I've seen vendor-provided "training". It's rubbish, and the support isn't much better. Certainly not worth paying double the price of the hardware. And the cost of a few server machines and wireless nodes should be in the noise compared to the cost of the laptops themselves. We're not talking enterprise class on-line transaction processing systems with SANs here. Just a few file servers.
If they had requested separate bids for computers and for support, I think they could have gotten a MUCH better deal on both.
While the contract includes "support", I very much doubt that it includes teacher training, software (other than the operating system and the software normally distributed with the operating system), or replacement of stolen machines.
To the extent that it does include any software beyond the OS, I can't imagine that it's particularly expensive software that can justify any significant portion of the total cost of the laptop.
That's over $1138 per laptop. Doesn't sound like a very good deal to me, especially for that large a quantity. I just bought an HP Pavilion dv5210us at Fry's for $649, and there's a $50 mail-in rebate. I'm fairly sure that if I called HP to try to place an order for 36,000 of them, the price would be even better. It has a 15 inch LCD with 1280x800 resolution, an AMD Turion ML-34 processor (64 bit, 1.8 GHz), 512MB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive. It came with Windows XP Home, though the first thing I did was to replace that with Fedora Core 5. Anyhow, what's so wonderful about the laptops Apple is supplying for this contract that makes them worth almost twice the price?
I'm sure some of you are going to say "Mac OS", but I'm not at all convinced that Mac OS is a win for educational users, as there appears to be a far better selection of educational software for Windows.
If I was a Maine taxpayer, I think I'd be calling and writing my state legislators demanding an investigation.
Amusing but false. Both the US and Soviet manned space flights used pencils until 1968, after which they both used the pressurized Fisher pen, which was privately developed by Fisher without any government funds.
If it was really a "from the ground up" factory, sand, crude petroleum, metal ores, and trees would go in one end, and finished motherboards in cardboard boxes would come out the other.
Having a factory that takes in copper-clad FR4 boards, electronic components, solder, and printed boxes and turns out assembled PCBs is not particularly unusual. Most electronics manufacturing of cost-sensitive consumer products is done in exactly that way. I suppose if they made the chips too I'd be a little more impressed.
It does look like their cafeteria serves healthier food than I usually get for lunch, but that's not really my employer's fault.
I stand by my original statement, that it is a "crude approximation". A theory that is just plain wrong about a fair amount of what goes on in the universe, and inexact about the rest, is by any reasonable definition a "crude approximation", no matter how elegant and powerful it is.
There are plenty of theories that are elegant, powerful, and wrong.
Certainly it is. It's just plain wrong for a non-trivial amount of what goes on in our universe. It's a very good approximation for much of the universe, though, which is why it is still commonly used.
Perhaps you were trying to ascribe some kind of moral judgement to my use of the word "crude"; I was not using the word in that sense. I merely meant that it is inexact. In many (but not all) cases the error is small enough to be disregarded.
That tends to make me think that we do in fact, have a pretty good grasp of the laws of physics. IMO, the only thing we're missing is the "gravity to the rest of it" connection
It's entirely possible that our current "pretty good grasp of the laws of physics" is only a crude approximation of how things really work, in the same way that Newtonian physics was found to be. Which is to say that it's obviously useful even though it it's only accurate within limited circumstances. Unifying gravity with the nuclear forces may invalidate our current gravitational and quantum theories.
Not an excuse to take private customer info home
on
Telecommuting Backlash
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There's no good reason why a laptop taken home needs to have private information about customers/patients/clients/etc. on it. The customer data can be kept on an enterprise database server that is less susceptible to theft or to being accessed from insecure networks. The telecommuting employees can access the data remotely via an encrypted VPN, or use Windows Terminal Services, VNC, SSH, or the like over the VPN.
Sure, but AFAIK that doesn't help me when I want user Joe to be able to access network drive \\foo\bar from Word but the same user Joe to NOT be able to access \\foo\bar from Firefox.
Windows groups are somewhat more flexible than Unix (Linux) groups, but they're certainly not a panacea, and they don't solve the OP's problem.
I didn't find anything in the referenced pages that suggests that Windows has any inherent capability to restrict access to resources by application. This is different than restricting access by user, which has been supported since NT 3.1.
As far as I'm aware, Windows doesn't have any standard API for that. Products like ZoneAlarm restrict access to resources by inserting hooks into the system in a relatively ad-hoc manner. (This is not a criticism of ZoneAlarm.)
Given Microsoft's claims about a strong focus on security in the forthcoming Windows Vista, perhaps it has an interface for security modules of the type you're suggesting.
Sure. That affects one exchange. It doesn't bring down the whole phone system, or any significant fraction of it. The only thing that took down a large part of the phone system was a bug in the 5ESS software.
The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.
The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.
The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.
Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
I'll bet $20 that I (thanks to an old support job) or a few of my friends who are
accountants can 10-key numbers on that little keypad far, far faster than you can reaching two rows up from the home row.
I'm sure they can. That's not the point. Not everyone is an accountant.
You'll spend $260 on a keyboard, and you won't splurge for a desk with a wider keyboard drawer?
That's messed up; I'm just saying.
I spent far more than that on my desk, and I like it fine. Having the non-keyboard drawers closer at hand is more valuable to me than having a wider keyboard drawer. Aside from which, a wider keyboard drawer and a keyboard with a numeric keypad would still require me to move my right hand further from the keyboard to use the mouse.
No one is trying to force a keyboard without a numeric keypad on you; I only dispute the claim that they aren't useful.
Plus, it's uses "electric capacitance" keys, which are simply inferior to mechanical swtich keys in my opinion.
Depending on your criteria, capacitive switches are either slightly worse than or slightly better than mechanical tactile switches (such as the Cherry brand keyswitches used in Das Keyboard), but they are FAR better than the rubber membranes used in almost all modern PC keyboards.
In the 1970s, capacitive keyswitches were generally considered better than most mechanical keyswitches. Keytronics built their reputation on capacitive keyboards, but more recently abandoned them in favor of the cheap rubber membranes.
For capacitive keyswitches:
No electrical contact to wear out.
Foam pad will eventually degrade (after more than ten years), but is easily replaced.
Tactile feedback is not guaranteed to occur 100% correlated with electrical recognition, but is generally fairly close.
Moderately expensive.
For mechanical keyswitches:
Metal buckling dome or strip has hysteresis guaranteeing that tactile feedback and electric contact always occur together
Buckling dome or strip will eventually fail. Entire keyswitch must be replaced.
Usually louder click than other keyboard types
Very expensive.
For rubber membrane keyboards:
Mushy feel compared to individual keyswitches
Tactile feedback, if present at all, is arbitrary; may occur without electrical connection,
or electrical connection may occur without tactile feedback
More contact bounce than keyswitches. Keyboard firmware has longer debounce interval to compensate, but this can miss real double keypresses by fast typists.
Membrane wears out, necessitating replacement of entire keyboard
what use is a keyboard that doesn't have a numeric keypad beside it?
It's quite useful to those of us who have learned to type numbers well enough on the main keyboard that we don't need the separate numeric keypad. And it makes room on my keyboard drawer for the mouse; I can't stand having to move my right hand from the keyboard drawer to the desk surface to use the mouse, and keeping my hand that high using the mouse for an extended time causes me pain.
I buy the cheapest keyboard the local PC store sells every time the old one dies
I don't want to have to get used to the layout and quirks of a new keyboard every few years. I want a keyboard with a layout I like, good feel, and that will last a long time. If I have to pay $300, that's fine with me, as long as I'm actually getting better construction. Certainly I wouldn't pay $300 for a keyboard built the same way as the $20 model.
The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are the most important parts of my computer., since those are the parts that I directly interact with many hours a day. If I need to save money on the computer, I'll save it elsewhere.
AMD won't happen to produce any of these "3rd party co-processors" will they?
No, by definition. If AMD produced them, they wouldn't be "3rd party".
It seems unlikely that AMD would try to get into the coprocessor market. Unless they find an extremely compelling coprocessor idea, they'll make more money using their wafer starts for more Athlon, Opteron, Sempron, and Turion processors than they would by devoting some of those wafer starts to coprocessors.
The example of a security coprocessor is questionable at best. The only advantage to plugging a coprocessor into a processor socket rather than a bus slot (e.g., PCI Express) is when that coprocessor can take useful advantage of much higher bus bandwidth than is available from the slot. Except in the largest servers, a security coprocessor does not need that much bandwidth.
A physics coprocessor might be able to put that much bandwidth to use; I'm not sure. I think it's more likely that physics coprocessing will be added into the next generation of video cards.
No, AMD almost always reduces their prices, just as Intel does. Isn't competition great?
Perhaps what you meant was that the stock market has been raising AMD's share price. That's a different thing entirely. AMD doesn't directly control its share price; that is affected by the market's perception on how well AMD is performing financially, whether they meet their projections and the analysts' forecasts, how their business is perceived to compare with Intel's, and factors like that. In fact, it is unlawful for a company to attempt to directly manipulate their share price, and I've seen no indication that AMD has engaged in such tactics.
Laying out and kerning bidirectional text is not some high-level functionality that should be relegated to a high-level library.
Why not? Why should X be some giant monolithic piece that tries to be all things to all people? It seems to me that a layered approach is better. I'd rather NOT try to cram everything down into Xlib.
Laying out and kerning bidirectional text is not some high-level functionality that should be relegated to a high-level library. It's a quite fundamental and basic thing that all apps need to do.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with which library it is implemented in. The fact is that the functionality is available in a widely available library commonly used with X. So what if it's not in Xlib? The end user doesn't care which library it's implemented in, and there's little reason for a developer to care much either.
Cairo is still relatively slow and immature software.
I haven't noticed it being exceptionally slow compared to the latest MacOS X or Windows betas. Maybe it is, but presumably it will improve.
And naturally it is immature given how new it is.
But neither is an argument for throwing it out and developing something new instead, which would then surely be even more immature.
The fact that it took 18 years for X to catch up to that is not a strawman,
Took 18 years to catch up to what??? X has NEVER been 18 years behind any widely deployed graphics system. That's even MORE of a strawman than the earlier arguments. If you want to argue that X doesn't have a comprehensive superset of the features of all other graphics systems, and doesn't outperform all of them, fine. I won't dispute that. I also don't think it's a very useful or interesting criticism.
In other words, if you want to be constructive, propose specific features or areas of improvement that are not addressed by X together with commonly available libraries. Don't just rant about things missing from the core of X. That's the point of it being the "core"; other things build up around it to add additional features.
I realize that redesigning the rendering system will be arduous and time consuming. But I think it wold be nice if the *nix rendering system would advance past the 70's.
How about explaining exactly what is wrong with the X rendering system, rather than just complaining about it? Are you talking about Xlib? There are certainly better APIs already available, such as Cairo.
X seems to work OK for me, and doesn't seem substantially less functional than the Windows or Mac OS models.
And if it Java was available under the GPL, do you think that Microsoft would have been willing to use it under the GPL terms? It seems much more likely that Microsoft would have purchased a non-GPL license from Sun, given how much vitriol against the GPL they have vented in public.
If GPL'd Java had been available, and Microsoft had used it, Sun would have had grounds to sue if Microsoft did not comply with the GPL.
If GPL'd Java had been available, but Microsoft decided to purchase a non-GPL license from Sun, there is no reason to believe the outcome would have been any different than the actual case in which Java was not available under the GPL.
The same argument applies to almost any open source license, although the GPL would actually protect Sun's rights better than most open source licenses.
the only thing they needed was redistribution on the zealots' OSes, and this license gets them that.
Actually it doesn't. It was put into Debian non-free without proper vetting of the license, and will likely be pulled out again. It's not going into Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora.
i don't want j. random opensource hacker submitting patches to sun.
That's another red herring. Making Java truly open source doesn't make it any more or less difficult for people to submit bogus patches to Sun. As you point out, it already happens. If some of these have already made it into Java, that's Sun's fault for accepting them.
On the other hand, making it open source will increase the pool of programmers who are willing to contribute to it, so the probability of there being some good contributions goes up.
Slashdot Mirror
If they had requested separate bids for computers and for support, I think they could have gotten a MUCH better deal on both.
To the extent that it does include any software beyond the OS, I can't imagine that it's particularly expensive software that can justify any significant portion of the total cost of the laptop.
I'm sure some of you are going to say "Mac OS", but I'm not at all convinced that Mac OS is a win for educational users, as there appears to be a far better selection of educational software for Windows.
If I was a Maine taxpayer, I think I'd be calling and writing my state legislators demanding an investigation.
Amusing but false. Both the US and Soviet manned space flights used pencils until 1968, after which they both used the pressurized Fisher pen, which was privately developed by Fisher without any government funds.
If private industry can come up with a spacecraft that can meet the needs from 2010 to 2014, why shouldn't it meet the needs from 2014 forward?
Having a factory that takes in copper-clad FR4 boards, electronic components, solder, and printed boxes and turns out assembled PCBs is not particularly unusual. Most electronics manufacturing of cost-sensitive consumer products is done in exactly that way. I suppose if they made the chips too I'd be a little more impressed.
It does look like their cafeteria serves healthier food than I usually get for lunch, but that's not really my employer's fault.
There are plenty of theories that are elegant, powerful, and wrong.
Perhaps you were trying to ascribe some kind of moral judgement to my use of the word "crude"; I was not using the word in that sense. I merely meant that it is inexact. In many (but not all) cases the error is small enough to be disregarded.
There's no good reason why a laptop taken home needs to have private information about customers/patients/clients/etc. on it. The customer data can be kept on an enterprise database server that is less susceptible to theft or to being accessed from insecure networks. The telecommuting employees can access the data remotely via an encrypted VPN, or use Windows Terminal Services, VNC, SSH, or the like over the VPN.
Windows groups are somewhat more flexible than Unix (Linux) groups, but they're certainly not a panacea, and they don't solve the OP's problem.
I didn't find anything in the referenced pages that suggests that Windows has any inherent capability to restrict access to resources by application. This is different than restricting access by user, which has been supported since NT 3.1.
Given Microsoft's claims about a strong focus on security in the forthcoming Windows Vista, perhaps it has an interface for security modules of the type you're suggesting.
Sure. That affects one exchange. It doesn't bring down the whole phone system, or any significant fraction of it. The only thing that took down a large part of the phone system was a bug in the 5ESS software.
The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.
The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.
The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.
Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
The updates are now WAY over 50-100MB. I haven't checked lately, but I think there's more than a full CD's worth.
No one is trying to force a keyboard without a numeric keypad on you; I only dispute the claim that they aren't useful.
Depending on your criteria, capacitive switches are either slightly worse than or slightly better than mechanical tactile switches (such as the Cherry brand keyswitches used in Das Keyboard), but they are FAR better than the rubber membranes used in almost all modern PC keyboards.In the 1970s, capacitive keyswitches were generally considered better than most mechanical keyswitches. Keytronics built their reputation on capacitive keyboards, but more recently abandoned them in favor of the cheap rubber membranes.
For capacitive keyswitches:
- No electrical contact to wear out.
- Foam pad will eventually degrade (after more than ten years), but is easily replaced.
- Tactile feedback is not guaranteed to occur 100% correlated with electrical recognition, but is generally fairly close.
- Moderately expensive.
For mechanical keyswitches:- Metal buckling dome or strip has hysteresis guaranteeing that tactile feedback and electric contact always occur together
- Buckling dome or strip will eventually fail. Entire keyswitch must be replaced.
- Usually louder click than other keyboard types
- Very expensive.
For rubber membrane keyboards:The keyboard, mouse, and monitor are the most important parts of my computer., since those are the parts that I directly interact with many hours a day. If I need to save money on the computer, I'll save it elsewhere.
It seems unlikely that AMD would try to get into the coprocessor market. Unless they find an extremely compelling coprocessor idea, they'll make more money using their wafer starts for more Athlon, Opteron, Sempron, and Turion processors than they would by devoting some of those wafer starts to coprocessors.
The example of a security coprocessor is questionable at best. The only advantage to plugging a coprocessor into a processor socket rather than a bus slot (e.g., PCI Express) is when that coprocessor can take useful advantage of much higher bus bandwidth than is available from the slot. Except in the largest servers, a security coprocessor does not need that much bandwidth.
A physics coprocessor might be able to put that much bandwidth to use; I'm not sure. I think it's more likely that physics coprocessing will be added into the next generation of video cards.
Perhaps what you meant was that the stock market has been raising AMD's share price. That's a different thing entirely. AMD doesn't directly control its share price; that is affected by the market's perception on how well AMD is performing financially, whether they meet their projections and the analysts' forecasts, how their business is perceived to compare with Intel's, and factors like that. In fact, it is unlawful for a company to attempt to directly manipulate their share price, and I've seen no indication that AMD has engaged in such tactics.
And naturally it is immature given how new it is.
But neither is an argument for throwing it out and developing something new instead, which would then surely be even more immature.
Took 18 years to catch up to what??? X has NEVER been 18 years behind any widely deployed graphics system. That's even MORE of a strawman than the earlier arguments. If you want to argue that X doesn't have a comprehensive superset of the features of all other graphics systems, and doesn't outperform all of them, fine. I won't dispute that. I also don't think it's a very useful or interesting criticism.In other words, if you want to be constructive, propose specific features or areas of improvement that are not addressed by X together with commonly available libraries. Don't just rant about things missing from the core of X. That's the point of it being the "core"; other things build up around it to add additional features.
If you just want a strawman argument that X as it existed in 2000 is not very good today, I don't think you'll get much disagreement.
X seems to work OK for me, and doesn't seem substantially less functional than the Windows or Mac OS models.
If GPL'd Java had been available, and Microsoft had used it, Sun would have had grounds to sue if Microsoft did not comply with the GPL.
If GPL'd Java had been available, but Microsoft decided to purchase a non-GPL license from Sun, there is no reason to believe the outcome would have been any different than the actual case in which Java was not available under the GPL.
The same argument applies to almost any open source license, although the GPL would actually protect Sun's rights better than most open source licenses.
On the other hand, making it open source will increase the pool of programmers who are willing to contribute to it, so the probability of there being some good contributions goes up.