I don't really know about other high schools, but mine only really had hand-me-down equipment and a bunch of bread-board supplies purchased out my teacher's pocket (granted, he did get some sort of tax thing on it). It was a pretty bare-bones program. If we didn't have the extra large workshop classrooms alongside the woodworking and autobody classes, we probably would not have a computer engineering program at all.

Well, this was a high school course. We did more than just that, we were also playing with bread boards and making primitive digital LED number displays, and oh, the EEPROMs...

There we also learned more basic skills, such as taking a motherboard and processor, and adding hard drives, memory, cd-roms, power supplies, heatsinks/fans, network cards, etc;. Half the battle was trying to dig through the crap and find components that worked, and trying to get a machine that would give you the right beeps at POST, and diagnose when it didn't. We shared the room with the Robotics class, and so we also had some limited involvment in maze-solving robots programmed in assembly.

And that was just Comp Engineering. I also had Comp Sci, which was playing around with Object Oriented Turing, Logo, Java, and then a Java based Battle Bot game I forget the name of. A lot of the time, we'd be done early and just read webcomics, or play Liero.

These were courses offered both in Grade 11 and Grade 12, the Grade 12 course obviously being a bit more advanced (I graduated the year after they removed grade 13 in Ontario). I didn't realize until after graduation what a special school that was. It's apparently not as nice as it used to be, the music and CS programs have suffered. Lots of fond memories, though.

Well, it is ironic, because if it didn't go on the Internet and was strictly cellular, SMS message actually cost nothing, they're carried on the control channel (the one cell phone just listens on). The average SMS message is about the tenth of a kilobyte, so the machine that google was providing this service on must have been seriously DDOS'd by all these people.

Oh anonymous coward, your criticisms see into our very souls.

Don't just chuck them. Look for a high-school that has a proper computer engineering program, and drop them off there. Whether you give them to the teachers or the students directly, they'll love you for it.

I remember building and disassembling many a computer in my class before I was able to install windows 95 (and subsequently, starcraft) on them.

I would like to point out that teen pregnancy is an unfortunate problem that is difficult to prevent in our society.

*obligatory eye-roll*

almost, unfortunately.

from http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp

I'm assuming you're running window... would you consider using more than one browser just for the beta?

I'm on Linux. I've just finished downloading firefox for windows, and I'm just waiting in the queue now so I can try it in wine. I don't even consider this a big deal.

Hey! That's unreal, not quake!

well, then that client would probably just act like a browser wrapped around that plugin. There will hypertext links and other browser-y stuff to deal with too.

One of the main ideas behind Quake Live is to give PC gaming something it could actually take advantage of.

No, THIS would suck. Especially for linux users ;-)

how much later?

When you build a kernel configured properly for your device/machine, you're not using all of the source code. In fact, you're using very little of the source.

The vmlinuz-generic image that came installed on the Slackware 12.2 setup that I'm typing with now is only 2.2M, although that's not including modprobe drivers. The associated System.map file is just 912K. By comparison, the vmlinuz-huge-smp kernel that also came by default is still just 4.6M. This is all according to what the df command is telling me.

slashdotted after 4 minutes.

Although mind you, slashdot's probably not the only site with member flocking to the KDE forums right now.