So with the site license program they can just keep adding licenses for a discontinued OS?
Good point - I missed this. Volume License Agreements allow the holder to backgrade (upgrade?) the license you purchase on a new machine to, for instance, XP Pro SP3. And you're also right that new hardware will sooner or later have no drivers for XP.
Extended support cycle for XP Professional and XP Pro x64 runs until 08/04/2014. Mainstream support for both stopped 14/04/2009. So what's the difference between mainstream and extended support? Mainstream support includes everything in extended support plus non-security hotfix support (although you buy a contract for this if you do it within 90 days of mainstream support ending), no-charge incident support, warranty claims and design changes and feature requests.
So which of these now not available mainstream items concern people?
XP's a pretty mature product at this point, or at least as mature as it is going to get, I'd say. Unless you think that some non-security hotfixes are going to be Really Important to Have, the difference between mainstream and extended support at this point looks pretty minimal to me.
I suggest that it comes down more on side of application support for XP than anything else. If you have apps you really require to run your business and new versions *that you require* don't support XP, you'll be driven to the Windows 7 bump, or have to find an alternative.
I'm with the GP comment on this one - what's the ROI on the cost and the effort of upgrading an enterprise from XP to Win 7? I just don't see the motivation. And even if some next rev of MS Office doesn't support XP, will there be sufficient value in that Office upgrade to drive the o/s upgrade? If not, then MS gets hit w/ the double whammy - the lack of motivation for the o/s upgrade drives down the sales of that next MS Office revision.
Hey, good catch, didn't know this. Under XP SP3, it appears that, having renamed the file by adding a.lnk extension using Win Explorer, you can't shake the.lnk. No matter what you change the filename too, it continues to be identified as a shortcut, with the.lnk extension hidden in Explorer, even with the setting for displaying filename extensions turned on.
Had to hit the command line to get rid of the.lnk extension.
Slackware, w/ 0.99 kernel w/ some long forgotten patch level. We were using SCO for named and some mail services, and even then I guess we knew we wanted to get out of that. Actually, just wanted a second name server on site, and didn't want to put out the dollars for SCO plus the TCP add-on software module. If you can imagine a flavour of *nix that actually offered TCP/IP as an option. Today it just seems absurd.
A whole bunch of floppies and rawrite. Later, tried the network based install and it actually worked. We were pretty impressed by that.
They believe that the only legitimate way to view a DVD is to have the physical disk available and inserted into a hardware device that will read it and output the contents on a display.
I think you're still right here, but only just - the tipping point is not that far out. I'm surprised by how many Just Plain Folks ask me, or people around me, about watching television on-line, or about 'DVD' players that will let them play 'computer movies' (e.g. avi's), and other questions about getting/watching movies outside the mainstream 'Buy it at Blockbuster' approach.
An individual - who has heretofore, to the best of my knowledge, just used her home desktop for surfing, webmail, and playing some mp3's- asked me this week how she could use her big-ass LCD TV as a computer monitor. When I asked why she thought they wanted to do that, she said that she'd been watching movies on her computer, but wanted to be able to sit on the couch w/ her husband/boyfriend and watch it from there instead of sitting in front of her 19" LCD monitor.
This next part, I *swear* is the truth... absolutely no BS or writer's embellishment. My mother - in her 70's, friends - has been given a few burned DVD's with avi's on them (it started with An Inconvenient Truth). I'm guessing that someone's grandson or granddaughter is hooking someone up, and now mine has got me burning Oprah stuff for her friends without broadband. I tell you that once my Mom and her cronies start trading media outside the Hollywood model, it's *got* to be the beginning of the end.
I suppose that some actuary has figured out that it is still worthwhile to litigate against DVD copying, but I think it is a fast-shrinking piece of the pie. Or the denial just runs way too deep.
It's easy to say that Microsoft faces competition in all its major product categories. From my perspective, some of Microsoft's behaviour which *could* be characterised as monopolistic is much more complex, and needs to be looked at from a broader perspective.
For example, Microsoft's Campus Agreement arrangement built on top of the strong-arming of desktop sellers to include a license in every sale regardless of whether that license was required, and over the mid-term, pushed educational institutions into a corner it is extremely difficult to work out of. These agreements require a MS O/S license be purchased with every desktop, and then gives the license holder the 'right' to backgrade or upgrade the license to the standard MS O/S in use at their institution. So most place purchased the cheapest MS O/S license, and then placed their own image - say XP - on that desktop.
Fast forward to a time where the institution wants out of the Campus Agreement. There is no incremental option available - if you don't renew, you have to fall back to the O/S purchased with the desktop (or notebook). Aside from this being a logistical nightmare (what license was purchased for each particular unit?) you have to forklift the entire upgrade in one go - there is no option for reducing the license, which is usually (but not always) based on full-time equivalent employees and students. So you can't do half your installed plant one year and the other the next, unless you sustain the full price agreement across that period.
I know that you can say that the institution should have seen what they were getting into. But there really was no other way for shops to afford the O/S licenses than to buy into the Campus Agreement approach, even though they knew they were making a deal with the devil. Too many curriculum-required applications were Windows-only, and you had to support it somehow.
Every Catholic service I've been to has been pretty easy going
I must admit I've heard lots of words associated with the Holy Roman Catholic Church (disclosure: raised Catholic, current status lapsed), but this is the first time for 'easygoing'.
I don't know whether I should be relieved or suffer a stroke.
This comes from an article at salon.com http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/ , but I've heard it a number of times, most recently on CBC Radio. Turns out that every other media gets most of their copy off the wire news services, and, on radio for example, reads it straight off the sheet. There's a funky name for it in the business that slips my mind right now.
Now, I've got my own beefs with the quality of reporting such as it exists today, but if you think it is bad now, what happens when newspapers go down the toilet? Does that just leave us with journalism by press release? Or, yegads, bloggers as our primary source.
It seems to me that newspapers still add value in terms of content, but their distribution model has died and they haven't figured out how to get revenue out of on-line services. So what if google is sending eyeballs their way, if there isn't enough money to be made in the paper's on-line ads?
Is it the case that the only people making real money out of on-line ads is google? If so, how long will that model work for google - it sounds like a long term loser, if all google's customers aren't making money off of what google is selling them?
I have some empathy for the papers here - google is another goddamned distributer getting rich off of content providers, no?
Grist for the mill - I'm not intending to troll here.
IANAL, and I'm not familiar with what it takes to get a warrant such as this. This being/., that shouldn't slow me down a wit here.:) Didn't a Judge have to sign this?
If yes, then it is the Judge who really needs to have a hard long look cast in their direction. Law enforcement agencies are *always* going to apply a warrant as broadly as possible. They want to turn the case from red to black - it's the same thing as account managers making their number, whereby a lot of them will sell *any* service, regardless of whether you can actually support what they're proposing, as long as they can argue they hit their number.
The Judge should be the check/balance in the process, and force for a narrowing of the warrant's scope to a reasonable point, which allows the FBI to gather the evidence required (I mean, most of us want the bad guys to get caught, right?), while
ensuring that other companies are not unreasonably hosed by the warrant. Being hosed means losing all your gear and service delivery facilities when the evidence used to get the warrant in the first place in *no* way implicates your company.
It doesn't take much grey matter or thought for a Judge to figure out that a finer granularity of shutdown than the main power supply switch for the building or data centre floors does indeed exist.
The Judge is a jerk-off, based on current facts and my wildly speculative opinions and lack of experience.
The new key to meeting cute geek chicks is a netbook?
True story - 1986 or '87 I bought a NEC Multispeed w/ 2 x 720k floppies, and a V20 processor (or maybe a v30). I schlepped it around 'cause it was a laptop, right? First day I use in one of the university cafeterias (doing battle w/ ChiWriter), two women who were in my program, but both of whom had never said *anything* to me before, stopped, separately, and both said 'OMG! It's so cute!!'
There's a fashion accessory angle here, I think - if it is something that is unique, isn't seen often, and is neater than the normal run of the mill, then there is an attraction factor.
As to the original poster - put the machismo aside my friend, and work the angle!
Everything that the U.N. does makes me feel that way.
Well, I can certainly come up w/ stuff that makes me feel similar - the resolution in question, the Iraq monitoring program and letting Colin Powell do the international sell-job of the U.S. war on Iraq are a few.
But *everything*? That's a bit over the top, I think. Peacekeeping missions, elections monitoring, immunization programs (managing and co-ordinating the elimination of polio ?? not sure on that one) and Korea come to mind. There's got to be a source out there...
I hear ya. Netbooks are incredibly cheap, and even desktop prices are falling through the floor. So the cost of requiring an individual to provide their own computing facility has dropped dramatically.
If the school provides an ArcInfo Desktop installation that supports the web app model, and where most of the work is done server side, then the requirements desktop side drop too, maybe even to the netbook level, I dunno. It's Saturday night and I'm too lazy to look it up.
But if you have heavy duty client side apps, then a netbook isn't going to cut it, and even a cheap desktop will be working it hard.
As some folks have said, netbooks are the cost of a couple of over-priced text books. While this expense doesn't matter for almost everyone, there are some students who aren't getting their freight paid by their parents who are up against the wall. We need to look for options to serving those people in the new model.
The Unanswered Question
Okay, here's the great unanswered question of this topic for me: if damn near every student has a computer, why are there lineups in student computer labs between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. for the two weeks before the end of term, or the week before Reading Weeks (mid-term breaks? *Something* is going on.
This is a really good point - glad to see you're getting mod'd up.
Individual computing facilities, particularly those used across the Internet, are really convenient in a lot of ways, but they remove you from the community of learning that exists in any school.
Collaborative learning services can mitigate the isolation somewhat, but I concur with you that good value is found in the face to face interactions. Where the best learning happened for me in grad school was in white-boarding up each other's projects in the grad student office at 2:00 a.m., getting constructive criticism on my approach, other's ideas about solving particular problems, and doing the same back to them and their projects/problems.
In my experience there's a lot of pressure from to get rid of labs in Universities and Colleges simply to reduce costs. At it's core, this is a process of shifting the cost of computing facilities from the institution to the students. And yes, I know that when the institution pays for labs the monies are ultimately coming, at least in part, from the paying students. However, a machine in a student lab is much more highly untilised that an individual's notebook, a cost of labs is spread across all students, rather than the individual, and the economies of scale mean that the cost per unit for the institution is utually much less than the cost per unit in the individual model.
Anyway, two reasons to retain labs:
- some students don't have notebooks. Should ownership of a computer be a prerequisite to obtaining a post-secondary education? I'm sure the vast majority of students have their own desktop or notebook, but the single parent working part-time and supporting two kids while trying to upgrade their credentials might not.
- speciality software (GIS, discipline-specific stuff for psychology courses, math courses, etc.) is pretty damned expensive, and typically has very restrictive licenses in terms of seat installations or concurrent users. Trying to get licensing that allows you to distribute to student PC is tough and expensive. And Microsoft is the biggest prick of them all; they hose you if you try to support virtual labs to give access even to Office applications, insisting that even if your virtual lab supports 50 concurrent users you must purchase a license for every student who could possibly use the service, which is typically in the 1000's.
We're starting to push users toward Open Office (we should have done it a long time ago I suppose, but version 3 is pretty sweet and a step up from previous version IMHO). But the FUD out there makes students hesitant - faculty telling them their work won't be accepted if it is created using anything other than Word, for example, with both the faculty and the student not realising that they are requiring a file format, not the use of a particular program.
Anyway, getting rid of student labs is a boon for Microsoft, and for hardware manufacturers, and hoses marginalised students, while adding yet another barrier to higher ed so that only snotty nosed kids whose parents are paying their way through school can afford to go to university.
Okay, that last part is a little over the top, but not so far - there's truth in there.
However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia
What kid isn't going to learn how to use Twitter (or whatever) on their own? So what is the point of devising and delivering curriculum that kids don't need to learn, because they've learnt it already on their own?
Wow - next we'll be teaching them how to breath and walk.
As a side note, by the time the Twitter curriculum is ready to go, Twitter will be passe and The Next Big Thing will be hip. Internet service popularity moves faster than the speed of curriculum development, at least in my experience.
But IBM never acquired XyWrite, did they? Although, IIRC, they screwed XyQuest and left them holding the bag when IBM bailed. Can I find a citation? [... on hold music here... ] Here 'tis: http://yesss.freeshell.org/x/_xywhat.htm
Questions and Answers
Why isn't my scrolling location saved?
This is a known issue related to a facility called AJAX within Microsoft.NET 2.0. Scrolling position is easily maintained, but it either causes page failures or decreases response time by 300%. A solution is being explored. In the meantine, the Skills widget enables you to be highly selective in list formation for Skills pinning. We recommend that you use this facility.
Oh, that pesky AJAX facility! There's a lot of info on performance issues using the ASP.NET AJAX. A quick read of the forums on asp.net suggests that this is only an issue if you don't actually think about the use and placement of controls while designing your page(s). In short, like anything else, if you use the wrong tool, and then use it excessively, load will be an issue in production. Too much to ask, I guess.
I bet I can find at least one way you are not altruistic.
So what's your point? I bet I can find at least one way in which you're not smarmy in your comments, but that too would have shit to do with the point at hand.
Don't talk to cops. Everyone should watch this regardless of the jurisdiction they live in (this is focused on the States but relevant in a lot more places, methinks). It's two parts - look for the second part in the Related Videos section. And the dude in the first part is the fastest talker you will ever encounter - watch, marvel and learn.
I broke down and read TFA, and I still don't understand whose money has been stolen. The payroll cards are presumably issued off an employer account, so that employees can hit an ATM and snag their pay (as I'm interpreting the idea of a payroll card). So why is there $90,000 sitting in a payroll account just waiting for the card to take it all? I would expect that the payroll card I get would be limited to the amount of money I've earned this pay period... ??
Even if you remove the daily transaction limit (as the article says occurred) there still has to be enough money in the account to which the card is attached.
I'm guessing I don't understand what a payroll card is, or am just too dumb to be a criminal in this day and age.
You realize, of course, that this is the ESPN business model. Basic cable customers already subsidize the customers who want to watch ESPN, which has the highest per-subscriber fee for a non-premium channel.
I hear ya. But I don't subscribe to cable, so I'm not paying them there, and I just as soon keep it the same WRT my Internet service, which I know I'm going to continue to subscribe to, no matter the circumstance.
Slashdot Mirror
So with the site license program they can just keep adding licenses for a discontinued OS?
Good point - I missed this. Volume License Agreements allow the holder to backgrade (upgrade?) the license you purchase on a new machine to, for instance, XP Pro SP3. And you're also right that new hardware will sooner or later have no drivers for XP.
Extended support cycle for XP Professional and XP Pro x64 runs until 08/04/2014. Mainstream support for both stopped 14/04/2009. So what's the difference between mainstream and extended support? Mainstream support includes everything in extended support plus non-security hotfix support (although you buy a contract for this if you do it within 90 days of mainstream support ending), no-charge incident support, warranty claims and design changes and feature requests.
So which of these now not available mainstream items concern people?
XP's a pretty mature product at this point, or at least as mature as it is going to get, I'd say. Unless you think that some non-security hotfixes are going to be Really Important to Have, the difference between mainstream and extended support at this point looks pretty minimal to me.
I suggest that it comes down more on side of application support for XP than anything else. If you have apps you really require to run your business and new versions *that you require* don't support XP, you'll be driven to the Windows 7 bump, or have to find an alternative.
I'm with the GP comment on this one - what's the ROI on the cost and the effort of upgrading an enterprise from XP to Win 7? I just don't see the motivation. And even if some next rev of MS Office doesn't support XP, will there be sufficient value in that Office upgrade to drive the o/s upgrade? If not, then MS gets hit w/ the double whammy - the lack of motivation for the o/s upgrade drives down the sales of that next MS Office revision.
Unless it's a .lnk file.
Hey, good catch, didn't know this. Under XP SP3, it appears that, having renamed the file by adding a .lnk extension using Win Explorer, you can't shake the .lnk. No matter what you change the filename too, it continues to be identified as a shortcut, with the .lnk extension hidden in Explorer, even with the setting for displaying filename extensions turned on.
Had to hit the command line to get rid of the .lnk extension.
Good God, an interesting post that is actually moderated as such.
What are the odds of those planets coming into alignment on /.? Should we head for the slots?
Where's Brad Templeton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Templeton when you need him?!
Slackware, w/ 0.99 kernel w/ some long forgotten patch level. We were using SCO for named and some mail services, and even then I guess we knew we wanted to get out of that. Actually, just wanted a second name server on site, and didn't want to put out the dollars for SCO plus the TCP add-on software module. If you can imagine a flavour of *nix that actually offered TCP/IP as an option. Today it just seems absurd.
A whole bunch of floppies and rawrite. Later, tried the network based install and it actually worked. We were pretty impressed by that.
They believe that the only legitimate way to view a DVD is to have the physical disk available and inserted into a hardware device that will read it and output the contents on a display.
I think you're still right here, but only just - the tipping point is not that far out. I'm surprised by how many Just Plain Folks ask me, or people around me, about watching television on-line, or about 'DVD' players that will let them play 'computer movies' (e.g. avi's), and other questions about getting/watching movies outside the mainstream 'Buy it at Blockbuster' approach.
An individual - who has heretofore, to the best of my knowledge, just used her home desktop for surfing, webmail, and playing some mp3's- asked me this week how she could use her big-ass LCD TV as a computer monitor. When I asked why she thought they wanted to do that, she said that she'd been watching movies on her computer, but wanted to be able to sit on the couch w/ her husband/boyfriend and watch it from there instead of sitting in front of her 19" LCD monitor.
This next part, I *swear* is the truth ... absolutely no BS or writer's embellishment. My mother - in her 70's, friends - has been given a few burned DVD's with avi's on them (it started with An Inconvenient Truth). I'm guessing that someone's grandson or granddaughter is hooking someone up, and now mine has got me burning Oprah stuff for her friends without broadband. I tell you that once my Mom and her cronies start trading media outside the Hollywood model, it's *got* to be the beginning of the end.
I suppose that some actuary has figured out that it is still worthwhile to litigate against DVD copying, but I think it is a fast-shrinking piece of the pie. Or the denial just runs way too deep.
It's easy to say that Microsoft faces competition in all its major product categories. From my perspective, some of Microsoft's behaviour which *could* be characterised as monopolistic is much more complex, and needs to be looked at from a broader perspective.
For example, Microsoft's Campus Agreement arrangement built on top of the strong-arming of desktop sellers to include a license in every sale regardless of whether that license was required, and over the mid-term, pushed educational institutions into a corner it is extremely difficult to work out of. These agreements require a MS O/S license be purchased with every desktop, and then gives the license holder the 'right' to backgrade or upgrade the license to the standard MS O/S in use at their institution. So most place purchased the cheapest MS O/S license, and then placed their own image - say XP - on that desktop.
Fast forward to a time where the institution wants out of the Campus Agreement. There is no incremental option available - if you don't renew, you have to fall back to the O/S purchased with the desktop (or notebook). Aside from this being a logistical nightmare (what license was purchased for each particular unit?) you have to forklift the entire upgrade in one go - there is no option for reducing the license, which is usually (but not always) based on full-time equivalent employees and students. So you can't do half your installed plant one year and the other the next, unless you sustain the full price agreement across that period.
I know that you can say that the institution should have seen what they were getting into. But there really was no other way for shops to afford the O/S licenses than to buy into the Campus Agreement approach, even though they knew they were making a deal with the devil. Too many curriculum-required applications were Windows-only, and you had to support it somehow.
Gist for the mill.
Every Catholic service I've been to has been pretty easy going
I must admit I've heard lots of words associated with the Holy Roman Catholic Church (disclosure: raised Catholic, current status lapsed), but this is the first time for 'easygoing'.
I don't know whether I should be relieved or suffer a stroke.
If newspapers die, so does reporting
This comes from an article at salon.com http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/ , but I've heard it a number of times, most recently on CBC Radio. Turns out that every other media gets most of their copy off the wire news services, and, on radio for example, reads it straight off the sheet. There's a funky name for it in the business that slips my mind right now.
Now, I've got my own beefs with the quality of reporting such as it exists today, but if you think it is bad now, what happens when newspapers go down the toilet? Does that just leave us with journalism by press release? Or, yegads, bloggers as our primary source.
It seems to me that newspapers still add value in terms of content, but their distribution model has died and they haven't figured out how to get revenue out of on-line services. So what if google is sending eyeballs their way, if there isn't enough money to be made in the paper's on-line ads?
Is it the case that the only people making real money out of on-line ads is google? If so, how long will that model work for google - it sounds like a long term loser, if all google's customers aren't making money off of what google is selling them?
I have some empathy for the papers here - google is another goddamned distributer getting rich off of content providers, no?
Grist for the mill - I'm not intending to troll here.
IANAL, and I'm not familiar with what it takes to get a warrant such as this. This being /., that shouldn't slow me down a wit here. :) Didn't a Judge have to sign this?
If yes, then it is the Judge who really needs to have a hard long look cast in their direction. Law enforcement agencies are *always* going to apply a warrant as broadly as possible. They want to turn the case from red to black - it's the same thing as account managers making their number, whereby a lot of them will sell *any* service, regardless of whether you can actually support what they're proposing, as long as they can argue they hit their number.
The Judge should be the check/balance in the process, and force for a narrowing of the warrant's scope to a reasonable point, which allows the FBI to gather the evidence required (I mean, most of us want the bad guys to get caught, right?), while ensuring that other companies are not unreasonably hosed by the warrant. Being hosed means losing all your gear and service delivery facilities when the evidence used to get the warrant in the first place in *no* way implicates your company.
It doesn't take much grey matter or thought for a Judge to figure out that a finer granularity of shutdown than the main power supply switch for the building or data centre floors does indeed exist.
The Judge is a jerk-off, based on current facts and my wildly speculative opinions and lack of experience.
The new key to meeting cute geek chicks is a netbook?
True story - 1986 or '87 I bought a NEC Multispeed w/ 2 x 720k floppies, and a V20 processor (or maybe a v30). I schlepped it around 'cause it was a laptop, right? First day I use in one of the university cafeterias (doing battle w/ ChiWriter), two women who were in my program, but both of whom had never said *anything* to me before, stopped, separately, and both said 'OMG! It's so cute!!'
There's a fashion accessory angle here, I think - if it is something that is unique, isn't seen often, and is neater than the normal run of the mill, then there is an attraction factor.
As to the original poster - put the machismo aside my friend, and work the angle!
Everything that the U.N. does makes me feel that way.
Well, I can certainly come up w/ stuff that makes me feel similar - the resolution in question, the Iraq monitoring program and letting Colin Powell do the international sell-job of the U.S. war on Iraq are a few.
But *everything*? That's a bit over the top, I think. Peacekeeping missions, elections monitoring, immunization programs (managing and co-ordinating the elimination of polio ?? not sure on that one) and Korea come to mind. There's got to be a source out there ...
Okay, it's obviously not an unbiased source, and the items get softer the further you delve into the list, but it has reasonable points on some good activities, I'd say: http://www.una-usadanecounty.org/about/index.php?category_id=1550
Is it worth it? Well that's another question, and another dialogue, for another day.
I hear ya. Netbooks are incredibly cheap, and even desktop prices are falling through the floor. So the cost of requiring an individual to provide their own computing facility has dropped dramatically.
If the school provides an ArcInfo Desktop installation that supports the web app model, and where most of the work is done server side, then the requirements desktop side drop too, maybe even to the netbook level, I dunno. It's Saturday night and I'm too lazy to look it up.
But if you have heavy duty client side apps, then a netbook isn't going to cut it, and even a cheap desktop will be working it hard.
As some folks have said, netbooks are the cost of a couple of over-priced text books. While this expense doesn't matter for almost everyone, there are some students who aren't getting their freight paid by their parents who are up against the wall. We need to look for options to serving those people in the new model.
The Unanswered Question
Okay, here's the great unanswered question of this topic for me: if damn near every student has a computer, why are there lineups in student computer labs between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. for the two weeks before the end of term, or the week before Reading Weeks (mid-term breaks? *Something* is going on.
This is a really good point - glad to see you're getting mod'd up.
Individual computing facilities, particularly those used across the Internet, are really convenient in a lot of ways, but they remove you from the community of learning that exists in any school.
Collaborative learning services can mitigate the isolation somewhat, but I concur with you that good value is found in the face to face interactions. Where the best learning happened for me in grad school was in white-boarding up each other's projects in the grad student office at 2:00 a.m., getting constructive criticism on my approach, other's ideas about solving particular problems, and doing the same back to them and their projects/problems.
In my experience there's a lot of pressure from to get rid of labs in Universities and Colleges simply to reduce costs. At it's core, this is a process of shifting the cost of computing facilities from the institution to the students. And yes, I know that when the institution pays for labs the monies are ultimately coming, at least in part, from the paying students. However, a machine in a student lab is much more highly untilised that an individual's notebook, a cost of labs is spread across all students, rather than the individual, and the economies of scale mean that the cost per unit for the institution is utually much less than the cost per unit in the individual model.
Anyway, two reasons to retain labs:
- some students don't have notebooks. Should ownership of a computer be a prerequisite to obtaining a post-secondary education? I'm sure the vast majority of students have their own desktop or notebook, but the single parent working part-time and supporting two kids while trying to upgrade their credentials might not.
- speciality software (GIS, discipline-specific stuff for psychology courses, math courses, etc.) is pretty damned expensive, and typically has very restrictive licenses in terms of seat installations or concurrent users. Trying to get licensing that allows you to distribute to student PC is tough and expensive. And Microsoft is the biggest prick of them all; they hose you if you try to support virtual labs to give access even to Office applications, insisting that even if your virtual lab supports 50 concurrent users you must purchase a license for every student who could possibly use the service, which is typically in the 1000's.
We're starting to push users toward Open Office (we should have done it a long time ago I suppose, but version 3 is pretty sweet and a step up from previous version IMHO). But the FUD out there makes students hesitant - faculty telling them their work won't be accepted if it is created using anything other than Word, for example, with both the faculty and the student not realising that they are requiring a file format, not the use of a particular program.
Anyway, getting rid of student labs is a boon for Microsoft, and for hardware manufacturers, and hoses marginalised students, while adding yet another barrier to higher ed so that only snotty nosed kids whose parents are paying their way through school can afford to go to university.
Okay, that last part is a little over the top, but not so far - there's truth in there.
However, the draft plans will require children to master Twitter and Wikipedia
What kid isn't going to learn how to use Twitter (or whatever) on their own? So what is the point of devising and delivering curriculum that kids don't need to learn, because they've learnt it already on their own?
Wow - next we'll be teaching them how to breath and walk.
As a side note, by the time the Twitter curriculum is ready to go, Twitter will be passe and The Next Big Thing will be hip. Internet service popularity moves faster than the speed of curriculum development, at least in my experience.
Here's your citation. XyWrite
But IBM never acquired XyWrite, did they? Although, IIRC, they screwed XyQuest and left them holding the bag when IBM bailed. Can I find a citation? [ ... on hold music here ... ] Here 'tis: http://yesss.freeshell.org/x/_xywhat.htm
Too bad - I was a XyWrite fan.
Questions and Answers
.NET 2.0. Scrolling position is easily maintained, but it either causes page failures or decreases response time by 300%. A solution is being explored. In the meantine, the Skills widget enables you to be highly selective in list formation for Skills pinning. We recommend that you use this facility.
Why isn't my scrolling location saved?
This is a known issue related to a facility called AJAX within Microsoft
Oh, that pesky AJAX facility! There's a lot of info on performance issues using the ASP.NET AJAX. A quick read of the forums on asp.net suggests that this is only an issue if you don't actually think about the use and placement of controls while designing your page(s). In short, like anything else, if you use the wrong tool, and then use it excessively, load will be an issue in production. Too much to ask, I guess.
http://forums.asp.net/p/1296488/2518160.aspx#2518160
Shouldn't this be on idle.slashdot.org?
I bet I can find at least one way you are not altruistic.
So what's your point? I bet I can find at least one way in which you're not smarmy in your comments, but that too would have shit to do with the point at hand.
Forcing your neighbors to pay YOUR health bills is not freedom. It's graft.
Well, you call it graft, I call it altruism.
Of course, I see it from the perspective of me being willing to help my neighbour with his health care bills, rather them him forcing me to pay them.
Don't talk to cops. Everyone should watch this regardless of the jurisdiction they live in (this is focused on the States but relevant in a lot more places, methinks). It's two parts - look for the second part in the Related Videos section. And the dude in the first part is the fastest talker you will ever encounter - watch, marvel and learn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik
I broke down and read TFA, and I still don't understand whose money has been stolen. The payroll cards are presumably issued off an employer account, so that employees can hit an ATM and snag their pay (as I'm interpreting the idea of a payroll card). So why is there $90,000 sitting in a payroll account just waiting for the card to take it all? I would expect that the payroll card I get would be limited to the amount of money I've earned this pay period ... ??
Even if you remove the daily transaction limit (as the article says occurred) there still has to be enough money in the account to which the card is attached.
I'm guessing I don't understand what a payroll card is, or am just too dumb to be a criminal in this day and age.
Amen, brother. You get my Comment of the Week award.
You realize, of course, that this is the ESPN business model. Basic cable customers already subsidize the customers who want to watch ESPN, which has the highest per-subscriber fee for a non-premium channel.
I hear ya. But I don't subscribe to cable, so I'm not paying them there, and I just as soon keep it the same WRT my Internet service, which I know I'm going to continue to subscribe to, no matter the circumstance.