When did you last audit a primary or secondary school class? The topic at hand is using technology funding for wifi on buses as part of compulsory education.
If the bus-based wifi is not limited in such a way that it can only be used for schoolwork, why should the school's budget pay for it?
Assume it is limited, proxied, etc. so that students don't just surf for porn and update Facebook. If the schools pay for mobile wifi subscriptions, then they may have to provide laptops as well to ensure each student has an equal opportunity to make use of the technology. Those laptops should provide enough reference material (eBooks, cached wikipedia, etc.) to be useful while disconnected from networks, so even with cheap hardware they may require a fair deal of licensed material. Providing wifi on buses is a slippery slope toward using costly technology in places where it has never been needed before. That seems like a big investment to reduce the frequency of hair pulling and yelling among kids of an age where such bad behaviors are normal.
I agree with you that laptops are nice for working when labs are unavailable in college; This article, however, is about school buses for primary/secondary students. In order for the bus wifi to be cost-effective it must be utilized; for that to happen, the schools must either provide laptops or encourage students to bring laptops. Way back in the stupid ages when I was in high school, the school's policy discouraged bringing expensive/fancy gadgets - they're neither helpful in classes with curricula that assume students bring pens and paper nor secure in halls full of mischievous students.
I graduated from college in the winter of 2006. With the exception of the computer science department, very few college students needed personal laptops at school. Why should primary or secondary school students lug laptops from home to school and back when most schools have controlled computer labs and most towns have public libraries? The complexity and cost of distributing and maintaining laptops seems unnecessary. Laptops and per-bus wifi seem like an expensive way to lessen the dullness of trips to and from school.
Perhaps a jump in number of cores will convince people outside the Apple and FreeBSD camps to port Grand Central Dispatch. Letting the kernel team handle the hairier parts of multi-threaded design should make it easy for barely-optimized software to use powerful hardware. Could its Apache license work with the #1 OS family?
Your recognition that the effects of each have their respective places and times shows much more discretion than those who would purchase a pre-mixed alcohol and caffeine drink. It's a real shame the man has to step in to save idiots from their own poor decisions.
When you graduate from high school and begin taking tests at a college level you may find that your TI-84 is far more complex than the calculators allowed in exams. All physics, chemistry, and engineering exams I took in college allowed the TI-30XA or an equivalent approved by the professor. A well-written test takes exactly long enough to complete that a students who knows the material will barely finish in time and students who smuggle in cheat sheets will run out of time while reading them.
You don't have to try that hard. NOAA's website accepts URLS of the form "weather.gov/zip" where "zip" is your zip code. Save yourself some typing, be lazy!
Have you used Adobe Flash Player on any platform? Many people often use the full power of their CPUs, but the reasons they do so generally involve playing simple games and videos coded badly.
I applaud Google's efforts to bring us all toward standards-compliance, but hope this tweak will be brought to MS Office rather than stopping at MSIE. Most companies have vector graphics of their logos for printing company swag, yet their email signatures still use image-based logos that add hundreds of kilobytes to the simplest one-line correspondence. So long as big boss wants email signatures that look like business cards and IT guys want uniform installations of Windows+IE+Office any move toward standards-compliance which Microsoft will embrace is a godsend.
I name my computers after Greeks real and mythical. Most of them go by a single name with a simple, phonetic spelling.
The desktop connected to the stereo used for playing music and video is Apollo
My grandmother's old, slow laptop is Thales
My more recent desktop is Pythagoras
My Macbook is Euclid
My iPod is Orpheus
My VMs are all named Plato
There are several famous real and mythical Greeks, so I don't risk running out of appropriate host names.
Electrolysis sucks. You can get hydrogen more cheaply by cracking hydrocarbons. Hydrogen gas as a fuel is impractical. Gobs of energy would need to be invested to compress the gas sufficiently to get a decent range out of a single fill. Would you rather take slight losses over the power grid or carry around a high pressure canister of flammable/explosive gas? Leave the chemistry stunts to the industries than can afford them at practical scales rather than making new engines unnecessarily complex and expensive.
It took a work trip to Alamogordo, NM for me to see the Milky Way clearly (milkily?) for the first time. \begin{irony}I visited the White Sands National Monument after finishing a day doing field take-off in Alamogordo's Walmart which was scheduled to be remodeled.\end{irony} It inspired me to go camping for the first time since Boy Scout campouts in my younger days.
Is that on my grandmother's Pentium II laptop or my boss's multi-core workstation? Startup time seems like an arbitrary statistic for a Linux distribution that should run on a broad range of outdated and current hardware.
Collaboration aside (and that's a big thing to throw out), why would you prefer exporting to.doc instead of to.pdf? I would suggest you try LaTeX if you really use that many tables and figures, but even if you don't make that leap it would be easy enough to make sure the format you share works (in the sense of readable with copy/paste-able text) by using.pdf output.
They'll quit cranking out "international" code books which apply primarily to California, are effectively required reading for engineering projects in the state, and cost upwards of $50/book for the privilege of reading material that by definition cannot be copyrighted.
Reasons unknown? If my boss blocked Facebook and YouTube fewer idiots would be wasting time they should be spending doing billable work for our clients. The schools' blocking open source sites for fear of hacking is disappointing, but your suggestion that social networking and flash video websites serve some useful purpose is ridiculous. I wish you luck getting programming and open source sites to kids, but try leave pointless time-wasters out of your argument when defending your suggestion in front of the school board. Unless the computer lab has overtaken the entire library, students may be able to use librarians (who as resources go are nearly as good as Google) to locate books (which as information goes is nearly as good as a website) for their educational endeavors.
Slashdot Mirror
http://members.socket.net/~llile/ConcreteStain/Compost_Toilet_50_gallon_drum.html
When did you last audit a primary or secondary school class?
The topic at hand is using technology funding for wifi on buses as part of compulsory education.
If the bus-based wifi is not limited in such a way that it can only be used for schoolwork, why should the school's budget pay for it?
Assume it is limited, proxied, etc. so that students don't just surf for porn and update Facebook.
If the schools pay for mobile wifi subscriptions, then they may have to provide laptops as well to ensure each student has an equal opportunity to make use of the technology.
Those laptops should provide enough reference material (eBooks, cached wikipedia, etc.) to be useful while disconnected from networks, so even with cheap hardware they may require a fair deal of licensed material.
Providing wifi on buses is a slippery slope toward using costly technology in places where it has never been needed before.
That seems like a big investment to reduce the frequency of hair pulling and yelling among kids of an age where such bad behaviors are normal.
I agree with you that laptops are nice for working when labs are unavailable in college; This article, however, is about school buses for primary/secondary students.
In order for the bus wifi to be cost-effective it must be utilized; for that to happen, the schools must either provide laptops or encourage students to bring laptops.
Way back in the stupid ages when I was in high school, the school's policy discouraged bringing expensive/fancy gadgets - they're neither helpful in classes with curricula that assume students bring pens and paper nor secure in halls full of mischievous students.
Gmail's fallback HTML mode (for browsers with javascript disabled) runs nicely.
I graduated from college in the winter of 2006. With the exception of the computer science department, very few college students needed personal laptops at school.
Why should primary or secondary school students lug laptops from home to school and back when most schools have controlled computer labs and most towns have public libraries? The complexity and cost of distributing and maintaining laptops seems unnecessary.
Laptops and per-bus wifi seem like an expensive way to lessen the dullness of trips to and from school.
Perhaps a jump in number of cores will convince people outside the Apple and FreeBSD camps to port Grand Central Dispatch.
Letting the kernel team handle the hairier parts of multi-threaded design should make it easy for barely-optimized software to use powerful hardware.
Could its Apache license work with the #1 OS family?
James Doohan is rolling over in his grave^H^H^H^H^H blowing around in his atmosphere.
Could it be QOS prioritizing the connections of top-speed users over those of lesser speed users?
Your recognition that the effects of each have their respective places and times shows much more discretion than those who would purchase a pre-mixed alcohol and caffeine drink.
It's a real shame the man has to step in to save idiots from their own poor decisions.
Trebek: This state failed to consider the cost of changing software and training users.
Yakov Smirnoff: What is free market Russia?
When you graduate from high school and begin taking tests at a college level you may find that your TI-84 is far more complex than the calculators allowed in exams.
All physics, chemistry, and engineering exams I took in college allowed the TI-30XA or an equivalent approved by the professor.
A well-written test takes exactly long enough to complete that a students who knows the material will barely finish in time and students who smuggle in cheat sheets will run out of time while reading them.
6 hours is just about the whole work day? Are you accepting applications?
I had mod points yesterday. I hope knowing that I spewed sweet tea out my nose when I read your reply makes you feel as good as a +1 Funny.
You don't have to try that hard.
NOAA's website accepts URLS of the form "weather.gov/zip" where "zip" is your zip code.
Save yourself some typing, be lazy!
Have you used Adobe Flash Player on any platform? Many people often use the full power of their CPUs, but the reasons they do so generally involve playing simple games and videos coded badly.
I applaud Google's efforts to bring us all toward standards-compliance, but hope this tweak will be brought to MS Office rather than stopping at MSIE.
Most companies have vector graphics of their logos for printing company swag, yet their email signatures still use image-based logos that add hundreds of kilobytes to the simplest one-line correspondence.
So long as big boss wants email signatures that look like business cards and IT guys want uniform installations of Windows+IE+Office any move toward standards-compliance which Microsoft will embrace is a godsend.
I name my computers after Greeks real and mythical. Most of them go by a single name with a simple, phonetic spelling.
The desktop connected to the stereo used for playing music and video is Apollo
My grandmother's old, slow laptop is Thales
My more recent desktop is Pythagoras
My Macbook is Euclid
My iPod is Orpheus
My VMs are all named Plato
There are several famous real and mythical Greeks, so I don't risk running out of appropriate host names.
Electrolysis sucks. You can get hydrogen more cheaply by cracking hydrocarbons. Hydrogen gas as a fuel is impractical. Gobs of energy would need to be invested to compress the gas sufficiently to get a decent range out of a single fill. Would you rather take slight losses over the power grid or carry around a high pressure canister of flammable/explosive gas? Leave the chemistry stunts to the industries than can afford them at practical scales rather than making new engines unnecessarily complex and expensive.
"[...] and they stack the desk against them [...]"
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It took a work trip to Alamogordo, NM for me to see the Milky Way clearly (milkily?) for the first time. \begin{irony}I visited the White Sands National Monument after finishing a day doing field take-off in Alamogordo's Walmart which was scheduled to be remodeled.\end{irony} It inspired me to go camping for the first time since Boy Scout campouts in my younger days.
Is that on my grandmother's Pentium II laptop or my boss's multi-core workstation? Startup time seems like an arbitrary statistic for a Linux distribution that should run on a broad range of outdated and current hardware.
Collaboration aside (and that's a big thing to throw out), why would you prefer exporting to .doc instead of to .pdf? I would suggest you try LaTeX if you really use that many tables and figures, but even if you don't make that leap it would be easy enough to make sure the format you share works (in the sense of readable with copy/paste-able text) by using .pdf output.
They'll quit cranking out "international" code books which apply primarily to California, are effectively required reading for engineering projects in the state, and cost upwards of $50/book for the privilege of reading material that by definition cannot be copyrighted.
Reasons unknown? If my boss blocked Facebook and YouTube fewer idiots would be wasting time they should be spending doing billable work for our clients. The schools' blocking open source sites for fear of hacking is disappointing, but your suggestion that social networking and flash video websites serve some useful purpose is ridiculous. I wish you luck getting programming and open source sites to kids, but try leave pointless time-wasters out of your argument when defending your suggestion in front of the school board. Unless the computer lab has overtaken the entire library, students may be able to use librarians (who as resources go are nearly as good as Google) to locate books (which as information goes is nearly as good as a website) for their educational endeavors.
I really dig your signature. I laughed harder after I clicked your signature's link than I have laughed at any recent posts.