I didn't, my playing faded out before that (sometime around 9, I think), since I'd been playing since shortly after the expansion came out. Okay, so they've increased the drop rate on sets, which is cool since some of those sets had awesome set bonuses. I've been meaning to find my install disks so I could start playing again. And after the original Diablo (between being able to dupe everything and having the Archangel's Staff of Apocalypse, the game got boring), I wasn't into a lot of multiplayer, except with a few friends, so item trading was pretty much out of the question. I wasn't fond of one of the patches (7, I think?), that capped the number of skeletons a necromancer could summon to 5. It was fun being able to summon 15 or 20 skeletons. Two necromancers could lag the game!:D Yeah, my friends and I had fun with that one.
Blizzard's spent so much time on balancing the classes, and yet we still get the "Nerf Shammies/Nerf Pallies" cries. And yes, you've got the game mechanics to consider...which is why a mage is more likely to get away with killing everyone of the opposite faction in Cenerian Hold than, say, as rogue is. And with a game like WoW, you do have to have certain limitations. Though, knowing what Blizzard's capable of, you'd think they could have done a little better with the variety of green items (especially since it has the same prefix/suffix naming scheme as the enchanted items in Diablo).
I'd like to see some sort of new Diablo game come out, though it'd be interesting to see how they take the storyline.
I completely agree. Take set items for example. How often in Diablo did you come across a set piece? Not very. How about two set pieces? You were lucky if you had two in your possession at the same time, let alone if they were from the same set. Having more than two pieces of a set indicated that either a) you were extremely lucky, or b) you had entirely too much time on your hands. In WoW? You could have 6 of 6 set pieces before you were level 30...a week or two of playing if you knew what you were doing. Epics? Legendaries? My WoW main has had an epic in her possession since before she could equip it, and has been on the recieving end of more Hands of Ragnaros than I can count.
WoW discourages experimentation due to the expense of respeccing and the timesink of getting another character to 60 (I have done three so far).
There is also the factor that the good gear compliments certain builds, so the hybrid classes (i.e. - healers) are stuck with gear that works best for a healing build if they want the end-game epics. The game itself, along with the guilds that run end-game instances, restrict the classes to a certain build. So by the end of it, almost every healer is healing specced, most warriors are tank-specced, and the rest are specced to do as much damage as possible while generating the least amount of threat. Yeah, you get the occasional Warlord/Marshal with their coorosponding PvP gear, but that's a little more rare.
Diablo was definitely created with only PvE in mind, but I don't think it was entirely intended for soloing. Classes like the Sorceress and Paladin seemed better suited for a group (even if it was just one other). The Sorceress was potentially a very powerful class, but lacked the armor and HP to really get in the middle of a big fight, not to mention could easily be screwed if she wasn't balanced properly (nothing like being a fire sorc and walking into Act IV of Nightmare Mode and finding everything immune or highly resistive to everything you have, so I, consequently, like having the option to respec, expensive though it may be). The Paladin had the auras that would obviously help party members.
Haha! That made my day! It'd be interesting to see the world PvP battles... One side gets pissed and raids the other's capital cities, leaving nothing but bombed out buildings or burning huts in their wake as they take their meat wagons and seige tanks, flanked by scouts and goliaths, through...
Yeah, I don't see a WoS coming out anytime soon, either. Mainly for what you've already pointed out. What people seem to be forgetting, too, is that the StarCraft and Diablo storylines were never set up like the WarCraft storyline is. WarCraft has always been a fight between the Horde and Alliance, an ongoing war where each side has, over time, gained new alliances (though the latest one for the WoW expansion is, in my opinion, crap). StarCraft, on the other hand, has basically been a game of everyone for themselves. You weren't even allies with members of your own race half the time. As cool as it may be to play a Hydralisk, it just simply wouldn't work in an MMO environment like WoW, Guild Wars, or Everquest. If they did it at all, they would either have to set it up like Battle.net or rewrite the storyline in some way. The same pretty much goes with Diablo. Both Diablo games are rather linear... you fight your way to the end-game boss and the story's over. The first one did a pretty good lead-in for the second one with the whole shoving the soulstone into the hero's skull, then Diablo slowly overtaking said hero until the demon's strong enough to take control and release his brothers as we go into the second and its expansion, but it pretty much ends there. By the time you reach the end of the expansion, you've defeated all three demons and destroyed their soulstones so they can't come back.
WoW does, however, incorporate several ideas from the Diablo universe. The idea of soulstones for one (though now used by warlocks to create other things and summon pets), general character information and talent trees (formerly known as spell trees), even some of the character classes and mobs seem to be reminicent of Diablo (including the Druid, Rogue/Assassin, and Paladin, and the warlock's Felhunter reminds me of Diablo himself and the succubus...well...she hasn't changed much from either Diablo game).
I loved StarCraft and both Diablo games, and I now enjoy WoW, though I think I'll always love its predecessors more. I think Blizzard incorporated elements from Diablo into WoW for a couple reasons: 1) it works for the game, and 2) they have no intention of making another Diablo game (at least not for quite some time), so instead of letting the ideas and concepts go to waste, they used them in a different context. StarCraft and WarCraft are too similar, yet too different for them to have been able to really incorporate anything from it. Somehow, the idea of combining swords with nuclear technology just doesn't work very well...
There is one major difference you seem to disregard in your comparison between Earth and Jupiter. On Earth, we know most of it's topography, we know what it's core, shell, and atomosphere consist of, we know how it spins and the general dynamics of its weather (with some exceptions, of course, but for the most part). With Jupiter, we know very little about it other than what we've been able to speculate. We speculate that it's a still-born star, so we speculate it has a mass similar to that of a small star. From our knowledge of what small stars consist of and what kind of gravity required to keep certain elements in an atomosphere, we can speculate the contents of Jupiter's atomosphere. We've even been able to see the top few layers with The Galileo Project, but the surface, if there is one, is still a mystery. So, not only do we not know what the surface is like, or how it affects the surrounding clouds and storms, but we're not even sure there is a surface. And we certainly don't know if these storms go all the way down to the surface. Who's to say the core even rotates? Or rotates at the same speed or in the same direction as everything else? This one's going out on a limb, I know, but space can already easily break many of the scientific laws that we've established (light itself breaks several of these), so who's to say that what goes on in the depths of a stillborn star goes against everything we consider to be logical?
Meteorologists say that it's practically an unsolvable problem, and that's on a planet which they already know a lot about. With a planet such as Jupiter, there's simply too many unknowns. Everyone knows that the more unknowns you have in a problem, the harder it becomes to solve. The problem here is that, for Jupiter, the problem/formula is almost entirely unknowns.
And any person who has ever worked tech support can tell you horror stories of every sort regarding things like anti-virus and networks/Internet.
I would like to add a couple things to your list:
what a spyware scanner is and why and how you should use it
a basic understanding of how a network works - now, I'm not talking about knowing what your net admin knows, but to at least know that when the company's server is down you won't be able to access your email, anything stored on a remote computer, or the Internet; to know that they're all linked through that little wire in the back of their machine shouldn't be that difficult of a concept to grasp.
what hardware drivers and system files are and why they <em>shouldn't</em> be deleted - yes, I've actually seen a few cases of "well, it didn't seem important, so I just deleted it" and then they wonder why they printer/disk drive/computer suddenly doesn't work, "but it worked fine yesterday! I don't know what happened!"
And people wonder why high school education has become all but worthless... Unfortunately, our society doesn't view anyone under the age of 18 to be old enough to know how to make decisions for themselves and therefore, view their opinions as unworthy of taking into consideration, instead of actually listening to them.
And you have to remember, too, that not every 30-40 year-old is computer illiterate. Some of those people do, in fact, know more about computer than any of us will probably ever know. Those were the ones that worked with the room-sized computers with vaccuum tubes, or learned to program a Commodore machine. Granted, they are few and far between, but at least there's a few in our schools that can actually teach beyond the "lower-mid" level, and maybe spark a few they teach into becoming teachers and so more schools can have people that are actually qualified to teach more about computers than just the "lower-mid" level and computer literacy standards will rise. But maybe I'm just dreaming...
Yes, a student fresh out of high school will almost always fall into the "lower-middle" category on this list. But you forget something: they more than likely grew up with computers, or had access to a computer of some sort from a very early age. You're talking 15 years of using a computer here, even if it is what many people consider "just the basics." There are many adults that don't even know how to turn on a computer, and many more that know how to turn on a computer but don't know enough about computers to know that anti-virus is typically a good thing. Just because they're 30 or 40 years old and has a college degree, doesn't mean that they'll know as much about computers as the 20-year-old that just graduated high school.
It's also a fact that kids adapt better to new things easier than adults. That's why adults seem to need a lot more training on somethings. Sit an 8-year-old in front of a computer running Linux after having him used to Windows and he'll find his way around the new OS before you're done explaining where everything is to the adult. So, by the time he graduates, he could be running scripts and compiling programs and add-ons for an OS that his "teacher" barely knows how to navigate.
I was going to post something like that, but I happened to see your post (I wasn't about to drudge through five pages of ways to "fix this problem" to find a couple posts of "maybe this isn't a problem after all.")
IMO, you're completely right. Guess what people? The global temperature changes every few million years. Yeah, so we screwed up the cycle, but good ol' Gaia will restablize herself long after we're gone, no matter how bad we screw up. Yes, it may take a billion or two years if/when we screw up the environment so bad that the Earth reverts back to pre-dinosaur ages, but guess what? Life started then, it'll restart again. For all we know, that's already happened a few times.
Perhaps next time, we'll end up with some more intelligent races....
It seems everyone here is forgetting that these computers are for kids, not teenagers. These kids aren't going to be worrying about what OS they're running as long as it looks remotely similar to what they're used to. The only ones that may have a problem are the ones that are old enough to noticed that a given computer runs slower because it's older than the others.
And in computer class, this is fine, when "learning" is related to learning the ins and outs and operations of a new OS. However, when a teacher wants to fire up a program in support of a lesson just taught, they should not have to learn and then teach their students a new OS just to get to the crux of the lesson they taught, which had nothing to do with learning a new OS.
First of all, these are kids aged 4 to 12. For most of them, any OS is a new OS, so it doesn't really matter what OS they work with. Especially when most Linux distros have a similar look and feel to Windows in that they both have a taskbar and a sort of "start" menu where you can find your programs. Not to mention the fact that most computer classes at that level will be teaching the students the basics of operating a computer in general.
Second, there's little to no difference in starting up a program in Linux than in Windows. You open the "start"-type menu (it can't be named "start" in Linux, because that would be copyright infringement), go the the "programs", "applications", or other aptly named folder that contains all the programs you have access to, find the name of desired program, and viola, you've got your program.
Most people with half a brain can spend five minutes in front of a computer and get the basics, such as opening a web browser or a word processor, figured out. You don't need to be a techaholic to do the basics on a new OS.
Schools also have to ability to adapt to a technological overhaul, it's the administration that slows things down to a snail's pace.
So, what you're saying is that they could have a couple fundraisers, raise a grand or two, and have a new system in place next year, and never have to replace them again?
Well, you would also want to keep in mind, too, that the so-called "computer ignorant parents" are starting to be replaced by those of us that grew up with computers.
Licensing costs for 14 copies of XP Pro Academic Upgrade would run just under a grand.
If the school has around 250 kids grade k-6, it's most likely that the community the school is in has no more than a couple thousand people. Most of those people also probably don't make very much, and probably require travelling 20-30 miles one way to work everyday, meaning the money they make goes to supporting the family. They can't afford to spare any money anywhere else. Also, I can guarantee you'd need more than 14 copies of WinXP. Most computer labs have around 30 computers in them ($2000), if the district wants a computer in every classroom, or even half the classrooms, there's another 10 or so machines (we're up to almost $3000 now, just for the OS, that's not including hardware upgrades and licensing for other software).
Then, what about educational software, office suites, etc? That stuff's not cheap by any means. Granted, some may have deals where you can have 5 or 10 licenses for about $400, but you still need to outfit at least 30 computers.
MS Windows XP Pro upgrades for 30 computers: $2000 MS Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition Suite for 30 computers: $4500 Educational Software such as Encarta, for 30 computers: $1500/title Total for OS, Office, and one educational software title: $8000
That's not including harware/computer upgrades, printer upgrades (if applicable), and additional software. A project like this can easily reach $10,000-$15,000. Keep in mind, as well, that something like this would need to be done every 5-7 years. In that span of time, the OS will become outdated and no longer be supported, the hardware will once again be too outdated for the new OS, and the additional software will be too outdated for the new OS to run cleanly. These costs can be cut dramatically if they only thing they would need to worry about paying for is new hardware, and even that could have a donation system set in place.
If the machines are running 95 and 98, I'd bet more then a few are old enough that they probably shouldn't be running XP so the actual cost likely is less.
You're backwards on your thinking here. If the machines are too old to be upgraded to the new OS, that means you'll either have to upgrade the hardware, or get new machines to have enough computers for a typical 15-35 student class. More upgrading equals more money.
Obviously running 95, 98, and XP Home may not be the best solution overall, but it apparently seems to work for the time being
That's what my school district said about our G2 Apple workstations that were running Mac OS9 and had a habit of crashing at least once a week, oftentimes taking the whole network down with it. We were the only school with such outdated machines in the district, and this was between 1999 and 2002.
What you are proposing is installing an operating system that is completely foreign to them.
Yes, it may be foreign to the teachers, but the students are young enough that they'll learn their way around the OS rather quickly. Think of the geeks whose first computer was a Commodore64 or a DOS-based machine. They had to convert from a command-line interface to a GUI.
Make the conversion over the summer or some other long break so that you have time to train the teachers on the basics of using the Linux OS. They don't need to know how to read the binary files and convert them to another language, they just need to know how to install necessary programs and do basic troubleshooting steps for when, say a program locks up. Remember, these are elementary school students learning computer basics, not college graduates working with.NET or Quartus.
I would also like to point out this little article that I found a while back. It basically takes the "I'm used to Windows, so Linux is like a foreign country to me" and flips it upside down.
I agree. When it comes to writing, you tend to sacrifice one or two of three things for the other(s): speed, legibility, and spelling/grammer. The sacrificed ones are dependent on the situation. It all depends on your audience. In the case of formal, or even semi-formal, writing, speed is sacrificed so that the writer makes sure to be able to get the intended point across the first time around. In informal writing, such as instant messaging, which is more of a conversational tone anyway, speed is the primary concern, so spelling is sacrificed.
Many of us here on Slashdot see the computer/technology field as simple, ordinary, or every-day. Our lives revolve around it. It's often hard to believe that not everyone knows the difference between a hard drive and memory. The same goes with people who are good with spelling and grammer. Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to act as translater between Geek-speak and common speech are just that much more employable, because they can communicate with everyone. However, it doesn't make them better than anyone else.
If hacking is such a "childish" thing, then why is it that several people have had the FBI knocking at their door before spending time in federal lockup with three or four economic giants filing lawsuits against them?
In computer terms, hacking is the art of learning a program or system better than even the designers. A typical, experienced hacker knows about a dozen programming languages, and probably the network systems of a handful of major companies (such as Verizon, WorldCom, and Microsoft), and chances are, they know the program/system better than the creators. A hacker has the ability to take a compiled program, decompile it, figure out all the code, and sometimes rewrite the code, recompile the program, and replace the old with the new without anyone ever noticing.
Hacking is engineering on a different level. It makes an art of science.
I remember that game. I only had the demo version, though, but that only kept me from using a couple of the weapons, I don't think I got to the end level of it (if there was a different level limit for the demo version). I couldn't find the full version of it, but what I had I loved. I'll agree, it took a little time to master the controls, but once you figured it out, it was easy. And it acutally took a degree of skill to keep from being caught and slaughtered by...say...a Mega.
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I didn't, my playing faded out before that (sometime around 9, I think), since I'd been playing since shortly after the expansion came out. Okay, so they've increased the drop rate on sets, which is cool since some of those sets had awesome set bonuses. I've been meaning to find my install disks so I could start playing again. And after the original Diablo (between being able to dupe everything and having the Archangel's Staff of Apocalypse, the game got boring), I wasn't into a lot of multiplayer, except with a few friends, so item trading was pretty much out of the question. I wasn't fond of one of the patches (7, I think?), that capped the number of skeletons a necromancer could summon to 5. It was fun being able to summon 15 or 20 skeletons. Two necromancers could lag the game! :D Yeah, my friends and I had fun with that one.
Blizzard's spent so much time on balancing the classes, and yet we still get the "Nerf Shammies/Nerf Pallies" cries. And yes, you've got the game mechanics to consider...which is why a mage is more likely to get away with killing everyone of the opposite faction in Cenerian Hold than, say, as rogue is. And with a game like WoW, you do have to have certain limitations. Though, knowing what Blizzard's capable of, you'd think they could have done a little better with the variety of green items (especially since it has the same prefix/suffix naming scheme as the enchanted items in Diablo). I'd like to see some sort of new Diablo game come out, though it'd be interesting to see how they take the storyline.
Thank you, I saw that too. It kinda bugged me. Probably because my favorite character of both games is the Druid.
I completely agree. Take set items for example. How often in Diablo did you come across a set piece? Not very. How about two set pieces? You were lucky if you had two in your possession at the same time, let alone if they were from the same set. Having more than two pieces of a set indicated that either a) you were extremely lucky, or b) you had entirely too much time on your hands. In WoW? You could have 6 of 6 set pieces before you were level 30...a week or two of playing if you knew what you were doing. Epics? Legendaries? My WoW main has had an epic in her possession since before she could equip it, and has been on the recieving end of more Hands of Ragnaros than I can count. WoW discourages experimentation due to the expense of respeccing and the timesink of getting another character to 60 (I have done three so far). There is also the factor that the good gear compliments certain builds, so the hybrid classes (i.e. - healers) are stuck with gear that works best for a healing build if they want the end-game epics. The game itself, along with the guilds that run end-game instances, restrict the classes to a certain build. So by the end of it, almost every healer is healing specced, most warriors are tank-specced, and the rest are specced to do as much damage as possible while generating the least amount of threat. Yeah, you get the occasional Warlord/Marshal with their coorosponding PvP gear, but that's a little more rare. Diablo was definitely created with only PvE in mind, but I don't think it was entirely intended for soloing. Classes like the Sorceress and Paladin seemed better suited for a group (even if it was just one other). The Sorceress was potentially a very powerful class, but lacked the armor and HP to really get in the middle of a big fight, not to mention could easily be screwed if she wasn't balanced properly (nothing like being a fire sorc and walking into Act IV of Nightmare Mode and finding everything immune or highly resistive to everything you have, so I, consequently, like having the option to respec, expensive though it may be). The Paladin had the auras that would obviously help party members.
Haha! That made my day! It'd be interesting to see the world PvP battles... One side gets pissed and raids the other's capital cities, leaving nothing but bombed out buildings or burning huts in their wake as they take their meat wagons and seige tanks, flanked by scouts and goliaths, through...
Yeah, I don't see a WoS coming out anytime soon, either. Mainly for what you've already pointed out. What people seem to be forgetting, too, is that the StarCraft and Diablo storylines were never set up like the WarCraft storyline is. WarCraft has always been a fight between the Horde and Alliance, an ongoing war where each side has, over time, gained new alliances (though the latest one for the WoW expansion is, in my opinion, crap). StarCraft, on the other hand, has basically been a game of everyone for themselves. You weren't even allies with members of your own race half the time. As cool as it may be to play a Hydralisk, it just simply wouldn't work in an MMO environment like WoW, Guild Wars, or Everquest. If they did it at all, they would either have to set it up like Battle.net or rewrite the storyline in some way. The same pretty much goes with Diablo. Both Diablo games are rather linear... you fight your way to the end-game boss and the story's over. The first one did a pretty good lead-in for the second one with the whole shoving the soulstone into the hero's skull, then Diablo slowly overtaking said hero until the demon's strong enough to take control and release his brothers as we go into the second and its expansion, but it pretty much ends there. By the time you reach the end of the expansion, you've defeated all three demons and destroyed their soulstones so they can't come back.
WoW does, however, incorporate several ideas from the Diablo universe. The idea of soulstones for one (though now used by warlocks to create other things and summon pets), general character information and talent trees (formerly known as spell trees), even some of the character classes and mobs seem to be reminicent of Diablo (including the Druid, Rogue/Assassin, and Paladin, and the warlock's Felhunter reminds me of Diablo himself and the succubus...well...she hasn't changed much from either Diablo game).
I loved StarCraft and both Diablo games, and I now enjoy WoW, though I think I'll always love its predecessors more. I think Blizzard incorporated elements from Diablo into WoW for a couple reasons: 1) it works for the game, and 2) they have no intention of making another Diablo game (at least not for quite some time), so instead of letting the ideas and concepts go to waste, they used them in a different context. StarCraft and WarCraft are too similar, yet too different for them to have been able to really incorporate anything from it. Somehow, the idea of combining swords with nuclear technology just doesn't work very well...
There is one major difference you seem to disregard in your comparison between Earth and Jupiter. On Earth, we know most of it's topography, we know what it's core, shell, and atomosphere consist of, we know how it spins and the general dynamics of its weather (with some exceptions, of course, but for the most part). With Jupiter, we know very little about it other than what we've been able to speculate. We speculate that it's a still-born star, so we speculate it has a mass similar to that of a small star. From our knowledge of what small stars consist of and what kind of gravity required to keep certain elements in an atomosphere, we can speculate the contents of Jupiter's atomosphere. We've even been able to see the top few layers with The Galileo Project, but the surface, if there is one, is still a mystery. So, not only do we not know what the surface is like, or how it affects the surrounding clouds and storms, but we're not even sure there is a surface. And we certainly don't know if these storms go all the way down to the surface. Who's to say the core even rotates? Or rotates at the same speed or in the same direction as everything else? This one's going out on a limb, I know, but space can already easily break many of the scientific laws that we've established (light itself breaks several of these), so who's to say that what goes on in the depths of a stillborn star goes against everything we consider to be logical?
Meteorologists say that it's practically an unsolvable problem, and that's on a planet which they already know a lot about. With a planet such as Jupiter, there's simply too many unknowns. Everyone knows that the more unknowns you have in a problem, the harder it becomes to solve. The problem here is that, for Jupiter, the problem/formula is almost entirely unknowns.
Exactly! =D Now, let's convince the school district's administration to do that...
And any person who has ever worked tech support can tell you horror stories of every sort regarding things like anti-virus and networks/Internet.
I would like to add a couple things to your list:
what a spyware scanner is and why and how you should use it
a basic understanding of how a network works - now, I'm not talking about knowing what your net admin knows, but to at least know that when the company's server is down you won't be able to access your email, anything stored on a remote computer, or the Internet; to know that they're all linked through that little wire in the back of their machine shouldn't be that difficult of a concept to grasp.
what hardware drivers and system files are and why they <em>shouldn't</em> be deleted - yes, I've actually seen a few cases of "well, it didn't seem important, so I just deleted it" and then they wonder why they printer/disk drive/computer suddenly doesn't work, "but it worked fine yesterday! I don't know what happened!"
And people wonder why high school education has become all but worthless... Unfortunately, our society doesn't view anyone under the age of 18 to be old enough to know how to make decisions for themselves and therefore, view their opinions as unworthy of taking into consideration, instead of actually listening to them.
And you have to remember, too, that not every 30-40 year-old is computer illiterate. Some of those people do, in fact, know more about computer than any of us will probably ever know. Those were the ones that worked with the room-sized computers with vaccuum tubes, or learned to program a Commodore machine. Granted, they are few and far between, but at least there's a few in our schools that can actually teach beyond the "lower-mid" level, and maybe spark a few they teach into becoming teachers and so more schools can have people that are actually qualified to teach more about computers than just the "lower-mid" level and computer literacy standards will rise. But maybe I'm just dreaming...
Yes, a student fresh out of high school will almost always fall into the "lower-middle" category on this list. But you forget something: they more than likely grew up with computers, or had access to a computer of some sort from a very early age. You're talking 15 years of using a computer here, even if it is what many people consider "just the basics." There are many adults that don't even know how to turn on a computer, and many more that know how to turn on a computer but don't know enough about computers to know that anti-virus is typically a good thing. Just because they're 30 or 40 years old and has a college degree, doesn't mean that they'll know as much about computers as the 20-year-old that just graduated high school.
It's also a fact that kids adapt better to new things easier than adults. That's why adults seem to need a lot more training on somethings. Sit an 8-year-old in front of a computer running Linux after having him used to Windows and he'll find his way around the new OS before you're done explaining where everything is to the adult. So, by the time he graduates, he could be running scripts and compiling programs and add-ons for an OS that his "teacher" barely knows how to navigate.
I was going to post something like that, but I happened to see your post (I wasn't about to drudge through five pages of ways to "fix this problem" to find a couple posts of "maybe this isn't a problem after all.") IMO, you're completely right. Guess what people? The global temperature changes every few million years. Yeah, so we screwed up the cycle, but good ol' Gaia will restablize herself long after we're gone, no matter how bad we screw up. Yes, it may take a billion or two years if/when we screw up the environment so bad that the Earth reverts back to pre-dinosaur ages, but guess what? Life started then, it'll restart again. For all we know, that's already happened a few times. Perhaps next time, we'll end up with some more intelligent races....
I agree here. I've lived in both Northeast/Central Ohio and Northwest Pennsylvania, we've always got strawberry fields galore in the summertime.
It seems everyone here is forgetting that these computers are for kids, not teenagers. These kids aren't going to be worrying about what OS they're running as long as it looks remotely similar to what they're used to. The only ones that may have a problem are the ones that are old enough to noticed that a given computer runs slower because it's older than the others.
And in computer class, this is fine, when "learning" is related to learning the ins and outs and operations of a new OS. However, when a teacher wants to fire up a program in support of a lesson just taught, they should not have to learn and then teach their students a new OS just to get to the crux of the lesson they taught, which had nothing to do with learning a new OS.
First of all, these are kids aged 4 to 12. For most of them, any OS is a new OS, so it doesn't really matter what OS they work with. Especially when most Linux distros have a similar look and feel to Windows in that they both have a taskbar and a sort of "start" menu where you can find your programs. Not to mention the fact that most computer classes at that level will be teaching the students the basics of operating a computer in general.
Second, there's little to no difference in starting up a program in Linux than in Windows. You open the "start"-type menu (it can't be named "start" in Linux, because that would be copyright infringement), go the the "programs", "applications", or other aptly named folder that contains all the programs you have access to, find the name of desired program, and viola, you've got your program.
Most people with half a brain can spend five minutes in front of a computer and get the basics, such as opening a web browser or a word processor, figured out. You don't need to be a techaholic to do the basics on a new OS.
Schools also have to ability to adapt to a technological overhaul, it's the administration that slows things down to a snail's pace.
So, what you're saying is that they could have a couple fundraisers, raise a grand or two, and have a new system in place next year, and never have to replace them again?
No cost in education is one-time.
Well, you would also want to keep in mind, too, that the so-called "computer ignorant parents" are starting to be replaced by those of us that grew up with computers.
Licensing costs for 14 copies of XP Pro Academic Upgrade would run just under a grand.
.NET or Quartus.
If the school has around 250 kids grade k-6, it's most likely that the community the school is in has no more than a couple thousand people. Most of those people also probably don't make very much, and probably require travelling 20-30 miles one way to work everyday, meaning the money they make goes to supporting the family. They can't afford to spare any money anywhere else. Also, I can guarantee you'd need more than 14 copies of WinXP. Most computer labs have around 30 computers in them ($2000), if the district wants a computer in every classroom, or even half the classrooms, there's another 10 or so machines (we're up to almost $3000 now, just for the OS, that's not including hardware upgrades and licensing for other software).
Then, what about educational software, office suites, etc? That stuff's not cheap by any means. Granted, some may have deals where you can have 5 or 10 licenses for about $400, but you still need to outfit at least 30 computers.
MS Windows XP Pro upgrades for 30 computers: $2000
MS Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition Suite for 30 computers: $4500
Educational Software such as Encarta, for 30 computers: $1500/title
Total for OS, Office, and one educational software title: $8000
That's not including harware/computer upgrades, printer upgrades (if applicable), and additional software. A project like this can easily reach $10,000-$15,000. Keep in mind, as well, that something like this would need to be done every 5-7 years. In that span of time, the OS will become outdated and no longer be supported, the hardware will once again be too outdated for the new OS, and the additional software will be too outdated for the new OS to run cleanly. These costs can be cut dramatically if they only thing they would need to worry about paying for is new hardware, and even that could have a donation system set in place.
If the machines are running 95 and 98, I'd bet more then a few are old enough that they probably shouldn't be running XP so the actual cost likely is less.
You're backwards on your thinking here. If the machines are too old to be upgraded to the new OS, that means you'll either have to upgrade the hardware, or get new machines to have enough computers for a typical 15-35 student class. More upgrading equals more money.
Obviously running 95, 98, and XP Home may not be the best solution overall, but it apparently seems to work for the time being
That's what my school district said about our G2 Apple workstations that were running Mac OS9 and had a habit of crashing at least once a week, oftentimes taking the whole network down with it. We were the only school with such outdated machines in the district, and this was between 1999 and 2002.
What you are proposing is installing an operating system that is completely foreign to them.
Yes, it may be foreign to the teachers, but the students are young enough that they'll learn their way around the OS rather quickly. Think of the geeks whose first computer was a Commodore64 or a DOS-based machine. They had to convert from a command-line interface to a GUI.
Make the conversion over the summer or some other long break so that you have time to train the teachers on the basics of using the Linux OS. They don't need to know how to read the binary files and convert them to another language, they just need to know how to install necessary programs and do basic troubleshooting steps for when, say a program locks up. Remember, these are elementary school students learning computer basics, not college graduates working with
I would also like to point out this little article that I found a while back. It basically takes the "I'm used to Windows, so Linux is like a foreign country to me" and flips it upside down.
The
I agree. When it comes to writing, you tend to sacrifice one or two of three things for the other(s): speed, legibility, and spelling/grammer. The sacrificed ones are dependent on the situation. It all depends on your audience. In the case of formal, or even semi-formal, writing, speed is sacrificed so that the writer makes sure to be able to get the intended point across the first time around. In informal writing, such as instant messaging, which is more of a conversational tone anyway, speed is the primary concern, so spelling is sacrificed.
Many of us here on Slashdot see the computer/technology field as simple, ordinary, or every-day. Our lives revolve around it. It's often hard to believe that not everyone knows the difference between a hard drive and memory. The same goes with people who are good with spelling and grammer. Those of us who are lucky enough to be able to act as translater between Geek-speak and common speech are just that much more employable, because they can communicate with everyone. However, it doesn't make them better than anyone else.
If hacking is such a "childish" thing, then why is it that several people have had the FBI knocking at their door before spending time in federal lockup with three or four economic giants filing lawsuits against them?
In computer terms, hacking is the art of learning a program or system better than even the designers. A typical, experienced hacker knows about a dozen programming languages, and probably the network systems of a handful of major companies (such as Verizon, WorldCom, and Microsoft), and chances are, they know the program/system better than the creators. A hacker has the ability to take a compiled program, decompile it, figure out all the code, and sometimes rewrite the code, recompile the program, and replace the old with the new without anyone ever noticing.
Hacking is engineering on a different level. It makes an art of science.
I remember that game. I only had the demo version, though, but that only kept me from using a couple of the weapons, I don't think I got to the end level of it (if there was a different level limit for the demo version). I couldn't find the full version of it, but what I had I loved. I'll agree, it took a little time to master the controls, but once you figured it out, it was easy. And it acutally took a degree of skill to keep from being caught and slaughtered by...say...a Mega.