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How long an individual disk or SSD or stone tablet lasts is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the prospects for information longevity, given the network, and new levels of automated distribution that will take place on it going forward.

I don't know that I agree with that.

Compare, for example, letters written during the Civil War, with email messages sent and received by those involved in either of the Gulf Wars. Which do you think had, at the time they were written, a better chance of being available to future historians?

I'd suggest we are in danger of losing our history. What's odd is how blithe we are about it.

My university is an almost completely paperless campus. Every student, teacher, and administrator has a tablet pc. All homework, tests, notes, and whatever else you can think of is done with digital ink. It works amazingly well and considering how small and in-the-middle-of-nowhere it is I am surprised the large and progessive universities don't have systems like this already. http://www.dsu.edu/

We recently switched to tablet computers. This transition went over easily enough. (you can read more here http://admissions.dsu.edu/ftr/article/tabletpc.asp )

i think the biggest problem we have run into has been the help desk/repair station.
our campus isnt too big so we only have about 5 people working in this area.

My university just began a Tablet PC program at the beginning of this academic year and while I admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, I've become a believer in the power of Tablet PCs. The students and faculty have been issued the M275 Gateway Tablets and while it may not be the best of the best in terms of hardware, I still wouldn't trade it for a top of the line laptop.

So what's so great about these Tablet PCs? Portability comes to mind right away. Sure, the wireless internet access is great, but this thing's also incredibly lightweight compared to all the books I used to carry around, which leads me to another point -- consolidation. Despite having only started this Tablet PC program this past fall, several of my books for my classes were either online or in an electronic format of some kind. My chemistry lab manual was in PDF form and (unfortunately at times) specifically prohibited printing so as to comply with the goal of making our school a paperless campus. Every single professor I had this past semester told my classmates and me to leave our books at home because we wouldn't need them. All of my assignments were submitted electronically and returned electronically. Students and professors alike could search for information in class in real time. Want to find the electronegativity of Francium? Go Google it!

The thing for me which sets the Tablet head and shoulders above just a plain old laptop, though, is the writing feature. I take all of my notes on my Tablet (using Microsoft OneNote). I did all of my calculations for Chemistry, Economics, and Math in OneNote as well. I printed professor's powerpoint lecture notes to the Windows Journal and wrote right onto the PowerPoint presentations. My Economics professor created lecture note templates for each chapter and allowed us to fill them in as he taught. In just one semester, notebooks and paper essentially became obsolete, and instead of dragging 3 several hundred page books, 3 notebooks, and 3 folders to class, I only took my Tablet, stylus, and maybe a calculator (though the Tablet even has that, and I even have a TI-89 emulator on my Tablet). The Tablet made my schoolwork so much more consolidated.

The one thing I do long for, however, is to run GNU/Linux on my Tablet. We're allowed to install pretty much whatever we want to as far as software on our machines, and I looked for a distro that would match XP Tablet Edition, but I couldn't find anything that came close. I dislike Microsoft just as much as the next guy (or gal), but I have to admit that when it comes to Tablet PCs, the free software camp is really trailing behind. I considered Xandros and also Lycoris' Tablet PC distro, but they're in their infancy at best. I'd miss being able to write in red ink all over a word processing document, writing notes and then having the program convert them into typed text, and the amazing handwriting recognition (especially with XP Tablet Edition 2005). I long for free software to catch up, and as a Computer Science major I hope that perhaps soon I may be able to begin contributing toward that goal, but for now Microsoft has the power and unfortunately that's the way things are. I really welcome this article's news of developers taking an interest in the Tablet PC and sincerely hope it's just the tip of the iceberg with respect to free software growing to serve the Tablet PC market.

My university just began a Tablet PC program at the beginning of this academic year and while I admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, I've become a believer in the power of Tablet PCs. The students and faculty have been issued the M275 Gateway Tablets and while it may not be the best of the best in terms of hardware, I still wouldn't trade it for a top of the line laptop.

So what's so great about these Tablet PCs? Portability comes to mind right away. Sure, the wireless internet access is great, but this thing's also incredibly lightweight compared to all the books I used to carry around, which leads me to another point -- consolidation. Despite having only started this Tablet PC program this past fall, several of my books for my classes were either online or in an electronic format of some kind. My chemistry lab manual was in PDF form and (unfortunately at times) specifically prohibited printing so as to comply with the goal of making our school a paperless campus. Every single professor I had this past semester told my classmates and me to leave our books at home because we wouldn't need them. All of my assignments were submitted electronically and returned electronically. Students and professors alike could search for information in class in real time. Want to find the electronegativity of Francium? Go Google it!

The thing for me which sets the Tablet head and shoulders above just a plain old laptop, though, is the writing feature. I take all of my notes on my Tablet (using Microsoft OneNote). I did all of my calculations for Chemistry, Economics, and Math in OneNote as well. I printed professor's powerpoint lecture notes to the Windows Journal and wrote right onto the PowerPoint presentations. My Economics professor created lecture note templates for each chapter and allowed us to fill them in as he taught. In just one semester, notebooks and paper essentially became obsolete, and instead of dragging 3 several hundred page books, 3 notebooks, and 3 folders to class, I only took my Tablet, stylus, and maybe a calculator (though the Tablet even has that, and I even have a TI-89 emulator on my Tablet). The Tablet made my schoolwork so much more consolidated.

The one thing I do long for, however, is to run GNU/Linux on my Tablet. We're allowed to install pretty much whatever we want to as far as software on our machines, and I looked for a distro that would match XP Tablet Edition, but I couldn't find anything that came close. I dislike Microsoft just as much as the next guy (or gal), but I have to admit that when it comes to Tablet PCs, the free software camp is really trailing behind. I considered Xandros and also Lycoris' Tablet PC distro, but they're in their infancy at best. I'd miss being able to write in red ink all over a word processing document, writing notes and then having the program convert them into typed text, and the amazing handwriting recognition (especially with XP Tablet Edition 2005). I long for free software to catch up, and as a Computer Science major I hope that perhaps soon I may be able to begin contributing toward that goal, but for now Microsoft has the power and unfortunately that's the way things are. I really welcome this article's news of developers taking an interest in the Tablet PC and sincerely hope it's just the tip of the iceberg with respect to free software growing to serve the Tablet PC market.

Palms were provided, but there was no way to really utilize them if the students didn't have their own computer, and all the money was spent on the Palms, not for infrastructure to do such things (there was no central syncing server). IR sync stations, that could pull information onto the Palms, were distributed across the campus, but they were slow and cumbersome to use.

While the infrastructure was added for the second year, by that time things kinda fizzled. Lots of m500s could be had for cheap, both on campus and on eBay (heck, I even traded a keg for one).

I think it would have been more successful if today's Palms would have been available, simply due to the advent of wireless (Bluetooth, 802.11b/g), though "more successful" != "success." There were more fundamental issues at play too, but I won't get into them here.

There are still a number of other projects going on like streaming media, wireless technologies, biometrics, etc., as well as many smaller PDA projects. What I find most amusing is that DSU is supposed to be the "computer school" for the state, yet is never ranked in such surveys.

Finally, students do have USENET access, even though the survey doesn't say so. And if it'd move us up a couple of places, I'd be happy to stream the KAOR (sounds like "core" == campus radio) from my desktop.

What version of Outlook are you using? Mine fires up Moz Firebird no problems, here's a link on how to do it.

No, there's still a few hold-overs left that use the en illegular plural like oxen or brethren. I could find more examples in paper documentation, or I could go have my first cup of coffee this morning. Tough call. A quick google .. Go slashdot Stephanie's student paper.

It's a funny kind of "synergy" where apps written for Linux will work pretty well on MacOS, but it's actually utterly impossible to do the reverse with a Wine style/scale reverse engineering project.

Right. Except ... no.

First, you don't mean "apps written for Linux," you mean "apps written for POSIX." (You also don't mean "MacOS", which doesn't exist, nor "Mac OS", but "Mac OS X"). An app written for POSIX works on Mac OS X, because Mac OS X has POSIX built-in. And if you write an app "for Mac OS X" that is also written for POSIX, then it will work just fine on Linux, as well as the opposite does. Big deal.

You're complaining that PART of Mac OS X is proprietary. Ever hear of the Serenity Prayer?

At the university I used to attend (Dakota State University), they wouldnt allow NT/2000 or Linux because they can be used as servers. Now of course they didnt seem to know that they could be used for non-serving purposes nor did they seem to know that 95/98/ME could be used as a server. This isnt to say they could tell what anyone was using but it does demonstrate how naive their computing services staff was (the students employed there generally knew better), and I doubt that they are somehow unique.