Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Portables

Submission + - Dell laptops still exploding (consumeraffairs.com)

bl8n8r writes: "It "looked like fireworks which would have been cool had it not been in my house." said Doug Brown of Columbus, Ohio. Brown, a Network Administrator, called 911 last week when the Dell 9200 laptop burst into flames in his house. Emergency response units included two pumpers, a ladder truck, a bamalance, the HAZMAT unit, and a battalion chief. When Doug phoned Dell to inquire about liability, he was asked if he had insurance. It's not clear if Doug's laptop is one of the earlier models recalled by Dell; a Macbook is cited in TFA for allegedly burning down a house in Australia as well as another instance of a suspect Dell laptop burning down a pickup truck in Nevada. If the burning battery issues are going to continue to be a problem, who's going to be responsible for losses? Insurance companies, Laptop makers, Battery vendors, and consumer negligence could presumably be cited in all cases."

Comment Re:Old farts and new farts have something to learn (Score 1) 218

"Ultimately, librarians simply need to understand that youth are coming to the library as amateur information finders. They already know Google, but not what's relevant. And they have no idea about non-digitized data, how to search it, and often what types of resources are available. For that, there's always the altar of the reference desk."

The problem I'm seeing (as a librarian, and someone who's been using computers from age 10-35) is that the students barely know Google but have the false belief that they're experts, and in many cases do NOT want to hear differently. They think that familiarity with imdb, wikipedia, and google's 2d page of search results (obtained by the barest of key word searching) makes them ready to do real research - then when they find nothing (or too much) they give up. Searching in more than one source is extremely foreign to them, and I explain on a daily basis, "I'm sorry, no, this is just the library catalog, it tells you what books we have and where they are, but you can't read the book from the computer."

There is also a strange distrust* of non-digital resources. Just this week a recent alum came up and needed help on a fairly technical question. We worked for a bit and I found a source which pointed to a paper with nearly the exact title of his question. I marked on a map where it was in the library and when he realized it was only available in print and was 7 years old, he said he'd keep looking online. . .baffling.

Also, believe it or not many do not understand the concept of an index, either in the back of a book, or as a separate source.

* 'Distrust' - I'm not sure what else to call it - I hate to say it's laziness of dealing with a copy machine, not when they're happy to spend 3 times as long sitting at a computer to get 0 results?

Slashdot Top Deals

It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming. -- J. Sammet

Working...