Text 58589, 68 rader
Skriven 2009-11-29 16:07:56 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 58587 av Jean Parrot (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Simili Taskbar.
=======================
Jean Parrot -> Alan Zisman wrote:
 JP> Alan wrote:

 AZ>> I have multiple copies of Win 7 (mostly the Release Candidate)
 AZ>> installed, but mostly ignored... I put the Dell netbook back to
 JP> Ubuntu,
 AZ>> but I do have two Win 7 installations on my Mac - one under the new
 AZ>> version of VMware Fusion virtualizer, the other under the new
 JP> version of
 AZ>> its competitor Parallels Desktop, so I can compare the two virtualizer
 AZ>> software programs for review.

 JP>     It still escapes me, I do not understand, why one would run an OS in
 JP> Virtual mode. Why not use the full version. Oh, on a Wormy ! Ok,
 JP> granted. But now, I know that you have PCs around the house, I guess
 JP> that you are running tests on this Vbusiness to be able to write about
 JP> it. Good on you.

 AZ>> My employer, the Vancouver School District, rolled out 7000 new Dell
 AZ>> desktops for teachers and students - running XP SP3. So my work
 JP> time is
 AZ>> spent getting people used to working on the new setups of the old OS.

 JP>     7k new machines ? I would hate to have to foot that bill even if a
 JP> mass purchase brings the cost down/unit. One school commission here, two
 JP> years ago, spent $1G to hand out a Wormy to all students and teachers,
 JP> they claimed that this was the way of the future. The tech support was
 JP> missing, this was under rated. It was breaking away from the standard
 JP> and the end results were not as expected. It was a primary school and
 JP> the young ones were not fully appreciative of this new medium. Mainly,
 JP> the parents forbade them to bring the machines home for fear that they
 JP> would be "lost" and they would have to foot the replacement bill, this
 JP> was in a rural area where the $$$ do not come easy.  Being a Wormy has
 JP> nothing to do with the problem.

The various school districts that have experimented with providing every
student with a laptop (Mac or PC) haven't, in my opinion, fully thought things
through.

In Vancouver, this past year, the IT department followed up on a small number
of Downadup virus infections - on some of their servers and on some
workstations - to shut down all computer use on the District for 2-3 weeks to
allow them to check every (Windows) system for infection and install antivirus
software... then went to the school board claiming that they'd found a real
mess that was impossible to keep updated (at least partially true!); they
proposed the mass purchase, and claimed that it could be made 'budget neutral'
by shifting money from various other computer-related programs, cancelling the
District's MS Office license (which was costing $100,000/yr) and other
sleight-of-hand.

The result- nearly 7,000 Dell systems: Celeron-based with 17" LCD screens for
students at a cost of about CDN$550/ea, and Core 2 Duo-based systems w. 19" LCD
screens for teachers at a cost of about CDN$650/ea.

The claim is that the long-term costs will decrease to support these
standardized systems, running a standardized, mostly free or open-source
software package that can updated centrally... what wasn't accounted for was
the need to upgrade network bandwidth significantly to allow all these new
systems to make more use of the network than was formerly the case.

-- 
==================================
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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