I'm sure I've read somewhere that Dell are required to ship every computer they produce with Windows pre-loaded as part of their contract with M$. So, I guess that the price will not come down. Which is a shame, it could make an affordable PC very affordable.
For our school in the UK, it is great value for money, because we are Microsoft sponsored and so all the software is free. But this just makes the IT department try and use it. IMHO, it is a slightly pointless review because in most cases it is good value for money, and what it doesn't address is how useful this software is going to be for the children in later life. There are people coming out of schools who can only name one word processor - Word, and that's the only one they know how to use. How useful is this going to be? Not very, IMO.
I attended FUDCON 2006 in Boston, and it looked like they were not going to use the dynamo idea...maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sure the guy said it was too hard to prevent the laptops from breaking with a crank.
I agree entirely. I started writing HTML at age 9, but my dad had drilled into my head that notepad was the way to go:) When I got my computer a few years ago, my parents refused to buy me Windows to put on it, so I moved to Linux and never looked back! At 14 I can write Perl, PHP and Java and Bash shell script.
I think part of the problem is that schools are not particularly interested in teaching students how to program, in any way. My IT lessons for the last 3 years consisted of a patronising teacher telling me where and how to click on the start menu. I have no doubt that every person in the room could do this.
The IT teachers at my school are all pulled in from other subjects if they even have a vague knowledge of computing (there are fewer ICT/computing teachers because the income is greater if they use their skills elsewhere). I have no doubt that none of them can program well enough to teach someone how to do it. The school comps are completely locked down, so there is no chance of writing anything server-side; I guess you could perhaps get away with a VB app though. Most of the schools are like this; that is why there are so few programmers coming out of them.
But, with the growth of MySpace, lots more kids are at least becoming interested in learning HTML, JavaScript and CSS, so I guess this is a start.
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I'm sure I've read somewhere that Dell are required to ship every computer they produce with Windows pre-loaded as part of their contract with M$. So, I guess that the price will not come down. Which is a shame, it could make an affordable PC very affordable.
For our school in the UK, it is great value for money, because we are Microsoft sponsored and so all the software is free. But this just makes the IT department try and use it. IMHO, it is a slightly pointless review because in most cases it is good value for money, and what it doesn't address is how useful this software is going to be for the children in later life. There are people coming out of schools who can only name one word processor - Word, and that's the only one they know how to use. How useful is this going to be? Not very, IMO.
I attended FUDCON 2006 in Boston, and it looked like they were not going to use the dynamo idea...maybe I'm wrong, but I'm sure the guy said it was too hard to prevent the laptops from breaking with a crank.
I agree entirely. I started writing HTML at age 9, but my dad had drilled into my head that notepad was the way to go :) When I got my computer a few years ago, my parents refused to buy me Windows to put on it, so I moved to Linux and never looked back! At 14 I can write Perl, PHP and Java and Bash shell script.
I think part of the problem is that schools are not particularly interested in teaching students how to program, in any way. My IT lessons for the last 3 years consisted of a patronising teacher telling me where and how to click on the start menu. I have no doubt that every person in the room could do this.
The IT teachers at my school are all pulled in from other subjects if they even have a vague knowledge of computing (there are fewer ICT/computing teachers because the income is greater if they use their skills elsewhere). I have no doubt that none of them can program well enough to teach someone how to do it. The school comps are completely locked down, so there is no chance of writing anything server-side; I guess you could perhaps get away with a VB app though. Most of the schools are like this; that is why there are so few programmers coming out of them.
But, with the growth of MySpace, lots more kids are at least becoming interested in learning HTML, JavaScript and CSS, so I guess this is a start.