Re:Rose-Hulman (Score 1)

If someone can afford a couple of textbooks at the ridiculous prices those things go for, they can certainly afford a decent laptop. I'm sitting here surfing the web, reading my e-mail, reading SlashDot, and looking over some Perl code I've been working on, all on a Compaq LTE Elite 486/75 running FreeBSD. It has a beautiful active-matrix color display, a built-in trackball, a PCMCIA ethernet card, and a 33.6K modem. Total cost: about $175, used, from ePay. Some of the functionality is provided by our server, but then if a school is going require laptops, I would imagine they could scrape together a server or six which students could access via their laptops from their dorm rooms. Stick a copy of RedHat and Star Office (or whatever it's being called these days) on a sub-$200 laptop, and you're in business. I think the whole concept is great; I know when I was in school, I kept thinking "Okay - I can think circles around most of these people, but why do I have to _memorize_ all this stuff and regurgitate it on paper during exams?" Unless I'm stuck on Gilligan's Island, I can _probably_ find a reference book or two to look up the information. And _that_ was before the marvelous Internet, which lets you find all kinds of useful (and useless...) information at a few keystrokes. People need exposure to the tools of the trade when they're in school, and those tools are computers for most college graduates today.