And the Acer Aspire Revo ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103228&cm_re=revo-_-83-103-228-_-Product ) looks like a pretty cheap and capable box at $200. VGA and HDMI, low power, and a commodity product, so you can have spares on hand.

It looks good, but at $1000 for one room, it is a bit pricey. It seems to me that a linux sound driver that pushes .wav (or maybe .mp3) onto the network, and a really dumb computer to convert it to analog should only be $20 or $30 per room, which is much more reasonable, but I don't know if such a thing exists.

Alternately, I have wondered if one could use a jail-broken iPod touch, which has built in wireless, built in sound decoding, and a touch screen, connected to an amplifier and speakers. I haven't found an app that would let it function like an airport express, but it should be too hard, right?

Actually with the 8500 it offers standard SANE, so xsane works just fine. Even better, it has a web based scanning that works from any browser. Not quite as powerful as a dedicated, but from anyh computer you can scan and it returns a pdf file of the scan through the browser.

I just did a major search, and this is what I decided.

My main concerns (in order) were
1. Color Multifunction
2. Good network and compatibility
3. Low cost of supplies
4. Low cost of operation (electricity)
5. Low cost of purchase

I looked at a bunch of different printers, and ended up with the HP 8500 Premier all-in-one. My reasoning was
1. It is a color multifunction printer with all of the capabilities that I needed, including duplexing.
2. It has good support with MSWindows, OSX and Linux, including remote printing and scanning, and even (HOORAY!!!) support for SANE interfaces so XSane works.
3. It uses a separate ink tank and replaceable print heads, and the cost per page is just a few cents per page; much less than for any other inkjet that I found. The premier comes with a second set of cartridges which justifies the extra $50 from newegg.
4. This was the biggie that made the difference. If you look at the stand-by power for either the Brother or HP color all-in-ones they are 25-30 W. This is listed at 5 W for standby, which saves a lot over a 24/7 month.
5. From newegg it was $299, which was a great price, much cheaper than any of the laser all-in-ones and included the extra cartridges and the duplexing unit.

I have been very happy, and so far it has been about 4-5 cents per page for black and white, and 20-30 for color. It has a web page that shows the exact amount of ink used on each page, so you can easily keep track of ink usage. So far in 2.5 months of medium use I have used 50% of the original ink cartridges, and since I got two sets of cartridges this is only 25% of the ink that came with the printer.

I am not an HP salesman, but I am pretty happy with the system, especially the Linux compatibility. You might want to give it a look. It is pretty big, and definitely made for offices, but it is works well for me.

Actually, that is not true. Electric transportation, assuming that we can make electricity with either nuclear, solar or wind power which does not generate CO2 in order to make electricity, is humanity's next step in reducing CO2 emissions. If you look at the current carbon footprint for electricity generation, it has a large component of coal burning, which is the absolute worst for CO2. So, electric cars are often (depending on where you live) inefficient coal burning cars.

Or as good as poo.

Even college level QM is pretty static. I teach the same material out of pretty muich the same textbook as when I took the course 20 years ago.

The really ironic thing is that if it hadn't been for the law suit, I would not have found Zotero. I have been complaining for years about Endnote, but was unwilling to go LaTeX/BibTeX all of the way, and had been paying for endnote, and using Microsoft Word. With Zotero, I got completely changed over to OpenOffice on all platforms.

So, Thanks for the law suit.

I have a 1/4 inch drill bit that can disable any camera in any device in minutes, and I think that any security guard would be able to see that it would never work again.

As a faculty member at a fairly large private university, I have some opinions on that. I find that most of the actual learning occurs when I am talking with my students. This can occur in a large classroom as a conversation between me and a few students, with the other 250 students listening, it can occur with 30 students in a classroom, or it can occur in my office with 2 or 3 students. I have been forced to do on-line learning activities, mostly run through e-mail or bulletin board systems, and I have never had it work. I even tried using facebook as a vehicle, hoping that since students already spend most of their time there, they would be more familiar with it than they were with BZlackboard/Moodle. In the end very little course material was ever discussed on-line. I tried to get discussions, my TAs tried, even a few students tried, but nothing ever happened (except for a lot of part invites, and wierd pictures of cats).

Most of the reason for this lies with the students. They wanted help with math and formulas in their homework, and it is easier to do it on the whiteboard. They needed to converse and that is easier to do in person. In the end, most of the real traffic was invites to meet in the library for study groups, which is a very real use for the technology.

I don't want to be too down on on-line work. If you have a mature learner who knows what he or she wants to learn, then on-line, or books, or technical papers or whatever work well. If you have a bunch of 19-23 year old students who don't know how to learn (an BOY do they not know how to learn) then some sort of personal touch is the most valuable thing you can give them.

The biggest problem is that backup has two different purposes, and people are often confused about these.

1. Disaster recovery: You need backup for you system that covers you for failure of a disk. For this RAID 1 is adequate, though higher levels of protection would be nicer. In our data system, we do a complete live mirror of the file system, with double parity disks.

2. Archiving: This is to cover the loss of data not due to disk failure. The problem described in the article is this kind of failure, and is not covered by the disaster recovery setup. These problems also include people deleting files, people altering files, and wanting original files, curruption of files, whatever problems alter the filesystem. These are not fixed with disaster recovery because they alter the filesystem properly, and permanently.

The archiving problem can be done with snapshotting, which does provide coverage, and combined with RAID can provide both kinds of backup, but still leaves one weakness. If the entire system is always on line, the failure of the controller can take out multiple disks and disk systems, so something should really be kept off-line. For our system we have 5 sets of disks in ESATA holders that are swapped out in groups for off-line storage.

Finally these don't cover physical problems, such as fires. For this we store one of the sets of disks off-site for certainty.

If data is lost during the day, the snapshotting allows recovery of the data. If it happens during a week, either the snapshot or one of the sets of off-line disks provide backup. The off-site backup has the longest time horizon, but provides the longest time horizon of safety.

I think that in the current computer ecosystem, most people just accept the flaws in microsoft as standard business, but expect perfection in everybody else. So, I have three different version of MSWord that I use, and I have files that each different version renders differently, and that's OK to most people, but if OpenOffice renders it differently, then it is a deep and terrible problem. My best analogy is to the computer support world. We used to have a crappy IT guy, and the servers were always crashing, and people got used to it. He left, we hired a new guy, and everything runs great. Now when the servers go down once a year, people become unglued, and say he is incompetent. The higher performance breeds higher expectations, which the higher performance then cannot match up to. So, I guess that the solution is to randomly shut down servers so that people don't get too confident.

This is especially strange news in light of an article from zdnet, http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=2304, saying that firefox is the top bad example from a list of 12 programs with the worst security record. More interestingly, they don't even mention Internet Explorer as having bad security problems, despite news like this. Does Microsoft just pay journalists to write things like this on the day before they know they have bad news to release in hopes that people won't notice their security problems?

In fact, I think that file formats are the most important front in the control of computers. 10 years ago, it was all about what operating system ran on what hardware, but things are different today. People don't really care what operating system they run, or what hardware they run it on, they only care that they can use the data that they need. That's why microsoft tried so hard to control web browsers or servers (either one would do) because that left them in control. Instead, open standards won out, and it doesn't matter what browser I use, or what operating system I run on, I can still access on-line content. If microsoft can continue to control office document formats, the can control another generation of computer sales to businesses, and thus computer sales to consumers who want to use the same stuff at home as at work. If we had an open office document format (like ODF) that everyone agreed on, then microsoft would have to compete based on the ease of use, feature set, cross-platform compatablility and cost of their software against WordPerfect, OpenOffice, KOffice and whatever else. So in the end, control of this format is critical. If it fails, it means that all of you data belongs to microsoft, because if you don't have the latest copy of MSOffice, you cannot exchange files any more.