[K12OSN] Given this situation, why bother continue with LTSP?

[The Prof]

One more thing I forgot to add:

We are in the design and about to start building a new church/school
center on new land near to us. (I had sent an email about this before
about helping design a new school.)  Ideally it would be great to have
the 2 building's networked together seamlessly. Does this impact each
the decision one way or another?

thanks,
Joseph

On 4/20/05, The Prof <joseph.bishay at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thank you for the prompt replies.  I'd like to continue the
> conversation by addressing some concerns which have been raised, as
> well as providing some more information.
> 
> In regards to the person doing the donating - the hardware must be
> given to a non-profit organization, and we are not allowed to re-sell
> the licenses. The hardware is coming from one place and it doesn't
> have any OS on them.  The number of software licenses available is
> very high so we'll never run out, and it includes ALL microsoft
> products.  I do not think there is a time-limit, so to speak, for
> these licenses, but I do not know.  The person doing the donating
> wants to help us out very much, and doesn't have an agenda of any
> sort. He has been trained extensively as a MSCE and other
> microsoft-related things, so he does know it all very well, but he's
> not going to gain anything one way or another.
> 
> In regards to the future upgrade of these donated machines - I would
> argue that the turn-over rate of computers in a church or elementary
> school is much slower than in a company - we were, until 1.5 years
> ago, running pentium 1 windows 98 machines on a WinNT server a little
> slowly, but no problem. Only reason we had to ditch that system was
> because our NT server died a horrible, smokey death and we wouldn't
> have been able to afford to upgrade all the clients to XP.  I think
> that if we had a lab of pentium 4 machines and a dual Xenon SCSI
> machine as the server (that's the type of hardware he can get us) that
> it would last us for a long, long time.
> 
> In regards to the spyware situation - doesn't microsoft now have
> anti-spyware software? If so, that would be included as part of the
> donation.  For the viruses, I'd assume that we'd have to install a
> server-based antivirus program to take care of that, along with
> locking down the clients a bit. That does require more work and admin,
> which brings me to the next point...
> 
> Administration:  Currently with a linux lab I am the only one who can
> administer it because no one knows how or is interested in this
> 'new-fangled stuff'. If it was a Windows lab, that responsiblity could
> be spread out among at least a few people who have this ability,
> lightening my load. In addition, most of the admin/setup/etc. is done
> for free as we volunteer our time.  So it isn't like we'd cost more
> because of the increased work to them :)
> 
> Learning a word-processor vs. learning MS WORD: This is an interesting
> argument. Since many people are educators here, you are approaching it
> differently than the parents/admin staff. They are looking at it from
> a certain perspective.  IE: I use MS at work. I use MS at home. My
> child in university uses MS and her prof uses MS in his lectures. My
> resume says that I know MS Office. Where does Linux fix in?  Bank
> website X and company website Y say that I need to get IE to make it
> work.  When I walk into BestBuy or open the paper I see the computers
> are being sold with Windows XP. So why are you forcing this
> non-Windows stuff on me? So what if it is less administration? Why do
> I care?  That's the dilemma.
> 
> As sad as it is to say, MANY people do not view education and school
> as a way to increase their child's capability of thought, but as a way
> to get a professional high-paying job. And I'm not about to take on
> the ideology of an entire culture. :)
> 
> Joseph
>