Current culture has an infatuation with the latest shiny shiny and just assumes that anything new is better anything old is bad and that the ancients didn't know anything. That's why they needed the help of extra-terrestrials.

Even if you're just "rolling a tape", you still have to manage the students. The "educator" is not just devaluing his own job but that of the tech. In all likelihood, the "tech" could probably get a better job somewhere else. The catch about the tech is he/she would need to be able to troubleshoot.

The same is kind of true of the "student management" aspect of the task. This "educator" seems to be just assuming that everything will go as easily as possible (both the tech and the cat herding).

If anything this cat-herder+tech person would likely be someone worth MORE in terms of job skills than less.

People typically devalue the jobs and skills of others but usually at least acknowledge their own.

I dunno. I'm not an educator, but I'm pretty sure that when I was in school that there was more to the class than just the lecture. I don't think you can just roll a copy of something from "The Great Courses" and declare yourself done.

I would be very worried about any teacher that would reduce their own job to that.

> So what are all those users of Plex, Xbmc, and MediaPortal running on then?

They're such a small and geeky part of the PC market that Linux no longer seems obscure anymore.

Keeping the plebs from copying their own stuff doesn't do anything but make paid for content less useful than the pirated stuff that someone else went to the trouble to liberate. And it only takes one. Past that point, all of the rubes can make extra copies as easy as if the original media had no DRM to begin with.

We gave up on that sort of elitism sometime around 1776.

If you can't copy it to a Linux box and play it with something other than iTunes then you don't really own it.

Apple sells a lot of that kind of stuff. If you're not aware, then perhaps you're stuck in 2003 and aren't aware of the newer things they are doing these days.

Even with the lastest and best supported Apple brand software and hardware, it can glitch while trying to phone home. DRM fail equals playback fail.

> Just so you know, nothing lasts forever.

Why not? Parts of my media hoard date back to 1994.

Bits don't wear out. There's no reason for them not to last forever.

My last iteration of "building from a collection of parts" was buying a QNAP from Amazon and a laptop from System76.

Ripping the content may require a little bit of upfront legwork but I never have to worry about some gatekeeper going out of business or deciding to just give me the middle finger.

Most of my MP3s are older than any sanctioned MP3 vendor. Now the older parts of my video collection have seen iTunes rise up as a video monger and then go offline.

This article is an advertisement for XBMC.

That's a distinction without a difference.

When people buy stuff from you that requires "phoning home", no one should let you off the hook for dropping "legacy support". People whine about things like "support" but this isn't a computing frame of reference here. This is consumer media.

The idea that your copy of the White Album suddenly stops working should not be tolerated.

No. You clueless blithering idiots don't get it.

No one whines in the news media "but think of the stupid kid with an egg allergy". It's always the kid that shouldn't even been anywhere near a school.

Some people are just in danger just by being exposed to lots of children and their germs. This kind of "medical excuse" is bogus. They shouldn't be in school to begin with. It doesn't matter if the whole rest of the school tries to cater to their condition or not.

As far as "allergies" go, that's a real judgement call. However, most alergies even aren't nearly as severe as diseases we vaccinate children for.

This is really one of those many situations where our own wealth puts us at a disadvantage. We're so used to not seeing some of these diseases that we are really out of touch with how bad they really are. The whole lot of us are terribly sheltered.

"establishment" and "restriction" are actually both very real issues with a good amount of caselaw behind them. The situation is neither simple nor trivial.

ANY ONE that needs an excuse of any sort to avoid a vaccination should not be in a public school. People spend a lot of time trying to eviscerate anti-vaxxers over this but this is an issue that impacts anyone that is immonosuppressed.

If you can't handle a Measles vaccine, you don't belong in school period. Just the other kids with normal things will be a deadly threat to you.

It sucks but that's the way it is. Doesn't matter if you are a kid recovering from blood cancer or a teacher also recovering from blood cancer.

It's just another situation with diminishing returns. Going from the spinning rust to an SSD achieves considerable and noticable gains whereas going to the next step does not. The transition to SSD probably already got rid of most of the perceptable bottleneck.

It's too bad that Intel hardware has such crappy performance. I am more interested in the base case. That's FAR more relevant to FAR more people. People bragging about how complicated they can make their parlour tricks are ridiculous and irrelevant.