The maximum range of a cell tower is only useful if you are in the middle of nowhere where you don't expect many people to be using their phones. The real limitation is that a tower can only support a limited number of simultaneous connections. In order to solve this problem, the carriers adjust the radius of the tower, by adjusting the downward tilt of the antennas and probably the transmitting power as well. In very high density areas the radius will be very small, so that they can install lots of towers to support the large number of users.
This means that calculating how many towers you need is not a simple mathematical problem, but has to factor in population density, subscriber density, and knowledge of which areas are currently experiencing problems--as I am sure that are lots of areas where data speeds are just fine.
One of the selling points of this ad was that if you have old hardware that is too slow to run Windows, you should switch to Linux. I had just such a laptop sitting around, and decided to load Linux on it to see if it was worth keeping around. After wasting about half a day, I finally gave up and trashed the machine. I am a computer professional who has run Linux at home and on servers in the past, but I still ran into the following problems:
1. The Ubuntu and SuSE installers wouldn't even run. Debian was the only installer I could get to work.
2. After install, the network interface wasn't enabled by default, and I had to figure out how to automatically enable it on boot.
3. My PCMCIA wireless adapter was only sporadically detected, and even then I never got it to work.
4. I could never get Xorg to use my LCD's native resolution of 1024x768.
I know that many of you Linux gurus will say that I just didn't know what I was doing, but that is exactly my point. I am a very computer literate person--with some moderate Linux experience--and I had all these problems which weren't worth my time to work out. If I have this much trouble, how is a "normal" user supposed to just install it and get everything to work? You may bash Windows all you like, but the fact is, once I point it to the right device drivers, everything pretty much just works. Mac OS X doesn't even have this problem since it is built for a proprietary hardware platform. Linux may be fine for servers and specialized applications, but I don't expect it to replace Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop any time soon--if ever.
Everyone is talking about cord blood banking as if it is insurance, but it is not. Insurance contracts guarantee a payout if certain events happen. Cord blood banking mostly depends on future research making it become useful.
It sounds more like an investment in a startup company than an investment in an insurance policy--and I don't have $2800 to invest in a startup company.
MS has a bit of power, with their driver certification stuff
MS Driver certification can only go so far. Sure, they make sure that things like basic power management, device insertion, and device removal work properly, but MS has no way to test every feature of every driver out there. Since every driver works differently, any product-specific features are not verified by MS driver testing.
My real question to MS would be: If you want us to test Windows 7, why is there no download on the MSDN website? Expecting driver developers to use some pre-pre-pre-beta that they obtained because they happened to attend WinHEC is silly--put it up on your self-proclaimed developer network. BTW, the one engineer I know who attended WinHEC is still waiting for his copy to arrive--so there is not much Windows 7 testing going on here!
That is a pretty big task to prepare high school students to enter the computer workforce. Unfortunately this way of thinking about careers in computers is preparing your students for what are becoming (have become?) commodity dead-end jobs. I say this because the computer careers which can be had with nothing more than high school and technical certifications are either hard to find or low-paying without much promotion potential. If this were 1998 you could get away with it, but not today.
I think that you should forget about making your students expert programmers, and focus on activities which will be fun, interesting, and encourage them to enter the computer field in general--with the intent being for them to go to college. The key is that they are doing something so that at the end of the class they will say, "boy, I can't believe we were able to do that." This could involve basic robotics, or just about anything else, but probably not poring over the details of sorting a binary tree.
I never had to figure anything out using documentation until my senior year in college...up until that we (the students) were always spoon-fed information. You should have seen the outcry from the other students when the TAs said "So you read the manual and don't know how to do this? Maybe you should read the manual again."
That was one of my most effective classes in college because it focused on learning things yourself, but I am not sure it is the best way to get people introduced to computers/programming.
Everyone always is scared to have people learn on C, but I initially learned to program with a copy of Turbo C and its help function. Since I didn't know any "easy" languages like BASIC or Pascal, it seemed perfectly natural to have to learn about pointers and C-strings.
Ultimately this kid should just be taught the proper tools for whatever end he wants to achieve. If he wants to do web programming, teach PHP and HTML, if he wants to do text processing, teach him a scripting language that suits the task. If he wants to program embedded controllers, teach him C. Sure, you might be able to do something with BASIC, but that just means he's going to have to re-learn to program later when he does something "real." I have yet to see BASIC used anywhere in my career.
You will also have to use whatever teaching method works for him. I learn well by having example programs and an API reference available. Other people prefer to read a whole book before they start, and others want someone standing over them telling them what to do. Only you know your kid, so you will have to let him decide how he wants to learn.
If your kid really wants to program you won't have to dumb things down for him, just help him do what he wants, and let him go.
Plus which, having worked as a service tech, I can tell you this: you're right, they weren't randomly looking through his pictures. They were systematically searching his drive looking for anything entertaining. Just his bad luck that they found kiddie porn, and the only reason it got reported was probably because their supervisor was looking over their shoulder enjoying the show right along with them! Otherwise they'd just have made copies for their own consumption and nobody would have been the wiser.
Agreed. When I worked at a computer store ten years ago, some of the techs would search every machine for porn to add to their collection. One particularly perverted employee used to brag about how many cds he had filled with the stuff.
That being said, the same thing happened at our store. One of the techs found child pornography, reported it to the police, and then I believe there was a lawsuit against the store. The tech ended up resigning. He had been working on starting his own company, and the whole chain of events ended up giving him a kick in the pants to do it.
I don't know what happened to the person who brought the machine in...the rest of us just heard what happened through rumors. The store owner didn't exactly want to make the event too public.
I managed a university computer lab, and we ended up using DeepFreeze everywhere, with NetSupport School in those locations where classes would be held.
We used to use restricted accounts, but this prevented many professors from doing things they wanted to with their classes--such as changing desktop settings and installing software. You have to remember that computer education involves using the computers as well as the applications. Using DeepFreeze allows the students to mess everything up they want, and a simple reboot fixes it all again. We scheduled our computers to unlock themselves at 11pm, perform automatic system updates and virus definition updates, then reboot in locked mode at 5am, well before our lab opened in the morning.
As far as the solution to distracted students, we used NetSupport School to solve this (netsupport-inc.com). This allows the teacher to lock the screens of students, blank their screens, take control, etc... It even allows the teacher to do things like push files across the network to student computers, remotely launch applications, and display a student's computer on the teacher's machine (which would presumably be connected to a projector, allowing the student to give a presentation from their own desk). It's not perfect software, but with some practice it is a very useful tool.
I am not affiliated with either of these companies, and no longer work with computer labs, but I spent a couple years dinking around with the same problem you have before finding this combination.
One of the reasons this would be hard to implement with a handheld circular saw is that when the blade is stopped in the table saw, the momentum transfers to a mechanism which drops the blade below the table very quickly. In a handheld saw, any mechanism which quickly stops the blade would probably twist the saw out of your other hand, and cause all sorts of problems--aside from not getting the blade out of the way like it can in a table saw.
Not providing technical support is a catch-22. You are supposedly saving time, training, and money by not supporting Linux, but if I sell a product and then refuse to support it, I then look bad. Public image is in many cases more important than the revenue that could have been generated by selling the product.
I work for a company that makes hardware and software (non-gaming), and we would definately prefer to be known for not offering a product than for providing lousy support, as it is precisely for our support that we are known.
Linux then presents a difficult issue. We make a list of distributions that we do support, and anything else is unsupported. We work in a fairly specialized field, and most of our Linux offerings are free drivers, so it is easy enough just to tell people to work with one of the three distributions we support if they want to use our products. Even still we are always receiving requests from people using all sorts of crazy distributions, and the effort and cost to validate our products and provide support is prohibitive.
One difficulty which we encounter, is that not every product we release is on the same release schedule. In Windows, releasing every year or 18 months is just fine, because it is a very stable platform. With our Linux drivers; however, they are out of date almost as soon as they release. This means that the latest drivers for our various products are not always compatible with the same versions of distributions. This is fine for open source software where everyone can compile their own version, but doesn't work well for commercial software.
I work for a hardware and software company and I can completely understand why a company would decide to drop Linux. While we are slowly expanding our Linux offerings, we pretty much only do so when we have a customer lined up committed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if we release for Linux. In other words, Linux support is treated as custom development.
It just isn't profitable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to port a product to Linux if you are only going to sell a couple hundred copies to the few people who want it on Linux (Or in our case, a couple hundred hardware units if we develop a driver). Until somebody BIG demands it, it is much more profitable to stick with Windows.
Granted, our products are already a niche on Windows, so Linux users make up a very small number of customers.
We are using Symantec Corporate on about 300 machines and had to deal with a total of three Novarg infections, and these were people who ran it before we could get new definitions out. Our server checks for updates several times a day and then pushes it out to all the clients automatically, so that we are never more than a few hours behind the latest defs. We decided to do it this way because Symantec doesn't have a set time of day that they release definitions, so there is no 'best time' to download them.
On the other hand, SAV has been a pain because their interface sucks. You have to go through about four levels in a context menu to see the virus history of a machine. Their alerting server is buggy and has very few configuration options. For example, if I have notifications turned on and one computer gets infected and has 1000 copies of a virus on it, I will get 1000 emails or pop up boxes or whatever it may be.
I know Trend Micro has options like "Notify me if we have x infections in y minutes." Much more powerful, but then we have a site license for Symantec and no money to buy something different, so we are stuck.
It's not my biggest mistake, but certainly the most memorable. I was working as a tech at a computer store and needed the replace the switch on a power supply, but I forgot to unplug the power cord. I succeeded in creating a nice fireworks show and welding a screwdriver to the case--all with the machine's owner watching!
Even more surprising is that he gave me a $20 tip when I carried his machine out to his car!
I have experimented with both DeepFreeze and another product called CleanSlate, but I have never had the time to get past some initial tests, and have never rolled anything out into our lab. I have never heard of Centurion Guard, but I looked at their website and it looks interesting. Same concept, but who knows, maybe it will be better than what I have tried so far.
If you've seen a large pipe organ they can consist of thousands of pipes spread over a rather large area. The acoustic effect of having different tones coming from totally different areas of an auditorium is completely different than placing a hundred speakers throughout and having every one of them replicating the same sound.
There's more to it than that...but that's all I feel qualified to bring up.
Agreed, this is by no means a pipe organ as the title of the post says, just a rather advanced electronic organ.
A large pipe organ will have thousands of pipes, but looking back into the article it does not state that 74 pipes will be represented, but 74 audio channels and therefore 74 speakers.
That would explain the large amount of computing power needed, you have to receive the input, and quickly retrieve/generate enough audio data to represent potentially thousands of pipes in 74 independent audio channels.
I was dissapointed that there is no educational pricing for Educational support. We are in the process of moving from some Solaris boxes to Linux, and just paid $800 for RHEL ES. At least once we become more comfortable with it we will be able to forego the support and save some cash, but as it is now Redhat support is more expensive than the support we receive from Sun, which covers software and hardware, and have something like a 30-40% educational discount.
Of course we can buy 4 Intel boxes for the price of a single Sun, so it goes both ways.
I would just like to point out that none of the headaches came from phone support, as I had already done everything I could and had the problem narrowed down to the motherboard and/or cpu, so the calls were short. Being any more of a guru would not have helped in the least because the parts were physically damaged and had to be replaced by Dell under their warranty restrictions.
I myself have spent eight years troubleshooting and repairing computers, and I know exactly what you mean about computers working on the bench but not later. I was not upset the first time it came back not working. I wasn't even too upset the second time, but after the third time they failed to solve my problem I decided they were probably focusing more on a fast turnaround time than actually making sure the computer was fixed.
Perhaps it was fixed every time and it was damaged in transit three times consecutively. If that is the case that Dell should really switch carriers.
1. 10 minutes on the phone to determine laptop motherboard is dead, so I ship my laptop in (they pay for it)
2. 2 days later I get it back, but this time it is in even worse shape. Another 10 minutes on the phone and I mail it in again.
3. 2 days later I get it back again, seems to work fine, until I realize that it will no longer charge the battery.
4. Finally I gave in and upgraded to on-site service, and my computer was fixed and working in another two days.
Needless to say I was not too happy that with three trips to their depot they still couldn't properly fix my problem. It seems like their techs should have at least tried turning on my computer before shipping it back.
I buy Dells all the time at work, but I think when it comes time to replace my personal computer I will either go somewhere else or build my own (not a laptop obviously).
I don't care if the new technology is cheap, as long as it drives down the price of the old. It would be fine with me if something better moved in and made LCD prices go the way of the CRT.
I think the idea of a rating system is good, but I would say the current one is broken, at least for movies. They should also be enforced by parents, not legislation.
Movie ratings seem to mean absolutely nothing, and appear to be randomly assigned. Some PG movies contain more violence than many PG-13 movies. PG-13 seems to go all the way from 'Mentioned smoking' to 'tasteful frontal nudity.' I think that ratings need to be applied in a manner which actually indicate the content of a movie, rather than being some arbitrary classification.
As far as enforcement of ratings, that has to be up to the parents. It is a parent's responsibility to teach and guide their children, and they should be deciding what set of moral standards should be passed on to their children. As the primary money source for young children is shouldn't be too hard to monitor the purchase of inappropiate materials. Once a teenager is earning their own money, it becomes a lot harder to enforce, but they also have to be trusted more to make their own decisions.
When parents trust a law to decide what is appropriate for their children they are giving the permission to someone else to decide. The moral standards of many people will not change nearly as fast as the moral standards of the media industry. Even if I agree with what the lawmakers say is appropriate today, I may not tomorrow.
My current stance is that I ignore movie ratings. I try to hold myself to a cleaner standard for movies than many people who post here, so for me even many PG-13 movies include more sex and violence than I would prefer. I find myself visiting sites like screenit.com to see a breakdown of why the movie received the rating it did.
Re:Can't beat a handbuilt house
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 1
My father is a contractor and he always told me about a local church that involved custom plaster work. He said the people working on it were 75 year olds because nobody younger knew how to do it by hand anymore, since everything now comes pre-molded.
I don't think anyone has said that a family should all share a single computer, just that they should be placed in public areas of the house. My family consists of two people and we wouldn't know what to do with only one computer as we are both college students.
As far as where to place the computer, I like the strategy my parents used with our stuff growing up. If they bought it, they decided where, when, and if it would be used. If we bought it, we did whatever we wanted to with it. For example, my sister's car would get taken away, because she didn't pay for it, but I paid for my own so my parents would never restrict me from it.
The same went with computers. Any computer my parents bought went into a room where any family member could enter at any time. Once I bought my own it went in my bedroom.
Slashdot Mirror
The maximum range of a cell tower is only useful if you are in the middle of nowhere where you don't expect many people to be using their phones. The real limitation is that a tower can only support a limited number of simultaneous connections. In order to solve this problem, the carriers adjust the radius of the tower, by adjusting the downward tilt of the antennas and probably the transmitting power as well. In very high density areas the radius will be very small, so that they can install lots of towers to support the large number of users. This means that calculating how many towers you need is not a simple mathematical problem, but has to factor in population density, subscriber density, and knowledge of which areas are currently experiencing problems--as I am sure that are lots of areas where data speeds are just fine.
One of the selling points of this ad was that if you have old hardware that is too slow to run Windows, you should switch to Linux. I had just such a laptop sitting around, and decided to load Linux on it to see if it was worth keeping around. After wasting about half a day, I finally gave up and trashed the machine. I am a computer professional who has run Linux at home and on servers in the past, but I still ran into the following problems:
1. The Ubuntu and SuSE installers wouldn't even run. Debian was the only installer I could get to work.
2. After install, the network interface wasn't enabled by default, and I had to figure out how to automatically enable it on boot.
3. My PCMCIA wireless adapter was only sporadically detected, and even then I never got it to work.
4. I could never get Xorg to use my LCD's native resolution of 1024x768.
I know that many of you Linux gurus will say that I just didn't know what I was doing, but that is exactly my point. I am a very computer literate person--with some moderate Linux experience--and I had all these problems which weren't worth my time to work out. If I have this much trouble, how is a "normal" user supposed to just install it and get everything to work? You may bash Windows all you like, but the fact is, once I point it to the right device drivers, everything pretty much just works. Mac OS X doesn't even have this problem since it is built for a proprietary hardware platform. Linux may be fine for servers and specialized applications, but I don't expect it to replace Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop any time soon--if ever.
Everyone is talking about cord blood banking as if it is insurance, but it is not. Insurance contracts guarantee a payout if certain events happen. Cord blood banking mostly depends on future research making it become useful.
It sounds more like an investment in a startup company than an investment in an insurance policy--and I don't have $2800 to invest in a startup company.
Mine is sophisticated enough to crash and display some sort of panic screen on my TV.
MS has a bit of power, with their driver certification stuff
MS Driver certification can only go so far. Sure, they make sure that things like basic power management, device insertion, and device removal work properly, but MS has no way to test every feature of every driver out there. Since every driver works differently, any product-specific features are not verified by MS driver testing.
My real question to MS would be: If you want us to test Windows 7, why is there no download on the MSDN website? Expecting driver developers to use some pre-pre-pre-beta that they obtained because they happened to attend WinHEC is silly--put it up on your self-proclaimed developer network. BTW, the one engineer I know who attended WinHEC is still waiting for his copy to arrive--so there is not much Windows 7 testing going on here!
That is a pretty big task to prepare high school students to enter the computer workforce. Unfortunately this way of thinking about careers in computers is preparing your students for what are becoming (have become?) commodity dead-end jobs. I say this because the computer careers which can be had with nothing more than high school and technical certifications are either hard to find or low-paying without much promotion potential. If this were 1998 you could get away with it, but not today.
I think that you should forget about making your students expert programmers, and focus on activities which will be fun, interesting, and encourage them to enter the computer field in general--with the intent being for them to go to college. The key is that they are doing something so that at the end of the class they will say, "boy, I can't believe we were able to do that." This could involve basic robotics, or just about anything else, but probably not poring over the details of sorting a binary tree.
I never had to figure anything out using documentation until my senior year in college...up until that we (the students) were always spoon-fed information. You should have seen the outcry from the other students when the TAs said "So you read the manual and don't know how to do this? Maybe you should read the manual again." That was one of my most effective classes in college because it focused on learning things yourself, but I am not sure it is the best way to get people introduced to computers/programming.
Everyone always is scared to have people learn on C, but I initially learned to program with a copy of Turbo C and its help function. Since I didn't know any "easy" languages like BASIC or Pascal, it seemed perfectly natural to have to learn about pointers and C-strings.
Ultimately this kid should just be taught the proper tools for whatever end he wants to achieve. If he wants to do web programming, teach PHP and HTML, if he wants to do text processing, teach him a scripting language that suits the task. If he wants to program embedded controllers, teach him C. Sure, you might be able to do something with BASIC, but that just means he's going to have to re-learn to program later when he does something "real." I have yet to see BASIC used anywhere in my career.
You will also have to use whatever teaching method works for him. I learn well by having example programs and an API reference available. Other people prefer to read a whole book before they start, and others want someone standing over them telling them what to do. Only you know your kid, so you will have to let him decide how he wants to learn.
If your kid really wants to program you won't have to dumb things down for him, just help him do what he wants, and let him go.
Agreed. When I worked at a computer store ten years ago, some of the techs would search every machine for porn to add to their collection. One particularly perverted employee used to brag about how many cds he had filled with the stuff.
That being said, the same thing happened at our store. One of the techs found child pornography, reported it to the police, and then I believe there was a lawsuit against the store. The tech ended up resigning. He had been working on starting his own company, and the whole chain of events ended up giving him a kick in the pants to do it.
I don't know what happened to the person who brought the machine in...the rest of us just heard what happened through rumors. The store owner didn't exactly want to make the event too public.
I managed a university computer lab, and we ended up using DeepFreeze everywhere, with NetSupport School in those locations where classes would be held.
We used to use restricted accounts, but this prevented many professors from doing things they wanted to with their classes--such as changing desktop settings and installing software. You have to remember that computer education involves using the computers as well as the applications. Using DeepFreeze allows the students to mess everything up they want, and a simple reboot fixes it all again. We scheduled our computers to unlock themselves at 11pm, perform automatic system updates and virus definition updates, then reboot in locked mode at 5am, well before our lab opened in the morning.
As far as the solution to distracted students, we used NetSupport School to solve this (netsupport-inc.com). This allows the teacher to lock the screens of students, blank their screens, take control, etc... It even allows the teacher to do things like push files across the network to student computers, remotely launch applications, and display a student's computer on the teacher's machine (which would presumably be connected to a projector, allowing the student to give a presentation from their own desk). It's not perfect software, but with some practice it is a very useful tool.
I am not affiliated with either of these companies, and no longer work with computer labs, but I spent a couple years dinking around with the same problem you have before finding this combination.
One of the reasons this would be hard to implement with a handheld circular saw is that when the blade is stopped in the table saw, the momentum transfers to a mechanism which drops the blade below the table very quickly. In a handheld saw, any mechanism which quickly stops the blade would probably twist the saw out of your other hand, and cause all sorts of problems--aside from not getting the blade out of the way like it can in a table saw.
Not providing technical support is a catch-22. You are supposedly saving time, training, and money by not supporting Linux, but if I sell a product and then refuse to support it, I then look bad. Public image is in many cases more important than the revenue that could have been generated by selling the product.
I work for a company that makes hardware and software (non-gaming), and we would definately prefer to be known for not offering a product than for providing lousy support, as it is precisely for our support that we are known.
Linux then presents a difficult issue. We make a list of distributions that we do support, and anything else is unsupported. We work in a fairly specialized field, and most of our Linux offerings are free drivers, so it is easy enough just to tell people to work with one of the three distributions we support if they want to use our products. Even still we are always receiving requests from people using all sorts of crazy distributions, and the effort and cost to validate our products and provide support is prohibitive.
One difficulty which we encounter, is that not every product we release is on the same release schedule. In Windows, releasing every year or 18 months is just fine, because it is a very stable platform. With our Linux drivers; however, they are out of date almost as soon as they release. This means that the latest drivers for our various products are not always compatible with the same versions of distributions. This is fine for open source software where everyone can compile their own version, but doesn't work well for commercial software.
I work for a hardware and software company and I can completely understand why a company would decide to drop Linux. While we are slowly expanding our Linux offerings, we pretty much only do so when we have a customer lined up committed to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars if we release for Linux. In other words, Linux support is treated as custom development.
It just isn't profitable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to port a product to Linux if you are only going to sell a couple hundred copies to the few people who want it on Linux (Or in our case, a couple hundred hardware units if we develop a driver). Until somebody BIG demands it, it is much more profitable to stick with Windows.
Granted, our products are already a niche on Windows, so Linux users make up a very small number of customers.
We are using Symantec Corporate on about 300 machines and had to deal with a total of three Novarg infections, and these were people who ran it before we could get new definitions out. Our server checks for updates several times a day and then pushes it out to all the clients automatically, so that we are never more than a few hours behind the latest defs. We decided to do it this way because Symantec doesn't have a set time of day that they release definitions, so there is no 'best time' to download them.
On the other hand, SAV has been a pain because their interface sucks. You have to go through about four levels in a context menu to see the virus history of a machine. Their alerting server is buggy and has very few configuration options. For example, if I have notifications turned on and one computer gets infected and has 1000 copies of a virus on it, I will get 1000 emails or pop up boxes or whatever it may be.
I know Trend Micro has options like "Notify me if we have x infections in y minutes." Much more powerful, but then we have a site license for Symantec and no money to buy something different, so we are stuck.
It's not my biggest mistake, but certainly the most memorable. I was working as a tech at a computer store and needed the replace the switch on a power supply, but I forgot to unplug the power cord. I succeeded in creating a nice fireworks show and welding a screwdriver to the case--all with the machine's owner watching!
Even more surprising is that he gave me a $20 tip when I carried his machine out to his car!
I have experimented with both DeepFreeze and another product called CleanSlate, but I have never had the time to get past some initial tests, and have never rolled anything out into our lab. I have never heard of Centurion Guard, but I looked at their website and it looks interesting. Same concept, but who knows, maybe it will be better than what I have tried so far.
If you've seen a large pipe organ they can consist of thousands of pipes spread over a rather large area. The acoustic effect of having different tones coming from totally different areas of an auditorium is completely different than placing a hundred speakers throughout and having every one of them replicating the same sound.
There's more to it than that...but that's all I feel qualified to bring up.
Agreed, this is by no means a pipe organ as the title of the post says, just a rather advanced electronic organ.
A large pipe organ will have thousands of pipes, but looking back into the article it does not state that 74 pipes will be represented, but 74 audio channels and therefore 74 speakers.
That would explain the large amount of computing power needed, you have to receive the input, and quickly retrieve/generate enough audio data to represent potentially thousands of pipes in 74 independent audio channels.
I was dissapointed that there is no educational pricing for Educational support. We are in the process of moving from some Solaris boxes to Linux, and just paid $800 for RHEL ES. At least once we become more comfortable with it we will be able to forego the support and save some cash, but as it is now Redhat support is more expensive than the support we receive from Sun, which covers software and hardware, and have something like a 30-40% educational discount.
Of course we can buy 4 Intel boxes for the price of a single Sun, so it goes both ways.
I would just like to point out that none of the headaches came from phone support, as I had already done everything I could and had the problem narrowed down to the motherboard and/or cpu, so the calls were short. Being any more of a guru would not have helped in the least because the parts were physically damaged and had to be replaced by Dell under their warranty restrictions.
I myself have spent eight years troubleshooting and repairing computers, and I know exactly what you mean about computers working on the bench but not later. I was not upset the first time it came back not working. I wasn't even too upset the second time, but after the third time they failed to solve my problem I decided they were probably focusing more on a fast turnaround time than actually making sure the computer was fixed.
Perhaps it was fixed every time and it was damaged in transit three times consecutively. If that is the case that Dell should really switch carriers.
My experience with Dell was this:
1. 10 minutes on the phone to determine laptop motherboard is dead, so I ship my laptop in (they pay for it)
2. 2 days later I get it back, but this time it is in even worse shape. Another 10 minutes on the phone and I mail it in again.
3. 2 days later I get it back again, seems to work fine, until I realize that it will no longer charge the battery.
4. Finally I gave in and upgraded to on-site service, and my computer was fixed and working in another two days.
Needless to say I was not too happy that with three trips to their depot they still couldn't properly fix my problem. It seems like their techs should have at least tried turning on my computer before shipping it back. I buy Dells all the time at work, but I think when it comes time to replace my personal computer I will either go somewhere else or build my own (not a laptop obviously).
I don't care if the new technology is cheap, as long as it drives down the price of the old. It would be fine with me if something better moved in and made LCD prices go the way of the CRT.
I think the idea of a rating system is good, but I would say the current one is broken, at least for movies. They should also be enforced by parents, not legislation.
Movie ratings seem to mean absolutely nothing, and appear to be randomly assigned. Some PG movies contain more violence than many PG-13 movies. PG-13 seems to go all the way from 'Mentioned smoking' to 'tasteful frontal nudity.' I think that ratings need to be applied in a manner which actually indicate the content of a movie, rather than being some arbitrary classification.
As far as enforcement of ratings, that has to be up to the parents. It is a parent's responsibility to teach and guide their children, and they should be deciding what set of moral standards should be passed on to their children. As the primary money source for young children is shouldn't be too hard to monitor the purchase of inappropiate materials. Once a teenager is earning their own money, it becomes a lot harder to enforce, but they also have to be trusted more to make their own decisions.
When parents trust a law to decide what is appropriate for their children they are giving the permission to someone else to decide. The moral standards of many people will not change nearly as fast as the moral standards of the media industry. Even if I agree with what the lawmakers say is appropriate today, I may not tomorrow.
My current stance is that I ignore movie ratings. I try to hold myself to a cleaner standard for movies than many people who post here, so for me even many PG-13 movies include more sex and violence than I would prefer. I find myself visiting sites like screenit.com to see a breakdown of why the movie received the rating it did.
My father is a contractor and he always told me about a local church that involved custom plaster work. He said the people working on it were 75 year olds because nobody younger knew how to do it by hand anymore, since everything now comes pre-molded.
I don't think anyone has said that a family should all share a single computer, just that they should be placed in public areas of the house. My family consists of two people and we wouldn't know what to do with only one computer as we are both college students.
As far as where to place the computer, I like the strategy my parents used with our stuff growing up. If they bought it, they decided where, when, and if it would be used. If we bought it, we did whatever we wanted to with it. For example, my sister's car would get taken away, because she didn't pay for it, but I paid for my own so my parents would never restrict me from it.
The same went with computers. Any computer my parents bought went into a room where any family member could enter at any time. Once I bought my own it went in my bedroom.