Simple and correct. The iPad is a consumer device in more than one respect - it's suitable for a home environment that consumes. The point of school is to experiment with producing.

The teachers buy into the shiny packaging of the iPad becuase of its marketing. Teachers don't make content, the school has no budget for developers to make content, so they use the iPad to play cutesy little games on the Internet. Some of these are educational, some are not. Most of them are infested with adware of spyware (which even the teachers don't understand). Some of the external content is decent, but you have to do some research. It, too, is not without its flaws (wants a certain browser, certain versions of flash...) I work in IT at a school.

My sister-in-law is a teacher, they don't have iPads yet. She gets essays with "LOL" in them. Thankfully, she's a teacher who will go toe-to-toe with a principal to fight to fail a kid in school (they still won't let her, but that's another issue).

I spend more time than I'd like dealing with panicked teachers for gathering "evidence" from Google chat sessions or Facebook.

That being said, we do have the Adobe Creative Suite, and some of the kids do some really neat stuff. I do wonder about "the three r's", though.

For the same reason we're pessimists - professional experience.

Let a group of kids (especially once they've discovered hormones) get their hands on an iPad, and see how often you're re-imaging those machines. Let them get their hands on a laptop, and see how often you're looking for pieces of keys, or epoxying the case back together.

I'm only on for two weeks of every six, thank God. After work until 10pm only.

I'm still trying to figure out a way to notice my phone if I want to use the pool at the gym. I usually do weights or aerobic exercise, but I have occasional foot problems which make me get my exercise from the pool. The caveat is that I actually have to pick up the phone and answer calls - it's not a matter of noticing an outage via text message. Waterproof 2.4Ghz headphone?

"Unfriending" is directly proportional to the amount you soapbox and/or complain (among other things).

However, there's plenty of people that I don't unfriend, but their facebook attitude makes me hide them from my feed within one or two days!

I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the 80's and 90's. Dial-up was only really available to the town the last year I was there. We had computers, no Internet. Our computer guy for the school was shared between four other (and larger) schools.

Computer classes were pretty much non-existent.

What did help, though, was my parents. We had a Vic20 at home, a Commodore 64 later, and then a 486. Between there and the school, I figured out how to get to the command line and do things.

I was "into computers", and my parents were both teachers, so everyone told me I was going to university and taking computer science. Some of it interested me, but I didn't know what I was getting into. I knew what programming was, but it wasn't my favourite.

(That's a lot of I's in there... I'm getting to my point...)

I would have killed to have the Internet and Wikipedia in my teen years. Even more so, I would have loved the ability to take a course to experiment with parts of the "computer" field before I decided (or rather, my parents decided) how I should spend my time after high school.

Not everyone is the same. Everyone doesn't need to be a programmer. But I think it's valuable to make kids take some computer usage courses, and in their later years, make them take some more specialised courses and ALLOW THEM THE CHOICE of what they'd like to experiment with.

Online courses are probably more beneficial for this, as you can offer more specialised courses, and kids who are in smaller towns or in more inaccessible or poor parts of a city have the opportunities they wouldn't have otherwise.

I also suspect a lot of them don't know about other alternatives for extra or other credits. A lot of schools will let you take intro university courses for credit, or arrange for you to job shadow someone for credit, but I'll bet a lot of students don't know about this.

That is a good point - I am constantly surprised by some of my friends and acquaintances who aren't in the computer field, but are learning some programming and scripting to support them at their jobs.

Some exposure is useful to anyone who will use a computer. At the very least, it will give you some insight into why the program you're using is acting a certain way. I've also seen it be a "gateway drug" - i.e. someone using InDesign needs to do something and find out they need to make an "action". As they get into it, they realize they can solve other problems with scripts. Then they're doing stuff on web sites, and learn flash. Then to solve another problem, it requires programming...

It's really fun trying to keep your teachers ahead of the technology game in schools, and be proficient enough at it to teach the kids... as opposed to the kids knowing more than the teachers, and telling them how to do it. It's especially fun if your teachers are older than 35.

Content networks like Discovery Education help. There are a few sites which are online software apps designed to let teachers choose content, extra media and questionnaires that will be available to their students. However, they are sometimes buggy, or suffer from performance issues. Add that into trying to make a class of kids with the attention span of fruit flies follow the same thing at the same time, or even follow general directions (and remember passwords, etc.)...

Mom and Dad can support it at home, but they don't know everything either.

The solution of the Internet also brings expense, even more-so for users that are kids.

Keep them indefinitely? You mean continually backing them up to different mediums and hoping the medium doesn't die, converting the pdf to something else if pdf comes to a point of dying, hoping for backwards compatibility of readers (and ideally testing many of the pdfs each time the version or software package changes)...

The effort involved with keeping magazines, in most instances, is carting the box around if you move. That, and keeping a pet bird away from it, if you happen to have one.

They spend hours compiling the thing every month, and now their server's going to have a higher load (presuming people stay on). I'm not sure what they're using for desktop publishing, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were occasional costs involved (stock images, etc.). How do you figure it's free to make and distribute?

I'm not saying charging the EXACT same price is reasonable, but asking for 0.49 or 0.99 per issue for digital might not be a reasonable thing for consumers to ask, either.

What would be free distribution is a free torrent - but then you'd either have to have it all free software, free images, free time, no expenses for the magazine, and people donating their time. As soon as you try to restrict who has it, you'll need to cover charges - the mere act of covering charges incurs a charge.

Curious what people would think a reasonable price would be. I don't know, myself.

I'm very disappointed because it was my bathtub reading material. The bottom corners can sometimes get soggy, but it's still good. Can't say the same about a digital device. I'm not into the iPad hype anyways.

I have a couple of other small devices able to read pdfs, but frankly my day consists of get ready for work, rush to work, work, gym, drive home, collapse on couch for an hour, make something to eat, catch up on life (bills, personal email - maybe, quality time with spouse), maybe have a bath for "me" time (damn you LJ), go to bed. Repeat.

Agree - this makes me think maybe the reason the price isn't changing is because they know ad sales are going to plummet.

The email I received started me thinking - they are implementing an additional system to one pdf. I hope it's more user-friendly than a magazine being available through EBSCO at your library, where you have to click on 70 links to get the whole magazine.

Part of the problem I have with the one-pdf is some of the ads have a crapload of image and text boxes - unvectorized, unrasterized. They take too long to load. I can't nicely split the pdf into 4-6 easy-to-load sections unless I want to run Acrobat Professional...

I know in Brazil tarriffs on most imported goods are very high (around 80%). Ideally, it's to preserve Brazilian culture and goods. The funny side effect it has is that imported goods are now a luxury item, so people middle-upper class really covet them and buy them anyway.

A sensible person can usually find a very affordable local alternative. Technology is harder though - if the company doesn't have a manufacturing plant there, then there may be few or no alternatives.

I wonder what the whole story is? Are there no tech goods being produced in Australia? Are there high tarriffs or fees, even on internet downloads? Even with a lack of fees, if the government makes it a huge pain in the ass for you to do business there with paperwork, rules, etc., a business is going to have to find a way to compensate for the P.I.T.A factor.

In fact, the attrition (or bounce rate) of video games is pretty pathetic.

This line is pathetic in of itself. Some games aren't that exciting; not finishing it because of that is hardly a "pathetic" situation. Other reasons for not finishing games? Family, friends, work, school, other hobbies and commitments... What would be pathetic is feeling you have to finish the game despite all that.

Games are entertainment or a distraction. It's not a necessity to finish it in order to gain some enjoyment or benefit from it.

If the expectation is that almost every game made should make you want to finish it to the end, then... wow... what a dumb expectation. Even in an "ideal" game world. //yes I've finish Red Dead Redemption, among a couple others...

You're unsympathetic to cyclists because 5% of them are jerks?

The bigger picture, too, is that cars/cyclists is a much bigger life/death concern than cyclists/pedestrians. I wear a skirt over my bike shorts so drivers treat me with some semblance of respect. When I don't, I get scraped, or have drivers gun to be in front of me and slam on the brakes (on purpose). I feel badly for the guys (who don't have the appropriate ammunition to rock a skirt on a bike).

I see so much hate for cyclists, but not a lot of blame being placed exactly where it should lie (BAD cyclists, BAD motorists, bad city planning, bad enforcement). I know even our own city officials and police officers have their priorities whacked when it comes to this. //to play devil's advocate though, I've seen plenty bad pedestrians too (hey, they can stop, I'm going to walk against my light anyway - they're only a cyclist)