Re: hmmmm....

[wllmundrwd@netscape.net (William Underwood)]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tighe Schlottog [mailto:emry@icephyre.net]
>Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 2:39 PM
>To: silug-discuss@silug.org
>Subject: hmmmm....
>
>
>Now, I was sitting here thinking again, I have been doing that alot lately
>and the pain seems to be only temporary from doing that.  ;) 
Yeah, same here.  Usually, I try not to think between the hours of 8:00 am 
and 5:00 pm.  That way, when I go home, I'm not crabby, and the wife likes 
me better. ;-)

> But anyways,
>I was thinking that with the recent attempted fleecing of the schools up
>in Washington by M$ and with the "audits" run by the BSA, 
They're just trying to get you to do your tithing properly.  Aren't you a 
member of the Greater Autocracy of the Technologically Eclesiastic 
Syndicate (GATES) Church?  [All hail Bill, high holy swindler, Aaahhh-men.]

>now might be a
>good time to start talking to the local schools about free software and
>the benefits that you can get from it.  
Even as a non gratis project, you'll need a good salesperson/presenter.  
The idea WILL have to be SOLD to the board, not the school.  From what I 
can tell about the local (OFallon and Collinsville, at least) school 
systems, the board controls the IT, and the IT director/staff reports to a 
district headquarters, not to the school proper.  I think a venture like 
this would meet the least resistance from a non-Catholic, parochial school. 
(The Catholic parochial schools are also centrally directed, although more 
locally managed.)

>Schools where they are paying a
>pretty penny to be able to use products such as Word or Excel could easily
>be replaced with StarOffice or OpenOffice with some ease.  
My daughter is in first grade at Hinchcliffe (OFallon), and has been using 
spreadsheet (coloring projects to introduce the concepts of rows, columns 
and cells), word processor, and graphics programs all year.  For some of 
the kids, this half-hour-per-week class is all the exposure they have to 
computing, but for many others (like my kids) it's all old hat.  They speed 
through the task in just a few minutes, and then race to load KidPix.

>With the recent
>advances in the stability of the windowing systems within linux and the
>unixes, it would be rather simple to setup something that they would be
>able use in a quick amount of time.  
I don't want anyone to think I live in the past, but I think xterms would 
be a good way to do this, all running off a local server.  It would 
certainly cut down on patch, management, and upgrade times.

>Also, the LTSP project looks to be
>something that they might want to do.  
http://www.ltsp.org/
Oh, so that's LTSP is... Heh!  
(kinda scary, I was thinking like Tighe.  Cree-eee-eee-py!)

>The only problem would be those
>schools that use specific programs that require a windows enviroment to
>run, such as the Mavis learning series or the Rabbit typing series for
>example.  
And lets not forget about the current most popular program: KidPix.
http://www.kidpix.com/
Would any of the windows emulators help with this?

>Now, here is the call to arms.  Who amoungst us would be willing
>to help out in such an endevor?  
From a technologist point of view, I am quite happy to help.  I am not 
willing to put time into managing it, as my family time is too important, 
and rather scant already.  Oh, and I'm NOT a salesman.

>I would be more than willing to put my
<snip>
>but I am looking for a project to do and I was wondering if anyone else
>would be interseted in this?  Bleh, back to the nap.
All in all, a very worthwhile endeavor, in my opinion.  Find a manager, a 
salesperson, and a few more techs/tutors/admins/trainers, and we'll be 
rockin'n'rollin.

>Tighe

William

-- 
William Underwood
wllmundrwd@netscape.net



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