You've foolishly fallen for the idea that this has anything to do at all with security. It got votes when it went in, and it costs a gazillion dollars of our money that the government gets to pay its friends who do the security work. Same with prisons. Same with just about everything. We're being fleeced by parasites who don't care if they kill the host.
I dont think it was even that good. He opened an attachment or a piece of malware and he was already logged into hotmail, it read his contact list, created a piece of spam and sent it. Hotmail was just the carrier. It didnt need the password. This happens routinely with several of my friends and relatives who click on every email from russian porn sites and anything that claims to be 'free'. They're always idiots with no idea of how a computer works, and apparently powerless to stop clicking on things that break their computer because no matter how many times they get infected, they still keep doing stupid things.
As fabulous as hotmail is (cough), it wont fix stupid. Neither will gmail. Facebook seems to amplify it.
Not to mention most businesses dont update to every single windows release. Most skip one. The bad one. Based on prior history windows 8 will not only be a horrible operating system like ME or slow and awful like Vista, it'll also look like a bunch of clowns built a compromise elephant by shoving 2,000,000 pounds of crap into a 5 pound operating system bag. Like I need or want windows on a tablet or phone...
You forgot to mention the part where it was probably a piece of malware that sent the emails using his contact list from hotmail and pretty much had nothing to do with hotmail. I've seen malware that does hotmail AND gmail or outlook or thunderbird or whatever have you.
It sounds like they made a large mistake. They asked a high touch user to evaluate something and when he had problems he blamed hotmail. I dont think anything that happened to him had much of anything to do with hotmail or windows 8.
But its kinda fun to figure out what really happened./would get rid of his hotmail account if he didnt have 9000 places I use it for a login// was really surprised that yahoo inactive-deleted my account. I'd think they need all the dead subscribers they can handle.
Really? I know some analysts that eat their own poo. Pick anything rocketing to the top and you'll find plenty of people standing around to tell you its going to continue.
I know the tech folks get warm and wet over arm although they have a hard time articulating why anyone else would want it. If I wanted it, I sure as shoot wouldnt want big fat honking windows on it. Its a lightweight processor. Put a lightweight operating system on it like one of the 5000 we already have.
Windows is dead anyhow. Just hasn't quit moving yet.
I'm sure there will be plenty of hair splitting by the apple afficionado's but just about every app I load, whether ios or android, all wants access to data they dont need and many transfer stuff like my name, phone number and who knows what else. I've had quite a few that broke my device or gave it some real problems, again on both platforms. I call that malware. It steals my stuff (although I agree to the theft because if I didnt, I'd have no apps) and often eats my battery life or gives me operational problems requiring an uninstall and reboot.
...have a billion dollar fortune 50 company be in existence for 30+ years.
Step 2: Dig up any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who worked there who had an idea once that someone in the company shot down, bonus points if its a CxO level character and full bonus if its someone that lots of people have heard of.
Step 3: Profit? Does anyone think that a smartphone like product in the days before cell networks were fleshed out, could carry data at more than an actual snails pace and a nascent internet would be of interest to anyone at all for any reason? Yeah, me neither. People dont buy smartphones because they spontaneously polish your knob at random intervals, they buy them to access apps, data and content. And none of that existed in 1991 and probably wouldnt havent flown in 2001 either.
So microsoft was smart to tell Nathan 'no' when they did and they'd have been smart to do it ten years later. The infrastructure simply wasnt there. The iphone succeeded because they offered a full content solution bundled with it (itunes, app store) and we had a well developed internet infrastructure for it to fit into.
Cart, horse.
Microsoft would have been even smarter to not try and foist a windows based offering when they did do a phone. I dont really want windows on my PC, and I sure as hell dont need it on a phone. We already have two working phone operating systems. Lets put our time and money behind those instead of creating more 3rd and 4th options that'll never succeed. Ask RIMM, Nokia and HP about it, they've experienced the joys. Oh wait, dont ask Nokia, they were stupid once in this regard and chose to fix their stupidity by choosing the #3 option. Sell any of their stock that you're holding while its still worth something.
As a retired fortune 50 marketing exec who is just volunteering, I'm sure as heck not going to do all that stuff. I just want to whine about the stupid expenditures that one hand makes while the other allows important things to lie fallow as you described.
I havent really looked into it in detail, but as I understand it the funding for this came from some individuals who just wanted to get ipads into the classrooms. That was the thrust. Now the way I've usually done things is identify all the problems, prioritize them in order of importance and cost and start paying for those from the top down. Not just throw product at something because I think its wonderful and I want to inflict it on a small subset of our public school children and see what happens.
I'm sure someone gave someone a great deal. What should have happened is the governor calling the ceo of HP when they were getting out of the tablet business and saying "We'll take them all, and you can take a charitable deduction for the slabs and all the work you do to integrate them".
I too enjoy the random use of immediately made up statistics laid out in terms like 'miniscule' and 'orders of magnitude'. Most of the apps I've downloaded from the app store and from play/market reported all sorts of things they didnt need to know about or report back to some mothership who-knows-where. I've never loaded a malicious app that caused me harm or did something that required repair...from either.
Yet there are plenty of stories about malware and the ability to enact it on both platforms, in all kinds. To say otherwise is simply laying on the blinders because otherwise you'll wonder why you paid so much.
Yep, that was the funny part of the article. "Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them.'"
But one of them would be that the assertion is ridiculously incorrect.
Why do apple people think their products and services are malware proof, even though anyone with a self respecting brain capacity would know its not true in theory or in practice? Is that why they pay twice as much for stuff?
I'm not good with anyone scanning my drivers license for a purchase. Target started doing that with liquor and I'm simply not going to dig my license out every time I shop. So I dont shop there at all.
Is it abuse? Its up to the store to manage the policy. When you have a customer with excessive returns, then ban THAT customer. But this is what happened with Costco. People started using their return policy for a free upgrade path, returning 2 year old computers and tv's. So now they only offer 90 days, and they WILL take your card and swoosh you out the door if you return too many things for no reason.
But BB sucks. Except for rare sales their prices are too high and their 'service' isnt anything I can use. Last time I went in I had a hard time getting one of the dozens of employees walking around doing nothing to help me, and when I did I was sorry.
This is a statewide program. They're buying 5 per classroom for ALL of the schools. And they did write an app to quiz students about a book they just read, but it doesnt roll anything up or record the information anywhere, so they have to write the results down on a piece of paper. Basically its an electronic test form. I guess maybe at some point it might send the information to a database, but someone still has to check to make sure they DO the quiz, finish the work, and arent fooling around. There really wasnt a lot of wiggle room in a piece of paper with questions on it and a pencil.
Do note that the day before these magically appeared in the classroom (with all the other teachers saying 'here...YOU take these...) we got a letter from the superintendent saying that the school bus program was being cut due to a budget shortfall, so we're encouraged to get more parents to ride the bus to ramp up bus revenues, and we're going to have all students start and end the day at the same time (instead of our current staggered program) so the parking lot will be so jammed with cars that parents will have no choice but to put their kids on the bus and pay the fees so we can pay for the bus program because we bought ipads for all the classrooms and dont really need them.
Yes, I was warned about the black-hole like intelligence sinks found in the public school system in advance. I prepared for the worst. My preparations were inadequate. And I work at one of the very best schools in the state that is pretty well managed and funded. I cant imagine how this is flying in areas where the teachers are being laid off.
Yes, I completely understand the mechanics. But right now we're in the process of canceling school bus funding and changing school hours to try and force parents to put their kids on the bus (and pay the fee, more profitable when the bus is full), we're cutting the PE classes and the library headcount.
But for the kids who do make it to school, are fat and illiterate...5 of the 25 get to play with an ipad to no positive result.
It should be up to the senior educators and politicians to make sure that basic educational needs are fully funded before we throw expensive technology at it without support. They arent doing those jobs properly. Even if they did, the schools couldnt implement a full technical solution. Even if they could, its unclear what if any benefits there might be.
And jeez, if we're getting technology funding from the feds and donors wanting to outfit the classroom with tech, why didnt we buy 25 $100-150 tablets per classroom instead of the current shenanigans, which is leasing them for 3 years with a buy-out option at the end. I have a funny feeling that I know who will be getting the super cheap buyouts in three years...
"I live in a remote alpine setting and would like to remotely monitor my pot plants to make sure nobody steals them, and I'd like to see how many there are and how they're armed before we hop in the truck and go ask them to leave the property."
As I've pointed out in other threads, I work in a school where we're slashing budgets but somehow can afford to buy ipads for all the classrooms. Sadly, the ipad isnt well integrated into the curriculum, there isnt an IT strategy or plan nor people to do something if there were one. Waste of money.
Creativity? Sure. We had etch-a-sketches for that sort of thing, and play doh and finger paints. Seems they're just electronic versions of the same.
I agree. But the hardware has to work, it has to be reliable and have reasonable performance, and the implementation has to be able to take a room full of kids beating on it. I learned all the major languages back in the 70's and 80's pretty much on my own, and it was nice that the school offered some computing resources I could use to that end. But we turned out a lot of students that spent all year learning to do something that had no use or applicability.
Things dont have to be cutting edge, but the thing is that except for bluebird idiots who want 5 school children in each classroom to explore the bliss that is owning an ipad just like they do. Sadly the infrastructure and people to do something useful with them simply dont exist in our public school system.
I spent less than the cost of an ipad to buy a box of really good computer parts, and my son and I spent the weekend putting it together with a million questions. I did make him leave the room for 5 minutes while I made win7 activate on it using an old upgrade disk, because I knew there would be some foul language involved. Then we put a bunch of stuff on it like Scratch and I showed him the basics. Good launching point. I just wouldnt expect that to happen in a public or most private schools.
As a very general rule of thumb, yes a heavy PS matters. However I can find plenty of very crappy, very heavy power supplies.
The real point was that guy had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, and couldnt have described why being heavier could be better. He was trying and I was standing behind him making faces at my girlfriend, who was desperately trying not to laugh.
That would be swell if I remembered to check it when I open the computer so as to avoid the volume being turned up to 11 by my seven year old the night before. But at 6am, pre-coffee...
Plus when I pause something because I dont want it, and you start it back up again because you think I do, or dont care if I do or not, then you'll no longer be of interest to me.
If nothing else, its streaming video that counts towards my cap, which I'm not watching and dont want to watch.
...teaching technology in k-12 is pretty much a complete waste of time, and it always has been.
The reason is that to teach kids this young, you're going to need good current equipment (which is expensive and schools have no budget, so they buy crap), and exceptionally talented teachers with both the technical chops and the ability to manage a classroom full of kids and explain their knowledge to them. Those guys can make six figures with their feet up on a desk and would therefore have very little interest in this kind of job.
Then you have a bunch of old crappy cheap hardware and software, and maybe a couple of guys to do the "IT" stuff that would be challenged to get a job at Bestbuy.
When I was in high school and took computer classes, we were being taught to punch cobol programs onto card decks and feed them into an old minicomputer with the results dumped to a line printer. It was ten year old tech then and useless once you graduated. Except for 2-3 colleges, most of the computer science programs were also teaching largely old useless stuff.
But my kids California school has a cool new approach. They bought millions of dollars worth of ipads for the students. The ipad has a questionnaire on it they answer when done reading a book. Except you cant get the kids to read the book because they want to play with the ipad. Then they get out of the questionnaire and into a game and it takes me 2 minutes to get it back to where its supposed to be, by which time the kids have derailed the rest of the ipads. At the end, we have to copy their answers off the ipad onto a piece of paper, because there is no IT infrastructure at the school to develop a cohesive way to integrate the ipad into the school work. So its a little fun for the kids, a pain in the ass for the teachers, and there is absolutely zero technology learning except for how to poke a capacitive screen.
The really fun part? We only get 5 ipads per classroom and all the reading groups in the area that I've worked with were groups of six. So one kid has to sit on their hands while the other 5 finish, then they get to do the test. This is usually the time I'm cleaning up and getting ready for my next group, but now I have to entertain a bored kid thats being kept from the toy, then go through the whole thing with them individually.
The good news is we got rid of the PE teacher and cut the library hours in half to meet budget constraints.
Yeah, talk about "who cares". They actually deleted my email account and its heavy load of two text emails. I thought most businesses were smart enough to hold onto 'dead subscribers'. But after they've basically spent 5 years moving stuff around on their pages without really changing the content, I became increasingly annoyed at having to get used to a new format without any new content or content improvement. Change without actual change is a waste of my time.
More recently I've found that clicking on yahoo news stories brings up a video of the story along with the text, and it cheerfully starts the video for me. I've gotten used to this particular lack of manners, since I asked to read a story not watch a video. But now if you pause the video, it waits about 4 seconds (long enough to scroll down off the video) and then it starts it right back up for you.
Thing is, I usually have three people sleeping about 8' from me when I'm READING frickin stuff on the internet, so I dont want video and sound. And if I've said I dont want to watch it by pressing pause, dont go ahead and shove it up my nose anyhow.
So yahoo's last tab on my browser went away and was replaced by its googe equivalent. I suspect Yahoo will find a way to delete their own tabs internally and just wither away and die quite soon./Should have taken that money from Microsoft. I think that would have finished both of them off.
Slashdot Mirror
You've foolishly fallen for the idea that this has anything to do at all with security. It got votes when it went in, and it costs a gazillion dollars of our money that the government gets to pay its friends who do the security work. Same with prisons. Same with just about everything. We're being fleeced by parasites who don't care if they kill the host.
Eh, she married him so she doesn't know everything. Or maybe she knew she'd make him miserable and divorce him and she liked that idea.
I dont think it was even that good. He opened an attachment or a piece of malware and he was already logged into hotmail, it read his contact list, created a piece of spam and sent it. Hotmail was just the carrier. It didnt need the password. This happens routinely with several of my friends and relatives who click on every email from russian porn sites and anything that claims to be 'free'. They're always idiots with no idea of how a computer works, and apparently powerless to stop clicking on things that break their computer because no matter how many times they get infected, they still keep doing stupid things.
As fabulous as hotmail is (cough), it wont fix stupid. Neither will gmail. Facebook seems to amplify it.
Not to mention most businesses dont update to every single windows release. Most skip one. The bad one. Based on prior history windows 8 will not only be a horrible operating system like ME or slow and awful like Vista, it'll also look like a bunch of clowns built a compromise elephant by shoving 2,000,000 pounds of crap into a 5 pound operating system bag. Like I need or want windows on a tablet or phone...
You forgot to mention the part where it was probably a piece of malware that sent the emails using his contact list from hotmail and pretty much had nothing to do with hotmail. I've seen malware that does hotmail AND gmail or outlook or thunderbird or whatever have you.
It sounds like they made a large mistake. They asked a high touch user to evaluate something and when he had problems he blamed hotmail. I dont think anything that happened to him had much of anything to do with hotmail or windows 8.
But its kinda fun to figure out what really happened. /would get rid of his hotmail account if he didnt have 9000 places I use it for a login // was really surprised that yahoo inactive-deleted my account. I'd think they need all the dead subscribers they can handle.
How big is the distribution compared to ios or android? I'm betting its a LOT bigger and a lot slower. And still a solution looking for a problem.
Really? I know some analysts that eat their own poo. Pick anything rocketing to the top and you'll find plenty of people standing around to tell you its going to continue.
Thing is...probably not.
I know the tech folks get warm and wet over arm although they have a hard time articulating why anyone else would want it. If I wanted it, I sure as shoot wouldnt want big fat honking windows on it. Its a lightweight processor. Put a lightweight operating system on it like one of the 5000 we already have.
Windows is dead anyhow. Just hasn't quit moving yet.
I'm sure there will be plenty of hair splitting by the apple afficionado's but just about every app I load, whether ios or android, all wants access to data they dont need and many transfer stuff like my name, phone number and who knows what else. I've had quite a few that broke my device or gave it some real problems, again on both platforms. I call that malware. It steals my stuff (although I agree to the theft because if I didnt, I'd have no apps) and often eats my battery life or gives me operational problems requiring an uninstall and reboot.
Sure seems like badware to me!
...have a billion dollar fortune 50 company be in existence for 30+ years.
Step 2: Dig up any one of the hundreds of thousands of people who worked there who had an idea once that someone in the company shot down, bonus points if its a CxO level character and full bonus if its someone that lots of people have heard of.
Step 3: Profit? Does anyone think that a smartphone like product in the days before cell networks were fleshed out, could carry data at more than an actual snails pace and a nascent internet would be of interest to anyone at all for any reason? Yeah, me neither. People dont buy smartphones because they spontaneously polish your knob at random intervals, they buy them to access apps, data and content. And none of that existed in 1991 and probably wouldnt havent flown in 2001 either.
So microsoft was smart to tell Nathan 'no' when they did and they'd have been smart to do it ten years later. The infrastructure simply wasnt there. The iphone succeeded because they offered a full content solution bundled with it (itunes, app store) and we had a well developed internet infrastructure for it to fit into.
Cart, horse.
Microsoft would have been even smarter to not try and foist a windows based offering when they did do a phone. I dont really want windows on my PC, and I sure as hell dont need it on a phone. We already have two working phone operating systems. Lets put our time and money behind those instead of creating more 3rd and 4th options that'll never succeed. Ask RIMM, Nokia and HP about it, they've experienced the joys. Oh wait, dont ask Nokia, they were stupid once in this regard and chose to fix their stupidity by choosing the #3 option. Sell any of their stock that you're holding while its still worth something.
As a retired fortune 50 marketing exec who is just volunteering, I'm sure as heck not going to do all that stuff. I just want to whine about the stupid expenditures that one hand makes while the other allows important things to lie fallow as you described.
I havent really looked into it in detail, but as I understand it the funding for this came from some individuals who just wanted to get ipads into the classrooms. That was the thrust. Now the way I've usually done things is identify all the problems, prioritize them in order of importance and cost and start paying for those from the top down. Not just throw product at something because I think its wonderful and I want to inflict it on a small subset of our public school children and see what happens.
I'm sure someone gave someone a great deal. What should have happened is the governor calling the ceo of HP when they were getting out of the tablet business and saying "We'll take them all, and you can take a charitable deduction for the slabs and all the work you do to integrate them".
I too enjoy the random use of immediately made up statistics laid out in terms like 'miniscule' and 'orders of magnitude'. Most of the apps I've downloaded from the app store and from play/market reported all sorts of things they didnt need to know about or report back to some mothership who-knows-where. I've never loaded a malicious app that caused me harm or did something that required repair...from either.
Yet there are plenty of stories about malware and the ability to enact it on both platforms, in all kinds. To say otherwise is simply laying on the blinders because otherwise you'll wonder why you paid so much.
Yep, that was the funny part of the article. "Whatever critics may say about Apple's App Store, which is significantly more selective about the titles it hosts, complaints about malware aren't one of them.'"
But one of them would be that the assertion is ridiculously incorrect.
Even weak google-fu turns up this, among many...
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/11/08/apple%E2%80%99s-app-store-security-compromised/
Why do apple people think their products and services are malware proof, even though anyone with a self respecting brain capacity would know its not true in theory or in practice? Is that why they pay twice as much for stuff?
But now I have one!
I'm not good with anyone scanning my drivers license for a purchase. Target started doing that with liquor and I'm simply not going to dig my license out every time I shop. So I dont shop there at all.
Is it abuse? Its up to the store to manage the policy. When you have a customer with excessive returns, then ban THAT customer. But this is what happened with Costco. People started using their return policy for a free upgrade path, returning 2 year old computers and tv's. So now they only offer 90 days, and they WILL take your card and swoosh you out the door if you return too many things for no reason.
But BB sucks. Except for rare sales their prices are too high and their 'service' isnt anything I can use. Last time I went in I had a hard time getting one of the dozens of employees walking around doing nothing to help me, and when I did I was sorry.
Get ready for the double face-palm.
This is a statewide program. They're buying 5 per classroom for ALL of the schools. And they did write an app to quiz students about a book they just read, but it doesnt roll anything up or record the information anywhere, so they have to write the results down on a piece of paper. Basically its an electronic test form. I guess maybe at some point it might send the information to a database, but someone still has to check to make sure they DO the quiz, finish the work, and arent fooling around. There really wasnt a lot of wiggle room in a piece of paper with questions on it and a pencil.
Do note that the day before these magically appeared in the classroom (with all the other teachers saying 'here...YOU take these...) we got a letter from the superintendent saying that the school bus program was being cut due to a budget shortfall, so we're encouraged to get more parents to ride the bus to ramp up bus revenues, and we're going to have all students start and end the day at the same time (instead of our current staggered program) so the parking lot will be so jammed with cars that parents will have no choice but to put their kids on the bus and pay the fees so we can pay for the bus program because we bought ipads for all the classrooms and dont really need them.
Yes, I was warned about the black-hole like intelligence sinks found in the public school system in advance. I prepared for the worst. My preparations were inadequate. And I work at one of the very best schools in the state that is pretty well managed and funded. I cant imagine how this is flying in areas where the teachers are being laid off.
My wife leaves the peeps out overnight so they harden. No flaccid marshmallows at our household.
Yes, I completely understand the mechanics. But right now we're in the process of canceling school bus funding and changing school hours to try and force parents to put their kids on the bus (and pay the fee, more profitable when the bus is full), we're cutting the PE classes and the library headcount.
But for the kids who do make it to school, are fat and illiterate...5 of the 25 get to play with an ipad to no positive result.
It should be up to the senior educators and politicians to make sure that basic educational needs are fully funded before we throw expensive technology at it without support. They arent doing those jobs properly. Even if they did, the schools couldnt implement a full technical solution. Even if they could, its unclear what if any benefits there might be.
And jeez, if we're getting technology funding from the feds and donors wanting to outfit the classroom with tech, why didnt we buy 25 $100-150 tablets per classroom instead of the current shenanigans, which is leasing them for 3 years with a buy-out option at the end. I have a funny feeling that I know who will be getting the super cheap buyouts in three years...
"I live in a remote alpine setting and would like to remotely monitor my pot plants to make sure nobody steals them, and I'd like to see how many there are and how they're armed before we hop in the truck and go ask them to leave the property."
As I've pointed out in other threads, I work in a school where we're slashing budgets but somehow can afford to buy ipads for all the classrooms. Sadly, the ipad isnt well integrated into the curriculum, there isnt an IT strategy or plan nor people to do something if there were one. Waste of money.
Creativity? Sure. We had etch-a-sketches for that sort of thing, and play doh and finger paints. Seems they're just electronic versions of the same.
I wish I had mod points.
I agree. But the hardware has to work, it has to be reliable and have reasonable performance, and the implementation has to be able to take a room full of kids beating on it. I learned all the major languages back in the 70's and 80's pretty much on my own, and it was nice that the school offered some computing resources I could use to that end. But we turned out a lot of students that spent all year learning to do something that had no use or applicability.
Things dont have to be cutting edge, but the thing is that except for bluebird idiots who want 5 school children in each classroom to explore the bliss that is owning an ipad just like they do. Sadly the infrastructure and people to do something useful with them simply dont exist in our public school system.
I spent less than the cost of an ipad to buy a box of really good computer parts, and my son and I spent the weekend putting it together with a million questions. I did make him leave the room for 5 minutes while I made win7 activate on it using an old upgrade disk, because I knew there would be some foul language involved. Then we put a bunch of stuff on it like Scratch and I showed him the basics. Good launching point. I just wouldnt expect that to happen in a public or most private schools.
As a very general rule of thumb, yes a heavy PS matters. However I can find plenty of very crappy, very heavy power supplies.
The real point was that guy had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, and couldnt have described why being heavier could be better. He was trying and I was standing behind him making faces at my girlfriend, who was desperately trying not to laugh.
All it was is that the heavier one cost more.
That would be swell if I remembered to check it when I open the computer so as to avoid the volume being turned up to 11 by my seven year old the night before. But at 6am, pre-coffee...
Plus when I pause something because I dont want it, and you start it back up again because you think I do, or dont care if I do or not, then you'll no longer be of interest to me.
If nothing else, its streaming video that counts towards my cap, which I'm not watching and dont want to watch.
...teaching technology in k-12 is pretty much a complete waste of time, and it always has been.
The reason is that to teach kids this young, you're going to need good current equipment (which is expensive and schools have no budget, so they buy crap), and exceptionally talented teachers with both the technical chops and the ability to manage a classroom full of kids and explain their knowledge to them. Those guys can make six figures with their feet up on a desk and would therefore have very little interest in this kind of job.
Then you have a bunch of old crappy cheap hardware and software, and maybe a couple of guys to do the "IT" stuff that would be challenged to get a job at Bestbuy.
When I was in high school and took computer classes, we were being taught to punch cobol programs onto card decks and feed them into an old minicomputer with the results dumped to a line printer. It was ten year old tech then and useless once you graduated. Except for 2-3 colleges, most of the computer science programs were also teaching largely old useless stuff.
But my kids California school has a cool new approach. They bought millions of dollars worth of ipads for the students. The ipad has a questionnaire on it they answer when done reading a book. Except you cant get the kids to read the book because they want to play with the ipad. Then they get out of the questionnaire and into a game and it takes me 2 minutes to get it back to where its supposed to be, by which time the kids have derailed the rest of the ipads. At the end, we have to copy their answers off the ipad onto a piece of paper, because there is no IT infrastructure at the school to develop a cohesive way to integrate the ipad into the school work. So its a little fun for the kids, a pain in the ass for the teachers, and there is absolutely zero technology learning except for how to poke a capacitive screen.
The really fun part? We only get 5 ipads per classroom and all the reading groups in the area that I've worked with were groups of six. So one kid has to sit on their hands while the other 5 finish, then they get to do the test. This is usually the time I'm cleaning up and getting ready for my next group, but now I have to entertain a bored kid thats being kept from the toy, then go through the whole thing with them individually.
The good news is we got rid of the PE teacher and cut the library hours in half to meet budget constraints.
Yeah, talk about "who cares". They actually deleted my email account and its heavy load of two text emails. I thought most businesses were smart enough to hold onto 'dead subscribers'. But after they've basically spent 5 years moving stuff around on their pages without really changing the content, I became increasingly annoyed at having to get used to a new format without any new content or content improvement. Change without actual change is a waste of my time.
More recently I've found that clicking on yahoo news stories brings up a video of the story along with the text, and it cheerfully starts the video for me. I've gotten used to this particular lack of manners, since I asked to read a story not watch a video. But now if you pause the video, it waits about 4 seconds (long enough to scroll down off the video) and then it starts it right back up for you.
Thing is, I usually have three people sleeping about 8' from me when I'm READING frickin stuff on the internet, so I dont want video and sound. And if I've said I dont want to watch it by pressing pause, dont go ahead and shove it up my nose anyhow.
So yahoo's last tab on my browser went away and was replaced by its googe equivalent. I suspect Yahoo will find a way to delete their own tabs internally and just wither away and die quite soon. /Should have taken that money from Microsoft. I think that would have finished both of them off.