Last week, a student at Big Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania was given detention for using Firefox on a school computer. Quoted below is the key explanation from the official detention writeup: Posted on 12/17/2007 11:41:53 AM PST by twntaipan
Last week, a student at Big Spring High School in Newville, Pennsylvania was given detention for using Firefox on a school computer. Quoted below is the key explanation from the official detention writeup:
“Today in class [name] had a program launched called Foxfire.exe. I had told [name] to close the program and to resume work but he told me that is was just a different browser and that he was doing his work. I had given him two warnings but he insisted that it was just a ‘better’ browser and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I had then issued his detention.”
I’m sure whether I should laugh or cry. It says so much about the state of technical education, respect for authority, what passes for civil disobedience and–of course–the all-consuming corporate hegemony of Microsoft. We live in a strange world.
Once again, hat tip to my buddy Lizard for the heads up.
Ain’t that the truth?
You obviously have a good IT department.
In general terms, how did you come up with the idea for your business?
Yeah. Of course, he could have done something really heinous, like cutting his meat with a knife, and could have been arrested for his trouble.
The motive for creating the hoax would belong to Firefox supporters if you ask me. They’re trying to get their product’s name out and whip up some sympathy as being unfairly persecuted in typical environments. From the looks of the thread responses it didn’t work, even many firefox users were turned off.
Thanks. I was away for a few hours and appreciate the updated information.
Wouldn’t it be a hoot if it turned out that the school’s IT department started this hoax?
Actually, it can be extremely fast, using either an image on a hidden partition on the hard drive, or if all the systems are identical, using multicasting (as long as you don't have any Dell switches on your network, because you'll wind up with broadcast storms).
From start to finish, it can take less than 7 minutes.
Policy based imaging can be your friend - Zenworks from Novell is my personal favorite in Windows environments, although for single computers, it's hard to beat Ghost.
Mark
Actually, it can be extremely fast, using either an image on a hidden partition on the hard drive, or if all the systems are identical, using multicasting (as long as you don't have any Dell switches on your network, because you'll wind up with broadcast storms).
From start to finish for a basic system, it can take less than 7 minutes.
Policy based imaging can be your friend - Zenworks from Novell is my personal favorite in Windows environments, although for single computers, it's hard to beat Ghost.
Mark
I suppose my school’s pretty laid back. In our comp class, we can pretty much do anything so long as we get our work done. I mean, Halo and several other games are installed on all of our computers, the teacher knows about it, and he actually installed it. We play the games and do whatever. If we waste too much time, we get bad grades. Simple.
Me thinks the teacher was either ignorant or a bit over zealously bureaucratic.
It turns out this was a hoax.
good point - would the student be a ‘tax-payer’ then? or just the dependent of a possible tax-payer?
That’ll knock the buzz right outta you. Don’t you think a whip would have felt better?
OH NOEZ!! IT'S THE OPEN SOURCE CONSPIRACY!! IT'S THE COMMUNISTS WHO DON'T LIKE MICROSOFT!! OMG OMG OMG!! EVERYBODY RUN!!!
C'mon GE, lighten up. Some kid who happens to hate IE probably decided to go up against the teacher, caught hell for disobeying directions, and decided to get even on the internet with a hoax.
Firefox's name is plenty "out", and no Firefox supporter would intentionally launch such an inane stunt anyway; as you correctly pointed out, it's not very effective.
Seriously, GE, they're not -ALL- out to get you... just us ;-)
Ah. My apologies to the teacher for any undue criticism.
In my case, I just started as a side business doing the same thing I did during the day, but for companies small enough not to hire an inside person. And I built the stuff instead of just designing it like I did during the day. Caught on, and I started doing it as a full time gig.
Don’t worry, we know what it is, not like we’re not used to the constant open source marketing threads like this distracting from more interesting and important articles on this site. Shot down like normal, too.
If you find them dull and unimportant, that's fine -- please do us all a favor: save your time and typing, and ignore them. Your comments typically add nothing substantive to the discussion, so we're all better off if you pay the open source threads no mind. Now wasn't that easy?
Most people do ignore them, not only because they are relatively unimportant, but they are typically filed with misinformation. But I like pointing it out.
If the kid went to to teacher to no avail its ok to then go to the admins, there does need to be respect throughout the process..
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