Linux stop holding our kids back

[norm]

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html

"...observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

Karen xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx Middle School
AISD





and the follow up

http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/character-assasinations-aint-us.html

[RaTix]

Great article. Just need to have the second part here as well.

Well, we got attention. When I published a part of the email this Teacher sent me, it experienced something known as "The Slashdot Effect." Slashdot is a website devoted to the tech/internet world and is read by hundreds of thousands an hour.

Yeah...hundreds of thousands an hour. My article scolding this teacher ended up on the front page of Slashdot.

For whatever reason, this story took on a life of its own. By 10:30 AM, I had to turn my cell phone off. Poeple were getting my number from my business website and calling me with their comments and reactions.

Not all of them were particularly on my side.

I received calls from South Africa, The Netherlands, Croatia, The Land Down Under and Russia.

It's the one from New Zealand that bothered me the most.

The caller identified himself and then further identified himself as an editor for a well known magazine published in the UK. He was extremely to-the-point with his call.

He would donate $1000.00 immediately to The HeliOS Project if I would give him the name of the Teacher I blogged about.

I hung up the phone.

"This is madness." I thought to myself. What is the big friggin' deal here? This is a non-story.

And my phone buzzed again but it wasn't with the incoming call ring...it was a text message being received. I cued the caller ID and it returned as "unavailable".

I pushed "read message" and waited for the text to appear on my screen.

"Can I call you?"

I pulled the truck over into a parking lot and answered:

"I guess. Who r u?"

The inactivity was so long that I started the truck and began to put it into gear and re-enter traffic when the buzz came again. I pushed the read button.

"Karen".

It was my turn to hesitate. Finally, I toggled Reply and typed in one character.

"k"

She didn't call right away. It took her about 15 minutes to finally call me. When she did she didn't say anything for the first 15 seconds. When she finally did speak, it was obvious she was crying.

"Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?"

I didn't even have to think of the reply.

"I didn't throw you to the wolves Karen, I threw ignorance to the wolves. Let me ask you something. If I had not emailed you a link to my blog, would you have even known about this?"

Again she hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you didn't know I had written that blog, would you have known about all these comments? Has anyone called you or bothered you about this? Have your co-workers mentioned it?"

"Well...no."

"Then the wolves didn't touch you Karen. If I had included your last name or email address, then yes, you could ask me that question but as it stands, you are just a nameless school teacher that evoked a public response from me."

She didn't say anything for several seconds. When she did, it was a quiet and simple:

"Thank you".

Yeah...thank you. Like I deserve that. Let me share a couple things with you here. First off, I want to sincerely apologize for some things I did say, things that were way off base and even if they were situationally true, they didn't add anything of value to the conversation.

I want to apologize to all the hard-working and honest NEA members. My statements were based on an isolated but nasty experience two years ago, and, while I developed a nasty dislike for the people in that situation, it was both unfair and short-sighted to say the things I did. The teachers that we entrust our kids with on a daily basis do us a service that is under-appreciated, under-paid and over-criticized. My mini tirade didn't add anything of value to the situation and only served to inflame an already volatile area of debate. You have my sincere apology for slapping you all with such a wide brush.

Karen isn't alone in her ignorance. I have sat in a PhD's office...a PhD that happened to be a principal of a school. She told me that according to her "tech staff", it was illegal to remove Microsoft Windows from their school computers. So who is ignorant here? The "tech staffer" afraid of losing his MCSE position or the Dr. of Education that didn't bother to check into such a statement. Ignorance isn't the sole possession of this particular school teacher.

Karen and I have talked on the phone now for a couple of hours, here and there. We've come to understand each other more and had she said some of the things in her email that she said during our phone conversations...this black ink on white digital paper probably wouldn't exist.

And neither would over 2000 comments that were less than kind on one end of it and absolutely brutal on the other.

The student did get his Linux disks back after the class. The lad was being disruptive, but that wasn't mentioned. Neither was the obvious fact that when she saw a gaggle of giggling 8th grade boys gathered around a laptop, the last thing she expected to see on that screen was a spinning cube.

OK, I have to interject here. You know that kid had a spinning cube on one desktop, and porn on another. Then just switched it when the teacher came snooping.

She didn't know what was on those disks he was handing out. It could have been porn, viral .exe's...any number of things for all she knew. When she heard that an adult had given him some of the disks to hand out, her spidey-senses started tingling. Coupled with the fact that she truly was ignorant of honest-to-goodness Free Software, and you have some fairly impressive conclusion-jumping.

In a couple of ways, I am guilty of it too.

Karen seems to be a good teacher, and as she stated to me today, she has learned more about the tech world in a few days than she's learned in five years.

That's because she's trapped in a world of Windows. Most people are.

I have contacted the technology department of AISD and have discovered it has a rich technology environment that uses open source software in all aspects of instruction, operation, and administration. The District has over 36,000 desktop and laptop computers. While about 24,000 of those computers run some version of Windows, AISD is anything but a Windows shop. Their current standard teacher/student image includes both Open Office and Firefox on all Windows computers, and recently has added Open Office to the Apple OS image. Other open source software on both images include audacity and lame, and other free software such as Google Earth, iTunes, Adobe and many plug-ins. They also are members of the world community grid; their 36,000 computers are providing many hours of spare processing time (during the work day) to organizations trying to solve major world problems such as energy, cancer, and AIDS. Additionally, they are running more than 100 Linux servers. Other Open Source and Free Software AISD uses include:

apache for web servers
samba for file sharing
nagios for server monitoring
mySQL and postgreSQL for some databases
sendmail for email services
ISC DHCP and bind for DHCP services
moodle for course management
tomcat and jboss for web based applications
perl and php to build in-house applications

As an Austin citizen I am proud to see that AISD is a solid supporter of the open source community and is not blindly following a Microsoft centric architecture. In fact because they are reasonably agnostic they make an overt attempt to find applications that are multi-platform and save money. Also, it is not unreasonable that an organization with approximately 6,000 teachers representing a cross section of America with many different teaching specialties, that there will be some individuals that are not totally aware of current technology trends.

Now to the meat of the matter. Many, many of you have pushed for the identification of this teacher.

I cannot or will not relinquish that. Read the comments from slashdot alone or the hundreds on my blog to understand why!

There isn't any amount of money I will accept to throw a human being into that cement mixer.

The fact that I did it to a profession is bad enough.

All Righty Then

[sovereign]

I wonder if she's friends with Judy Patch:

A beginners guide to computer hardware

lol


(If you want the page in its full glory with images, use google's cached page.)

[Brocman]

It's amazing how dumb some people are. Sadly there are still people who think the CD tray is a cup holder.

[RaTix]

For the lazy people who don't like links.

Classic stupidity.

A beginners guide to computer hardware

Computers & Accessories

Angelfire finally restored my web site, a hacker got into my main frame and got my hard drives Ip Address. Im taking donations at my paypal address so I can recover from this unfortunate event and continue to produce my informational CD about how computers work. If everyone could donate $1 I would be much obliged.

Hello, and welcome to my guide on computer hardware for beginners.

My name is Judy Patch and I have always been fascinated by computers.

I wrote this guide to inform others on the basic hardware components of today's standard home P.C.s



This site is sill a working progress, being my first website, its not perfect. Please email any queries, tips, etc Alternitavely, you can contact me via MSN messenger using this address. Thank you

-Judy

Central Programming Unit

the C.P.U. (or 'motherboard' as it is more commonly known) is the main part of hardware you need to know about. It is a large circuit that is made up of tiny microscopic wires and connections that pass data to different parts of the computer.

All computers have C.P.U.s

The C.P.U. has many plugs and slots for various other pieces of computer hardware such as R.A.M., a chip, cards, FDD disk drives, A.G.P. cards etc...

The C.P.U. looks quite complicated, but is in fact quite simple.

A C.P.U.'s speed is measured by the amount of busses it has. A Bus is a tiny microscopic electronic component that carries computer data. The more busses a cpu has, the more data can be carried at once, the faster it is. Most of today's modern C.P.U.s have over 700 busses.

An image of a typical CPU unit



Chip

The chip is, in a sense, the 'brain' of the computer. it plugs into a special slot in the the C.P.U. and processes all the computers data. The chip's speed is measured in Megahertz (mhz) the more mhz the chip has, the faster it is.

There are three main types of chips, Celeron, Pentium and A.M.D. There are no distinct differences between the three, just different brands, although, Pentium is the most widely known and is suported by most, if not all, software companies.

The chip has many pins on its under-face, these pins slot into the holes of the C.P.U.'s chip-slot so it can communicate with the C.P.U.

A Pentum chip



Random Access Memory

Random access memory, or R.A.M. is used by the computer to store files and data until the P.C. is shut down.

whenever you create a file, edit a document or make any similar changes, all this information is stored in your R.A.M. until you shut down, then it is transferred onto your HDD disk drive. Ofcourse a computer runs better if it has more R.A.M., the standard amout of R.A.M. for todays home P.C.s is about 512 mgb of R.A.M.

There are different types of R.A.M. which include EDO, SD and DDR. There is a new standard of R.A.M. beginning sale this year, it is known as DDR2 which holds more data than normal DDR R.A.M.

DDR3 is also expected to go on sale in early 2007 which will be able to hold even more data than DDR and DDR2.

A R.A.M. unit



HDD Disk Drive

HDD Disk Drives or 'Hard Drives' are where all the computers data is stored when the computer is off.

R.A.M. cannot keep data stored unless it has power, whereas hard drives can hold data even when no power is present. Hard drives come in a range of sizes, but the standard for today is about 80 gb.

Every Hard drive has a unique IP address. An IP address is used by the internet so the governmnet can keep track of you. That way if someone is doing something illegal, such as hacking, the government or police can identify this person by their IP address, simmilar to a cars liscence plate.

Some hackers however, have found ways to steal peoples IP address by using special virusses called trojan horses. Once the hacker has stolen someones IP address, they can use it while hacking to avoid being caught.

stealing IP addresses is illegal and I will not be explaining how to do it here.

A typical HDD Disk Drive

If you think this sounds about right, go slap yourself and then PM me so I can educate you.

[Taco_assassin]

Imagine a technological world where kids in school are taught not only computers from a fairly young age, but different OS's too. Then, not only would they be able to grasp lots of different things but they'd also have a choice as to how to get it done. Choice??? In AmeriCorp?? Who allowed this to happen???
Think about how easy linux command line would have been to learn if it started in later grade school or early high school years. Or maybe if mac usage had been thrown into the mix. Instead we've had M$ shoving that product down our throats since the Apple went obsolete in schools...
Pay enough and your OS is used everywhere. Granted windows is easy to use for everyone, but even some of the stuff people like me have figured out how to do isn't all that hard. Even for John Q. Public. This, to me is why linux is so different to most people. To really get things done, or fix things, you need to get your hands dirty and actually research something and figure out how to do it. God forbid Mr./Mrs. Public be involved enough. Sorry I went off on a bit of a rant. I may not have been as articulate as i wanted to but whatever.

[Zabka]

Or maybe if mac usage had been thrown into the mix. Instead we've had M$ shoving that product down our throats since the Apple went obsolete in schools...
Pay enough and your OS is used everywhere.

It's easy to vilify the big, often non fair trade compliant Microsoft, but MS didn't shove its product down out throats. There was not a viable alternative. Macs were too expensive for most institutions, and for a while there, didn't have the processing speed. Don't forget that Apple was a complete mess not too long ago in the interim-Jobs era (after he got fired and before he got rehired). The machines were relegated to graphic design and things of that nature because Quark Express was easier on the Mac. I say this because when I went to college, everyone had a Mac and most of the school's computers were Macs. It was a rude awakening for me to go into the working world and have to transition to a non-Mac world (this is when Lotus 123 was the dominant spreadsheet program and Excel was still trying to catch up, dBase and Paradox were the key relational databases, not Microsoft's). So they took advantage of their market dominance in Word (which was the best WP for both the Mac and PC) and created Office and they were off. Competition could have done a better job, but they didn't innovate fast enough. When Mac's finally got the processing power, they became competitive again and have since shown some really nice innovation.

But the evolution on MS's dominance was one I transitioned slowly through--and it wasn't being thrust upon us. Powerpoint, Excel, and Word were just better programs than what was out there. Mac's were underpowered for business purposes (as well as late to the laptop game). The competition sucked..that's all. It was sometime after that they became evil....