[ale] Planned obsolescence / Computers for Schools

[Chris Fowler]

On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 10:12 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> 
> When we tried to bid to finish the job throughout the school
> district, 
> we were preparing to develop the industrial capacity to assemble and 
> deploy on the order of 15,000-25,000 thin clients - diskless, fanless 
> units screwed to the back of LCD monitors, with an app server for
> every 
> 200-250 thin clients and one file server per school.
> 
> 

I'm going to throw out some flamebait here but I don't understand the
purpose of putting computers in school in large numbers.  Maybe there is
motivation but is the US seeing results?

When I was in HS we had one computer lab.  I took CS for 3 years and use
that lab.  The only people that used that lab were the CS students and
the French students came along after I wrote a program to quiz them on
French -> English.  

I don't see why kids can't write essays with pencils.  I think there
should be a lab for CS students and science studies where they could use
tools like Matlab.  I'm not sure I understand the reason to progress
outside of the lab.

Even TC's seem to be a huge drain on resources and I'm not sure the US
is seeing results.  It also seems the eduction in the US is going
backwards in results.  Seems the computers that are there are not
helping.

I will admit that in my job I would be lost without Google.  Wikipedia
is great for looking up anything I want to look up.  Kids need to learn
how to use the Internet to lean anything they want to learn.  Even in CS
we had slackers that would play Leisure Suite Larry instead of writing
their programs.