Hi Ian et al,
The issue is this: we have £61k to implement a public facing ict system which must also have a curriculum and community benefit.
I am having a major debate on this with my immediate line manager which goes along these lines:-
Me: We should use LTSP with Thin Clients because:- [1]. It's physically secure - it's not worth nicking a NIC and if they did it would'nt work! [2]. If it's facing the public then floppy disks are a bad idea - let's start a virus collection shall we?
Also floppies are fairly easy to break with someone who dosn't know what they are doing also being capable of destroying the drive too.
[3]. There are no desk tops that can be 'messed up', no hdd's to reformat, no cd drives to pick 'things' out of
This agrees with my experience that adult students can be just as destructive as the children. (Only difference it that they appear less likely to hunt for games and porn on the internet.)
[4]. The biggest requirement fron joe public will be for Internet Access [5]. The area we are based in indicates that joe public will not be likely to have a home pc, they will traverse between schools / libraries / cybercafes / pubs in the area that have internet access. therefore let them sign up to something like Thinkfree office and use an asp model where they can obtain thier documents from anywhere - a true 'community' solution!, rather than carry lots of floppies around building up a massive virus challenge for any ict system.
Or some other method of network storage. Be that global or actually physically present in South Wales.
[6]. We can offer office functions via StarOffice [7]. We can offer lots of other applications (and therefore courses) for little cost eg: SQL/HTML/Pascal/C++/PERL/Python/Graphics Manipulation (GIMP) [8]. It will be a 'cheap', low tco solution [9]. Pupils will be able to 'log on' to the LTSP and obtain access to thier NT4 work areas via SAMBA, joe public won't be allowed to get that far. [10. We should be providing access to different systems running different os's and applications so that pupils can actually learn some
This applies just as much to the adults as the children.
'real' ict skills which will bring benefit both to them and, at a later date, the country.
You can also use Win4Lin/VMware/etc, to provide multiple environments. IMHO Windows is far better running in it's own virtual machine than let loose on the real hardware. (Especially if it's run as a copy which can simply be thrown away when the session is finished, so if someone messes with it it dosn't matter at all. Next time it's started up there is a fresh copy anyway.)
[11]. We have StarOffice 5.1/5.2 installed on everything except out apple ibooks.
Him: No, joe public uses M$ office or works, therefore we must provide
Which version of these though? If you have to provide every version of office and works known to man then even at educational prices the licences will eclipse the hardware costs.
it, School uses Lotus smartsuite, therefore we must provide it. In order to do this we must provide floppy disc access on windows systems to all
People carting floppy disks around is going backwards, IMHO.#
pupils, staff and joe public. Joe public will not be able to use
The pupils and staff already have a prefectly good network area. It's prefectly possible to provide the same for "Joe Public". The major issue is providing a high enough bandwidth connection to the filestore.
StarOffice and we cannot expect teachers to run two applications and transfer files between them. The benefits arising from free packages and languages under linux are irrelevant because we don't teach them and joe public does'nt use them or does'nt now how to operate a linux system
There really is very little really difference from the user POV in the first place.
(same argument used against apples). We need to buy laptops with office on or ibooks with office on (oops - no fdd's - scrub that idea) and use fdd's to transfer data. If Lotus Wordpro and 123 will run on LTSP then
Maybe you can get something which uses punched cards :)
I'll consider it!
Me: well, Corel Office runs under WINE on Linux and LTSP....
Him: No, joe public does not use it in this area and anyway, teachers
They found this out exactly how?. Did the Welsh version of the census ask these kind of questions (the English version certainly didn't) (Even if they did it's a bit quick to be getting any data out.)
will have to learn a different package so that's not an option.
Me: If my six year old can deal with this concept, and the 10 year old routinely switches between os's, then I cannot see the problem,
I can't think of any other area where this is even an issue. It's almost as though it is a matter of misplaced pride for people to only be able to use a very specific piece of software. Maybe he should pop down the road and try and convince the DVLA to use the same kind of criteria for issuing driving licences.
Him: yes, but your children are different
Your children are smarter than the average adult??? Or maybe havn't yet learned to be stupidly bone headed about... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763