Yeah, the point of a school is to prepare students for the real world, not to create some dumbed-down simulation of it. Rules that are made that retract federal or state laws have no place.
Its interesting to note how different school systems appear to be in Australia from the US. The MSN Spaces of people at my school (nerds and non-nerds alike) post pictures and stories about other students with no issues. We have a laptop programme, so every student has wireless internet access and their own computer. I have never heard of suspension over what is posted though. Has that happened before or is this all a hypothetical?
We are a fairly protected school in terms of internet and such. We have ContentKeeper running across the network to stop certain sites being shown but did step on a few toes when the Uniting Church, who own the school, discovered that their own website had been blocked under 'Personal Beliefs/Cults'. The problem was very quickly rectified! Also, if laptops are sent in for repair and Kazaa is discovered, you recieve disciplinary action (anything from detention to suspension) and your My Music or Shared Folder(s) are deleted with all the contents inside it. This is even if there is no indication it is being used over the network (hard, considering it is blocked).
Anyway, I shall be watching this thread closely, its interesting! I think it is taking matters way too far. Blogs are online journals. They are replacing the hard-bound journal of yester-year and record the thoughts of teenagers during their times at school. I think it is a healthy thing for students to be doing, provided that they do not disclose personal information openly. MSN Spaces are good for his, they can be limited to people who you know and who are on your contact list, so it becomes even less of an issue and more of a good thing.
You would run into all sorts of problems if you could use your iPod or PSP has a HDD for the XBox 360. Notably, file system formats would be different and there lacks a high-speed, uniform connector for use. The MS 360 HDD can use a connection which is faster than the USb2.0 found on iPod, PSP, etc.
I think this whole concept of being able to plug in iPod, etc is hardly newsworthy, I think it is a feature that should be considered standard. Computer syetems are becoming increasingly integrated. The days of a dedicated and seperate games console and seperate and dedicated DVD/VHS are over. Convergance and intergration are critical for tech to actually help people and I don't see Sony or Nintendo being as open as MS is the 360 so good one MS!
Please do your research. Project 42 became.NET and I would hardly call it disasterous. But I can think of three reasons why it would be considered so by the Slashdot crowd.
1. Its not open source.
2. You weren't employed by the team of 1500.
3. Its not open source.
Oh, if you want a fourth:
4. Bill Gates is involved and I mean, not like he ever did anything to help computers become mainstream! No siree! He is the devil, completely against everyone and everything and you, the readers of Slashdot, wioll champion the free world and lead them to a GPL'ed world! w00t 1337 haz0r dud3!
Mac OS X boot times vary. On a G4 PowerBook, a boot takes around a minute in Tiger (10.4) whereas it takes less than 5 seconds on a G5, given that it is optimised for this hardware. Nice side effect from it being based on UNIX is that cron scripts keep it running nicely when it is not being used but is still turned on. My iMac very rarely gets turned off.
I can see this technology being useful for media applications, such as DVD players. For example, turning on your computer and only having DVD player start, if it was used in a media centre environment. It would no doubt just improve the experience full stop. I remember mention of this over the past few months, along with news of Seagate developing HDD's with flash memory to speed up start up time. Cool concept...just store the entire OS on the flash drive.
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Yeah, the point of a school is to prepare students for the real world, not to create some dumbed-down simulation of it. Rules that are made that retract federal or state laws have no place.
Its interesting to note how different school systems appear to be in Australia from the US. The MSN Spaces of people at my school (nerds and non-nerds alike) post pictures and stories about other students with no issues. We have a laptop programme, so every student has wireless internet access and their own computer. I have never heard of suspension over what is posted though. Has that happened before or is this all a hypothetical?
We are a fairly protected school in terms of internet and such. We have ContentKeeper running across the network to stop certain sites being shown but did step on a few toes when the Uniting Church, who own the school, discovered that their own website had been blocked under 'Personal Beliefs/Cults'. The problem was very quickly rectified! Also, if laptops are sent in for repair and Kazaa is discovered, you recieve disciplinary action (anything from detention to suspension) and your My Music or Shared Folder(s) are deleted with all the contents inside it. This is even if there is no indication it is being used over the network (hard, considering it is blocked).
Anyway, I shall be watching this thread closely, its interesting! I think it is taking matters way too far. Blogs are online journals. They are replacing the hard-bound journal of yester-year and record the thoughts of teenagers during their times at school. I think it is a healthy thing for students to be doing, provided that they do not disclose personal information openly. MSN Spaces are good for his, they can be limited to people who you know and who are on your contact list, so it becomes even less of an issue and more of a good thing.
You would run into all sorts of problems if you could use your iPod or PSP has a HDD for the XBox 360. Notably, file system formats would be different and there lacks a high-speed, uniform connector for use. The MS 360 HDD can use a connection which is faster than the USb2.0 found on iPod, PSP, etc. I think this whole concept of being able to plug in iPod, etc is hardly newsworthy, I think it is a feature that should be considered standard. Computer syetems are becoming increasingly integrated. The days of a dedicated and seperate games console and seperate and dedicated DVD/VHS are over. Convergance and intergration are critical for tech to actually help people and I don't see Sony or Nintendo being as open as MS is the 360 so good one MS!
Please do your research. Project 42 became .NET and I would hardly call it disasterous. But I can think of three reasons why it would be considered so by the Slashdot crowd.
1. Its not open source.
2. You weren't employed by the team of 1500.
3. Its not open source.
Oh, if you want a fourth:
4. Bill Gates is involved and I mean, not like he ever did anything to help computers become mainstream! No siree! He is the devil, completely against everyone and everything and you, the readers of Slashdot, wioll champion the free world and lead them to a GPL'ed world! w00t 1337 haz0r dud3!
Mac OS X boot times vary. On a G4 PowerBook, a boot takes around a minute in Tiger (10.4) whereas it takes less than 5 seconds on a G5, given that it is optimised for this hardware. Nice side effect from it being based on UNIX is that cron scripts keep it running nicely when it is not being used but is still turned on. My iMac very rarely gets turned off.
I can see this technology being useful for media applications, such as DVD players. For example, turning on your computer and only having DVD player start, if it was used in a media centre environment. It would no doubt just improve the experience full stop. I remember mention of this over the past few months, along with news of Seagate developing HDD's with flash memory to speed up start up time. Cool concept...just store the entire OS on the flash drive.