I remember playing the line graphic version of the game on a stand up console in the arcade. It was one of my favorite games. The version I remember was a line graphic one, with the craggy outline of a landscape, and different size "flat spots" you could land on. The smaller ones gave you more points. The game was replaced, probably by Donkey Kong or Pac Man and I remember being pissed off at the time that I could no longer play it (this was Pre-Atari 2600).
In college, I took an advanced CAD course where we wrote CAD software. There was a hodge-podge of machines there, from a Dec PDP-11 to a Harris 800. Lots of DEC Rainbow machines with the dust covers on them because they used the 80186 chip which wasn't/really/ PC compatible. We also had one Silicon Graphics IRIS machine. It was the hot rod of the bunch, but single user, so you had to wait your turn.
Anyway, we finally got an open ended assignment on the SGI machine, so I decided to write the Lunar Lander game on it - with the original as my design reference. I did a pretty good job of it too - as a mechanical engineer, I was able to use Newton's laws to accurately reflect the behavior of the LM... it obeyed Newtonian mechanics (no - it didn't take into account the weight of the fuel burned but neither did the original to my understanding).
I got all done and most of the people who looked at the rendition had not ever seen the original game. So they complained that I hadn't taken advantage of the 3d graphics the SGI machine had. It was like drawing a picture in Kindergarten and having the teacher tell me my grass was the wrong color. Only one other guy understood what I'd done - copied a real live arcade game from scratch. When they asked him what he thought, he just kept playing it and said "Awesome!"
The other funny thing was that at the end, nobody went back to look at the modeled objects... they all went back to play the game.
Nothing will beat the Clipper version system... Everytime I used the Summer 87 edition, my mind would conjure up images of a schooner slicing through the chop in Nantucket Sound, with a bikini clad blonde bombshell sunning herself on the bow... ahhhhh...
And then someone who hadn't bathed in 3 or 4 days would lean over me at my IBM PC XT computer and ask me for help in compressing an index. Daydream explodes.
It will happen. It will take time. Corporate IT departments have to plan way ahead for a change like this, and so it will take them time to do the switchover, but rest assured, it will happen. XP is clearly long in the tooth at this point. Don't get me wrong. I love XP. It runs most of my home computers. I have 7 PC's... 2 run Vista - one of those is a Media Center desktop. The other is a laptop that came with Vista and I left it that way. The others either came with XP, or in most cases, I built them and put XP on them. But 1 of them, my main computer, runs Windows 7 RC... I love it. It is rock solid. It runs everything I need to run, and it runs it FAST. It is clearly better than XP - the main desktop is better, the performance is as good or better, so there is no reason NOT to go to Windows 7. What will be really interesting is what the pre-order upgrade sales look like. I bought 2 copies. I'll probably buy more later, but wanted to take advantage of the cheap pricing. Bottom line is that new PC's will have Windows 7, as will new netbooks. Once people start using it, they'll want it at work. People will begin to talk about around the watercooler about corporate IT... Hey, I'm running it on my new PC and it works great, and looks so much better than XP... Yeah, me too, why can't corporate get their act together and get our machines upgraded? As soon as the CEO and the CFO are the ones having that discussion, it will be the corporate IT department getting the flame under their collective butts to get it rolled out. Look for this to start in say Q1, Q2 2010, with the pressure mounting by year end. By 2011, 90% of companies will have changed over or will be on their way... And the good news for all the Microsoft haters will be that they'll have another decade to complain about the evil Microsoft corporation...
You are setting your sites too low if you have a physical education degree. You SHOULD be a Superintendent of Schools - they are all gym teachers because gym teachers are the only ones who have the time to get the certifications required to be Superintendent... No homework to correct... no lesson plans!
You reminded me of a problem I had at work... My computer account would get locked out every time I rebooted my laptop and tried to log in. I didn't give it too much thought (I'm a developer) and so I called the help desk each time it happened. They would unlock my account and on I'd go. Well, I finally got tired of this (didn't happen every day, as I started locking my desktop at night and skipped the daily reboot and login). I escalated it. Nobody could help me. At least 4 local help desk people couldn't figure it out. We swapped out docking stations. We checked profiles and permissions. Long story short, the final escalation was to re-image my laptop. I politely declined and investigated myself.
I quickly figured out that I had some services that were not started but were set to start automatically. Then I found out that they logged in with my local account. So it was these services on boot up that were sending bogus passwords and locking my account out. After the reboot, and an account unlock, everything would work.
Since I obviously didn't NEED the services (hey, they hadn't run in months...), I set them to manual start, and the problem went away.
Here's the upshot. I saw all 4 help desk guys in the elevator shortly after fixing the problem. I said, "Hey guys - I figured out my account lockout problem"... They said "Good for you!" and the got off at the next floor. Not one of them asked me what the problem was. Later I saw them again, and I said "Hey, you know it wasn't lost on me that none of you ASKED ME WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS OR HOW TO FIX IT..." They all laughed and got off the elevator again, without asking the question...
We recently outsourced our Help Desk. All these guys had to re-interview for their jobs. Most got rehired, but at MUCH lower salaries. I shed no tears for them.
One of my favorites was the Zenith PC compatible... It came with floppy disk drives with the traditional "fold down" switch like most floppy drives of the day. What was different was that the switch wouldn't fold down unless there was a floppy in the drive. So the lab at school I worked in had dozens of drives with broken latches that had been forced closed without a floppy in the drive. Dumb.
The optomism is proven realistic IF:
1....the kids don't destroy the equipment in a matter of weeks or months rather than years.
2....you can get Microsoft/McAfee/Apple/Symantec/etc to provide free licensing for the required products.
3....you can come up with a method of securing the OS against "unintended uses".
4....you lo-jack every unit to mitigate theft.
5....you assume the kids will fix their own machines and you won't need to hire additional IT staff for every school.
6....you assume that there are not incidental and normal hardware failures requiring repair/replacement.
7....you increase the infrastructure in every school to handle the thousands of connections rather than the few hundred previous connections.
8....you disregard the cost for the build-out of all the hard LAN connections, or the purchase/deployment of WiFi in the schools on a scale that can handle thousands of students.
9....you obtain contractural agreement with every school districts internet provider to compound the network bandwidth many fold at little or no additional ongoing cost.
10....you have a fall-back for the inevitable network failures during school hours.
Lets take them point by point:
1) Agreed that breakage can be an issue. The same is true of textbooks. We already charge students who lose/"break" a textbook, the same would be true for the netbooks. And if a student chose not to take that risk, we could print off copies of the textbooks for them in the exceptional cases. Repair is not an issue if we keep a small stock of netbooks available for swap... easy to do and allows breakage to be repaired without downtime to the student.
2) Most of that licensing is included either with the netbook or is freely available. We're not talking about exotic technologies here. We're talking about an os, Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc... industry standard, open source technologies for the most part. Sure, if we went with Windows there'd be the cost of antivirus. Not huge software costs in general though.
3) Not sure what "unintended usages" you are talking about here. Porn? Hacking? We cover that already with acceptable use policies. If you break them, you lose the netbook and you have to carry a printed copy with you. Ample disincentive if you ask me.
4) Lojacking for theft... well sure we might have some theft problems and we'd need to address that. But I think that a combination of things could be put into place to obviate the need for a lojack on each device. Police reports for real thefts for one thing (to prove you didn't just lose it) would be a start. We'd have to see how it went in a pilot program. And don't forget that since they get to keep the computer when they graduate, they'll take better care of it and will guard against theft on their own.
5) When you say fix their own machines, I'm assuming you're talking about software problems. In such a case, I'd simply issue a spare and image it for them, and then reimage their original machine. Not a big deal. And if we found they violated the acceptable use policy, well there'd be consequences (carry those printed copies, kid)... maybe they earn back the right to the netbook somehow... in any case, with the proper incentives, this becomes a non-issue.
6) Normal wear and tear would be fixed at the district's expense... your hard drive craps out - here's your spare and we swap in a new $50 drive... I suspect that we can still take advantage of manufacturer warranties, and maybe we add a support cost to each machine. It doesn't change the economics of the model much.
7-10) These are all flavors of the same issue, infrastructure of the computers... We already have that in most cases. All of our buildings are already wired and many classrooms already have WiFi. As for Internet service, we have that in spades... Our who
I agree that there are issues with viruses/breakage/hacking/objectionable material etc. But you hold the mistaken belief that the schools aren't already dealing with those issues. My district has something like a computer for every 2 kids (not all are kid accessible, but most are) and we deal with this stuff everyday. In fact, we're probably pretty good at it now, and our students have to sign computer use agreements and so we have policy around it and manage it. You also leave out the fact that if the computer is THEIRS... or will be theirs at the end of High School, they might take better care of it.
As to the cost of school materials, that is the central theme on this thread - everyone is looking at the publisher model here and those models are NOT compelling... the monopolistic publishers (There are like 3 of them, maybe 2 depending on how you cut it) don't want districts to move to online, and so they price their online additions such that it would be cheaper to keep buying the dead tree versions. They don't want to eat their own lunch, and while I don't blame them, I for one have had enough of it.
I'm advocating an approach similar to what California is doing - they are creating their OWN textbooks, free of the publishers. They get real educators, PhD's and everything, to write their ebooks. That is the model I am advocating. Think of it like Open Source for textbooks.
The arguments AGAINST such a model are the same arguments that Open Source faced at its beginning, and still face, to one degree or another, today. But at this point, you CAN run your computer completely on open source software if you want to, and with time, you'll be able to run your school system completely on open source textbooks. And instead of having to choose from 2 versions of your AP US History textbook that come from HM or PH, you'll be able to choose from who knows how many open source versions, all with the ability to tweak the textbook for your curriculum. I realize there will be a transitionary period, and that during that period you may end up having to do a mix of dead tree books and ebooks. But given a few more years, you will be able to basically give up the dead tree versions and the pay for play ebook versions, thus getting to a more flexible and sustainable textbook model.
It doesn't HAVE to be that way. I'm on a local school board and I'm looking into this issue for my own district. Many, if not all over time, of the books may end up being "free"... MIT already produces books that are freely distributable, and there are other outfits starting up to do the "free" thing... here is one of them CK12.org One of the really cool features of a system like this is that teachers can modify their textbooks to suit their curriculum, allowing them to custom build textbooks if they wish
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
I'm a tech guy, so I understand there will be issues with support/breakage, but it isn't going to be very much more expensive than the "breakage" we already have in textbooks. And you can lock the desktops down to a great degree, such that the students don't have admin privileges. Install Defender and AVG and you have a pretty good package.
Also, if you are using local copies of books rather than relying on an Internet connection to get them, you can pretty much put that "digital divide" issue to bed. Students can sync up when in school and get assignments and other background materials from their WiFi connection, and while at school, or in the public libraries, use the Internet. For those that have it at home, it is a convenience, but not a necessity.
Finally, you now don't have to wonder if a student has access to a computer to write papers and do computer based assignments. They all have them. And thus, the "digital divide" problem, if not solved, has gone WAY down.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
He was able to successfully get them to stop for a short time. Right up until the next delivery person in the rotation picked up his neighborhood, and having no knowledge of his desire not to have the paper, started delivering it again. Since the pay for such jobs suck, the turnover in delivery folk was high. So every time they turned over, he'd have to call and get them to notify the delivery person NOT to deliver to his door. Life's too short
I've had the same problem with the Hartford Courant which is a subscription service. We canceled the paper but it kept coming. Eventually it stopped. We started getting notices that we owed the paper money and ignored them. Eventually they threatened to turn our account over to a collection agency. At that, my wife paid them the outstanding balance by their accounts to make them go away.
After paying them, the paper started coming again...
My new plan with them is to repeat this whole exercise again. When they threaten to turn my account over to a collection agency again, I'm going to send my payment with a cancellation notice, AND with an offer to allow them to deliver the paper to my residence for a fee of $50 per month. It will say that delivering the paper to my door will be acceptance of my offer. When the first paper arrives, I plan to bill them. When the collection notice arrives again, I'll send them a formal demand letter for the balance of our agreement. My guess is that a small claims court will make them pay me to deliver the paper.
Free needs to be combined with demand
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The "Dangers" of Free
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· Score: 2, Insightful
From TFA, the example was an over abundance of free newspapers delivered to people's doors. The problem with such a model is that there is no way to measure the demand for the paper
We have a similar situation where I live. There is a free weekly paper that is available in newspaper boxes. There are two papers that are delivered to your door.
The newspaper box one requires the consumer to actually take one from some "central" location - there is a cost to the "free" paper - the cost of getting a copy is going to one of the newspaper boxes and taking one.
In the other two cases, the papers show up on your doorstep. My brother didn't want one of them, and he fought bitterly with the provider to stop "littering" his door with them. If you go away for a couple of weeks, the piled up papers become a neon sign saying "No One Is Home"... Try as he might, he could not get the door delivered paper to stop showing up.
I'm glad you brought up the trailers... For my showing it was Terminator Salvation, Good. Then Transformers. Uh oh. And then GI Joe. Oh CRAP! Let me say up front that I'm a trekkie from way back, have seen every TOS episode at least 4 times, probably 8 in most cases, seen every TNG episode, most Voyager episodes, and probably half of DS9 and Enterprise. I've seen every movie at least twice. I've argued the Trek/Star Wars thing over an over with Force Fanboys. I know the monetary unit of measure on the planet Triskelleon, and what the cure for Interspace is. Those are my creds.
Overall, while I like the movie, I have this growing problem with the reboot. Sure, they didn't invalidate cannon, but the reboot stands on VERY tenuous ground. Let's look at Kirk as the main example, but the same kinds of arguments can be made for the other characters, particularly Spock.
Kirk is now a 23 year old cadet who is now captain of the flagship. As he asked Dr. Dehner in TOS about Gary Mitchell and his god-like powers, "But what will he learn along the way?" In the reboot, the answer is basically "nothing"
Kirk doesn't spend any time knowing how the ship, or Starfleet works. He never has put a notation in Commander Finney's file. He never served on the Farragut, so he doesn't know what that sickly sweet smell of the gaseous creature in "Obsession" is up to... he won't know its intelligent and that it is about to multiply. He has no relationship to Commodore Decker, so no real way to stop Decker from commandeering his ship in "The Doomsday Machine"... in fact, in the reboot, Kirk plays the part of Decker almost exactly... I kept waiting for Kirk to say "Belay that order, we are going to turn and ATTACK"... Kirk goes and attacks a ship of far greater power than his own instead of meeting the fleet like Spock wanted to. Hell, when he meets the planet killer, we're likely to have 2 dead Starships instead of one. Will Enterprise now suffer the same fate as Constellation?
Sure, the movie was thrilling, and now we have our heart's desire, Kirk in command of the Enterprise. But it isn't the SAME Kirk. Is he better? Nope. He's a punk. If I wanted to see punks in charge of powerful Starships, I'd just rewatch Star Wars Episode 4.
I was a on a mainframe project writing batch COBOL programs and was putting in lots of overtime. I started having nightmares that instead of being people, we were all just job streams running on the 'frame... We all competed for CPU time, and those of us in the lower priority queues were jealous of those in the higher priority queues. Those who processed big flat files were fat, those of us who processed smaller ones were skinny. We all wanted to run to a normal completion, ie. that our job streams would end normally. We were all horribly afraid of an ABEND, as that represented an untimely death.
There is an apocryphal story about how the SRB's on the Space Shuttle are directly related to the width of a horse's ass... Snopes has called the story "false" when in fact it is the case that the SRB's are limited in their size by the width of a horse's ass...
The simple fact is that all technology is based on the technology that came before it. The computer industry is rife with examples... most of us are still using x86 technology is one... Why should rocketry be different?
I've taken many economics courses and your response doesn't take into consideration all of the economic issues... Points 2 and 3 leave out consideration of hidden economic costs not calculated directly in the cost of fossil fuels. The cost of wars in the Middle East are not accurately reflected in the cost of the fuel we get from there. And regardless of the fact that Middle Eastern oil will be sold to other countries, it is an economic benefit to the US not to have to rely on the Middle East for oil. It means we can more readily avoid costly wars in that region, and it also means we can devote less resources to stockpiling oil as we have to do now because of the fact we cannot afford a long term disruption in that source. Your analysis also doesn't reflect the economic benefits of decoupling the fuel source from the transportation sector of our economy... there are economic benefits when we are able to arbitrage the energy source for the transportation sector over many energy options.
Check out the windows in the bump out on the "bottom" of the module... Given the view, why not Ten Forward...
(But only if the bar is stocked with Synthohol and served by Guinan)
Actually, the words "government of the people, by the people, for the people" doesn't appear in the US Constitution... I'm inferring that you think it is part of the Constitution based on your use of the word amendment. The phrase you cite is from the Gettysburg Address - an amazing oratory, but one that has no effect of law in the US.
I find it interesting that the rants here are about not stopping violent video games, while on the Superbowl Ad thread Slashdot users bemoan the fact that ads that are sexually suggestive are censored, while the violent commercials are not. Hunkering down now for the inevitable blowback...
We did a variation on this... we named the main test server after a co-worker's mom... So during the day you'd hear things like "EDSMOM just went down again" or "Wow, everyone is banging on EDSMOM today"... Poor Ed, a junior developer at the time, just had to grin and bear it.
You are technically correct in the short term... however, if you did turn the moon into a black hole, it would then begin to lose mass via Hawking Radiation... Assuming that radiation loss was higher than random stuff falling into it, our moon would eventually evaporate and be gone. So while it wouldn't suck us in, it would leave us with the plot of Space 1999...
This is more than a purse strings situation. With the shuttle retiring and no US replacement for 5 years, the only way to get to the space station is aboard a Russian rocket. That is bad news considering the fact that the US basically built the thing. If relations go sour, we basically cede control of the space station for a goodly chunk of its useful life.
The full line was "I cannae change the laws of physics... I've got to have 30 minutes"...
I always thought it would have been funny if the line had been used in "Who Mourns for Adonsis" with Scotty in bed with Lt. Palamas, responding to her question "That was great Scotty, ready for another go?"
Okay... good points... but I'm still not convinced... Ares I is being designed not just for lunar missions, but for LEO missions (ex: Space Station missions) as well. If we only built Jupiter, we'd need to use it for the LEO missions, and its unnecessarily big for that. I get that the SRB's in Jupiter are reused Shuttle ones - that is a blessing in your mind, perhaps a curse though. The existing SRB's are VERY reliable (never cut out early, never blew up), but the o-rings were still problematic. Is it possible that redesigned, bigger SRB's that would essentially be Ares I could be made with better o-rings? Without better o-rings in either SRB, you run the risk of igniting the main tank. No matter how you slice it, if you ride a single SRB up to orbit, that is likely the least risky scenario for the crew. Jupiter ensures they always have that "oops, the main tank just blew up" problem. Ares I will never have that happen. Given that we KNOW it CAN fail that way, I think Ares I is the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember playing the line graphic version of the game on a stand up console in the arcade. It was one of my favorite games. The version I remember was a line graphic one, with the craggy outline of a landscape, and different size "flat spots" you could land on. The smaller ones gave you more points. The game was replaced, probably by Donkey Kong or Pac Man and I remember being pissed off at the time that I could no longer play it (this was Pre-Atari 2600).
/really/ PC compatible. We also had one Silicon Graphics IRIS machine. It was the hot rod of the bunch, but single user, so you had to wait your turn.
In college, I took an advanced CAD course where we wrote CAD software. There was a hodge-podge of machines there, from a Dec PDP-11 to a Harris 800. Lots of DEC Rainbow machines with the dust covers on them because they used the 80186 chip which wasn't
Anyway, we finally got an open ended assignment on the SGI machine, so I decided to write the Lunar Lander game on it - with the original as my design reference. I did a pretty good job of it too - as a mechanical engineer, I was able to use Newton's laws to accurately reflect the behavior of the LM... it obeyed Newtonian mechanics (no - it didn't take into account the weight of the fuel burned but neither did the original to my understanding).
I got all done and most of the people who looked at the rendition had not ever seen the original game. So they complained that I hadn't taken advantage of the 3d graphics the SGI machine had. It was like drawing a picture in Kindergarten and having the teacher tell me my grass was the wrong color. Only one other guy understood what I'd done - copied a real live arcade game from scratch. When they asked him what he thought, he just kept playing it and said "Awesome!"
The other funny thing was that at the end, nobody went back to look at the modeled objects... they all went back to play the game.
Nothing will beat the Clipper version system... Everytime I used the Summer 87 edition, my mind would conjure up images of a schooner slicing through the chop in Nantucket Sound, with a bikini clad blonde bombshell sunning herself on the bow... ahhhhh...
And then someone who hadn't bathed in 3 or 4 days would lean over me at my IBM PC XT computer and ask me for help in compressing an index. Daydream explodes.
It will happen. It will take time. Corporate IT departments have to plan way ahead for a change like this, and so it will take them time to do the switchover, but rest assured, it will happen. XP is clearly long in the tooth at this point. Don't get me wrong. I love XP. It runs most of my home computers. I have 7 PC's... 2 run Vista - one of those is a Media Center desktop. The other is a laptop that came with Vista and I left it that way. The others either came with XP, or in most cases, I built them and put XP on them. But 1 of them, my main computer, runs Windows 7 RC... I love it. It is rock solid. It runs everything I need to run, and it runs it FAST. It is clearly better than XP - the main desktop is better, the performance is as good or better, so there is no reason NOT to go to Windows 7. What will be really interesting is what the pre-order upgrade sales look like. I bought 2 copies. I'll probably buy more later, but wanted to take advantage of the cheap pricing. Bottom line is that new PC's will have Windows 7, as will new netbooks. Once people start using it, they'll want it at work. People will begin to talk about around the watercooler about corporate IT... Hey, I'm running it on my new PC and it works great, and looks so much better than XP... Yeah, me too, why can't corporate get their act together and get our machines upgraded? As soon as the CEO and the CFO are the ones having that discussion, it will be the corporate IT department getting the flame under their collective butts to get it rolled out. Look for this to start in say Q1, Q2 2010, with the pressure mounting by year end. By 2011, 90% of companies will have changed over or will be on their way... And the good news for all the Microsoft haters will be that they'll have another decade to complain about the evil Microsoft corporation...
You are setting your sites too low if you have a physical education degree. You SHOULD be a Superintendent of Schools - they are all gym teachers because gym teachers are the only ones who have the time to get the certifications required to be Superintendent... No homework to correct... no lesson plans!
You reminded me of a problem I had at work... My computer account would get locked out every time I rebooted my laptop and tried to log in. I didn't give it too much thought (I'm a developer) and so I called the help desk each time it happened. They would unlock my account and on I'd go. Well, I finally got tired of this (didn't happen every day, as I started locking my desktop at night and skipped the daily reboot and login). I escalated it. Nobody could help me. At least 4 local help desk people couldn't figure it out. We swapped out docking stations. We checked profiles and permissions. Long story short, the final escalation was to re-image my laptop. I politely declined and investigated myself.
I quickly figured out that I had some services that were not started but were set to start automatically. Then I found out that they logged in with my local account. So it was these services on boot up that were sending bogus passwords and locking my account out. After the reboot, and an account unlock, everything would work.
Since I obviously didn't NEED the services (hey, they hadn't run in months...), I set them to manual start, and the problem went away.
Here's the upshot. I saw all 4 help desk guys in the elevator shortly after fixing the problem. I said, "Hey guys - I figured out my account lockout problem"... They said "Good for you!" and the got off at the next floor. Not one of them asked me what the problem was. Later I saw them again, and I said "Hey, you know it wasn't lost on me that none of you ASKED ME WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS OR HOW TO FIX IT..." They all laughed and got off the elevator again, without asking the question...
We recently outsourced our Help Desk. All these guys had to re-interview for their jobs. Most got rehired, but at MUCH lower salaries. I shed no tears for them.
One of my favorites was the Zenith PC compatible... It came with floppy disk drives with the traditional "fold down" switch like most floppy drives of the day. What was different was that the switch wouldn't fold down unless there was a floppy in the drive. So the lab at school I worked in had dozens of drives with broken latches that had been forced closed without a floppy in the drive. Dumb.
The optomism is proven realistic IF: 1. ...the kids don't destroy the equipment in a matter of weeks or months rather than years.
2. ...you can get Microsoft/McAfee/Apple/Symantec/etc to provide free licensing for the required products.
3. ...you can come up with a method of securing the OS against "unintended uses".
4. ...you lo-jack every unit to mitigate theft.
5. ...you assume the kids will fix their own machines and you won't need to hire additional IT staff for every school.
6. ...you assume that there are not incidental and normal hardware failures requiring repair/replacement.
7. ...you increase the infrastructure in every school to handle the thousands of connections rather than the few hundred previous connections.
8. ...you disregard the cost for the build-out of all the hard LAN connections, or the purchase/deployment of WiFi in the schools on a scale that can handle thousands of students.
9. ...you obtain contractural agreement with every school districts internet provider to compound the network bandwidth many fold at little or no additional ongoing cost.
10. ...you have a fall-back for the inevitable network failures during school hours.
Lets take them point by point:
1) Agreed that breakage can be an issue. The same is true of textbooks. We already charge students who lose/"break" a textbook, the same would be true for the netbooks. And if a student chose not to take that risk, we could print off copies of the textbooks for them in the exceptional cases. Repair is not an issue if we keep a small stock of netbooks available for swap... easy to do and allows breakage to be repaired without downtime to the student.
2) Most of that licensing is included either with the netbook or is freely available. We're not talking about exotic technologies here. We're talking about an os, Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc... industry standard, open source technologies for the most part. Sure, if we went with Windows there'd be the cost of antivirus. Not huge software costs in general though.
3) Not sure what "unintended usages" you are talking about here. Porn? Hacking? We cover that already with acceptable use policies. If you break them, you lose the netbook and you have to carry a printed copy with you. Ample disincentive if you ask me.
4) Lojacking for theft... well sure we might have some theft problems and we'd need to address that. But I think that a combination of things could be put into place to obviate the need for a lojack on each device. Police reports for real thefts for one thing (to prove you didn't just lose it) would be a start. We'd have to see how it went in a pilot program. And don't forget that since they get to keep the computer when they graduate, they'll take better care of it and will guard against theft on their own.
5) When you say fix their own machines, I'm assuming you're talking about software problems. In such a case, I'd simply issue a spare and image it for them, and then reimage their original machine. Not a big deal. And if we found they violated the acceptable use policy, well there'd be consequences (carry those printed copies, kid)... maybe they earn back the right to the netbook somehow... in any case, with the proper incentives, this becomes a non-issue.
6) Normal wear and tear would be fixed at the district's expense... your hard drive craps out - here's your spare and we swap in a new $50 drive... I suspect that we can still take advantage of manufacturer warranties, and maybe we add a support cost to each machine. It doesn't change the economics of the model much.
7-10) These are all flavors of the same issue, infrastructure of the computers... We already have that in most cases. All of our buildings are already wired and many classrooms already have WiFi. As for Internet service, we have that in spades... Our who
I agree that there are issues with viruses/breakage/hacking/objectionable material etc. But you hold the mistaken belief that the schools aren't already dealing with those issues. My district has something like a computer for every 2 kids (not all are kid accessible, but most are) and we deal with this stuff everyday. In fact, we're probably pretty good at it now, and our students have to sign computer use agreements and so we have policy around it and manage it. You also leave out the fact that if the computer is THEIRS... or will be theirs at the end of High School, they might take better care of it.
As to the cost of school materials, that is the central theme on this thread - everyone is looking at the publisher model here and those models are NOT compelling... the monopolistic publishers (There are like 3 of them, maybe 2 depending on how you cut it) don't want districts to move to online, and so they price their online additions such that it would be cheaper to keep buying the dead tree versions. They don't want to eat their own lunch, and while I don't blame them, I for one have had enough of it.
I'm advocating an approach similar to what California is doing - they are creating their OWN textbooks, free of the publishers. They get real educators, PhD's and everything, to write their ebooks. That is the model I am advocating. Think of it like Open Source for textbooks.
The arguments AGAINST such a model are the same arguments that Open Source faced at its beginning, and still face, to one degree or another, today. But at this point, you CAN run your computer completely on open source software if you want to, and with time, you'll be able to run your school system completely on open source textbooks. And instead of having to choose from 2 versions of your AP US History textbook that come from HM or PH, you'll be able to choose from who knows how many open source versions, all with the ability to tweak the textbook for your curriculum. I realize there will be a transitionary period, and that during that period you may end up having to do a mix of dead tree books and ebooks. But given a few more years, you will be able to basically give up the dead tree versions and the pay for play ebook versions, thus getting to a more flexible and sustainable textbook model.
It doesn't HAVE to be that way. I'm on a local school board and I'm looking into this issue for my own district. Many, if not all over time, of the books may end up being "free"... MIT already produces books that are freely distributable, and there are other outfits starting up to do the "free" thing... here is one of them CK12.org One of the really cool features of a system like this is that teachers can modify their textbooks to suit their curriculum, allowing them to custom build textbooks if they wish
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
I'm a tech guy, so I understand there will be issues with support/breakage, but it isn't going to be very much more expensive than the "breakage" we already have in textbooks. And you can lock the desktops down to a great degree, such that the students don't have admin privileges. Install Defender and AVG and you have a pretty good package.
Also, if you are using local copies of books rather than relying on an Internet connection to get them, you can pretty much put that "digital divide" issue to bed. Students can sync up when in school and get assignments and other background materials from their WiFi connection, and while at school, or in the public libraries, use the Internet. For those that have it at home, it is a convenience, but not a necessity.
Finally, you now don't have to wonder if a student has access to a computer to write papers and do computer based assignments. They all have them. And thus, the "digital divide" problem, if not solved, has gone WAY down.
Overall, the proposal has a lot of merit and I'm hoping the rest of the nation can benefit from California's efforts here. It would be good to have a state like California to lead this effort, and then allow other districts in other states be able to leverage what they do.
He was able to successfully get them to stop for a short time. Right up until the next delivery person in the rotation picked up his neighborhood, and having no knowledge of his desire not to have the paper, started delivering it again. Since the pay for such jobs suck, the turnover in delivery folk was high. So every time they turned over, he'd have to call and get them to notify the delivery person NOT to deliver to his door. Life's too short
I've had the same problem with the Hartford Courant which is a subscription service. We canceled the paper but it kept coming. Eventually it stopped. We started getting notices that we owed the paper money and ignored them. Eventually they threatened to turn our account over to a collection agency. At that, my wife paid them the outstanding balance by their accounts to make them go away.
After paying them, the paper started coming again...
My new plan with them is to repeat this whole exercise again. When they threaten to turn my account over to a collection agency again, I'm going to send my payment with a cancellation notice, AND with an offer to allow them to deliver the paper to my residence for a fee of $50 per month. It will say that delivering the paper to my door will be acceptance of my offer. When the first paper arrives, I plan to bill them. When the collection notice arrives again, I'll send them a formal demand letter for the balance of our agreement. My guess is that a small claims court will make them pay me to deliver the paper.
From TFA, the example was an over abundance of free newspapers delivered to people's doors. The problem with such a model is that there is no way to measure the demand for the paper
We have a similar situation where I live. There is a free weekly paper that is available in newspaper boxes. There are two papers that are delivered to your door.
The newspaper box one requires the consumer to actually take one from some "central" location - there is a cost to the "free" paper - the cost of getting a copy is going to one of the newspaper boxes and taking one.
In the other two cases, the papers show up on your doorstep. My brother didn't want one of them, and he fought bitterly with the provider to stop "littering" his door with them. If you go away for a couple of weeks, the piled up papers become a neon sign saying "No One Is Home"... Try as he might, he could not get the door delivered paper to stop showing up.
One person's free is another person's litter.
I'm glad you brought up the trailers... For my showing it was Terminator Salvation, Good. Then Transformers. Uh oh. And then GI Joe. Oh CRAP! Let me say up front that I'm a trekkie from way back, have seen every TOS episode at least 4 times, probably 8 in most cases, seen every TNG episode, most Voyager episodes, and probably half of DS9 and Enterprise. I've seen every movie at least twice. I've argued the Trek/Star Wars thing over an over with Force Fanboys. I know the monetary unit of measure on the planet Triskelleon, and what the cure for Interspace is. Those are my creds.
Overall, while I like the movie, I have this growing problem with the reboot. Sure, they didn't invalidate cannon, but the reboot stands on VERY tenuous ground. Let's look at Kirk as the main example, but the same kinds of arguments can be made for the other characters, particularly Spock.
Kirk is now a 23 year old cadet who is now captain of the flagship. As he asked Dr. Dehner in TOS about Gary Mitchell and his god-like powers, "But what will he learn along the way?" In the reboot, the answer is basically "nothing"
Kirk doesn't spend any time knowing how the ship, or Starfleet works. He never has put a notation in Commander Finney's file. He never served on the Farragut, so he doesn't know what that sickly sweet smell of the gaseous creature in "Obsession" is up to... he won't know its intelligent and that it is about to multiply. He has no relationship to Commodore Decker, so no real way to stop Decker from commandeering his ship in "The Doomsday Machine"... in fact, in the reboot, Kirk plays the part of Decker almost exactly... I kept waiting for Kirk to say "Belay that order, we are going to turn and ATTACK"... Kirk goes and attacks a ship of far greater power than his own instead of meeting the fleet like Spock wanted to. Hell, when he meets the planet killer, we're likely to have 2 dead Starships instead of one. Will Enterprise now suffer the same fate as Constellation?
Sure, the movie was thrilling, and now we have our heart's desire, Kirk in command of the Enterprise. But it isn't the SAME Kirk. Is he better? Nope. He's a punk. If I wanted to see punks in charge of powerful Starships, I'd just rewatch Star Wars Episode 4.
I was a on a mainframe project writing batch COBOL programs and was putting in lots of overtime. I started having nightmares that instead of being people, we were all just job streams running on the 'frame... We all competed for CPU time, and those of us in the lower priority queues were jealous of those in the higher priority queues. Those who processed big flat files were fat, those of us who processed smaller ones were skinny. We all wanted to run to a normal completion, ie. that our job streams would end normally. We were all horribly afraid of an ABEND, as that represented an untimely death.
There is an apocryphal story about how the SRB's on the Space Shuttle are directly related to the width of a horse's ass... Snopes has called the story "false" when in fact it is the case that the SRB's are limited in their size by the width of a horse's ass... The simple fact is that all technology is based on the technology that came before it. The computer industry is rife with examples... most of us are still using x86 technology is one... Why should rocketry be different?
I've taken many economics courses and your response doesn't take into consideration all of the economic issues... Points 2 and 3 leave out consideration of hidden economic costs not calculated directly in the cost of fossil fuels. The cost of wars in the Middle East are not accurately reflected in the cost of the fuel we get from there. And regardless of the fact that Middle Eastern oil will be sold to other countries, it is an economic benefit to the US not to have to rely on the Middle East for oil. It means we can more readily avoid costly wars in that region, and it also means we can devote less resources to stockpiling oil as we have to do now because of the fact we cannot afford a long term disruption in that source. Your analysis also doesn't reflect the economic benefits of decoupling the fuel source from the transportation sector of our economy... there are economic benefits when we are able to arbitrage the energy source for the transportation sector over many energy options.
Check out the windows in the bump out on the "bottom" of the module... Given the view, why not Ten Forward... (But only if the bar is stocked with Synthohol and served by Guinan)
Actually, the words "government of the people, by the people, for the people" doesn't appear in the US Constitution... I'm inferring that you think it is part of the Constitution based on your use of the word amendment. The phrase you cite is from the Gettysburg Address - an amazing oratory, but one that has no effect of law in the US.
I find it interesting that the rants here are about not stopping violent video games, while on the Superbowl Ad thread Slashdot users bemoan the fact that ads that are sexually suggestive are censored, while the violent commercials are not. Hunkering down now for the inevitable blowback...
We did a variation on this... we named the main test server after a co-worker's mom... So during the day you'd hear things like "EDSMOM just went down again" or "Wow, everyone is banging on EDSMOM today"... Poor Ed, a junior developer at the time, just had to grin and bear it.
You are technically correct in the short term... however, if you did turn the moon into a black hole, it would then begin to lose mass via Hawking Radiation... Assuming that radiation loss was higher than random stuff falling into it, our moon would eventually evaporate and be gone. So while it wouldn't suck us in, it would leave us with the plot of Space 1999...
I, for one, welcome our new Frozen Mice Clone overloards
Did they let the Unabomber out of jail, or simply give him some Internet access?
This is more than a purse strings situation. With the shuttle retiring and no US replacement for 5 years, the only way to get to the space station is aboard a Russian rocket. That is bad news considering the fact that the US basically built the thing. If relations go sour, we basically cede control of the space station for a goodly chunk of its useful life.
The full line was "I cannae change the laws of physics... I've got to have 30 minutes"... I always thought it would have been funny if the line had been used in "Who Mourns for Adonsis" with Scotty in bed with Lt. Palamas, responding to her question "That was great Scotty, ready for another go?"
Okay... good points... but I'm still not convinced... Ares I is being designed not just for lunar missions, but for LEO missions (ex: Space Station missions) as well. If we only built Jupiter, we'd need to use it for the LEO missions, and its unnecessarily big for that. I get that the SRB's in Jupiter are reused Shuttle ones - that is a blessing in your mind, perhaps a curse though. The existing SRB's are VERY reliable (never cut out early, never blew up), but the o-rings were still problematic. Is it possible that redesigned, bigger SRB's that would essentially be Ares I could be made with better o-rings? Without better o-rings in either SRB, you run the risk of igniting the main tank. No matter how you slice it, if you ride a single SRB up to orbit, that is likely the least risky scenario for the crew. Jupiter ensures they always have that "oops, the main tank just blew up" problem. Ares I will never have that happen. Given that we KNOW it CAN fail that way, I think Ares I is the way to go.