... until the professors know what to do with them.
At MS State, they've been requiring laptops of all students in the engineering department since 1999. I bring my laptop to every class, lab, etc. In the classroom though, its usually not that much help. Occasionally the teacher will say something that I will further investigate online or if I'm lost I can get another perspective of it. Most of the time though its assignments for other classes, email, or slashdot.
Labs are an entirely different story. Most of the labs in the CS and ECE departments require the use of a laptop. Sure, everything *could* be done on a desktop, but you won't be around a TA or other students to learn that the datasheet for the widget has a typo, or, in theory, you can do this, but that usually results in an explosive failure, etc. Also, I can have *my* development environment with me everywhere. I don't have to sit and fight the machines that are locked down, worry about going over my quota, or finding a program that does what I want without admin privileges.
The biggest benefit is for group projects. A group meeting without laptops won't consist of much actual work being done in my experience. A good example is the software engineering lab I'm in right now, when we're figuring out how we want to write our documents, we have to make sure they conform to IEEE standards. I certainly find it wasteful for each of us to print out *ALL* the applicable standards, memos from the client, class assignments, etc to be a meaningful participant in the group discussion. With laptops I can have all those resources available, search the PDFs for exactly where I want to go without flipping and scanning, etc.
All the comments about it being a tool are exactly true. For me the laptop has been a wonderful tool, but I really wonder how much an art major is going to care for this tool. Especially when a laptop probably equals the amount of supplies they have to buy!
They reduced the size of the thing by 75%, which either means they bought much more expensive components and gave some people in PCB layout headaches, or they did a MASSIVE cost reduction of the board. Either way, I haven't bought a PS2 yet and this just means I'll wait untill these are out....
Slashdot Mirror
... until the professors know what to do with them.
At MS State, they've been requiring laptops of all students in the engineering department since 1999. I bring my laptop to every class, lab, etc. In the classroom though, its usually not that much help. Occasionally the teacher will say something that I will further investigate online or if I'm lost I can get another perspective of it. Most of the time though its assignments for other classes, email, or slashdot.
Labs are an entirely different story. Most of the labs in the CS and ECE departments require the use of a laptop. Sure, everything *could* be done on a desktop, but you won't be around a TA or other students to learn that the datasheet for the widget has a typo, or, in theory, you can do this, but that usually results in an explosive failure, etc. Also, I can have *my* development environment with me everywhere. I don't have to sit and fight the machines that are locked down, worry about going over my quota, or finding a program that does what I want without admin privileges.
The biggest benefit is for group projects. A group meeting without laptops won't consist of much actual work being done in my experience. A good example is the software engineering lab I'm in right now, when we're figuring out how we want to write our documents, we have to make sure they conform to IEEE standards. I certainly find it wasteful for each of us to print out *ALL* the applicable standards, memos from the client, class assignments, etc to be a meaningful participant in the group discussion. With laptops I can have all those resources available, search the PDFs for exactly where I want to go without flipping and scanning, etc.
All the comments about it being a tool are exactly true. For me the laptop has been a wonderful tool, but I really wonder how much an art major is going to care for this tool. Especially when a laptop probably equals the amount of supplies they have to buy!
They reduced the size of the thing by 75%, which either means they bought much more expensive components and gave some people in PCB layout headaches, or they did a MASSIVE cost reduction of the board. Either way, I haven't bought a PS2 yet and this just means I'll wait untill these are out....
The article states 51kW from 100,000 people. That could probably supply one or two houses with electricity if they didn't use electric heaters.
Would be nice for those farms though, lots of animals, but not as much demand. This probably won't go as mainstream as the article suggests though
Anybody have any numbers for the Bio-Gas plants?