Re: [K12OSN] proposal

Kirk Rheinlander (kirk@kpj2.com)
Fri, 29 Mar 2002 09:59:28 -0700 

LONG WINDED, but should help.....

Sales position - Terminal Server environments are cheaper to operate than 
"fat client" PCs -- Data: Gartner and IDC both report that it costs $8-12k 
per year to operate and maintain a fat client PC. If you don't believe 
that, take the amount of time you spend weekly on PC maintenance (software 
upgrades, repair and maintenance on broken "stuff", support time [yours or 
with someone else], training, etc.) on a single machine that you use. If it 
works out to be around 1.5+ hours/week, you are at the $8k figure (about 80 
hours at $100/hr - typical burdened rate for basic skill set IT folk). 
Multiply it by the number of machines in the mix. Your rate may vary, but I 
would assume, as a school, you have very limited resource time availability.

Now add to this the cost of support, maintenance, software upgrades, hand 
holding, network infrastructure, servers (file, application, database, 
DHCP, DNS, Firewall, etc.) amortized over some number of machines, then add 
Internet access costs - well, you get the point. It easily creates the 
$8-12k/yr data.

Terminal servers still have paragraph 2 costs, plus some, but typically not 
enough $$$ (read: time) to offset to the paragraph #1 costs. AND, in a 
terminal server environment, you only fix the server, or server software, 
and all the client are fixed by default.

Add to all of this that, at least with the LTSP approach, ancient hardware 
works perfectly fine as terminals. AND those machines now have a useful 
life determined by the brawn of the server, not the desktop (and no client 
upgrade cycle time!).

Time wise, cost wise, availability of resource (school IT staff), use of 
older (read: donated for FREE) hardware, and the cost of the majority of 
the software (free) make a compelling argument for a school environment (or 
for any environment, for that matter).

Now, the Mickey$oft camp will argue that now having MS Windows out there, 
and things like Visual Basic for the labs, is detrimental to the kid's 
education. That is pure FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - taught in IBM 
marketing school in the 60s-80s and learned well by Mickey$oft) - the 
corporate world (an area which I am well versed, having developed the 
Enterprise I/T architecture for many of the Fortune 100 companies in the 
US) is moving at an extremely fast pace to web-fronted, web-enabled, or 
full web-services environments. These are NOT Microsoft strengths (unless 
you subscribe to .NET taking over that space).

As such, programming should be far more platform agnostic, and maybe even 
web centric. Python, PHP, JAVA, J2EE, etc, as well as strong focus on DB 
programming as well would be far more appropriate. Those schools that 
concentrate on the human interface aspect of programming (Visual Basic?) 
are missing much of what programming is all about. You would be amazed at 
what PHP and MySQL is capable of creating, and it is pure [client] platform 
agnostic. These are all freebies in the  Open Source camp.

I have some very large corporate (multi-$B) clients that are aggressively 
looking at a 3 year plan to eliminate Mickey$oft totally from their 
environments. Many more are putting the server side of LINUX in place 
today. Steve Balmer stated that LINUX is the #1 threat to Microsoft 
currently out there. Microsoft's current license scheme, forced payments 
and agreements (sign on now at this rate, or it will cost you 2x+ later), 
have lit a fire under many to seriously look at non-MS alternatives.

On the other side of the coin, Win2k T.S. is a good approach, if you have 
to have MS. Educational pricing is absolutely awesome.

But thin clients on old hardware do not perform nearly as well as the same 
hardware on LTSP. License management is a bear, and the constant threat of 
MS oversight is abhorrent (recently publicized article on MS suing the 
bankrupt Philadelphia school system for $millions$ because of a few illegal 
copies of Windows - MS auditing schools here in Colorado, making them prove 
the legality of everything on their machines, etc, etc, etc.)

The other argument that will come from the MS camp is the existing school 
management software out there. Here is the (low cost or free) counter to 
that....

School admin from the Shuttleworth foundation - open source....includes
attendance, personnel mgmt, curriculum, AP,AR,GL, etc.
http://www.schooltool.org/
K12ADMIN software
http://k12admin.cmsd.bc.ca/
The Shadow Network for Schools - Frequently Asked Questions
http://sns.internetschools.org/info/faqs/index.cgi

Hope this helps your presentation.....

Kirk Rheinlander





At 07:10 AM 3/26/2002, Jay Kline wrote:
>I will be making a proposal to a school shortly to get LTSP set up in a lab.
>This is a 100% volunteere project, and shuold not cost the school district
>anything- but I could use some advice on how to make the proposal.  I dont
>want to sound like a blabering nerd, and I dont want to insult their
>intelligance- but I have no experience in making proposals, so any advice is
>gladly accepted.
>
>
>Jay
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>K12OSN mailing list
>K12OSN@redhat.com
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