Comment Seriously... (Score 1) 26
Yeah nice one, how about adding a couple of hunderd more characters to your messages? 140 characters was fine when SMS messaging was big in 1998!
Comment Familiar? (Score 1) 496
Is Miller talking about Aliens, or is he talking about us? Becuase if he's right, the prognosis for humanity isn't that bright!
L8r.
Ubuntu Desktop In the Cloud 83
jimjimovich writes "One new feature in Ubuntu 10.04 that caught my attention is the Desktop in the Cloud project. Ubuntu already has great EC2 support, and it's getting even better. Now you can launch Ubuntu Desktop instances on EC2 and connect to them with an NX client."
Scientists Discover Booze That Won't Give You a Hangover 334
Kwang-il Kwon and Hye Gwang Jeong of Chungnam National University have discovered that drinking alcohol with oxygen bubbles added leads to fewer hangovers and a shorter sobering up time. People drinking the bubbly booze sobered up 20-30 minutes faster and had less severe and fewer hangovers than people who drank the non-fizzy stuff. Kwon said: "The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage reduces plasma alcohol concentrations faster than a normal dissolved-oxygen alcohol beverage does. This could provide both clinical and real-life significance. The oxygen-enriched alcohol beverage would allow individuals to become sober faster, and reduce the side effects of acetaldehyde without a significant difference in alcohol's effects. Furthermore, the reduced time to a lower BAC may reduce alcohol-related accidents."
Federal Deadline Hobbling eHealth IT Rollout 99
Lucas123 writes "A federal deadline that begins next year and requires hospitals to prove they're meaningfully using electronic health records will lead to technical problems and data errors affecting patient care, say politicians and top IT professionals responsible for the deployments. Physicians and hospitals have until the end of 2011 to receive the maximum federal incentive monies to deploy the technology. If not deployed by 2015, they face penalties through cuts in Medicare reimbursements. 'I think we have nontechnology people making decisions about technology,' said Gregg Veltri, CIO at Denver Health. 'I wonder if anybody understands the reality of IT systems and how complex they are, especially when they're integrated together. You're going to sacrifice quality if you increase the speed [of the rollout].'"
Comment I feel your pain! (Score 1) 411
I work in an Aussie school, and we've just recently wrangled with the idea of how to best outfit our students with PC's. It's funny, no matter what way we looked at the problem, just about every affordable idea we came up with was really only a workaround way of sharing the machines. For technology to be fully integrated into the curriculum and highly available at the point of learning, there's only one solution. Give every student a laptop. It's expensive, and we can't afford to do it, so I imagine you may not be able to either, but it really needs to be said that it is the best solution.
I remember when we handed laptops to all of our teaching staff, we had theories that it was the best way of giving them access, but nothing like the actual reality. After the deployment the increase in the use of technology (actively encouraged by the schools policy makers) was incredible. I don't think that it would be any different with students. Don't listen to any of the nay-sayers who will tell you they'll be too distracting in class, or the kids will lose them or break them, these are all things that can be worked around.
That's if you can afford it. If not, beware of those who want to cut corners. Schools are notoriously underfunded and there's a temptation to penny-pinch, but the students will suffer as a result. Thin clients for example, suffer badly from not coping with a lot of video/sound/CAD software, and while you can get away with them in certain areas, teachers favour a homogeneous environment throughout.
Anyway, I can bang on about this forever. I guess I'm trying to say that nothing good can come from cutting corners. It's a big responsiblity you've got there, and I hope it works out for you.
L8r.
