On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 19:27 +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
Yes, sorry - it's the UK that needs the most help :( 1.5 billion Euros of Education IT spend puring into a black hole every year. :-/
I'm sure you already know this, but just in case, you should make sure that the lucky winner does not have a site license from Microsoft.
I was rather disgusted to discover that one school to which I donated ~50 computers (saved from an international bank's skip) on which they were running Linux, resulted in Microsoft making at least 5k, and probably closer to 10k per year more in license fees. *vomit*
Hello Phil, Thanks for the tip off, I'd nearly forgotten about that.
The reason being that the school's site license was worded such that any pentium class or better machine incurs an additional license fee, regardless of whether it had any M$ software installed, or not, and that probably included paying the extra for the office suit that they also wouldn't be installing on those machines.
It's a great lock-in tool, we can only admire their business skills :-(
It occurs to me that one possible way of avoiding that, and saving the planet at the same time, would be to produce ARM (or some other non-intel) based machines which would sidestep the pentium-or-better nonsense, and would save the country a few power stations if widely deployed.
Arm-based thin clients are great, one of my colleagues does have some, and we use them as demo clients at shows. I wonder if the 601 and 602 PowerPCs count as Pentium-class? Another client-side issue for schools - particularly primary schools - is the space taken up by PCs and monitors, and the problems of moving them each time the classroom is re-arranged (not something they do so often in high schools). We're looking at various thin client solutions, including laptops, but would rather we could use regular recycled boxen :-/ Regards, - Richard -- Richard Smedley, rs@m6-it.org Technical Director, www.M6-IT.org M6-IT CIC +44 (0)779 456 07 14 Sustainable Third Sector IT solutions. PRINCE2[TM] Project Management Web services * Back-ups * Support * Training & Certification * E-Mail M6-IT is a Community Interest Company, limited by guarantee. Registered in England & Wales, Registration No: 6040154 11 St Marks Road, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY9 7DT Northern Office: 4, Hollins Green, Bradwall, Cheshire, CW10 0LA. Welsh office/Swyddfa Gogledd Cymru: e-mail / e-bost - cymru@m6-it.org Southern Office: Bristol contact matthew@m6-it.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org