Almost no-one knows how a television works past “A ’station’ sends a signal and a ’set’ shows it.” Damn, I designed and built tube amps, and still don’t get why transistors work. But I have built very complex electronic boxes using chips and my friends the npn variety of transistors. I don’t know why they work but I know how to work them.

As for communications technology, try this on for size. Wired telephone systems run off DC power – in North America, 48 volts. At the switching centre, all power ultimately comes from two bus bars – a positive and a negative. Power goes through your phone, gets modulated by a variable-resistance microphone with the result that sound comes out the other party’s earpiece. Since we’re all on the same power source at the switching centre, why can’t we all hear each other? [Forget about repeaters, concentrators, and the electronics in your portable phone. They are merely improvements on an old system. This problem occurred when the fourth phone was installed and two calls could be made simultaneously.] The point: we can use things very effectively without understanding how they work.

Now to the FLOSS or F/OSS issue you all bashed me for at the beginning. Maybe, just maybe I’ll upgrade the version of Linux I am running to see if the more recent stuff is less bizarre, a little more accepting of standards – even simple things like HTTP aren’t that good on the version I am using, and it would be nice if the various amusing offerings worked in similar fashions to each other.

And, mayhaps I will put an Apache box on line as well, just to see what happens to my sites. I know it is faster, but when last I gave it a shot several years ago, it lacked EASY connectivity and development tools weren’t all that great. Admittedly I am reluctant to change languages and tools simply because I am usually in a rush to get things done and use what I know will work.

And I see you all hate my first comment, BUT… I use Firefox – a decidedly quicker, easier to use and better product, but my web sites, none of which are for programmers, all show an 80-82% MSIE use. I haven’t checked to see if IS is available for Linux, but I suspect not. That means at LEAST 80% of the people surfing my crap are Windows folks.

B

I have been turning many windows users to Linux just because it is a better solution. Of course I am simply cutting my throat because FOSS is so reliable (what are viruses, etc.), that I will not be making any MONEY!!!! and then again I say who cares, at some point there has to be an upgrade I can charge for (not).

Just kidding, I have many converts and I am still making dollars via FOSS.

1 – There are plenty of people who make a living supporting FLOSS, have you ever heard of Novell? There is quite a bit of benefit to more than the grass root hackers you are probably envisioning. The less it costs to have a secure OS in your entereprise the better the bottom line.

2 – The educational goals of any institution should include making people understand the evolution of the field of study, and that which makes it tick today.

3 – Learning .NET and Visual Studio are trivial for someone who has been well educated in almost any other high level programming language. One should not become so dependent on a suite that will do 90% of the redundancies – and learn to crawl before you walk.

Don’t confuse this with a marketing/business model equation, because I would have a hard time spending a dime on a VCR if the Beta machine was free… I hope others have this sense too.

Robert
http://www.coarseblog.blogspot.com

2) Its unrealistic to assume that all students comming out of a highschool programming course will be able to cope in industry, as much as it is to assume that someone who has taken a highschool phyics course can build a bridge.

3) While you can probably find a part time job with .NET, you’d find yourself hardpressed (you’d be lauged at) if you tried to use your experience to find yourself a full time position. There are many windows applications that are built with tools ported from linux. Its very hard to cope with a plastic toy when what you really need is a power saw.

1) To keep bright, motivated young people out of the work force as long as possible, and to steer them into spending yet more of their lives in post-secondary “education” so they do not endanger the existing union-government power structure.

2) To keep discontented young people in day-prison where they can be tracked, and through continuous failure teach them that they cannot contribute to society. Minimum wage and “child labor” laws ensure that there is no functional alternative for such young people in the historically successful forms such as apprenticeship.

3) To bore and tire the students as much as possible, to teach them to comply with and depend upon arbitrary rules and bells, in order for there to be as great a number of compliant workers and reflex voters as possible.

Therefore, forcing Microsoft software is perfectly rational given the purposes that public school was established to fulfill.

Nor is he/she aware that Norway, Chile, major US school districts, parts of S. Korea and S. Africa are using the same technology in schools that, afaik, was being used in this Ontario school.

Nor is he/she aware that within a few years, web-delivered software such as zohowriter and easywriter will take a major share of the now propietary “office” software market – and this is what Steve Ballmer has nightmares about.

Nor are they aware that virtually every movie they now watch uses Linux cgi effects.

But to the point of education – the real objective of the letter: an Italian educator put it well when he objected to the “let’s teach Microsoft in schools” as creating a generation of “mouse-clicking monkeys”. FLOSS offers the same functionality as propietary systems. But further, it allows students to take control and understand the software itself. In English and Math classes, students are taught not how to calculate expense reports but to understand the underlying concepts of language and math.

As well, the financial considerations are immense. Not only for the schools, many of which spend half or more of their technology budgets on licensing alone but to the students themselves. We’ve created a generation of haves/have nots – those who most desperately need the education don’t have parents who can bring home a copy of Powerpoint from the office.

FLOSS/Linux works wonderfully in school As the kids say at our school when a computer occasionally boots back up in that “other” OS: “What happened to the good screen?”

One of the really nice things about F/OSS is that people can run it themselves on down-grade hardware without asking anyone’s permission.

Smartest thing this teacher could do is hand out KNOPPIX or another live CD to the kids and say something like, “I’m not allowed to teach you this in school, but I can’t legally give you any of the software we use here. So go use this instead.”

60% of jobs in Dice.com or Jobserve are related to Unix/Linux which means Linux is a much more viable path that .NET or MS stuff to seek for employments.

Maybe you are computer illiterate enough to think IT science is all about installing Office and cleaning windows viruses, but think twice, do you really think industry software runs on buggy Windows machines. Do you think telco, energy or engeniering companies, the internet of your city traffic controls runs on Windows. None, absolutely none of them run of windows.

If student get miss-educated on the M$ world they will be doomed to a world of “swaping viruses” and pressing “next-next-next” to install stupid and unesefull Office and Adobe software. On the opposite if they get edducated the High-available 24×7 Unix world they will get a change to have well paid jobs.

2,3) So you are trained in Dot-Net 2.0 and Office 2003. You haven’t been taught any underlying principles. Do you understand word processing, as in word processing itself not just the location of the Bold button in the Office 2003 interface? Have you studied design patterns? Do you know the pros and cons of the choices you can make in software – or do you merely know how to drag a text box onto a form in Visual Studio?

If you only know Office 2003 and Visual Studio’s drag and drop form designer then you are not skilled in computing. By the time you leave college your skils may be out of date or something better may have come along. Learn the real concepts and principals – and you can do this perfectly well in Linux / Java / Open Office or even LaTeX – and you will be set up for life. Unfortunately too many people are not skilled in computing.

The more people who make their letters public, the more people who might feel comfortable writing their own letters.

The M$ software that these kids use will be long obsolete by the time the kids hit the workforce or institutes of higher learning.

Besides, education is about teaching concepts and ideas not about training people how to use a product or delivering future customers to a transnational software conglomerate.

Also, as a taxpayer I resent my hard earned dollars being used to line the pockets of a convicted monopoly corporation when high quality software is available for free to anyone who wants it.

Schools should be about empowering students to make critical decisions about the kind of software they use.

This is a horrible decision and I’ve linked this article to other sites in the hopes that others will see the error of this government’s ways.