Enterprise environments desperately need better storage density. For example, increasing government requirements for long term record storage mean that IT departments in the medial industry are increasingly stressed. As another example, the explosion of online media distribution (YouTubes, Napsters, and the like) require insane amounts of storage. You can't just keep making the data centers bigger. At some point you must increase the amount of storage each location can hold.
The home user is just one customer for hard drives, and probably not the one targeted for this capacity of hard drive (yet). However, think about the amount of storage required to store large amounts full-quality HD video on a DVR and you might see that in a few years time even the casual home user might require this amount of capacity.
Not so long ago a 10MB hard drive was considered huge and hard to fill to capacity.
Note that New York State is more than just New York City. The truth is that upstate many high-quality jobs *are* moving to other states due to high taxation, usually in areas where the loss of such jobs can further cripple an already devastated local economy.
Have you considered experimenting with VNC together with vnc2swf? Older versions of VNC exist for MacOS 8&9 (I understand the server may be shaky, though) and you may be able to turn the output of the viewer window into a Flash movie using vnc2swf. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising.
I certainly agree that when one has a standards-compliant browser available, then one should use it. However, some people truly don't have much of a choice.
For example, some people still use a 68k Mac. IIRC, the last available version of Netscape for 68k was version 4.0. If that user does not have sufficient means (money, computer proficiency, etc.) to upgrade the computer, then that user is stuck using the last product available.
Again, I am not necessarily disagreeing with your point, but perhaps we should be a little less aggressive with the clue bat if we wish to keep the Internet available to 'all of us'.
As an Electrical Engineer child of one high school and one middle school teacher, and as the husband of an elementary school teacher, I sympathize with your surprise at the lack of truly useful (or at least current) applications of technology in education.
The lack of understanding of current technologies among teachers/administrators is exemplified in the low wages, budget, and status of school IT departments (where they even exist) across the country. If school systems and the universites that train their staff knew what a danger such conditions posed in the form of internal and external cracking, exposure to "non-educational";-) material, time & money wasted on misapplication of technology, etc, then I assure you that far more time would be spent making sure that computers were deployed properly, securely, and for the right reasons.
I live in Western New York - probably one of the better areas in the country for teacher training. We have several teaching colleges nearby - Fredonia State, Buffalo State, Daemon, UB - and most have little teacher training on the proper application of technology. UB does have a pretty decent campus network, but I'm not sure that translates into good computer training for the teachers that the university produces.
Perhaps the best discussion of technology and education I've read is Clifford Stoll's 'High Tech Heretic'. It is certainly worth a read for insight into the current state of computing in academia.
I would be interested in knowing how beneficial this would be across different types of blindness. Patient Alpha grew up with sight (two words - safety goggles) and one can presume he knew how the world was supposed to 'look' prior to decoding the phosphenes.
Would a person born blind be able to use this technology? If so, better or worse than a patient who had sight? On the one hand, a person born blind may not have any preconcieved notions about how the world is supposed to look and may be better at interpreting the phosphenes as the 'real world'. On the other hand, I wonder if the phosphenes would be interpretable at all to a visual cortex that has never learned how to see.
The book 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker may provide some assistance. It offers insight into how the brain perceives and develops language ability. While it doesn't contain explicit techniques for improving speech recognition, perhaps it will give you some ideas on how to develop your own exercises for training your hearing.
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Enterprise environments desperately need better storage density. For example, increasing government requirements for long term record storage mean that IT departments in the medial industry are increasingly stressed. As another example, the explosion of online media distribution (YouTubes, Napsters, and the like) require insane amounts of storage. You can't just keep making the data centers bigger. At some point you must increase the amount of storage each location can hold.
The home user is just one customer for hard drives, and probably not the one targeted for this capacity of hard drive (yet). However, think about the amount of storage required to store large amounts full-quality HD video on a DVR and you might see that in a few years time even the casual home user might require this amount of capacity.
Not so long ago a 10MB hard drive was considered huge and hard to fill to capacity.
Note that New York State is more than just New York City. The truth is that upstate many high-quality jobs *are* moving to other states due to high taxation, usually in areas where the loss of such jobs can further cripple an already devastated local economy.
Have you considered experimenting with VNC together with vnc2swf? Older versions of VNC exist for MacOS 8&9 (I understand the server may be shaky, though) and you may be able to turn the output of the viewer window into a Flash movie using vnc2swf. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks promising.
I certainly agree that when one has a standards-compliant browser available, then one should use it. However, some people truly don't have much of a choice.
For example, some people still use a 68k Mac. IIRC, the last available version of Netscape for 68k was version 4.0. If that user does not have sufficient means (money, computer proficiency, etc.) to upgrade the computer, then that user is stuck using the last product available.
Again, I am not necessarily disagreeing with your point, but perhaps we should be a little less aggressive with the clue bat if we wish to keep the Internet available to 'all of us'.
Still got some fully functioning Wang's here...
File this one under "Phrases you never want to hear at a nursing home".
As an Electrical Engineer child of one high school and one middle school teacher, and as the husband of an elementary school teacher, I sympathize with your surprise at the lack of truly useful (or at least current) applications of technology in education.
;-) material, time & money wasted on misapplication of technology, etc, then I assure you that far more time would be spent making sure that computers were deployed properly, securely, and for the right reasons.
The lack of understanding of current technologies among teachers/administrators is exemplified in the low wages, budget, and status of school IT departments (where they even exist) across the country. If school systems and the universites that train their staff knew what a danger such conditions posed in the form of internal and external cracking, exposure to "non-educational"
I live in Western New York - probably one of the better areas in the country for teacher training. We have several teaching colleges nearby - Fredonia State, Buffalo State, Daemon, UB - and most have little teacher training on the proper application of technology. UB does have a pretty decent campus network, but I'm not sure that translates into good computer training for the teachers that the university produces.
Perhaps the best discussion of technology and education I've read is Clifford Stoll's 'High Tech Heretic'. It is certainly worth a read for insight into the current state of computing in academia.
I would be interested in knowing how beneficial this would be across different types of blindness. Patient Alpha grew up with sight (two words - safety goggles) and one can presume he knew how the world was supposed to 'look' prior to decoding the phosphenes.
Would a person born blind be able to use this technology? If so, better or worse than a patient who had sight? On the one hand, a person born blind may not have any preconcieved notions about how the world is supposed to look and may be better at interpreting the phosphenes as the 'real world'. On the other hand, I wonder if the phosphenes would be interpretable at all to a visual cortex that has never learned how to see.
The book 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker may provide some assistance. It offers insight into how the brain perceives and develops language ability. While it doesn't contain explicit techniques for improving speech recognition, perhaps it will give you some ideas on how to develop your own exercises for training your hearing.