[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by phrontist

As long as I'm only modifying the laptop assigned to me, who am I potentially harming other than myself?

As I said, you are harming the IT department (not you as in you specifically, but you as in any student who changes their laptop). The IT department's job is to see that each student has a working laptop. If you break it, then they have to fix it to maintain their goal.

This is a red herring. We're not talking about altering any machine other than the one assigned to robotics student in question.

Yes we are, because if they let you change your laptop then they need to let everyone change their laptop. The IT department does not have any real way of knowing if you are competent enough to modify things without dorking something up.

How do you tease someone with a laptop?! I'm not sure what exactly is being described here, but it sounds as though these are actions that negatively impact the education of other students. This is not what is being described by any of the above posters. Any harm that could come out of the above actions would be self-inflicted.

I was describing a potential consequence of letting the kids install software, and in this case IM software. This is not a hypothetical - I've seen a situation like this.

That doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, but rather that you shouldn't bother tech support when you get yourself in trouble. If you never come in contact with tech support, everyone is happy.

That would be fine if you weren't required to do anything with the computer. If you screwed it up and no one found out then I suppose it would be less of a concern. However, I assume these computers are distributed with the intent of them being used in class and for homework. If your teacher tells you to pull out your laptop and start up Excel or something and you can't because you installed Linux, then you have a problem. And when you tell your teacher you can't start Excel there's a good chance he/she will send you to IT to get your laptop fixed.

It's hard because you are trying to protect people from themselves, a policy which I have yet to hear a successful implentation of. See "The War on Drugs"

Once again, you are not trying to protect the students from themselves, you are trying to protect the IT department from having to deal with the consequences of students mucking with things that they shouldn't be.

I'm advocating the entirely different practice of booting a CD and storing files on a USB key. This lives the computer totally immune from technical fowl up. There is simply no technical reason this should be of concern.

First of all, it was already mentioned that the BIOS was locked and the laptops wouldn't boot from other media. Even if it weren't, there's probably a policy against it. And, booting from CD/USB does not leave the computer "totally immune from technical fowl up". I can boot from a Knoppix CD and mount the local hard drive (or run dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda) and still screw things up. By booting from another medium you're circumventing security measures put in place by IT (that's how they'll view it).

A computer is a tool like any other, why should it be treated differently?

Exactly my point! Does your school let you make your own blade for a table saw and use that? Do they let you write in their textbooks? Do they let you take apart the school VCRs and rewire them? I doubt it.

I've interned at a fairly large (300+ employee) aeronautics engineering firm. I arrived the first day expecting to spend a lot of time explaining to tech support why I would need various tools to do my project (writing UAV groundstation software, which required a lot of unusual software configurations for testing). I was pleasently suprised to find that IT simply managed the network and left engineers (and lowly interns) to do what they needed, helping when help was requested. I'd imagine most companies that value employee sanity would do the same. As long as I was doing my work (reaching deadlines) and not inhibiting fellow employees from doing the same (say, by playing Half Life 2 on my break and doing the Zombie Frag dance every five minutes) everything was copacetic.

Employers will expect you to have more responsibility for yourself, yes. You still will probably not have free reign however. Maybe you did at that place, but you won't everywhere. I can do pretty much what I want with my work laptop, but I'm still not allowed to do certain things, such as installing Ethereal, or formatting it and putting Linux on it. If we need that for our job then our department will buy a "lab" laptop which is totally unsupported by IT (and it's still scanned by IT for vulnerabilities which we have to patch, etc).

You need to look at this from the IT perspective of supporting 1000s of machines, not from your own perspective where you're convinced you won't screw it up. I'm sure you can imagine someone else who you go to school with who you think could do some damage with the admin password. Well, for better or worse that's probably how the IT staff views you and all of your classmates (probably through years of experience).