I agree, and seeing this in the standard C/C++ libraries down the road would be nice. I would say Java would have framework-esque multicore support first, but then again Sun is in trouble and Java is just now getting video and 64-bit support. I don't use.NET enough to know, but it would be interesting to know if.NET has decent native multicore support and if Mono implements it correctly, although this all depends on MSIL versioning/limitations I'm sure.
In a nutshell, we need more portable multicore solutions in order to make better usage of them. Not just for the sake of being cross-platform, but for better documentation, example code, etc.
I believe this allows make to make use of several cores, not the actual application being compiled. More specifically, -j means "jobs" and therefore not necessarily "cores" per se, but you could always manually tweak the affinity yourself if you're compiling something absolutely huge.
Care to do your own hardware abstraction, graphics library, standard C/C++ implementation from direct x86 ASM? And what about booting from only a DVD, or prepackaging games in the extremely popular HDD format (oh wait, that requires a custom filesystem too unless you want to settle for FAT performance).
Lets get something straight. I bought my laptop with 1GB of RAM/1.6Ghz dual core proc in late 2006, and it came with Vista. It was absolutely unusable after about a month, so I started disabling Indexing, aero (then reverting to classic), tweaking registry values and paging options, and defragging daily. Still terrible responsiveness.
So I upgraded to 2GB of RAM, and damn if Vista still took its own sweet time doing anything.
After months of this, I gave up and tried Ubuntu 8.04 via Wubi, and not only did it have incredible speed, but the out-of-the-box compiz effects were astonishing, and later I would roll out the cube, wobbly windows, zoom etc. for no performance hit whatsoever.
Fast forward to now: Vista is gone from my laptop, I triple boot Ubuntu 8.10, Mac OS X Leopard (hackintosh), and Solaris 10. My Ubuntu installation runs almost the entire plethora of compiz plugins, which run incredible on the exact same hardware vista abused, and even running Windows XP in a 384MB RAM virtual machine on top of said Ubuntu has absolutely no performance loss whatsoever, even after coming out of suspension or hibernation, something Vista took literally 45 minutes to do with just a word document open.
In a nutshell, I love graphics, but I'm not willing to lose productivity over them, and Linux/compiz gives 100% better graphics for an iota of the overhead Aero/Vista in general needs.
If Windows 7 (6.1) outperforms Vista as I've seen its betas do (in virtual machines running on top of Ubuntu) then I might consider installing it for good in a VM in the same manner as I've done Windows XP since Vista ruins performance in both virtual machines and right on top of the bare metal.
The thing is, I use media players like (dare I say it) iTunes, WMP, Media Center, or RhythmBox to manage my songs and/or videos for me (as well as play them), so I don't need to sit there and browse folders or take a performance hit for indexing.
When the great grandparent post said they liked indexing because they have a huge hard drive, the only thing I can think of for having such a hard drive would be Music/Video libraries, games, or absolutely huge Flash documents. The music/video most certainly would have a manager like iTunes or Media Center, the games are just apps with start menu/desktop launchers, and as a Flash dev myself I just put all of my.flas in a directory such as ~/Documents/Flash.
And if you need a terabyte of hard drive space to store a bunch of word processing documents, then not only do I feel sorry for you but by all means enable indexing since you apparently do nothing other than edit word processing documents all day long.
And as far as UAC, Indexing, and Aero having the ability to be turned off, I personally turn off Indexing for better personal organization, and always use the "classic" theme under any Windows version, but I would never turn off UAC in Vista because it is just as vital to security as sudo/gksu/root/wheel in *nix, and one of the reasons Vista does not have nearly the amount of security problems other past Windows versions have had.
Vista has its share of problems other than what can be disabled (DirectX 10, WDM issues, memory management issues etc.), but many of these have been somewhat resolved in the Windows 7 betas I've tested, although driver issues persist (they were betas, after all). I am personally skipping Vista from my work-related virtual machine collection for these reasons, awaiting the production build of Windows 7 (actually Windows 6.1). Microsoft has been paying attention to our complaints with Vista, and 7 reflects this, e.g. a toned down UAC, better memory management, more streamlining, and graphics without quite as much performance hit.
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use, and to help index your hard drive since apparently us users can never seem to remember where we put anything despite the fact we get a UAC prompt if we choose to save anything outside of our home directory.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly. And by the way, you're paying an assload of money for all of this too, including another crappy chassis.
These little flash-based games come a dime a dozen these days, and the fact that they are starting to fill such subtle niches are no surprise. That said, political cartoons are arguably read by a larger portion of the population due to their printed nature, but I could easily see the internet (a.k.a. "a series of tubes", Al "manbearpig" Gore's creation) completely replacing printed materials, especially newspapers, in the very near future making something like this inevitable.
Games, despite the prevalence of these little Flash-based ones, will probably not replace printed political cartoons as quickly as regular images and videos over the internet, but I could easily be wrong if I underestimate their popularity among regular (e.g. over age 12) users.
That said, does anyone here have a link to a website that propagates these Flash-based satirical games on a frequent basis for my own personal evaluation?
Novell has already done this in several viral videos, just do a youtube search. The Linux foundation no doubt has less funding than Novell, so they should partner up on this and get a commercial out together, since Novell not only has experience/material on this, but a viable pitch as well what with the woman being Linux and more creative/better than the PC/Mac representatives.
And honestly, why are they still beating this whole "I'm a $PLATFORM" bit death rather than creating a new pitch, as Apple will undoubtably do once everyone has parodied their commercial to death.
Black comedy: A subgenre of comedy that deals with common taboos (not racism, as in blaxploitation). Synonyms include: gallows humor, dark comedy, and morbid humor.
The default mod of 0 on your comment should have tipped me off, but having an education typically makes insults have more credibility. The more you know...
I've never liked Toshiba computers, they have more problems compared to other machines. Call me flamebait, but installing OpenSolaris (which gave me hell in my tests) seems like a perfect match for Toshibas.
Please go back to 4chan's/b/ or whatever asshole of the internet you came from, because that was completely uncalled for, even on/.
I'm all for black comedy, but stick a disclaimer in there somewhere so no 12 year old causes a national suit, because I don't want to have to fall back on Digg, or having to find my own tech articles:p.
Or maybe this is just a more modern trolling attempt, sorry to act new here in that case.
It's simple really: just keep them (and their devices) out of the small wireless power range, which includes:
A) Locking your door and not giving the neighbors a key, recommend an "alarm" (or alarm-like) system for optimal security B) Preventing the neighbors from staying in your home, in the same room as the device charger for extended periods of time, especially while their chargeable device is visible C) Do not place the wireless charger next to any outside walls, or next to any guest room walls
D) provide a unique SSID and WPA (not WEP) encryption to the wireless charger, optimally combined with MAC Address filtering and RADIUS (ok, I made that part up).
But seriously, this does not have nearly the same range as wireless routers, else Linksys/Netgear/Belkin would have already had an all in one gateway-router-AP-charger already:D.
Sounds fun when going through metal detectors. What is worse, the fact you set off a metal detector, the fact you set off a metal detector using tin foil underwear, stripping publicly to reveal the foil, or getting put in the looney bin while trying to explain why you're wearing said tin foil undergarments.
Ideally, bugs like cancer-causing levels of radiation will be worked out before it goes into production.
I sure hope so, but some things can easily slip by quality control, and I would think this could be easier in wireless development due to possible difficulties in testing, and a lack of knowing "exactly" what causes cancer in the first place.
And it is also scary how quality control's quality itself seems to be decreasingdrastically.
Because then the OEMs and hardware companies would be losing money due to consumers buying the same cable for their product from another, cheaper, company thus losing profit. If Dell sold replacement power supplies for their laptops for ~$20.00, and say since the cable is a standard HP sells the same one for $15.00, Dell would be losing some profit unless they change the connector on the cable to only fit their hardware, hence the "drawer full of cables" we all seem to have (except those in the A/V business, where this is almost never the case).
Despite this, however, other companies still tend to sell proprietary cables for other hardware anyway, I just a replacement power cable for my laptop from an obscure (yet cheaper) eBay store for half the price my laptop's OEM was selling it for.
But I agree, like current AC power cables for desktops, why can't laptops and other devices have the same standardized power cables? Think of ye olde motherboard molex connectors - there were 2 types, one pretty much entirely for floppies and the other for hard drives. The same could apply to power adapters, and save teh consumers time, stress, and drawer space. If every USB device had a different connector, my house would be insulated with wires right now:p.
I see the article is tagged with "cancer", which got me thinking: could all this energy going through the air cause cancer potentially? I know its only a few volts of direct current, but think of the spectrum and the (very high) frequencies of gamma rays and the like, could it be possible? I am no expert in this field by any means, but I have to ask.
Man, I thought regular trolls were bad enough, but now we seem to have clone trolls! I swear you're like the flood off of halo - you're a disembodied version of the original that is more annoying and harder to kill, in your case the horrendous grammar and beating that same meme to death.
The original New Here may be gone, but we don't need a ghost in his place, OK? I thought it was funny, and don't consider the original New Here a troll (meme-enforcers walk a thin line from being trolls), and even your post was funny to a degree, but give it a rest - this is like the 5th or 6th troll post in this article alone.
Like everything in life other than alcohol, do it in moderation, ok?
Oh yeah, and my response was mainly for Windows machines, which are for all practical purposes (trying not to become flamebait, people) easier to monitor and restrict access to thanks to group policy and the ability to easily embed/integrate software in the startup process. Most school districts, as I said in my previous post, use Windows/Netware for their network, but venturing into Mac territory has always been difficult for a number of reasons (theft, monitoring, compatibility, price etc.) and implementing Macs in a take home situation seems awfully risky, and for that I won't even touch that with a 20 foot pole.
I'm sure it could be done, don't get me wrong, but it would be difficult, time consuming, and risky, and because of that I won't even begin to start working out scenarios, despite how much I favor Macs over the Windows/PC platform in any other situation.
This is exactly the kind of horror stories I hear that make me carry my laptop around in my hands in airports no matter what. People look at me like I'm carrying around a security blanky or something but now that you said this, I'm handcuffing this thing (my pentabooted laptop) to me 3 days before even heading towards the airport:p. You've never seen a grown man cry as much as when my power supply frayed and it took a week to ship a new one (even with 3 backup desktops), so losing it or having it critically injured... I don't even want to think about it *shiver*.
I completely agree. While I admire the school in question's goal to provide laptops for the students, using it as an invasion of privacy (a common debate here on/.) just seems a little too strange to me, and maybe borderline legal child abuse (I'm not a lawyer, however).
Extended hours of permission-restricted school desktop access is one option so the students can be filtered from the school campus while supervised, or if you must have them take the laptops home, charge a nominal "renting fee" and do just that: rent the computers as part of an educational (almost OLPC-esque) program run by the school, with perhaps MS Office/OpenOffice (to prevent legal issues) prepackaged for usage.
In any case, the most away-from-school monitoring I would do of the computers so as to not tread on legally sure or unsure territory would be maybe antivirus logging, maybe authentication (most school districts in the US use Novell Netware client/servers) although not all kids may have internet, and at the most privacy invasive, web history monitoring at a very minimal degree, i.e. only sites you must block, at you or your school district's discretion (to myspace or not to myspace...).
I have managed in-school computers, both high school and middle school, and whereas there may be a "its not mine" mentality, I've seen the horrors done to those machines, and the thought of unlimited time to do said horrors would probably kill me quickly. But as I said, privacy is an issue, so VNC would be inappropriate for several reasons, strict, verbose logging would be both data-intensive and impossible to manage, and then there's the possibility of software piracy only inhibited by using FOSS like OO.o in place of the traditional (and traditionally pirated) MSO.
Thats just what I would do, but nevertheless a screening process would be needed for theese kids, such as a computer usage background check (weed out the script kiddie wannabes) and a "do you currently own/have nominal access to a computer?" checkbox on the application for the program.
And as always, from my experience with managing public school computers, don't jump the shark on the district, watch the gov. spending especially in this economic state, and do your child abuse, antivirus, group policy, and minimalistic logging research before going for this bold move. Another thing I didn't go into detail about enough is internet connectivity (since no computer probably = no internet), but a monthly/weekly check-in process can be initiated in its place.
No, but it reminds me of the lockward screensaver in gnome/ubuntu. Its been my screensaver for years, and although its technically more greycode emulating than this, it looks like the back of the device in the demonstration video, and usually memorizes anyone who happens to see it.
I can understand where it can be seen as an early engineering masterpiece, but honestly so was the wheel. Either this guy has way too much time on his hands, or he's a Mac user amazed by devices with 1 input (referencing the mice on macs and the single doorknob thing on this calculator).
Whats even more interesting is that this device seems to implement an early form of graycode, only so easy a caveman could do it.
Depending on their budget, linksys/netgear is cheaper, yet trades off quality as you mentioned due to lower-end hardware. For a little more (going a long ways) a smaller Cisco NAS would suffice as an out-of-the-box solution that does not sacrifice speed and throughput (depending on the model, of course).
A custom-built box, as many commenters suggested, seemed a tad inappropriate to me as he asked for an NAS device, not a server. Installing Ubuntu or whatever on it seems like more of a performance hit than a properly optimized "off the shelf" NAS box, since they most likely don't run Dbus, GNOME, Hald, bluetooth or any other desktop software atop the basic kernel and networking services.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and seeing this in the standard C/C++ libraries down the road would be nice. I would say Java would have framework-esque multicore support first, but then again Sun is in trouble and Java is just now getting video and 64-bit support. I don't use .NET enough to know, but it would be interesting to know if .NET has decent native multicore support and if Mono implements it correctly, although this all depends on MSIL versioning/limitations I'm sure.
In a nutshell, we need more portable multicore solutions in order to make better usage of them. Not just for the sake of being cross-platform, but for better documentation, example code, etc.
I believe this allows make to make use of several cores, not the actual application being compiled. More specifically, -j means "jobs" and therefore not necessarily "cores" per se, but you could always manually tweak the affinity yourself if you're compiling something absolutely huge.
And the infrastructure they need is available free as open source, besides. What's stopping them.
The GPL.
And "games on Linux" is for the moment something unheard of without Wine unless you enjoy half-assed Quake clones.
Care to do your own hardware abstraction, graphics library, standard C/C++ implementation from direct x86 ASM? And what about booting from only a DVD, or prepackaging games in the extremely popular HDD format (oh wait, that requires a custom filesystem too unless you want to settle for FAT performance).
Lets get something straight. I bought my laptop with 1GB of RAM/1.6Ghz dual core proc in late 2006, and it came with Vista. It was absolutely unusable after about a month, so I started disabling Indexing, aero (then reverting to classic), tweaking registry values and paging options, and defragging daily. Still terrible responsiveness.
So I upgraded to 2GB of RAM, and damn if Vista still took its own sweet time doing anything.
After months of this, I gave up and tried Ubuntu 8.04 via Wubi, and not only did it have incredible speed, but the out-of-the-box compiz effects were astonishing, and later I would roll out the cube, wobbly windows, zoom etc. for no performance hit whatsoever.
Fast forward to now: Vista is gone from my laptop, I triple boot Ubuntu 8.10, Mac OS X Leopard (hackintosh), and Solaris 10. My Ubuntu installation runs almost the entire plethora of compiz plugins, which run incredible on the exact same hardware vista abused, and even running Windows XP in a 384MB RAM virtual machine on top of said Ubuntu has absolutely no performance loss whatsoever, even after coming out of suspension or hibernation, something Vista took literally 45 minutes to do with just a word document open.
In a nutshell, I love graphics, but I'm not willing to lose productivity over them, and Linux/compiz gives 100% better graphics for an iota of the overhead Aero/Vista in general needs. If Windows 7 (6.1) outperforms Vista as I've seen its betas do (in virtual machines running on top of Ubuntu) then I might consider installing it for good in a VM in the same manner as I've done Windows XP since Vista ruins performance in both virtual machines and right on top of the bare metal.
The thing is, I use media players like (dare I say it) iTunes, WMP, Media Center, or RhythmBox to manage my songs and/or videos for me (as well as play them), so I don't need to sit there and browse folders or take a performance hit for indexing.
.flas in a directory such as ~/Documents/Flash.
When the great grandparent post said they liked indexing because they have a huge hard drive, the only thing I can think of for having such a hard drive would be Music/Video libraries, games, or absolutely huge Flash documents. The music/video most certainly would have a manager like iTunes or Media Center, the games are just apps with start menu/desktop launchers, and as a Flash dev myself I just put all of my
And if you need a terabyte of hard drive space to store a bunch of word processing documents, then not only do I feel sorry for you but by all means enable indexing since you apparently do nothing other than edit word processing documents all day long.
And as far as UAC, Indexing, and Aero having the ability to be turned off, I personally turn off Indexing for better personal organization, and always use the "classic" theme under any Windows version, but I would never turn off UAC in Vista because it is just as vital to security as sudo/gksu/root/wheel in *nix, and one of the reasons Vista does not have nearly the amount of security problems other past Windows versions have had.
Vista has its share of problems other than what can be disabled (DirectX 10, WDM issues, memory management issues etc.), but many of these have been somewhat resolved in the Windows 7 betas I've tested, although driver issues persist (they were betas, after all). I am personally skipping Vista from my work-related virtual machine collection for these reasons, awaiting the production build of Windows 7 (actually Windows 6.1). Microsoft has been paying attention to our complaints with Vista, and 7 reflects this, e.g. a toned down UAC, better memory management, more streamlining, and graphics without quite as much performance hit.
Yes, but only to use the extra RAM and processing time to "cache" all of the crap you never use, and to help index your hard drive since apparently us users can never seem to remember where we put anything despite the fact we get a UAC prompt if we choose to save anything outside of our home directory.
And lets see how well the SLI/Crossfire graphics cards run games while also being called by the desktop window manager and and explorer to redraw aero effects constantly. And by the way, you're paying an assload of money for all of this too, including another crappy chassis.
</rant>
These little flash-based games come a dime a dozen these days, and the fact that they are starting to fill such subtle niches are no surprise. That said, political cartoons are arguably read by a larger portion of the population due to their printed nature, but I could easily see the internet (a.k.a. "a series of tubes", Al "manbearpig" Gore's creation) completely replacing printed materials, especially newspapers, in the very near future making something like this inevitable.
Games, despite the prevalence of these little Flash-based ones, will probably not replace printed political cartoons as quickly as regular images and videos over the internet, but I could easily be wrong if I underestimate their popularity among regular (e.g. over age 12) users.
That said, does anyone here have a link to a website that propagates these Flash-based satirical games on a frequent basis for my own personal evaluation?
Novell has already done this in several viral videos, just do a youtube search. The Linux foundation no doubt has less funding than Novell, so they should partner up on this and get a commercial out together, since Novell not only has experience/material on this, but a viable pitch as well what with the woman being Linux and more creative/better than the PC/Mac representatives.
And honestly, why are they still beating this whole "I'm a $PLATFORM" bit death rather than creating a new pitch, as Apple will undoubtably do once everyone has parodied their commercial to death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_comedy
Black comedy: A subgenre of comedy that deals with common taboos (not racism, as in blaxploitation). Synonyms include: gallows humor, dark comedy, and morbid humor.
The default mod of 0 on your comment should have tipped me off, but having an education typically makes insults have more credibility. The more you know...
I've never liked Toshiba computers, they have more problems compared to other machines. Call me flamebait, but installing OpenSolaris (which gave me hell in my tests) seems like a perfect match for Toshibas.
*bangs head against wall*
:(.
Sigh, I give up. No more feeding the trolls. Slashdot will forever be tainted by both trolls and troll clones alike. Take it, its yours
WOW
/b/ or whatever asshole of the internet you came from, because that was completely uncalled for, even on /.
:p.
Please go back to 4chan's
I'm all for black comedy, but stick a disclaimer in there somewhere so no 12 year old causes a national suit, because I don't want to have to fall back on Digg, or having to find my own tech articles
Or maybe this is just a more modern trolling attempt, sorry to act new here in that case.
It's simple really: just keep them (and their devices) out of the small wireless power range, which includes:
:D.
A) Locking your door and not giving the neighbors a key, recommend an "alarm" (or alarm-like) system for optimal security
B) Preventing the neighbors from staying in your home, in the same room as the device charger for extended periods of time, especially while their chargeable device is visible
C) Do not place the wireless charger next to any outside walls, or next to any guest room walls
D) provide a unique SSID and WPA (not WEP) encryption to the wireless charger, optimally combined with MAC Address filtering and RADIUS (ok, I made that part up).
But seriously, this does not have nearly the same range as wireless routers, else Linksys/Netgear/Belkin would have already had an all in one gateway-router-AP-charger already
Sounds fun when going through metal detectors. What is worse, the fact you set off a metal detector, the fact you set off a metal detector using tin foil underwear, stripping publicly to reveal the foil, or getting put in the looney bin while trying to explain why you're wearing said tin foil undergarments.
Ideally, bugs like cancer-causing levels of radiation will be worked out before it goes into production.
I sure hope so, but some things can easily slip by quality control, and I would think this could be easier in wireless development due to possible difficulties in testing, and a lack of knowing "exactly" what causes cancer in the first place.
And it is also scary how quality control's quality itself seems to be decreasing drastically.
Because then the OEMs and hardware companies would be losing money due to consumers buying the same cable for their product from another, cheaper, company thus losing profit. If Dell sold replacement power supplies for their laptops for ~$20.00, and say since the cable is a standard HP sells the same one for $15.00, Dell would be losing some profit unless they change the connector on the cable to only fit their hardware, hence the "drawer full of cables" we all seem to have (except those in the A/V business, where this is almost never the case).
:p.
Despite this, however, other companies still tend to sell proprietary cables for other hardware anyway, I just a replacement power cable for my laptop from an obscure (yet cheaper) eBay store for half the price my laptop's OEM was selling it for.
But I agree, like current AC power cables for desktops, why can't laptops and other devices have the same standardized power cables? Think of ye olde motherboard molex connectors - there were 2 types, one pretty much entirely for floppies and the other for hard drives. The same could apply to power adapters, and save teh consumers time, stress, and drawer space. If every USB device had a different connector, my house would be insulated with wires right now
I see the article is tagged with "cancer", which got me thinking: could all this energy going through the air cause cancer potentially? I know its only a few volts of direct current, but think of the spectrum and the (very high) frequencies of gamma rays and the like, could it be possible? I am no expert in this field by any means, but I have to ask.
Man, I thought regular trolls were bad enough, but now we seem to have clone trolls! I swear you're like the flood off of halo - you're a disembodied version of the original that is more annoying and harder to kill, in your case the horrendous grammar and beating that same meme to death.
The original New Here may be gone, but we don't need a ghost in his place, OK? I thought it was funny, and don't consider the original New Here a troll (meme-enforcers walk a thin line from being trolls), and even your post was funny to a degree, but give it a rest - this is like the 5th or 6th troll post in this article alone.
Like everything in life other than alcohol, do it in moderation, ok?
Oh yeah, and my response was mainly for Windows machines, which are for all practical purposes (trying not to become flamebait, people) easier to monitor and restrict access to thanks to group policy and the ability to easily embed/integrate software in the startup process. Most school districts, as I said in my previous post, use Windows/Netware for their network, but venturing into Mac territory has always been difficult for a number of reasons (theft, monitoring, compatibility, price etc.) and implementing Macs in a take home situation seems awfully risky, and for that I won't even touch that with a 20 foot pole.
I'm sure it could be done, don't get me wrong, but it would be difficult, time consuming, and risky, and because of that I won't even begin to start working out scenarios, despite how much I favor Macs over the Windows/PC platform in any other situation.
This is exactly the kind of horror stories I hear that make me carry my laptop around in my hands in airports no matter what. People look at me like I'm carrying around a security blanky or something but now that you said this, I'm handcuffing this thing (my pentabooted laptop) to me 3 days before even heading towards the airport :p. You've never seen a grown man cry as much as when my power supply frayed and it took a week to ship a new one (even with 3 backup desktops), so losing it or having it critically injured... I don't even want to think about it *shiver*.
I completely agree. While I admire the school in question's goal to provide laptops for the students, using it as an invasion of privacy (a common debate here on /.) just seems a little too strange to me, and maybe borderline legal child abuse (I'm not a lawyer, however).
:D.
Extended hours of permission-restricted school desktop access is one option so the students can be filtered from the school campus while supervised, or if you must have them take the laptops home, charge a nominal "renting fee" and do just that: rent the computers as part of an educational (almost OLPC-esque) program run by the school, with perhaps MS Office/OpenOffice (to prevent legal issues) prepackaged for usage.
In any case, the most away-from-school monitoring I would do of the computers so as to not tread on legally sure or unsure territory would be maybe antivirus logging, maybe authentication (most school districts in the US use Novell Netware client/servers) although not all kids may have internet, and at the most privacy invasive, web history monitoring at a very minimal degree, i.e. only sites you must block, at you or your school district's discretion (to myspace or not to myspace...).
I have managed in-school computers, both high school and middle school, and whereas there may be a "its not mine" mentality, I've seen the horrors done to those machines, and the thought of unlimited time to do said horrors would probably kill me quickly. But as I said, privacy is an issue, so VNC would be inappropriate for several reasons, strict, verbose logging would be both data-intensive and impossible to manage, and then there's the possibility of software piracy only inhibited by using FOSS like OO.o in place of the traditional (and traditionally pirated) MSO.
Thats just what I would do, but nevertheless a screening process would be needed for theese kids, such as a computer usage background check (weed out the script kiddie wannabes) and a "do you currently own/have nominal access to a computer?" checkbox on the application for the program.
And as always, from my experience with managing public school computers, don't jump the shark on the district, watch the gov. spending especially in this economic state, and do your child abuse, antivirus, group policy, and minimalistic logging research before going for this bold move. Another thing I didn't go into detail about enough is internet connectivity (since no computer probably = no internet), but a monthly/weekly check-in process can be initiated in its place.
Anyways, thats just me
No, but it reminds me of the lockward screensaver in gnome/ubuntu. Its been my screensaver for years, and although its technically more greycode emulating than this, it looks like the back of the device in the demonstration video, and usually memorizes anyone who happens to see it.
I can understand where it can be seen as an early engineering masterpiece, but honestly so was the wheel. Either this guy has way too much time on his hands, or he's a Mac user amazed by devices with 1 input (referencing the mice on macs and the single doorknob thing on this calculator).
Whats even more interesting is that this device seems to implement an early form of graycode, only so easy a caveman could do it.
Depending on their budget, linksys/netgear is cheaper, yet trades off quality as you mentioned due to lower-end hardware. For a little more (going a long ways) a smaller Cisco NAS would suffice as an out-of-the-box solution that does not sacrifice speed and throughput (depending on the model, of course).
A custom-built box, as many commenters suggested, seemed a tad inappropriate to me as he asked for an NAS device, not a server. Installing Ubuntu or whatever on it seems like more of a performance hit than a properly optimized "off the shelf" NAS box, since they most likely don't run Dbus, GNOME, Hald, bluetooth or any other desktop software atop the basic kernel and networking services.