[ale] Re: This bites (was Re: [ale] More on Mozilla/Java)

[Thompson Freeman]

I guess, once the mind set is formed, nothing ever ever will change
it. Sad to see an alledged education institution go from works to sort of
works...

On 25 Mar 2002, James P. Kinney III wrote:

> 
> > Snoopy minds want to know: Were you able to get the liscence fee back from
> > MS? Were you able to make the UI identify itself as a Linux implementation
> > as opposed to a MS implementation? Are you able to check that the Students
> > are aware that they are not using a MS solution, even though it really
> > really shouldn't be an issue?
> 
> Of course there was no license fee refund. The box shipped with NT
> pre-installed. The NT guy then blew them off and installed his Norton
> Ghosted NT installation (it took nearly 2 weeks for that get working).
> When I trashed the NT of the box, I had already twiddled with the ghost
> setup and left a partition big enough for a linux distribution to be
> installed in. 
> 
> The gdm screen is _clearly_ not M$. I also customized it so it had a
> background image relevant to both the school and the department. A few
> students didn't catch on to "use the foot icon" very fast. But they
> weren't catching on to much of anything in the class anyway. 
> 
> It was VNC that really blew them all away! I gave a multi-client demo of
> how to use the interface. They all watched the same screen and were
> clearly astounded. I was in the process of setting up a VNC control
> panel for the lab TA's so they could "observe" from one location the
> efforts of the students. This was not specifically a spy tool, but it
> had uses during lab exams. It was really speedy on it's own private
> network.
> 
> Alas, I grew disgusted and left to do other things. The entire Linux
> operations were replaced by NT workstations over the next break (it took
> over 4 days to reinstall the ghost images, snicker) and the custom lab
> software was deleted the following break time. It was a sad thing to see
> them go back to the mess of "a program for every task" that I had
> replaced with a simple to use browser interface. 
> 
> 

-- 
===========================================
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
                    Lee Iacocca
===========================================
Thompson Freeman          tfreeman at intel.digichem.net


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.