It looks like it started out as a simple, "portable hard drive" system... hardly different from the stories about storing BLAST data or Lord of the Rings clips on an iPod. The addition of the iPod's photo-display capabilities and - more significantly, I think - the iChat sharing makes this sound like a setup. I wonder when they will incorporate support for the iPod's video capabilities...
Is there a term for this kind of intermittant site inaccessability due to Internet outage -- not the user or the server being offline, but the Internet failing?
Mr. Siklos seems to miss the point, and the details. Apple substantially downplayed the video capability of the iPod, and the audience reaction was understandably lukewarm considering the limited selection and quality of available content.
As for the details: There already is a "bogeyman" of online video: BitTorrent. Hell, it's the bogeyman of online everything, depending on who you ask. It's no centralized Napster, but that's mostly due to the lessons learned from Napster.
There are TV tuners for computers available. How long until it's seamless to drop content from your PVR software into your iTunes Library and onto your iPod? I noticed I can't drag just any video into my iTunes Library, but I haven't played enough to really see about adding my own video.
Trying to wedge PVR functionality into the portable device is overkill. It's a player. Let the computer do the work... that's why it's there.
Re:it's all just rumor...
on
Video iPod Oct 12?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The invitation picture piques my interest, though. I don't think it'll be a video iPod, but I think movies are involved bdsed on the red curtain.
The "AirPort Express" device is probably not for the iPod, but rather like the Express, a video-out system for Macs, allowing you to play your movies to your TV without having them near each other... Hasn't this constantly been the intention of Apple - the "digital hub" without all the wires?
I wonder if/hope it will support a remote control, so you can control your on-computer content in the other room from the TV.
Different Aspects?
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
What do think are the most important aspects of game design and do you think they vary greatly for different genres?
Right now, you pay either $0.99 per song or $9.99 per album for most music. Some artists charge "song value" for their albums (14 tracks = $13.86). There are already some exceptions in album pricing, and artists/labels can enforce album prcing by offering certain songs as "Album Only".
they can revert to $1 / song
The odds of the music industry accepting a return to $1/song after they've rejected it, even if it worked better, are low. Why? Because they still don't really understand the benefits of the medium.
Record labels are venture capitalists. They invest in hundreds of artists, hoping that some of them will be big enough to cover the costs of the others. They pour money into marketing to generate interest and then adjust the price point of the album to reap the maximum benefit of their advertising investment.
Online sales are still seen as a form of threat to the "traditional" business model. This is going off a bit, but it does have a point.
The music industry, hasn't come to see the benefits of Lean Enterprise/Just-in-Time Manufacturing. When a new album (movie, book... same problems for each industry) comes out, there is a huge initial push in production. Make a massive number of copies, and get them out there for distribution. With the batch production runs, they spend less per disc with larger quantities.
As online music sales take hold, it threatens to diminish the demand for CDs. As the demand goes down, the production runs decrease, and it costs the record label more per disc. Even though they aren't spending anything extra on the electronic download (bandwidth charges are probably lower than freight) they are "losing" money. I know it's not actually loss, but we've seem countless demonstrations of their math skills.
The benefit of the variable pricing is clear to the label - people will pay higher prices up front for new music. Later, when the excitement has died down, you can lower your prices to move the surplus inventory.
The benefit of fixed pricing is clear to the distribution channel and the customer. If music is $1 per song, you can budget very easily. If you want five songs, it's $5 (plus tax, of course). If you want two albums, it's $20. It's piece of mind. The distributor doesn't have to spend money adjusting prices. A single price point saves money.
I wonder what percentage of COGS for CDs is price stickers? You'll sometimes see four or five on an album after the initial rush is over, and the store steadily decreases it's price to move product and recoup the investment.
f Green Day's label can make more revenue on iTunes by selling their hits for $1.50, why not? It's their call. If they can also increase revenue by lowering new artist prices to increase overall demand (units sold), so be it.
The potential benefit to the consumer is the possibility of a lower price point. New (read: new, big) artists are expensive. The prices will go up, just like they do with CDs. Additionally, with the speed of reporting and without delay for manfacturing, the response time on a product can be quite quick. If people start buying a relatively unknown artist, the labels can know within hours. This could be very beneficial, as they can start advertising on the artist. It also means there's little delay in price increases related to popularity.
Ultimately, there's a delicate balance. If a label were to take their catalog of music away, it would deal a major blow to the music store. However, by doing so they close themselves out of a major market. And, if a label walks away from Apple for being non-cooperative, how thin is the ice on which the other stores are standing?
Like another poster mentioned, it would be nice if they (any iPod, really) was more scratch-proof, but I suppose it helps drive the acessories market.:)
What about users who don't control the client software? Many small businesses use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express because they are there. There isn't an employee who's job it is to install better software and safeguard the machine, and the primary employees often do not have the time to do so. That is when we must fall back on user education.
I'm not saying that better software isn't a good path; it certainly is. The problem is there are too many times when the best solution is not a manageable solution.
User education can go a long way toward preventing problems.
One of my PCs at home runs Windows 2000 SP4. I have no virus protection installed. I have no spyware detector running actively. I have no spam blocker on my primary mail accounts, save for Gmail. I do use the Google Toolbar for pop-up blocking, though it doesn't catch everything.
I have never had an issue with any infections or malware on that computer. A friend used my computer for 25 minutes, and I spent some ten hours removing spyware, adware, malware, viruses, etc. He depended upon anti-virus and pop-up blockers to protect him from his own actions.
And I say that as a Mac user. At some point, you must educate the user to the dangers - don't open suspicious messages or attachments; don't wander into sketchy websites.
I think it is fair to say that for a large share of the market, performance statistics are only significant if they are bad. If you have no complaints - and remember, the number of people who report a problem is a tiny fraction of those who experience it - and your numbers are "average" then you should be fine. If the numbers are bad, you have something to work on.
For some markets, like online trading, etc, performance can mean something entirely different.
I discussed this with a friend some six years ago. The problem with standards like HTML and CSS can be summed up in one word:
MAY
By putting the word may into a standard, you make the standard non-standard. If you can't reliably depend upon CSS to render a dashed line on a border, why do you even provide it? Two completely compliant browsers can give you a different picture, depending on their choice to implement optional components.
There are enough issues with non-compliant browsers that we don't need to build issues into the standards!
I almost used the term venture capitalists, but thought better (worse?) of it. There's a very real possibility that the ROI for a project like this is long. One could be pouring money into this for years until you hit break even. It could work faster, if you could get widespread adoption, but there are no guarantees.
It's as possible as not that you will run into a competitor in the field, and spend months - even years - fighting for supremacy or in talks for interoperability or buyout.
This is an "infrastructure" kind of technology. Like many of these, there is no guarantee that anyone will make money until the infrastucture is truly in place. Once it's a sure thing, VCs and investors will hop on board. Until then, I think we're looking for philanthropists.
Right now, I have subscriptions to a couple of sites. They cost me about $60 per year, regardless of how much I use them. If, instead of a flat fee, I could pay a ten cents for a day of use ($30 = $0.11 if you use a site every weekday) or a cent or two per page view, I could still provide them revenue, but also have the cost be weighted to my use.
It also provides the opportunity for me to spend a little money at other sites. If I could spend a nickel or dime at a site for use instead of a $30 yearly - or even $2 monthly fee - it would be feasible for me to access more pay content without putting a hole in my budget.
I don't mind paying for information, so long as the prices aren't exorbitant. Micropayments can help make that possible.
How long do you think the sites will leave their money sitting on PayPal, though?
I understand that PayPal's solution is quite different from Slashdot's solution; PayPal is banking on $0.50-$2.00 - type transactions and Slashdot is a penny a page. The latter style (CmdrTaco's comment) is what I was talking about.
PayPal may be uniquely positioned to provide such a service, as they already provide some aspects of the needed technology.
As Taco mentioned, though, the real test of "micropayments" is not under $2.00, but rather under $0.10. The markets are likely quite different though. This 5% plus 5 cents could work for a variety of small transactions.
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
The cost is in the partnering. Even if you can get the user to put in money in large blocks that don't kill you in financial transaction fees ($20+ is my guess) instead of being charged a few cents a day/week, you have the transaction overhead of whatever unique system each site uses (per page, per article, per section, per day, any of these with caps...), subtracting the fees from each user, aggregating the total payment to each site and providing statements to all.
The key to the micropayment game is aggregation of volume. If your company is processing 2000 payments per day of $0.01 each from 2000 different people, it's probably costing you more than it's worth. However, if you're processing five million payments a week with an average individual's cost being around $0.25, you might be breaking even. If you could get two dozen major sites and hundreds of smaller ones on board, you might make money.
Either the financial costs (actually taking and distributing money) need to be reduced, or the number of transactions per person/site need to go way up. I don't see banks and credit card companies giving out money for cheaper, so, here's the hard question: How do you get widespread buy-in on a system that only works once it has widespread buy-in? Who's the philanthropist who will fund a losing game for as long as it takes to become profitable?
Hey, maybe the government is interested! They own the money, anyway...
Well, lets start with the obvious: Mobile phones have to connect to a network via a series of towers. Now, with the power out, some towers will be down, diminishing the available coverage. Some towers, however, have their own generators. permitting them to run despite power interruptions. Few of those, I imagine, come equipped with snorkel kits in the event 25 feet of water come rushing over them, and so have likely stopped working.
Next up is communication lines. In case it wasn't made clear to you elsewhere, cell towers aggregate the individual calls together and send them out over a cable - "hard line" for fans of The Matrix. When 120 mile-per-hour winds come whipping through your town, some of these cables will inevitably be torn down. Some run underground - not sure how common this is in New Orleans, where underground is just that much more moist. In any case, most of these technologies rely on power running along the lines, power at the endpoints, or both. When the central office loses power, it doesn't matter how many cell towers sitting atop hills still have functioning generators and great coverage... the calls won't leave the area.
Finally, welcome to the concept of oversold bandwidth. Simply put, there are more phones out there than there are available lines to connect half of them (each call has two phones, so...). This is based on the time-honored knowledge that it is extremely rare for everyone to want to use the phone at once. It would be far too costly to make it possible for everyone in New York to be on the phone at once, especially since most (>80%, is my uneducated guess) of the bandwidth would sit, un-used, for most (>95) of the time.
In order to prevent disasters from causing communication problems, we would have to throw money at the problem. We'd need cell towers with self-contained air supplies that could last x days, as well as over-blown fiber connections meshed around between different towers to share load and act as fault tolerance. Cell service has the same problem as the Last Mile in broadband... like it or not, the last mile is a single point of failure, that can only be protected by extraordinary - and expensive - measures.
It's not that all classes need to teach technology, it's that they could use them. As for the younger teachers, you still have to be careful that they don't use technology when they shouldn't.
A balance is where the best solution lies. Use a PowerPoint to step through the lesson, but don't be afraid to pick up a dry erase marker, either. In my experience as an instructor, projecting an image onto a whiteboard makes a great way to manipulate the image, and saves the work of drawing it.
If the instructor is fiddling with the computer, they aren't making good use of it, and they need some assistance.
The writing/typing issue is a personal one, I think. I find it easier to type than to write, both in terms of speed and feeling. When I try to write and keep up with my thoughts, I end up with chicken scratches. My junior & senior years in high school, I took notes in most of my classes on a laptop. It allowed me to get the information in faster, and organize it much more conveniently.
One of the problems of most [inexpensive] computer-based solutions for tasks typically handled by a calculator - graphing or otherwise - is that the interface is difficult. On the calculator, everything is custom-designed to be convenient and easy to remember. Approximating that on the computer and working around a keyboard layout and mousing interface can cause all sorts of usability issues. These are things that, hopefully, become better with time.
Perhaps it would be better stated, "Still, an aspect of school is babysitting."
I didn't intend it to trivialize the efforts of teachers. I am friends with a number of teachers - elementary and high school level - and still volunteer a bit to help the local speech and drama programs at my old high school.
I've worked with good and dedicated teachers; teachers who put in much more effort than for which they will ever be compensated. That describes about 30% of the teachers I know. I've also worked with - and been taught by - teachers who were acceptable and those who were merely passable.
My fifth grade teacher was taking night school to learn the math she was teaching us. I would like to point out that was division. My geometry teacher gave us the manuals - including the answers - and said, "Go." He wasn't a good teacher, but we finished the book that year without him. I've had teachers that gave students an "A" for a quarter for a particularly well-formed opinion paper, and others that failed students because their notes weren't in her preferred format.
To be nearly on topic: I've worked as an instructor in a variety of ways, from home user training to call centers. It was something I enjoyed doing. For me, it was challenging and fulfilling. Some of my co-workers were simply not good at it and their students often expressed or demonstrated that.
While I do give teachers credit for the work they do and believe that they often deserve more gratitude than they receive, I will not automatically assign them greatness. Teaching is difficult, and often the restrictions and fears of our society make it more difficult still.
That teaching is a noble profession and that schools are a form of daycare are not mutually exclusive.
School is still babysitting. Unless you have a parent or tutor in the home who is capable of directing the child to maintain their studies - or a particularly dedicated student - the problem is not one of information transfer, but of physical control.
Those costs, however, are education overhead, if you will. Busses do not scale with learning or technology. If every other student stays home the bus is even less efficient. Unless you can convince all of the distant students to learn from home... of course, in my area, these are often the ones who cannot get/afford high-speed access.
I do think technology can help education costs. Technology can provide students a way to obtain and submit their homework electronically. Technology can automate grading. It can provide online, linkable calendars of each course with the daily details of homework, tests, quizzes, etc. Technology, harnessed properly, can mean more productive time for student and teacher, alike. Along the way, it might save a gallon of gas or two, but mostly for the parent who's child left their books/homework/reading at school.
Slashdot Mirror
It looks like it started out as a simple, "portable hard drive" system... hardly different from the stories about storing BLAST data or Lord of the Rings clips on an iPod. The addition of the iPod's photo-display capabilities and - more significantly, I think - the iChat sharing makes this sound like a setup. I wonder when they will incorporate support for the iPod's video capabilities...
Is there a term for this kind of intermittant site inaccessability due to Internet outage -- not the user or the server being offline, but the Internet failing?
Except anyone can start a tracker.
Mr. Siklos seems to miss the point, and the details. Apple substantially downplayed the video capability of the iPod, and the audience reaction was understandably lukewarm considering the limited selection and quality of available content.
As for the details: There already is a "bogeyman" of online video: BitTorrent. Hell, it's the bogeyman of online everything, depending on who you ask. It's no centralized Napster, but that's mostly due to the lessons learned from Napster.
There are TV tuners for computers available. How long until it's seamless to drop content from your PVR software into your iTunes Library and onto your iPod? I noticed I can't drag just any video into my iTunes Library, but I haven't played enough to really see about adding my own video.
Trying to wedge PVR functionality into the portable device is overkill. It's a player. Let the computer do the work... that's why it's there.
The invitation picture piques my interest, though. I don't think it'll be a video iPod, but I think movies are involved bdsed on the red curtain.
The "AirPort Express" device is probably not for the iPod, but rather like the Express, a video-out system for Macs, allowing you to play your movies to your TV without having them near each other... Hasn't this constantly been the intention of Apple - the "digital hub" without all the wires?
I wonder if/hope it will support a remote control, so you can control your on-computer content in the other room from the TV.
What do think are the most important aspects of game design and do you think they vary greatly for different genres?
Right now, you pay either $0.99 per song or $9.99 per album for most music. Some artists charge "song value" for their albums (14 tracks = $13.86). There are already some exceptions in album pricing, and artists/labels can enforce album prcing by offering certain songs as "Album Only".
they can revert to $1 / song
The odds of the music industry accepting a return to $1/song after they've rejected it, even if it worked better, are low. Why? Because they still don't really understand the benefits of the medium.
Record labels are venture capitalists. They invest in hundreds of artists, hoping that some of them will be big enough to cover the costs of the others. They pour money into marketing to generate interest and then adjust the price point of the album to reap the maximum benefit of their advertising investment.
Online sales are still seen as a form of threat to the "traditional" business model. This is going off a bit, but it does have a point.
The music industry, hasn't come to see the benefits of Lean Enterprise/Just-in-Time Manufacturing. When a new album (movie, book... same problems for each industry) comes out, there is a huge initial push in production. Make a massive number of copies, and get them out there for distribution. With the batch production runs, they spend less per disc with larger quantities.
As online music sales take hold, it threatens to diminish the demand for CDs. As the demand goes down, the production runs decrease, and it costs the record label more per disc. Even though they aren't spending anything extra on the electronic download (bandwidth charges are probably lower than freight) they are "losing" money. I know it's not actually loss, but we've seem countless demonstrations of their math skills.
The benefit of the variable pricing is clear to the label - people will pay higher prices up front for new music. Later, when the excitement has died down, you can lower your prices to move the surplus inventory.
The benefit of fixed pricing is clear to the distribution channel and the customer. If music is $1 per song, you can budget very easily. If you want five songs, it's $5 (plus tax, of course). If you want two albums, it's $20. It's piece of mind . The distributor doesn't have to spend money adjusting prices. A single price point saves money.
I wonder what percentage of COGS for CDs is price stickers? You'll sometimes see four or five on an album after the initial rush is over, and the store steadily decreases it's price to move product and recoup the investment.
f Green Day's label can make more revenue on iTunes by selling their hits for $1.50, why not? It's their call. If they can also increase revenue by lowering new artist prices to increase overall demand (units sold), so be it.
The potential benefit to the consumer is the possibility of a lower price point. New (read: new, big) artists are expensive. The prices will go up, just like they do with CDs. Additionally, with the speed of reporting and without delay for manfacturing, the response time on a product can be quite quick. If people start buying a relatively unknown artist, the labels can know within hours. This could be very beneficial, as they can start advertising on the artist. It also means there's little delay in price increases related to popularity.
Ultimately, there's a delicate balance. If a label were to take their catalog of music away, it would deal a major blow to the music store. However, by doing so they close themselves out of a major market. And, if a label walks away from Apple for being non-cooperative, how thin is the ice on which the other stores are standing?
Nice to know it is so durable.
:)
Like another poster mentioned, it would be nice if they (any iPod, really) was more scratch-proof, but I suppose it helps drive the acessories market.
What about users who don't control the client software? Many small businesses use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express because they are there. There isn't an employee who's job it is to install better software and safeguard the machine, and the primary employees often do not have the time to do so. That is when we must fall back on user education.
I'm not saying that better software isn't a good path; it certainly is. The problem is there are too many times when the best solution is not a manageable solution.
User education can go a long way toward preventing problems.
One of my PCs at home runs Windows 2000 SP4. I have no virus protection installed. I have no spyware detector running actively. I have no spam blocker on my primary mail accounts, save for Gmail. I do use the Google Toolbar for pop-up blocking, though it doesn't catch everything.
I have never had an issue with any infections or malware on that computer. A friend used my computer for 25 minutes, and I spent some ten hours removing spyware, adware, malware, viruses, etc. He depended upon anti-virus and pop-up blockers to protect him from his own actions.
And I say that as a Mac user. At some point, you must educate the user to the dangers - don't open suspicious messages or attachments; don't wander into sketchy websites.
Not the easiest thing to instruct, though.
I think it is fair to say that for a large share of the market, performance statistics are only significant if they are bad. If you have no complaints - and remember, the number of people who report a problem is a tiny fraction of those who experience it - and your numbers are "average" then you should be fine. If the numbers are bad, you have something to work on.
For some markets, like online trading, etc, performance can mean something entirely different.
I discussed this with a friend some six years ago. The problem with standards like HTML and CSS can be summed up in one word:
MAY
By putting the word may into a standard, you make the standard non-standard. If you can't reliably depend upon CSS to render a dashed line on a border, why do you even provide it? Two completely compliant browsers can give you a different picture, depending on their choice to implement optional components.
There are enough issues with non-compliant browsers that we don't need to build issues into the standards!
I almost used the term venture capitalists, but thought better (worse?) of it. There's a very real possibility that the ROI for a project like this is long. One could be pouring money into this for years until you hit break even. It could work faster, if you could get widespread adoption, but there are no guarantees.
It's as possible as not that you will run into a competitor in the field, and spend months - even years - fighting for supremacy or in talks for interoperability or buyout.
This is an "infrastructure" kind of technology. Like many of these, there is no guarantee that anyone will make money until the infrastucture is truly in place. Once it's a sure thing, VCs and investors will hop on board. Until then, I think we're looking for philanthropists.
Right now, I have subscriptions to a couple of sites. They cost me about $60 per year, regardless of how much I use them. If, instead of a flat fee, I could pay a ten cents for a day of use ($30 = $0.11 if you use a site every weekday) or a cent or two per page view, I could still provide them revenue, but also have the cost be weighted to my use.
It also provides the opportunity for me to spend a little money at other sites. If I could spend a nickel or dime at a site for use instead of a $30 yearly - or even $2 monthly fee - it would be feasible for me to access more pay content without putting a hole in my budget.
I don't mind paying for information, so long as the prices aren't exorbitant. Micropayments can help make that possible.
How long do you think the sites will leave their money sitting on PayPal, though?
I understand that PayPal's solution is quite different from Slashdot's solution; PayPal is banking on $0.50-$2.00 - type transactions and Slashdot is a penny a page. The latter style (CmdrTaco's comment) is what I was talking about.
PayPal may be uniquely positioned to provide such a service, as they already provide some aspects of the needed technology.
As Taco mentioned, though, the real test of "micropayments" is not under $2.00, but rather under $0.10. The markets are likely quite different though. This 5% plus 5 cents could work for a variety of small transactions.
Still amazing that in 2005 nobody has figured out a way to make it simple to charge a penny on-line.
The cost is in the partnering. Even if you can get the user to put in money in large blocks that don't kill you in financial transaction fees ($20+ is my guess) instead of being charged a few cents a day/week, you have the transaction overhead of whatever unique system each site uses (per page, per article, per section, per day, any of these with caps...), subtracting the fees from each user, aggregating the total payment to each site and providing statements to all.
The key to the micropayment game is aggregation of volume . If your company is processing 2000 payments per day of $0.01 each from 2000 different people, it's probably costing you more than it's worth. However, if you're processing five million payments a week with an average individual's cost being around $0.25, you might be breaking even. If you could get two dozen major sites and hundreds of smaller ones on board, you might make money.
Either the financial costs (actually taking and distributing money) need to be reduced, or the number of transactions per person/site need to go way up. I don't see banks and credit card companies giving out money for cheaper, so, here's the hard question: How do you get widespread buy-in on a system that only works once it has widespread buy-in? Who's the philanthropist who will fund a losing game for as long as it takes to become profitable?
Hey, maybe the government is interested! They own the money, anyway...
The full image is 1280x960. 14 days for the full image.
I'm not sure New Orleans can provide a cast large enough for a Kevin Costner epic.
That's sub-section 1 of the larger plan: Throw Money At It.
The equipment doesn't need to breathe, but the generators do.
Gee, this is a tough one...
Well, lets start with the obvious: Mobile phones have to connect to a network via a series of towers. Now, with the power out, some towers will be down, diminishing the available coverage. Some towers, however, have their own generators. permitting them to run despite power interruptions. Few of those, I imagine, come equipped with snorkel kits in the event 25 feet of water come rushing over them, and so have likely stopped working.
Next up is communication lines. In case it wasn't made clear to you elsewhere, cell towers aggregate the individual calls together and send them out over a cable - "hard line" for fans of The Matrix. When 120 mile-per-hour winds come whipping through your town, some of these cables will inevitably be torn down. Some run underground - not sure how common this is in New Orleans, where underground is just that much more moist. In any case, most of these technologies rely on power running along the lines, power at the endpoints, or both. When the central office loses power, it doesn't matter how many cell towers sitting atop hills still have functioning generators and great coverage... the calls won't leave the area.
Finally, welcome to the concept of oversold bandwidth. Simply put, there are more phones out there than there are available lines to connect half of them (each call has two phones, so...). This is based on the time-honored knowledge that it is extremely rare for everyone to want to use the phone at once. It would be far too costly to make it possible for everyone in New York to be on the phone at once, especially since most (>80%, is my uneducated guess) of the bandwidth would sit, un-used, for most (>95) of the time.
In order to prevent disasters from causing communication problems, we would have to throw money at the problem. We'd need cell towers with self-contained air supplies that could last x days, as well as over-blown fiber connections meshed around between different towers to share load and act as fault tolerance. Cell service has the same problem as the Last Mile in broadband... like it or not, the last mile is a single point of failure, that can only be protected by extraordinary - and expensive - measures.
Has anyone ever heard of support? Apple may need the occasional extra lot of processors for years to come to support their existing support contracts.
It's not that all classes need to teach technology, it's that they could use them. As for the younger teachers, you still have to be careful that they don't use technology when they shouldn't.
A balance is where the best solution lies. Use a PowerPoint to step through the lesson, but don't be afraid to pick up a dry erase marker, either. In my experience as an instructor, projecting an image onto a whiteboard makes a great way to manipulate the image, and saves the work of drawing it.
If the instructor is fiddling with the computer, they aren't making good use of it, and they need some assistance.
The writing/typing issue is a personal one, I think. I find it easier to type than to write, both in terms of speed and feeling. When I try to write and keep up with my thoughts, I end up with chicken scratches. My junior & senior years in high school, I took notes in most of my classes on a laptop. It allowed me to get the information in faster, and organize it much more conveniently.
One of the problems of most [inexpensive] computer-based solutions for tasks typically handled by a calculator - graphing or otherwise - is that the interface is difficult. On the calculator, everything is custom-designed to be convenient and easy to remember. Approximating that on the computer and working around a keyboard layout and mousing interface can cause all sorts of usability issues. These are things that, hopefully, become better with time.
Perhaps it would be better stated, "Still, an aspect of school is babysitting."
I didn't intend it to trivialize the efforts of teachers. I am friends with a number of teachers - elementary and high school level - and still volunteer a bit to help the local speech and drama programs at my old high school.
I've worked with good and dedicated teachers; teachers who put in much more effort than for which they will ever be compensated. That describes about 30% of the teachers I know. I've also worked with - and been taught by - teachers who were acceptable and those who were merely passable.
My fifth grade teacher was taking night school to learn the math she was teaching us. I would like to point out that was division. My geometry teacher gave us the manuals - including the answers - and said, "Go." He wasn't a good teacher, but we finished the book that year without him. I've had teachers that gave students an "A" for a quarter for a particularly well-formed opinion paper, and others that failed students because their notes weren't in her preferred format.
To be nearly on topic: I've worked as an instructor in a variety of ways, from home user training to call centers. It was something I enjoyed doing. For me, it was challenging and fulfilling. Some of my co-workers were simply not good at it and their students often expressed or demonstrated that.
While I do give teachers credit for the work they do and believe that they often deserve more gratitude than they receive, I will not automatically assign them greatness. Teaching is difficult, and often the restrictions and fears of our society make it more difficult still.
That teaching is a noble profession and that schools are a form of daycare are not mutually exclusive.
School is still babysitting. Unless you have a parent or tutor in the home who is capable of directing the child to maintain their studies - or a particularly dedicated student - the problem is not one of information transfer, but of physical control.
Those costs, however, are education overhead, if you will. Busses do not scale with learning or technology. If every other student stays home the bus is even less efficient. Unless you can convince all of the distant students to learn from home... of course, in my area, these are often the ones who cannot get/afford high-speed access.
I do think technology can help education costs. Technology can provide students a way to obtain and submit their homework electronically. Technology can automate grading. It can provide online, linkable calendars of each course with the daily details of homework, tests, quizzes, etc. Technology, harnessed properly, can mean more productive time for student and teacher, alike. Along the way, it might save a gallon of gas or two, but mostly for the parent who's child left their books/homework/reading at school.