I just saw a report on this on CNN, and the cameras are set up so that they're rather hard to break: they're encased into the ceiling and completely covered by a black hemisphere of glass (or maybe plastic or something).
Unless you somehow found out where the cameras pointed (which, in theory only the principal and security people know), it would be incredibly difficult to disable a camera without being caught.
I get the feeling that everyone's standard for deciding when a particular piece of hardware contains too high a proportion of defects is whether it happened to him or her.
Considering the wide readership of slashdot and its way-above-average spending on technological goodies, someone will have had a defective unit and write about it, and these individuals will be much more vocal than those who had no problems. Just because we hear several horror stories it doesn't mean that the production standards are low, although I'm not precluding that possibility. And does one person's story about one broken PDA really merit a story here?
Of course, there might really be a problem with certian models. I guess what we really need is some kind of site where you could register before (since otherwise only the angry buyers of defective units would report) you bought some gadget, and periodically report on how it was doing. Only then could one get a good idea of the percentage of defects in a particular model.
Here in Japan we have cell phone services that are light years ahead of what's offered in other countries: almost-passable web browsing, Java applets, and e-mail.
There's a problem, though: spam. It's bad enough to get a dozen messages that take forever to delete with the bad UI, but the last straw is having to pay to recieve them - around 2 cents for a 500-byte message. Luckily, I can set my phone to recieve from only certain people, but that can be inconvenient. I guess what we really need is good spam-filtering.
Back to regular telephones: again, here in Japan some phones are equipped to display the phone numbers of callers, and you can even set up filters: does this kind of thing exist elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
I just saw a report on this on CNN, and the cameras are set up so that they're rather hard to break: they're encased into the ceiling and completely covered by a black hemisphere of glass (or maybe plastic or something).
Unless you somehow found out where the cameras pointed (which, in theory only the principal and security people know), it would be incredibly difficult to disable a camera without being caught.
Nethack.
Here in Japan we've had a bunch of cell-phone games, though most of them single-player, for years.
Of course, there might really be a problem with certian models. I guess what we really need is some kind of site where you could register before (since otherwise only the angry buyers of defective units would report) you bought some gadget, and periodically report on how it was doing. Only then could one get a good idea of the percentage of defects in a particular model.
Here in Japan we have cell phone services that are light years ahead of what's offered in other countries: almost-passable web browsing, Java applets, and e-mail.
There's a problem, though: spam. It's bad enough to get a dozen messages that take forever to delete with the bad UI, but the last straw is having to pay to recieve them - around 2 cents for a 500-byte message. Luckily, I can set my phone to recieve from only certain people, but that can be inconvenient. I guess what we really need is good spam-filtering.
Back to regular telephones: again, here in Japan some phones are equipped to display the phone numbers of callers, and you can even set up filters: does this kind of thing exist elsewhere?