Originally Posted by TRaffic Jammer
^^^^^Hey those look Badassed^^^^^^
I went to a meeting in my sister's kids' school before giving wireless access and apple laptops to all the kids as a pilot project. Sounds cool, what software is going to be installed, I ask. Oh MS Office and web stuff , maybe some stuff for aiding in homework. Can we install our own software? I'm thinking PhotoShop, Illustrator, Indesign, for creative stretching. Oh no I'm told, the hard drives will all be locked.
So what you want is the school system to pre-train the next generation of office workers? No answer. What about all the creative software that can show kids there is more to life then a spreadsheet and a powerpoint presentation? AGain no answer.
That is such a can of worms.
On one hand, if course the hdds are locked. That's no mystery at all. After past cases of kids unlocking their locked hard drives and doing what they want w/ school laptops I'm surprised the school boards haven't knee-jerked kids back to an abacus or slide rule chained to the floor in every classroom. I like how it's news to these idiots that when you give a kid a computer (which odds are they can use better than you) and tell them there's something with it they
can't do, they go right ahead and tear it apart as they see fit the minute you take your eyes off them. Supriiise su-****ing-prise. Anyway, I'm off on a tangent. My point is that it's no surprise the hhds are locked. That's an expected deer-in-headlights reaction from a school board facing intelligent children.
The software though, that's good conspiracy theory material. Let's assume there was a committee in charge of deciding what software would be on those machines. First question, was that committee full of idiots or people with an agenda? My guess is probably a little bit from Column A and a little bit from Column B. It's not like the school board actually
paid for any of that software. MS gladly ate the cost and supplied it all for free, knowing full well they they were getting thousands of hours of free advertising for their biggest software suites with "future professionals" at their most vulnerable age. The Adobe Creative Suite and Macromedia Studio Suites are absent either because some people didn't want to include them, couldn't negotiate well enough to get them or were just too stupid to realize that kids want/deserve them (why does a kid "deserve" commercial software from some revoltingly-boated corporation? - because some of those programs are amazing artistic platforms ... the benefit to the kids' creativity outweighs the corporate evil). Next question, what's stopping the school board from changing the software on these machines for next year?