On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 19:04 +1100, rodryan wrote: > Gday folks > Here in Australia our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd has promised a > computer for each desk for senior students year 9 - 12. I think the best > way to go is with Linux and open source software. Have you any > suggestions (political, presentation, hardware, software) on the way to go. > tia > Rod Ryan > WooHoo! Technology to the students! Personal background to justify my comments: I am trained as a physicist, have taught college physics and astronomy for nearly a decade, have done technology administration/design/support for small to large businesses for nearly a decade and I am the architect behind the Atlanta Public Schools Linux thin client pilot project (33 server, 2200 linux thin clients, 4400 students, 7 schools, 1 huge success). I can not emphasize enough how important it is to not get laptops. DO NOT GET LAPTOPS!!! They are the most expensive computing platform available in terms of initial purchase, ongoing maintenance, replacement parts and their basic fragility makes them totally unsuited for use in a high impact environment like the area surrounding a typical high school teenager. Since the plan is to do a one-to-one roll-out and support costs will likely be the driving factors in component use and software. Unless Dell/HP/etc drastically slash hardware prices and Microsoft jumps onboard and offer their products basically for no cost for the next 10 years with free copies for all students and teachers to take home as well, Linux thin clients are the most affordable solution. The clients are all solid state, no moving parts, low electrical power, minimal cooling requirements and the servers carry all the load. Since the servers are standard components (at least the ones I design and install), parts are nearly commodity items and thus available and affordable. The support costs are minimal as in our typical design, there are only two servers that even have hard drives (OK, so they typically 8 hard drives) and they are redundant mirrors of each other. All of the servers that drive the thin clients are identical and only require replacing a fan when it fails. The beauty of all of this every student (and teacher) can get to their stuff from anywhere in the school, it's always running and the integration of heavy data access in the classroom happens almost magically. Once the teachers acclimate to always having working computers, they adapt the curriculum pretty quickly to do many projects that involve research and critical thinking - just the skills education is supposed to foster. It's a win-win-win-win situation (schools-teachers-students-society). If I can be of assistance in this, please let me know. -- James P. Kinney III CEO & Director of Engineering Local Net Solutions,LLC 770-493-8244 http://www.localnetsolutions.com GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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