Backblazeâ(TM)s pods cost $7,500 for 135TB or $55 per TB.
Letâ(TM)s be generous and say one employee needs to maintain a Pod once per month for one hour (way higher than our server management). Letâ(TM)s assume they consume 1KW of power each. Even if the pod burned out every other year, unlikely but weâ(TM)ll be generous, to Amazon that works out to ($3750) + (12 months*$100/hr) + ($0.10/KWh * 24hr * 365 days) = $5826/12 = $485 per month / 135 TB = $3.59 per TB per month. Thatâ(TM)s assuming a 50% failure rate in HDDs per year.
Letâ(TM)s also not forget bandwidth. Backblaze is looking to upgrade to 10gbps for their datacenter (OC-192). Which runs about $200k per month from what limited data I could find. They currently have 40Petabytes which works out to $200k/40kTB = $5 per month per TB.
So our total is about $9TB per month for Backblaze vs $30TB per month for AWS.
But thatâ(TM)s just my estimate. You could easily cut almost all of those support time costs. You could very easily get 4 years not 2 years out of a pod and you could probably use green drives that use less than 200watts cutting your power by 80%. In other words $9TB is generous and assuming that they actually need 10gbps right now.
I have a RED camera which shoots 18megapixel raw photos at 24+ frames per second. Backblaze hasn't throttled me at all and I have 20mbps upload speeds.
Yeah, that's not why you ration. You ration because you want to be "The Place That Has Hard Drives" and hopefully have your customers buy a pallete of diapers or a bigscreen TV while they're at the store. A customer who gets nothing is worse than a customer who only gets a reasonable amount.
Amazon had a debt to equity ratio of 15:1. If you view the nation of the United States as the potential equity of the country (that could hypothetically be nationalized) then the US Debt to Equity Ratio is more like 1:10.
I come from a religious background (private school K-12 etc). They aren't just "bad apples" they're the leaders of almost every church in the country. They're the pastors, deacons, principles, teachers and counselors. They're the presidents, they're the bishops they're the people with real power within the organization.
When you think of a denomination or religion in the US the organization as it's defined by its leadership is probably just like this congressman.
Yeah I'm pretty militantly anti-smoker. Not because they are killing themselves but because they stand out side my apartment window and smoke or smoke on the street outside bars etc. As a result their smoke always drifts away from their immediate location and create a 50' sphere of allergies for me.
But even I think if they can find a way to do it (maybe inside an enclosed glass box or something) without annoying and harming everyone around them they should be free to do as they please.
You shouldn't be able to discriminate against my off-the job behavior. Then again I don't know a single smoker who doesn't take copious smoke breaks throughout the day.
Yeah, I would suspect the "bug" in this case was one of design not execution. So even if a professional programmer had been in charge they would have made the same error if they were following 'spec'.
This isn't an 'excel' glitch, this is a design glitch. They improperly modeled a real world behavior but got the model wrong. That's a mistake that everybody involved in planning can make.
He didn't make the analogy. He simply was saying with the comment "We're living in a time where senators are targets of violence."
It's true. A couple years ago senators wouldn't get very much protection because who would bother killing a senator? But after Giffords we DO need to take potential threats to our representatives seriously since apparently the nut jobs want to make them fair game.
There are no shadows to talk about, everything is too HDR-ish
Ok, I'm a Lighting and Comp Sup and I'n not sure what you're talking about here. There's a lot wrong with this movie, especially on the writing and acting end of the spectrum but the actual rendering seems pretty good except for some noisy GI sampling in a number of shots. I'm seeing a lot of cases where the lighting is wrong but not where it's lacking in shadow detail or missing shadows. Generally they match the 'character' and softness of the lighting correctly.
Could you pick out a time-code with lack of shadowing? In both of their outdoor scenes it's a cloudy (or foggy even) day which will create a very non-directional soft look with very diffuse shadows but that's how the real world looks in those lighting scenarios.
Yep. Everything in Windows 8 is if anything pilfered from previous Microsoft products.
App Context menu a swipe from the bottom: WP7 Swapping between maximized windows: Alt+Tab Global "Charms" menu: WP7 'sharing' menu/hardware search button. Segoe Font: Media Center, WP7, Zune etc. Live Tiles: WP7 and kind of Media Center and Zune HD before that. Metro Design: Zune
WP7 was supposed to be out by October 2009 and was announced in early spring 2010 so unless Microsoft redesigned key parts of WP7 in a couple months right before announcing the project based on a web video that probably nobody saw... unlikely.
You've only mentioned style and appearance. This is about the function of the UI.
Con10uum: Every window should be always open and you just scroll left to right between them. Dynamically scaling each window with pinch/zoom. Windows 8: Only 1 or 2 apps should ever be open and you swap the one currently on the screen. Functional comparison: Fingers are involved in both gestures. Functionally completely different windowing philosophy.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the left side of the screen to bring up the app context menu. Windows 8: You swipe from the bottom of the screen. Functional comparison: Both acknowledge the fact that applications have menus and provide a means of accessing said menu.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the right side of the screen to open the launcher. Windows 8: You should swipe from the side of the screen to reveal an onscreen button to open the launcher. You also reveal global actions such as sharing or printing the current page. Functional comparison: Both involve clicking on the right area of the screen. Seeing as there are only 3 usable sides to a touchscreen it's a stretch to say that this was a rip-off. Especially since Microsoft's explanation of "It's where your thumb is when you hold a tablet" is a perfectly good rationale and makes more sense than "because some web video that nobody saw put it there." Con10uum has no equivalent to Microsoft's global sharing button. In Con10uum that would be part of the application's file menu and would be in a different menu.
Con10uum: Desktop widgets. Windows 8: No desktop in Metro. The launcher icons though can display extended information. Functional Comparison: Widgets have been around for decades. Every customized windows theme included an RSS/News widget on the desktop. It's just "what you do". But functionally a widget and a metro tile are completely different. A widget is an enhanced part of the desktop and was in Windows Vista as part of the OS for years before Con10uum. A tile though serves dual purposes as primarily an icon but a secondary duty as a widget.
This doesn't even deserve the obligatory defense of "nothing is invented in a bubble".
There's no real similarity between Windows 8 and the Con10uum interface beyond the fact that both support multi-touch.
Dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen.
Wow widgets you say? On the desktop? You mean like "gadgets" in Windows Vista (shipping 3 years prior) and pretty much every theme since the 90s? The 'tile' innovation isn't that it's a widget it's that it's both a widget and an icon to launch an application. Which also in of itself isn't much of an innovation since icons previously carried information (gmail/outlook notifier changing colors when you had new emails etc) but it's certainly different from a pure RSS widget on your desktop.
swipes alternate between open, fullscreened apps,
4 fingered swipes in Con10uum, and the entire point of con10uum is that every window is always open. Swiping from off screen in Windows 8 is essentially a gesture for Windows Vista's Flip3D (again from 2006). Windows 8 for better or for worse pushes a full screen window manager or split screen. There are essentially no similarities between con10uum and Windows 8 as far as window management philosophies are concerned... and the gesture is completely different.
If there is any similarity it should be to Palm's webOS which was announced in January 2009 about 10 months before Con10uum.
left tap for the app context menu,
In windows 8 it's a bottom of the screen swipe.
right tap for the system context menu.
In Con10uum the "system context menu" is essentially the start menu. In Windows 8 it's actually a menu. And again it's a swipe not a button.
And in Miller's video at [5:41], it would seem Microsoft used the same or nearly the same font [4:30]."
Yes I'm sure Microsoft went back in time to 2002 to create a font for their devices and operating systems in order to avoid the legal implications of ripping off some random web video in 2009.
Oh the stories I could tell... Shit like this slips through all the time. And we don't know how many people were fired--I would imagine many. But to say that this doesn't happen is silly, the democratic convention is something like 48 hours of A/V material. The fact that a couple seconds were in error isn't surprising in the least. I bet there were a few typos as well.
As a man of reason I would expect someone like Bill Nye to employ pragmatism as administrator of the US Federal Government. As such I would expect that he would be as imperfect as my other picks for president (Obama included).
Take the Tax cut debacle. Many liberals wish Obama had stuck to his guns--but the alternative was an intractable opponent which would have happily allowed unemployment insurance to run out. As long as the world is full of people who present no-win scenarios I expect every president to make pragmatic and often imperfect decisions that may very well be the best choice available.
Take Syria. We could intervene in Syria but then Russia would get involved. The Syrian conflict sucks but there is not good solution only a choice between bad ones. That's the president's real job... choosing between bad options. Because that's how life goes.
It's not equivalency the cop is just saying a very sensible thing: "Until we know why they did this, we have to assume it's a crazy who might use violence."
Throwing a brick through someone's window and tampering with their property are not the acts of a happy constituent.
Which is precisely the problem. If you are a corporation then US law prohibits you from striking back. So all you can do is play defense defense defense. You can harden your systems all you want but being a stationary and fallible target it's almost inevitable that you'll be compromised. It's too easy to compromise a system. And even if you identify the attackers it's unclear if the judicial system simply doesn't care or the government is the attacker. It's incredibly difficult to press charges against foreign hackers. So without a viable means of justice it's not surprising that people want to resort to the oldest form of 'justice' in history when there are no peaceful responses: violent and forceful action. You might not be able to sue them but you can hopefully start making it more expensive by finding the sources and shutting them down.
He went on TV talking about the investigation, the video I was watching was a follow up by some sort of a talk show host who was saying that it's illegal to talk about the investigation or even admit you are being investigated--that seems absolutely insane to me as well.
That's true in the US too. Judges can issue gag orders.
"Legitimate claims for use of a gag order include, for instance, a criminal court may issue a gag order on the media if the judge believes, or claims to believe, that potential jurors in a future trial will be influenced by the media reporting or speculation on the early stages of a case. Another example might be to ensure police are not impeded in their investigations by media publicity about a case." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order
Infrastructure costs money to put in. So getting charged 100% of the cost of the electricity makes sense. Charging 300% makes no sense since presumably the usage cost would include the cost of extra infrastructure. "We had to increase our capacity to meet your demand." is a fair argument but unless the utility was selling the power to Microsoft at 33% of the actual cost then it makes no sense.
Agreed. And I would go on to say that this is potentially *less* pollution. If Microsoft took the $140k they saved and put it into carbon offsets they would most likely come out with a negative emission balance by burning through the extra power.
Microsoft already committed to going carbon neutral for their data center so I would imagine they probably did the cost analysis as: "We could burn $70k worth of power and spend $35k in carbon offsets and still come out neutral while saving $100k".
Teacher: Nothing, they just won't allow us to see it and use it, or know what it is doing. This is not a good philosophy to have for education, science, or any learning in general. Everything must be out in the open if we are to take it seriously and build on it with new research or ideas.
Now everybody please boot up your desktop super computers and matlab--no wait, don't do that. Also please unplug everything from the nearest power outlet since all of the utilities use closed source software to mange their power grids. Also please remove all light bulbs since the design is probably patented. Also I would instruct everyone to remove their clothes since they use chemicals produced using proprietary systems.
We're scientists damnit and we never would *dream* of using a CT Scanner, Electron Microscope, Mass Spec or any other device which might be burdened by patents! Someone get the marine biology department on the line, I have it on good authority that their scuba gear and boats are all patent laden!
I've tried to teach people computers. And some people have to literally write down every single step on a piece of paper and then follow it to the letter or they get lost. Things as simple as launching an application and saving are a huge burden on their learning capabilities.
If you teach them Office Libre and anything at all changes their notes will be useless. This applies to Office 2007 or 2013 as well but it'll probably be at least a little closer.
One of the best ways to teach someone something is to get them comfortable on *something* and then they can apply what they've learned to another application. And if they don't then at least they know how to use the specific application that they're most likely to run into.
Computers 101 is really "This is the class you need to pass so that you can do your other class' homework. There isn't enough time in a 101 class to teach people the concepts and the specifics they need to know in order to write term papers and create class presentations.
Slashdot Mirror
Backblazeâ(TM)s pods cost $7,500 for 135TB or $55 per TB.
Letâ(TM)s be generous and say one employee needs to maintain a Pod once per month for one hour (way higher than our server management). Letâ(TM)s assume they consume 1KW of power each. Even if the pod burned out every other year, unlikely but weâ(TM)ll be generous, to Amazon that works out to ($3750) + (12 months*$100/hr) + ($0.10/KWh * 24hr * 365 days) = $5826/12 = $485 per month / 135 TB = $3.59 per TB per month. Thatâ(TM)s assuming a 50% failure rate in HDDs per year.
Letâ(TM)s also not forget bandwidth. Backblaze is looking to upgrade to 10gbps for their datacenter (OC-192). Which runs about $200k per month from what limited data I could find. They currently have 40Petabytes which works out to $200k/40kTB = $5 per month per TB.
So our total is about $9TB per month for Backblaze
vs
$30TB per month for AWS.
But thatâ(TM)s just my estimate. You could easily cut almost all of those support time costs. You could very easily get 4 years not 2 years out of a pod and you could probably use green drives that use less than 200watts cutting your power by 80%. In other words $9TB is generous and assuming that they actually need 10gbps right now.
Backblaze's official numbers are $100k per 3 years for 1PB.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
$100k / 36 months / 1,000TB = $2.70 per TB per month.
Most people probably have $1TB of backup needs.
I have a RED camera which shoots 18megapixel raw photos at 24+ frames per second. Backblaze hasn't throttled me at all and I have 20mbps upload speeds.
Yeah, that's not why you ration. You ration because you want to be "The Place That Has Hard Drives" and hopefully have your customers buy a pallete of diapers or a bigscreen TV while they're at the store. A customer who gets nothing is worse than a customer who only gets a reasonable amount.
Ummmm No.
In 2005 http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Amazon.com_(AMZN)/Data/Debt_to_Equity/2005?ref=chart
Amazon had a debt to equity ratio of 15:1. If you view the nation of the United States as the potential equity of the country (that could hypothetically be nationalized) then the US Debt to Equity Ratio is more like 1:10.
I come from a religious background (private school K-12 etc). They aren't just "bad apples" they're the leaders of almost every church in the country. They're the pastors, deacons, principles, teachers and counselors. They're the presidents, they're the bishops they're the people with real power within the organization.
When you think of a denomination or religion in the US the organization as it's defined by its leadership is probably just like this congressman.
Yeah I'm pretty militantly anti-smoker. Not because they are killing themselves but because they stand out side my apartment window and smoke or smoke on the street outside bars etc. As a result their smoke always drifts away from their immediate location and create a 50' sphere of allergies for me.
But even I think if they can find a way to do it (maybe inside an enclosed glass box or something) without annoying and harming everyone around them they should be free to do as they please.
You shouldn't be able to discriminate against my off-the job behavior. Then again I don't know a single smoker who doesn't take copious smoke breaks throughout the day.
Yeah, I would suspect the "bug" in this case was one of design not execution. So even if a professional programmer had been in charge they would have made the same error if they were following 'spec'.
This isn't an 'excel' glitch, this is a design glitch. They improperly modeled a real world behavior but got the model wrong. That's a mistake that everybody involved in planning can make.
He didn't make the analogy. He simply was saying with the comment "We're living in a time where senators are targets of violence."
It's true. A couple years ago senators wouldn't get very much protection because who would bother killing a senator? But after Giffords we DO need to take potential threats to our representatives seriously since apparently the nut jobs want to make them fair game.
There are no shadows to talk about, everything is too HDR-ish
Ok, I'm a Lighting and Comp Sup and I'n not sure what you're talking about here. There's a lot wrong with this movie, especially on the writing and acting end of the spectrum but the actual rendering seems pretty good except for some noisy GI sampling in a number of shots. I'm seeing a lot of cases where the lighting is wrong but not where it's lacking in shadow detail or missing shadows. Generally they match the 'character' and softness of the lighting correctly.
Could you pick out a time-code with lack of shadowing? In both of their outdoor scenes it's a cloudy (or foggy even) day which will create a very non-directional soft look with very diffuse shadows but that's how the real world looks in those lighting scenarios.
$100k might be 'cheap' but it also wouldn't have fixed the problem. The solution was evidently to fix the g suits not the oxygen system.
"The source of the issue, the Pentagon now says, is believed to be a faulty valve in the high-pressure vest that is worn by the pilots at extreme altitudes -- one that Air Force officials believe is constricting the pilots' ability to breathe."
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/air-force-confident-22-raptor-fighter-problem-solved/story?id=16845990#.UGYcBk3A98E
Yep. Everything in Windows 8 is if anything pilfered from previous Microsoft products.
App Context menu a swipe from the bottom: WP7
Swapping between maximized windows: Alt+Tab
Global "Charms" menu: WP7 'sharing' menu/hardware search button.
Segoe Font: Media Center, WP7, Zune etc.
Live Tiles: WP7 and kind of Media Center and Zune HD before that.
Metro Design: Zune
WP7 was supposed to be out by October 2009 and was announced in early spring 2010 so unless Microsoft redesigned key parts of WP7 in a couple months right before announcing the project based on a web video that probably nobody saw... unlikely.
You've only mentioned style and appearance. This is about the function of the UI.
Con10uum: Every window should be always open and you just scroll left to right between them. Dynamically scaling each window with pinch/zoom.
Windows 8: Only 1 or 2 apps should ever be open and you swap the one currently on the screen.
Functional comparison: Fingers are involved in both gestures. Functionally completely different windowing philosophy.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the left side of the screen to bring up the app context menu.
Windows 8: You swipe from the bottom of the screen.
Functional comparison: Both acknowledge the fact that applications have menus and provide a means of accessing said menu.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the right side of the screen to open the launcher.
Windows 8: You should swipe from the side of the screen to reveal an onscreen button to open the launcher. You also reveal global actions such as sharing or printing the current page.
Functional comparison: Both involve clicking on the right area of the screen. Seeing as there are only 3 usable sides to a touchscreen it's a stretch to say that this was a rip-off. Especially since Microsoft's explanation of "It's where your thumb is when you hold a tablet" is a perfectly good rationale and makes more sense than "because some web video that nobody saw put it there."
Con10uum has no equivalent to Microsoft's global sharing button. In Con10uum that would be part of the application's file menu and would be in a different menu.
Con10uum: Desktop widgets.
Windows 8: No desktop in Metro. The launcher icons though can display extended information.
Functional Comparison: Widgets have been around for decades. Every customized windows theme included an RSS/News widget on the desktop. It's just "what you do". But functionally a widget and a metro tile are completely different. A widget is an enhanced part of the desktop and was in Windows Vista as part of the OS for years before Con10uum. A tile though serves dual purposes as primarily an icon but a secondary duty as a widget.
This doesn't even deserve the obligatory defense of "nothing is invented in a bubble".
There's no real similarity between Windows 8 and the Con10uum interface beyond the fact that both support multi-touch.
Dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen.
Wow widgets you say? On the desktop? You mean like "gadgets" in Windows Vista (shipping 3 years prior) and pretty much every theme since the 90s? The 'tile' innovation isn't that it's a widget it's that it's both a widget and an icon to launch an application. Which also in of itself isn't much of an innovation since icons previously carried information (gmail/outlook notifier changing colors when you had new emails etc) but it's certainly different from a pure RSS widget on your desktop.
swipes alternate between open, fullscreened apps,
4 fingered swipes in Con10uum, and the entire point of con10uum is that every window is always open. Swiping from off screen in Windows 8 is essentially a gesture for Windows Vista's Flip3D (again from 2006). Windows 8 for better or for worse pushes a full screen window manager or split screen. There are essentially no similarities between con10uum and Windows 8 as far as window management philosophies are concerned... and the gesture is completely different.
If there is any similarity it should be to Palm's webOS which was announced in January 2009 about 10 months before Con10uum.
left tap for the app context menu,
In windows 8 it's a bottom of the screen swipe.
right tap for the system context menu.
In Con10uum the "system context menu" is essentially the start menu. In Windows 8 it's actually a menu. And again it's a swipe not a button.
And in Miller's video at [5:41], it would seem Microsoft used the same or nearly the same font [4:30]."
Yes I'm sure Microsoft went back in time to 2002 to create a font for their devices and operating systems in order to avoid the legal implications of ripping off some random web video in 2009.
Perhaps you start by looking at what technologies have been compromised most frequently and you avoid those technologies.
That technology is usually a person.
Oh the stories I could tell... Shit like this slips through all the time. And we don't know how many people were fired--I would imagine many. But to say that this doesn't happen is silly, the democratic convention is something like 48 hours of A/V material. The fact that a couple seconds were in error isn't surprising in the least. I bet there were a few typos as well.
As a man of reason I would expect someone like Bill Nye to employ pragmatism as administrator of the US Federal Government. As such I would expect that he would be as imperfect as my other picks for president (Obama included).
Take the Tax cut debacle. Many liberals wish Obama had stuck to his guns--but the alternative was an intractable opponent which would have happily allowed unemployment insurance to run out. As long as the world is full of people who present no-win scenarios I expect every president to make pragmatic and often imperfect decisions that may very well be the best choice available.
Take Syria. We could intervene in Syria but then Russia would get involved. The Syrian conflict sucks but there is not good solution only a choice between bad ones. That's the president's real job... choosing between bad options. Because that's how life goes.
It's not equivalency the cop is just saying a very sensible thing: "Until we know why they did this, we have to assume it's a crazy who might use violence."
Throwing a brick through someone's window and tampering with their property are not the acts of a happy constituent.
Which is precisely the problem. If you are a corporation then US law prohibits you from striking back. So all you can do is play defense defense defense. You can harden your systems all you want but being a stationary and fallible target it's almost inevitable that you'll be compromised. It's too easy to compromise a system. And even if you identify the attackers it's unclear if the judicial system simply doesn't care or the government is the attacker. It's incredibly difficult to press charges against foreign hackers. So without a viable means of justice it's not surprising that people want to resort to the oldest form of 'justice' in history when there are no peaceful responses: violent and forceful action. You might not be able to sue them but you can hopefully start making it more expensive by finding the sources and shutting them down.
He went on TV talking about the investigation, the video I was watching was a follow up by some sort of a talk show host who was saying that it's illegal to talk about the investigation or even admit you are being investigated--that seems absolutely insane to me as well.
That's true in the US too. Judges can issue gag orders.
"Legitimate claims for use of a gag order include, for instance, a criminal court may issue a gag order on the media if the judge believes, or claims to believe, that potential jurors in a future trial will be influenced by the media reporting or speculation on the early stages of a case. Another example might be to ensure police are not impeded in their investigations by media publicity about a case."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_order
Infrastructure costs money to put in. So getting charged 100% of the cost of the electricity makes sense. Charging 300% makes no sense since presumably the usage cost would include the cost of extra infrastructure. "We had to increase our capacity to meet your demand." is a fair argument but unless the utility was selling the power to Microsoft at 33% of the actual cost then it makes no sense.
Agreed. And I would go on to say that this is potentially *less* pollution. If Microsoft took the $140k they saved and put it into carbon offsets they would most likely come out with a negative emission balance by burning through the extra power.
Microsoft already committed to going carbon neutral for their data center so I would imagine they probably did the cost analysis as: "We could burn $70k worth of power and spend $35k in carbon offsets and still come out neutral while saving $100k".
The article even cites someone who reverse engineered an ARMv7 and the project was 'disappeared' so that sounds a lot alike.
Teacher: Nothing, they just won't allow us to see it and use it, or know what it is doing. This is not a good philosophy to have for education, science, or any learning in general. Everything must be out in the open if we are to take it seriously and build on it with new research or ideas.
Now everybody please boot up your desktop super computers and matlab--no wait, don't do that. Also please unplug everything from the nearest power outlet since all of the utilities use closed source software to mange their power grids. Also please remove all light bulbs since the design is probably patented. Also I would instruct everyone to remove their clothes since they use chemicals produced using proprietary systems.
We're scientists damnit and we never would *dream* of using a CT Scanner, Electron Microscope, Mass Spec or any other device which might be burdened by patents! Someone get the marine biology department on the line, I have it on good authority that their scuba gear and boats are all patent laden!
Also, why as a student do I give a shit if the CPU is patented? That's as relevant to education as the school bus's windshield wipers being patented.
I've tried to teach people computers. And some people have to literally write down every single step on a piece of paper and then follow it to the letter or they get lost. Things as simple as launching an application and saving are a huge burden on their learning capabilities.
If you teach them Office Libre and anything at all changes their notes will be useless. This applies to Office 2007 or 2013 as well but it'll probably be at least a little closer.
One of the best ways to teach someone something is to get them comfortable on *something* and then they can apply what they've learned to another application. And if they don't then at least they know how to use the specific application that they're most likely to run into.
Computers 101 is really "This is the class you need to pass so that you can do your other class' homework. There isn't enough time in a 101 class to teach people the concepts and the specifics they need to know in order to write term papers and create class presentations.