I know this is slashdot, but if you RTFA you will see the following quote:
Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although eBay points out common misspellings, he said that the most common question he gets is, "When will e-Bay get a spell checker?"
His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
That's exactly it. The school pays money to the service. The service makes money. The papers that the students submit are in the database that the company uses to make money. Bottom line, student's work is being used by the company to make money and student is not compensated
I don't really use my old "fat mac" any more, but the SE 30 has some games that don't run anywhere else, so it's turned on occasionally. The Centris 610 works just fine for my 10 year old to read her email, draw with appleworks, and write school papers. Plus we can still find some old games in the $5 bin for it. The Beige G3 still plays DVDs just fine and works great as a music server since I have never liked iTunes as well as SoundJamMP (developed by the same team before they did iTunes for Apple). My G4 AiBook is my main computer now, but I don't think it will be dumped when I finally get a G5. My other child loves her G3 "flower power" iMac and will take it to college with her, my mom loves her G3 iMac, and my wife hated computers until I bought her a 15" G4 iMac last year. Will I get rid of any of those? No Way. They all work fine, and will continue to do their job for years and years.
In the same timeframe however, I've been through about 7 different DOS and Windoze boxes, and have tossed them out with no regrets as the next one came along.
It sounds like you need to find a store with a smarter staff. Most of what you said you need is either built-in, or easily had. Most of what they told you appears to be just plain wrong.
nearly 10 years ago I bought a Casio wristwatch that included a universal remote control. It was fun for about the first 5 minutes. But after the "Gee Whiz" factor wore off it wasn't particularly useful.
Of course Email does go down on occasion, but these days most students have alternate ways to send. For example, the college where I teach has an elaborate campus email system, which is fairly robust, but most of my students have personal email accounts as well, and most of them have yahoo/hotmail, etc too. This past semester we had one outage of campus email, and every single student in my Advanced C++ class managed to find an alternate way to email the assignment to me. The beginning programming class wasn't as good at it, but I tend to cut them more slack anyhow.
I even do this with my Intro to Computers classes. One of the skills they are supposed to master is attaching files to email, so when they take their tests, there is always a "hands on" portion where they create a file of some kind, (depending on the unit) and email it to me during the exam.
Nothing is perfect, but I have had less problems with email than I ever had with diskettes, and it's so much easier to grade programs when I can compile them, make some changes, etc. than back when I used to have to look at hard copy.
I teach computer science/computer technology at a small college, and this has been my experience with the power point as well. I had to threaten that if I saw anything but the "six slides to a page" I would stop making the powerpoint available at all.
As for homework, I started requiring all homework be submitted electronically years ago. First on 3.5" diskettes, then on CD-R and now most is Email. For example, this past semester I taught a course in advanced C++. All assigments were emailed to me, I would compile the source code, test it, and then email it back with comments and the grade. Saves all sorts of paper and has a quicker turn around time for the students as well. In addition, I can make assignments due at a time when neither I nor the students would normally be at the school, such as midnight on a Sunday night.
There are add-on progs for Safari that let you change what it reports as it's identity. I have gone to several web sites that refused to let me in because I wasn't using IE, told Safari to claim it was IE, and then the web site let me in and everything ran just fine.
Works with the offline file too. Figure out the naming convention, download the files, and load them into the flash player. They will say they don't run from that location, but click play and they will run anyhow.
12" AiBook. DVD-R version, 640Meg Ram, using Airport Extreme. Had it since late February. Sometimes it wobbles, the solution is to either press on the battery a bit, or move the computer a couple of inches. Does it heat up? sometimes it does, but not so much as to blister my hand. My previous laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook and it would get much hotter, although that was on the bottom.
Bottom line is that I love this computer. It's on nearly 24/7 (One more machine for Seti@Home after all!) and it's so stable it's incredible. I'd buy another in a heartbeat.
I searched on COBOL at Monster and Dice. Both were over 500. Puts them in the top 5 or so on both lists. Guess that just shows the bias of the original poster. Probably lots of other languages that were left out would score higher as well.
There are lots of good fonts out there. Some designed specifically as replacements for the M$ fonts. Trouble is getting any kind of uniform decision on them. M$ weren't the best, but they were (are) everywhere, so you know that if you use Verdana, say, on your web page, almost everyone will have it.
This sounds like a typical M$ trick. Take something that is widespread and then break it so that other products don't work with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is slashdot, but if you RTFA you will see the following quote:
Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the country. Although eBay points out common misspellings, he said that the most common question he gets is, "When will e-Bay get a spell checker?"
His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you buy something called a dictionary."
That's exactly it. The school pays money to the service. The service makes money. The papers that the students submit are in the database that the company uses to make money. Bottom line, student's work is being used by the company to make money and student is not compensated
I don't really use my old "fat mac" any more, but the SE 30 has some games that don't run anywhere else, so it's turned on occasionally. The Centris 610 works just fine for my 10 year old to read her email, draw with appleworks, and write school papers. Plus we can still find some old games in the $5 bin for it. The Beige G3 still plays DVDs just fine and works great as a music server since I have never liked iTunes as well as SoundJamMP (developed by the same team before they did iTunes for Apple). My G4 AiBook is my main computer now, but I don't think it will be dumped when I finally get a G5. My other child loves her G3 "flower power" iMac and will take it to college with her, my mom loves her G3 iMac, and my wife hated computers until I bought her a 15" G4 iMac last year. Will I get rid of any of those? No Way. They all work fine, and will continue to do their job for years and years. In the same timeframe however, I've been through about 7 different DOS and Windoze boxes, and have tossed them out with no regrets as the next one came along.
It sounds like you need to find a store with a smarter staff. Most of what you said you need is either built-in, or easily had. Most of what they told you appears to be just plain wrong.
nearly 10 years ago I bought a Casio wristwatch that included a universal remote control. It was fun for about the first 5 minutes. But after the "Gee Whiz" factor wore off it wasn't particularly useful.
Of course Email does go down on occasion, but these days most students have alternate ways to send. For example, the college where I teach has an elaborate campus email system, which is fairly robust, but most of my students have personal email accounts as well, and most of them have yahoo/hotmail, etc too. This past semester we had one outage of campus email, and every single student in my Advanced C++ class managed to find an alternate way to email the assignment to me. The beginning programming class wasn't as good at it, but I tend to cut them more slack anyhow.
I even do this with my Intro to Computers classes. One of the skills they are supposed to master is attaching files to email, so when they take their tests, there is always a "hands on" portion where they create a file of some kind, (depending on the unit) and email it to me during the exam.
Nothing is perfect, but I have had less problems with email than I ever had with diskettes, and it's so much easier to grade programs when I can compile them, make some changes, etc. than back when I used to have to look at hard copy.
I teach computer science/computer technology at a small college, and this has been my experience with the power point as well. I had to threaten that if I saw anything but the "six slides to a page" I would stop making the powerpoint available at all.
As for homework, I started requiring all homework be submitted electronically years ago. First on 3.5" diskettes, then on CD-R and now most is Email. For example, this past semester I taught a course in advanced C++. All assigments were emailed to me, I would compile the source code, test it, and then email it back with comments and the grade. Saves all sorts of paper and has a quicker turn around time for the students as well. In addition, I can make assignments due at a time when neither I nor the students would normally be at the school, such as midnight on a Sunday night.
There are add-on progs for Safari that let you change what it reports as it's identity. I have gone to several web sites that refused to let me in because I wasn't using IE, told Safari to claim it was IE, and then the web site let me in and everything ran just fine.
Works with the offline file too. Figure out the naming convention, download the files, and load them into the flash player. They will say they don't run from that location, but click play and they will run anyhow.
Click Play and it will play anyhow. At least they all do on mine, both in the flash player, and in quicktime
12" AiBook. DVD-R version, 640Meg Ram, using Airport Extreme. Had it since late February. Sometimes it wobbles, the solution is to either press on the battery a bit, or move the computer a couple of inches. Does it heat up? sometimes it does, but not so much as to blister my hand. My previous laptop was a Fujitsu Lifebook and it would get much hotter, although that was on the bottom.
Bottom line is that I love this computer. It's on nearly 24/7 (One more machine for Seti@Home after all!) and it's so stable it's incredible. I'd buy another in a heartbeat.
no time to get the mix right, balance the sound, etc. yuck
I searched on COBOL at Monster and Dice. Both were over 500. Puts them in the top 5 or so on both lists. Guess that just shows the bias of the original poster. Probably lots of other languages that were left out would score higher as well.
I just put a JVC head unit in my car. It plays MP3 and also has a front panel input. Can plug in WalkMan, iPod, etc. no problem.
Suggested title for the FBI warning notice! (apologies to Mick)
This sounds like a typical M$ trick. Take something that is widespread and then break it so that other products don't work with it.