathtype', some extra add-on for Word. "Doing it wrong!", I cried, "why is anyone writing papers chock-full of equations in Word anyway? Use LaTeX like everyone else in the department. It's free, it produces nicer papers, it is just beautiful."
So they asked for my advice, and it was 'use LaTeX'. What they did: buy more MathType licenses.
I'm thinking of starting a policy of not helping anyone who asks for tech support in our department and then does something else. I'm speccing up two labs with about 50 seats this week. I'm recommending 50 thin clients and 5 fat servers just to make it manageable. If the suit overrules this and says 'no, no, no, just put 50 desktop boxes in' then I'm not supporting it - to the extent of quitting the project. The idiots are not winning this one (although the servers will of course be running Win TS 2003 as well as Linux).
I'm not sure how we can stop the idiots from winning - MS will up their muscle in the fight, since they fatten up the idiots in order to feed off them. Or is it more like giving them free heroin and getting them hooked and then charging for the next fix. It's idiocy whatever way you cut it.
End of Sunday night before Monday Work Rant.
[Dan Ashcroft was a character in Nathan Barley...]
Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
Because the school IT support is crap. Even by the usual low IT standards the people employed are poorly paid imbeciles. They are of lower ability than the sales guys at PC World. How do I know this? My sister is a teacher and I have to help her undone the stupid things they do to her laptop. One time they locked down the laptops so tightly that the users couldn't even save files into their own My Documents directory. The teachers are given laptops so they can take them home to do lesson plans and so forth on them. What the fuck is the point of having a laptop you can't save anything to. The laptops are not kept patched and a whole primary school gets a visit from an IT guy once every two weeks. So even when they are there they don't have time to half the things that need doing. Imagine how bad it is at a secondary school that has umpteen student using computers to visit myspace. Just the thought of that makes me shudder.
The current IT school people (outsourced or otherwise) couldn't cope with Linux and the government (local or central) sure isn't going to pay to get people that know what they are doing or retrain the ones they have.
Re:This is unbelievable (Score:4, Interesting)
An educational establishment has lots of PCs running various versions windows and various versions of various software some MS, some none MS, some legit, some pirate. This is a management nightmare but paying regular prices to upgrade everything would be cost prohibitive. MS comes along and offers windows and office at a very steep discount and with the right to use any version you want (the windows OS part is upgrade/downgrade only but since virtually all machines come with an OEM windows license that is not really a major issue).
However to get the products at this discount they have to sign up to terms that are not very nice. The license cost is based on some factor other than the number of machines running windows (for schools I belive it is total number of PCs, for universities I think it is total students or something like that). So there is no financial incentive to move individual machines to free software. Further the deals are often subscription based so the institution has to keep paying even if they have no desire to upgrade.
Re:Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
So while lazy, cheap teachers get the free windows and M$ office at home they are making everybody else pay for all the student licences even when the student's computers aren't and likely wont be using any M$ software. So it is a straight up lie and to be honest your lie is just that as well. The truth is M$ is not a viable option for school use, where you would have to be paying a licence fee for each and every student for the 12 years that are at school amounting to thousands of dollars added to the cost of public schooling, M$ exploiting children yet again.
As for keyboarding, I used a computer everyday at work no touch typing, basically because I had to shift the keyboard around my work, no set location, no touch typing. So you see everybody on the planet employed as secretaries, computer coders and data input operators. Silly me and I though the OLPC XO laptop was already being used with Linux to effectively teach children in schools and that was the real reason behind the new M$=B$ licensing scheme.
Re:Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried to deconstruct this sentence, and can't really get anywhere with it.
Operating systems are just that; systems software that facilitates the use and configuration of the hardware it is running on. I don't think that there is an inherent element within any OS which 'teaches' anything.
Obviously individuals develop preferences, and one's experience may even lead to a greater understanding of systems' architecture (or similar) using a particular OS. Certainly my experience was that using *nix of various flavours encouraged me to dig into elements of hardware and design more than using classic Mac OS did at the time. I don't think I would have ever started trying to write device drivers for NICs, or SLP drivers, if I had only been using a MAC (pre-OS X).
Before I get hammered by the Mac crowd for this comment, let me say that I don't think this was as a result of any shortcoming; rather, I believe that by *intention* using a Macintosh focused me as a user on the functional outcome I was trying to achieve, isolating me *by intention* from the internals below. That's fine - it's just one approach to structuring the user experience.
By contrast, the experience of obtaining and installing Slackware at the time made me very aware of the underlying system elements for interfacing with and using the hardware, and I suppose this is what the original poster may have been driving (sorry!) at - that using Linux leads to one being more informed about the systems architecture and interaction.
There's nothing sacred about this though - some people will argue that the point of using computers is to focus on the functional outcome desired, not learn how the underlying system is structured or works. I suspect that most folks on /. are interested in all these elements, but we're not typical users.
As for the ease of transition for Win98-->Vista vs. say SysV-->Ubuntu w/ gnome, I dunno if I buy this. Hell, trying to move people between kde and gnome has been known to start a war.
As for what all this has do do with why schools don't all use OSS, I'd say 'not much'. In the institution I work at, the main factors keeping OSS installation 'pocketed' rather than ubiquitous are custom software required to support faculty's curriculum on the academic side, and resistance to anything that doesn't say MS Office on the admin side.
I suspect that almost all software baked into curriculum (at least at the undergraduate level) has a reasonable OSS equivalent, but some (enough) faculty are strident in their resistant to change, and there is zero that the IT function can do about it.
Ironically, file portability/sharability led to the standardisation on MS Office in this institution; a potpourri of word processors but primarily WP were previously in use, but as MS marketing succeeded in selling Office, the critical mass of Word documents flowing in and out of the place ended up in a decree of Word only. Now the suggestion of using anything else leads to howls of outrage, and naturally MS continues to work to maintain complications of selling a switch via the Office Open XML specification.
It's not a money issue - the MS Campus agreement in use here keeps the annual cost of license upgrades for OS and Office plus other misc apps low enough that there isn't a big enough dollar saving available to make a compelling business case for the switch, particularly in light of the knee-jerk opposition to any such change.
All that being said, OSS gets big time play in the institution's back-end services, and there are pockets of energized evangelists. The biggest push on the desktop I see within the institution is not related to OSS, but rather to OS X. Fifty percent of student notebooks coming through the door are running OS X, and there is a growing faculty contingent running OS X as well.
I think the change is more likely to be from Windows to OS X, if anything. Small mercies, I suppose - at least it is Unix. But the licensing is just a switch from one big corp to another.
Re:One of those tricks (Score:5, Interesting)
One student at the high school I was administering discovered that even with our more prohibitive settings (many/most of those alternatives were disabled) he could simply create a shortcut to C: on a floppy disk and he was home free.
Sure, I was pissed at him, but at the same time I was impressed with the elegant simplicity of it all.
Can't...help...myself! Arrghh! (Score:3, Interesting)
'Though They paint these walls to stop my pen, the Shithouse Poet has struck again!'
I cannot properly attribute this, but I did see it in my high school restroom in 1974.
BTW, that line of yours would make a great
"I wonder what it is any of us are doing here?"
Yeah, it can seem like that quite often, but for me...
I have learned some neat stuff here, some not so neat stuff(goatse I'm looking at you-aghhh!), and have heard a lot of useless stuff.
It seems to find equilibrium at slightly positive for me.
Sometimes it's something funny that makes my day brighter. Sometimes it opens whole new mental doors for me. Sometimes I find out how far I am either ahead or behind the curve on a subject. Sometimes it's just silly and a waste of time.
But it is always Slashdot....kind of like online Russian Roulette, but my survivors don't have to clean up the mess off the walls and floors when it goes bang!
Re:Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Take it from me; teachers don't administrate, and when they do all they do is mess things up. Usually pretty horribly at that. Teachers in public (elementary, secondary) schools tend towards the computer illiterate side of the fence. Some to the degree of simple uncertainty, some to the degree where they'll order a student suspended because they changed their desktop background - that's the outright fear category right there.
We've had teachers inform us, the lowly know-nothing network administrators (see, we weren't University Edumucated so what could we really know anyways?) that their lab was working PERFECTLY the day before, that NOTHING had changed, except somehow the computers wouldn't turn on anymore. Yes, of course they're plugged in! I checked it personally!
Yes, the power bars were unplugged from the wall outlets. He was correct though; the computers were in fact plugged into the power bars.
As for software administration, hoo-boy, you don't even want to go near that one.
Security? What of the teacher who used to perpetually walk from his math class to the computer lab across the hall and leave his online bank and investment site LOGGED IN all through 2nd period?
Or even common sense. Like why I, a male network administrator, would want access to the girl's phys-ed office (not the change room, the office, where the computer connected to the dead printer was).
Will Linux replace Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
I just saw that Tesco UK is selling Ubuntu PCs [tesco.com] as well! This is a first in England.
For those that don't live here Microsoft is the computer. For about 10 years I have never heard of anyone else using Linux in the UK (I mean walking around or in real life. Not over the internet), then this year suddenly walking around the university everyone's laptops have Ubuntu or Fedora or SUSE. Even my university has SUSE in one of their labs. Now that is a first!
There was a piece from 2005 [guardian.co.uk] in which it talks about the government seriously thinking of switching all its software to open source.
Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think schools should take advantage of this and focus on using cross-platform software in the classroom whenever possible. Doing so almost guarantees that students will be able to use the same software at home that they use at school (no matter what OS they use at home). It also means that students who need to use a computer with an unfamiliar OS will still be able to get work done since the program(s) they are used to using will likely be available for that OS.
I worked as an instructor in the computer lab of a Boys and Girls Club for a few years, and this is about what I did. Ten computers in the lab had Windows 2k Professional on them, and a wide range of lower ends computers had Linux on them. I made sure all of the computers, regardless of OS, had Open Office, Firefox, Gaim (now pidgin), Thunderbird, Abiword, Gimp, and VideoLAN on them. I taught the children (ages ranging from 6 to 18) how to use the programs and the differing operating systems were never really a problem. Since all of the software was open source I was also able to give them all CD's which they could use to install the software at home or wherever else. In doing so, I made sure that our choice of operating systems did not negatively impact their education. I think schools need to do the same.
not at all (Score:2, Interesting)
This attitude itself is a problem.
You wouldnt say that about mathematics, or language, or basic logic.
All are difficult things one must master to make a useful contribution to the science, and I dont see why a computer is any different.
You are taking a very common albiet luddite position, imo.
A computer is a powerful tool which rewards your investment into learning how to use it accordingly.
A computer is not unqiue devices which simply submits to you the fruits of a skill without requiring the corresponding investment by learning.
That sort of fuzzy thinking, "do what I mean", "AI" nonsense is a staple of science fiction, and not of the real world.
Get off your physicist laurels and learn to use the machine to an level that gives you what you need. (personally a non-programmer physicist seems dreadfully antiquated to me these days)
Re:Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is true only for very small values of true. Yes, Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, but chances are high that years later they will, if bright and attentive, accumulated a collection of Windows-specific trivia (mostly interface-specific) and nothing more.
By contrast, someone "who learned Unix ten years ago", or even last year, is unlikely within their first few months of learning not to have, at the very least, a familiarity with the fundamentals of what a computer is and how it works. That's knowledge that extends past a single operating system and relevant outside of the fool's notion of a computer as "a tool". In fact, I'd bet that most point-and-click novice Ubuntu users, for example, have a basic understanding of what a kernel is, what code is, how memory is used, file systems, rights and permissions, basic IO, networking, etc., etc. From there, their learning is limited only by their motivation and imagination. I'd even go so far as to say that it would take a undue effort to avoid learning when everything is documented, logical, transparent, historically consistent, and unambiguously presented to the user at every turn.
Seems to me that dismissing any of this as unimportant or characterising it as a bunch of "nitty gritty details" is tantamount to saying learning to use a technology that's become (and will continue to be) a major part of everyone's lives, and is used (and will be continue to be used) daily at work and at home by just about everyone in the industrialised world, is of negligible value. It also suggests that such issues as a skilled and employed work force, patents, copyrights, and the destructive effects of monopoly power aren't real social or political concerns, but mere annoyances.
What is it, I wonder, that we should be teaching our kids? Show them how to press the image of a button, because someone else worked out the button part? If that's the case, then I say we should skip Physics as well. Why invest the time and effort to learn Physics, when it's more efficient if not easier to wait for someone to put the principles, knowledge and study into practical use? We can then just buy the product on the shelf when it's available for sale.
Like software from Microsoft.
Re:One of those tricks (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen laptops, that if you popped the battery off to tamper with the BIOS, or if you forgot your password, you have to ship the unit in to have the BIOS reset. I am not sure if anyone has found an exploit on those yet, but that is a step in the direction of security.
And, yep, it is darned inconvenient for the average Joe. It has a home in the corporate and government worlds though.
InnerWeb
Re:One of those tricks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:One of those tricks (Score:3, Interesting)
The guy running the network there was such an ass. He "solved" problems by disabling stuff; by the time I left he had disabled the floppy drives, USB ports, school email, Yahoo/Gmail/Hotmail/etc. and pretty much every way to get work to and from school. Thing is, these were disabled within Windows, so I used a boot floppy to load Damn Small Linux from a USB drive. There's always a way around these things.