Were this just an isolated incident, I would be screaming hoax with the best of you; however, given PayPal's handling of a recent charity case, where a group had their account suspended after trying to raise money to buy presents for poor children, I'm not so sure. Quote PayPal's support: "You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people."
Meh. This idea has been bouncing around for a while now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8YIR60Ij0
Though the application demonstrated in the video was for a slightly different purpose, it would be an additional benefit, should the need arise.
I do this exact thing and use mp3fs on Ubuntu to allow me to quickly transcode files for use in iTunes. You basically mount your directory containing the FLAC files in fstab as something like/media/music/mp3s and voila, instant mp3s with tags. Works great!
This has been my experience too. I was in the Netherlands and was only able to get voice, not data, as I was not a resident (US citizen)--though I was going to be there for a month. I'm going there on Saturday and would love to have data whilst I travel around. If Germany is covered too, that would be great.
I too believe that Moodle should be included; however, there are some issues in your post I'd like to address:
Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT.
Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.
While Moodle is very feature-rich--we use it in a limited fashion on our campus--the easy thing to forget here is what that additional $60,000 (far less at our institution) gets you: 24/7 support. While I am a huge support of OSS and encourage the use of it on campus, the LMS/CMS is mission critical: if something breaks, the universities mission is hampered; ergo, we cannot afford downtime.
For Moodle, there is not a group of people I can call at 2:00 AM in the morning to fix something. And for $60,000, I cannot afford to hire the staff to do this, so financially, it makes sense to go commercial.
That's not to say that OSS precludes this. There are a number of companies that provide support OSS (Unicon comes to mind). Our concern with them, though, is that they do not "own" the product. If the product goes in one direction, but the company prefers another, what happens? A branch/spin off?
What if development on the product stops--as has happened with some OSS projects? With a commercial product, we have a contract that the company will continue to support the product until the end of the contract. Again, this is another benefit the $60,000 buys us: stability.
So to wrap up, I think Moodle is great and is definitely one of many success stories of OSS, but there are benefits with going commercial as well. In fact, we are in an LMS RFP process right now and discussed that very issue, and it really came down to a support and stability issue for us. That being the case, we decided to only look at commercial products, but have recommended that a thorough feasibility study be performed to see if our system can support an OSS LMS in the future.
just ask AOL how they do it. Then again, their storage methord is probably more distributed than the submitter would like.
There's also the question on data retention/recovery. I alone must have thrown out about a hundred or so discs or at best used them as coasters.
Perhaps a Palm LifeDrive will suit your needs:
$400? Check.
Wi-Fi & Bluetooth? Check.
Mass-storage device? Depends on how you define "mass" storage. It has a 4GB HDD, with expansion via an SD slot. (tentative) Check.
4-5 Hours battery life? Check.
Keyboard It has a virtual keyboard and graffiti. A free wireless keyboard came with mine. Check.
Landscape mode for surfing the web or looking at pictures? Check.
Plus it has a drive mode for acting like a USB mass storage device, a camera mode for use with digital cameras, and comes loaded with software. Want to edit your office documents? Use Docs2Go. Want to listen to your music? It comes with PocketTunes. It's even got solitaire.
The Palm initiative at USD was only a two-year program and is no longer active. I believe it was a project ahead of its time that was not largely successful due primarily to one simple fact: the Palms were intimately tied to the desktop.
Palms were provided, but there was no way to really utilize them if the students didn't have their own computer, and all the money was spent on the Palms, not for infrastructure to do such things (there was no central syncing server). IR sync stations, that could pull information onto the Palms, were distributed across the campus, but they were slow and cumbersome to use.
While the infrastructure was added for the second year, by that time things kinda fizzled. Lots of m500s could be had for cheap, both on campus and on eBay (heck, I even traded a keg for one).
I think it would have been more successful if today's Palms would have been available, simply due to the advent of wireless (Bluetooth, 802.11b/g), though "more successful" != "success." There were more fundamental issues at play too, but I won't get into them here.
There are still a number of other projects going on like streaming media, wireless technologies, biometrics, etc., as well as many smaller PDA projects. What I find most amusing is that DSU is supposed to be the "computer school" for the state, yet is never ranked in such surveys.
Finally, students do have USENET access, even though the survey doesn't say so. And if it'd move us up a couple of places, I'd be happy to stream the KAOR (sounds like "core" == campus radio) from my desktop.
...but this looks like the first time it's ever been available on DVD.
Actually, MORE is on the Film-Fest DVD - Issue 2 - Cannes released in 1999--the main reason I purchased it; well, that and the picture of Selma Hayek on the front (yum). Just do a search on Amazon or your favorite DVD shoppe.
...but I can't believe how the MPAA and RIAA can continually find the strangest sources to blame for their problems instead of addressing their flawed business models. And just when I was getting a soft spot in my heart (albeit a very small one) for the MPAA as they were keeping some movies cheaper than their respective soundtracks.
I haven't seen any of the movies referenced, so I cannot say whether or not they sucked. What I can say is that word of mouth has dictated that I not see them, because of those whose opinions I hold in high regard. What next! Are you gonna have to sign an NDA before seeing a movie?
Slashdot Mirror
Were this just an isolated incident, I would be screaming hoax with the best of you; however, given PayPal's handling of a recent charity case, where a group had their account suspended after trying to raise money to buy presents for poor children, I'm not so sure. Quote PayPal's support: "You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people."
http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0/
Meh. This idea has been bouncing around for a while now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN8YIR60Ij0 Though the application demonstrated in the video was for a slightly different purpose, it would be an additional benefit, should the need arise.
I do this exact thing and use mp3fs on Ubuntu to allow me to quickly transcode files for use in iTunes. You basically mount your directory containing the FLAC files in fstab as something like /media/music/mp3s and voila, instant mp3s with tags. Works great!
This has been my experience too. I was in the Netherlands and was only able to get voice, not data, as I was not a resident (US citizen)--though I was going to be there for a month. I'm going there on Saturday and would love to have data whilst I travel around. If Germany is covered too, that would be great.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1237423/Stolen-Auschwitz-sign-Arbeit-macht-frei-turns-hundreds-miles-away-cut-pieces.html
Frog blast the vent core!
Um, then Slimer would be played by both Ralph Bellamy & Don Ameche?
Actually, it can use a Windows-based installer: Wubi
Actually, it was the other way around, though they officially refer to it as a merger.
Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.
While Moodle is very feature-rich--we use it in a limited fashion on our campus--the easy thing to forget here is what that additional $60,000 (far less at our institution) gets you: 24/7 support. While I am a huge support of OSS and encourage the use of it on campus, the LMS/CMS is mission critical: if something breaks, the universities mission is hampered; ergo, we cannot afford downtime.
For Moodle, there is not a group of people I can call at 2:00 AM in the morning to fix something. And for $60,000, I cannot afford to hire the staff to do this, so financially, it makes sense to go commercial.
That's not to say that OSS precludes this. There are a number of companies that provide support OSS (Unicon comes to mind). Our concern with them, though, is that they do not "own" the product. If the product goes in one direction, but the company prefers another, what happens? A branch/spin off?
What if development on the product stops--as has happened with some OSS projects? With a commercial product, we have a contract that the company will continue to support the product until the end of the contract. Again, this is another benefit the $60,000 buys us: stability.
So to wrap up, I think Moodle is great and is definitely one of many success stories of OSS, but there are benefits with going commercial as well. In fact, we are in an LMS RFP process right now and discussed that very issue, and it really came down to a support and stability issue for us. That being the case, we decided to only look at commercial products, but have recommended that a thorough feasibility study be performed to see if our system can support an OSS LMS in the future.
just ask AOL how they do it. Then again, their storage methord is probably more distributed than the submitter would like. There's also the question on data retention/recovery. I alone must have thrown out about a hundred or so discs or at best used them as coasters.
Perhaps a Palm LifeDrive will suit your needs: $400? Check. Wi-Fi & Bluetooth? Check. Mass-storage device? Depends on how you define "mass" storage. It has a 4GB HDD, with expansion via an SD slot. (tentative) Check. 4-5 Hours battery life? Check. Keyboard It has a virtual keyboard and graffiti. A free wireless keyboard came with mine. Check. Landscape mode for surfing the web or looking at pictures? Check. Plus it has a drive mode for acting like a USB mass storage device, a camera mode for use with digital cameras, and comes loaded with software. Want to edit your office documents? Use Docs2Go. Want to listen to your music? It comes with PocketTunes. It's even got solitaire.
Yes, because one thing that doesn't come with MS-Office is amore. And we could all use a little more love.
Palms were provided, but there was no way to really utilize them if the students didn't have their own computer, and all the money was spent on the Palms, not for infrastructure to do such things (there was no central syncing server). IR sync stations, that could pull information onto the Palms, were distributed across the campus, but they were slow and cumbersome to use.
While the infrastructure was added for the second year, by that time things kinda fizzled. Lots of m500s could be had for cheap, both on campus and on eBay (heck, I even traded a keg for one).
I think it would have been more successful if today's Palms would have been available, simply due to the advent of wireless (Bluetooth, 802.11b/g), though "more successful" != "success." There were more fundamental issues at play too, but I won't get into them here.
There are still a number of other projects going on like streaming media, wireless technologies, biometrics, etc., as well as many smaller PDA projects. What I find most amusing is that DSU is supposed to be the "computer school" for the state, yet is never ranked in such surveys.
Finally, students do have USENET access, even though the survey doesn't say so. And if it'd move us up a couple of places, I'd be happy to stream the KAOR (sounds like "core" == campus radio) from my desktop.
Actually, MORE is on the Film-Fest DVD - Issue 2 - Cannes released in 1999--the main reason I purchased it; well, that and the picture of Selma Hayek on the front (yum). Just do a search on Amazon or your favorite DVD shoppe.
...skip the middle man and go directly to Xerox.
...profit
I haven't seen any of the movies referenced, so I cannot say whether or not they sucked. What I can say is that word of mouth has dictated that I not see them, because of those whose opinions I hold in high regard. What next! Are you gonna have to sign an NDA before seeing a movie?
For those of you who do not know what FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is, here's the link to the SourceForge page: http://flac.sourceforge.net/
You mean something that Microsoft was involved with was "full of flaws in both design and execution!" Say it isn't so...
two fish
red fish
blue fish
Black fish
blue fish
old fish
new glow-in-the-dark zebra fish(tm)
Copyright Dr. Seuss 1960
Indeed, as if I needed another reason not to buy Kenny G CDs... Bean, Bird, Newk, the Prez, Trane, and Tram all breathe a sigh of relief....
Lasted way longer than I expected (and longer than it should have, for that matter...)