Re:The iPod is awesome.. cool... easy to use...
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iPod Takes Japan by Storm
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Apparently, you don't even have to go that far. All you need to do is put it in your pocket with your keys, then you can get lots of money back because "It scratches easily"
It's a fact that no matter what road your college takes, you will always have students complaining about one thing or another. I went to a large state school where we could go in to the OIT office and buy a license for windows xp for $10, and for an extra $10 we could have them burn a copy of the full version winxp pro. How my school worked this deal, I will never know, but it was pretty awesome.
We had mac labs and dell labs. There was never a time in any lab that i went in, ever, that 100% of the computers were 100% working. The digital art classes i took all had the student do work on their own time because the one art computer classroom was used by another class at the time ours was held. This allowed the student to use whatever program and hardware they wanted to finish the work, even though Adobe products were encouraged, since the teacher knew those programs better, so he/she could offer help to the student. There were a few classes that were specific to a program, but they were introductory classes aimed at people who had never used a computer before or had never used a computer for anything more than IM and Word, which is the majority of artists in college. With student's that fall into that category, they are going to use whatever tool you teach them to use, and most likely they will never search to use another tool until a job tells them they need to. I'm sure there are several philosophical and sociological studies out there which explain this. Even Newton's first law of physics can be used to illustrate this phenomena.
Now, this example will not be 100% the case with an art school but it is very similar. My girlfriend is in med school and they were "forced" to buy a laptop that the school picked out for them. The reason they could not choose a model is probably to ease the load on the tech support. If every student has the exact same laptop with the exact same base programs, then you are basically just dealing with a computer lab. When you start letting people pick which computer they want and the base software they want, you throw more variables in to the equation, which makes it harder to diagnose problems. When my girlfriend saw that she HAD to buy a laptop and it HAD to be the one they gave her, she complained about it every day until she actually recieved it. She complained about it being so expensive and how she thought the quality wouldn't justify the price. Part of the expense is the insurance on it and the service cost. If her laptop is stolen, she gets a replacement free of charge. If it breaks, she takes it in to the tech guys and has it fixed relatively fast, usually in a few hours, for free. Personally, i think this is a great idea, because she can take her lap top with her anywhere she wants to study. So, she can study in the library, on the couch, at a friend's house, in the "pods" (a group study area at her school), and so on. I also think this is a great idea, because it gives every student the exact same tools to learn with and use.
my girlfriend also complained that she already had a desktop computer and had no need for a laptop. The fact is, once she got her laptop, she never used her desktop, even though her desktop has everything she needs and it was still set up in her room. She takes her laptop to lecture every day and uses it to watch videos of the lecture and review the powerpoints every night. She uses the laptop to take all of her exams. Basically, her life revolves around that laptop. The school tells the students to not install any software updates until the school tests and distributes them. This is to prevent updates from breaking software and then having a huge flux of students coming in at once for tech support.
i hope that made some sense and wasn't too much of a incoherent ramble of thoughts.
"Unless you're just teaching the basic functionality, the color rendition of the laptop LCD screen is inadequate for Photoshop."
...Yet 'artists' swear by and use Mac's everyday. A true artist would never use a laptop. They would use a color corrected 21" CRT, but that's a moot point. The fact is most artists are non-techies. They like eye candy. If their computer is "good enough", they are happy. Personally, I chalk it up to "i'm an artist, and my computer looks better than yours, and everyone else has one, so I'm cool like them" because I've used photoshop in both OSX and windows XP environments and both function EXACTLY the same, aside from the obvious OS differences.
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Apparently, you don't even have to go that far. All you need to do is put it in your pocket with your keys, then you can get lots of money back because "It scratches easily"
Xbox - November 15, 2001 USA release
PS2 - October 26, 2000 USA release
same generation, no?
We had mac labs and dell labs. There was never a time in any lab that i went in, ever, that 100% of the computers were 100% working. The digital art classes i took all had the student do work on their own time because the one art computer classroom was used by another class at the time ours was held. This allowed the student to use whatever program and hardware they wanted to finish the work, even though Adobe products were encouraged, since the teacher knew those programs better, so he/she could offer help to the student. There were a few classes that were specific to a program, but they were introductory classes aimed at people who had never used a computer before or had never used a computer for anything more than IM and Word, which is the majority of artists in college. With student's that fall into that category, they are going to use whatever tool you teach them to use, and most likely they will never search to use another tool until a job tells them they need to. I'm sure there are several philosophical and sociological studies out there which explain this. Even Newton's first law of physics can be used to illustrate this phenomena.
Now, this example will not be 100% the case with an art school but it is very similar. My girlfriend is in med school and they were "forced" to buy a laptop that the school picked out for them. The reason they could not choose a model is probably to ease the load on the tech support. If every student has the exact same laptop with the exact same base programs, then you are basically just dealing with a computer lab. When you start letting people pick which computer they want and the base software they want, you throw more variables in to the equation, which makes it harder to diagnose problems. When my girlfriend saw that she HAD to buy a laptop and it HAD to be the one they gave her, she complained about it every day until she actually recieved it. She complained about it being so expensive and how she thought the quality wouldn't justify the price. Part of the expense is the insurance on it and the service cost. If her laptop is stolen, she gets a replacement free of charge. If it breaks, she takes it in to the tech guys and has it fixed relatively fast, usually in a few hours, for free. Personally, i think this is a great idea, because she can take her lap top with her anywhere she wants to study. So, she can study in the library, on the couch, at a friend's house, in the "pods" (a group study area at her school), and so on. I also think this is a great idea, because it gives every student the exact same tools to learn with and use.
my girlfriend also complained that she already had a desktop computer and had no need for a laptop. The fact is, once she got her laptop, she never used her desktop, even though her desktop has everything she needs and it was still set up in her room. She takes her laptop to lecture every day and uses it to watch videos of the lecture and review the powerpoints every night. She uses the laptop to take all of her exams. Basically, her life revolves around that laptop. The school tells the students to not install any software updates until the school tests and distributes them. This is to prevent updates from breaking software and then having a huge flux of students coming in at once for tech support.
i hope that made some sense and wasn't too much of a incoherent ramble of thoughts.
...Yet 'artists' swear by and use Mac's everyday. A true artist would never use a laptop. They would use a color corrected 21" CRT, but that's a moot point. The fact is most artists are non-techies. They like eye candy. If their computer is "good enough", they are happy. Personally, I chalk it up to "i'm an artist, and my computer looks better than yours, and everyone else has one, so I'm cool like them" because I've used photoshop in both OSX and windows XP environments and both function EXACTLY the same, aside from the obvious OS differences.