Thank you for using "it's" correctly.

Thank you. In the 15 seconds it took me to log in, you beat me to the punch. Bloody grocer's apostrophes.

It is, in that Crossley is the sole owner (principal), rather than a partner. But he has (had?) employees that we know of from the emails (one is asking for a new copy of Office, since he had to give his license to the other one). Chances are his website wasn't internally run, however- a company his size wouldn't have had their own IT team, but would be using contractors. So my money's on a sympathetic sysadmin 'accidentally' typing the wrong thing in his terminal window. All those *nix commands look so similar, you know!

I'm reminded of a story (probably apocryphal) about the first McDonald's that was opened in Moscow. When the staff were being trained by the American reps, one of the managers put his hand up and asked, "Why do we have to be polite to the customers? WE have the hamburgers!"

Mr. Henderson is an idiot, no offense to the intellectually challenged out there. He, like everyone else in the music industry, has blinders on, and is clueless as to what the people with the money (ie, the CUSTOMERS) want. I'd love to get Pandora here. It was brilliant while it lasted, and nothing else I've tried has been able to beat it. And here's the irony for CRIA and their ilk: since Pandora got shut off in Canada, I've simply gone back to downloading. Yes, it's still legal here, as long as we're paying the blank media levies we do. And Mr. Henderson can kiss my shiny metal ass, because I'll NEVER pay a cent for music from artists he 'represents'. Not even to a 'legal' streaming service. Am I sad Pandora has given up on Canada? Yes, because I loved their system. And no, because it really doesn't affect me anymore. iTunes has Genius, which is pretty damn good these days, and since I can happily download tunes till I'm out of drive space.

Leonard Hoffsteader built one when he was a kid, because his mother wouldn't hug him. Apparently his father used to borrow it.

another tag for this article: 666

Meh, legal, schmegal. You can now do an install off a retail Snow Leopard disc, so all you're violating is the EULA, which probably won't hold water anyhow!

Am following up with an email...

I work in the tech department for a small public school district with a heavy emphasis on educational technology integration in the classroom (we have a 1:1 laptop program as well). A few years ago, we did an experiment with tablet PCs, where we purchased 5 different models from the major vendors (IBM, HP, Fujitsu, Acer, and Toshiba), played around with them, and then offered them to a few teachers to try out. The only one we had any success with was the HP tc4200, which was given to a Primary teacher who used it extensively for a year.

The Thinkpad was the best unit in terms of 'feel'- it was light, solid, with a good battery life. However, both the first and second models we got were sent back because of poor performance (very slow to boot up, high latency during operation, and a tendency to run very hot). The Fujitsu was too heavy, as was the Toshiba. The Acer (Travelmate C200) was great in terms of performance (dedicated 256MB Nvidia graphics, 2GB RAM, etc), but was a bit bulky due to its built-in optical drive. In addition, Acer's method of sliding the screen up from the slate position was stupid, locking it into one angle when using the unit as a notebook. I'm using that one as a gaming platform now (three years later!). The HP tc4200 was, quite frankly, the best tablet I have ever used. It's light, sturdy (not quite as solid-feeling as the Thinkpad), and quick. The lady who used it said she never felt it was annoying to carry it around her classroom for most of the day. In addition to the tablet, we gave her a wifi-enabled projector, so she could work untethered while moving about, and this worked perfectly.

My suggestion is to get one of the tc4200's- they are dead cheap these days, and you can upgrade the RAM and hard drive easily if you wish. I have seen them for $400. Not only that, but you can even shoehorn OS X onto them if you are bored- I did that with our for shiggles and it was awesome for a few days before I missed my Macbook Pro too much!

Most projectors these days have built-in wifi for wireless projection (at least from Windows computers!), and this can really make a huge difference for instructors.

From a pedagogical perspective, you can even justify the cheap route and buy a bluetooth-enabled Wacom tablet. Sure, you don't get a screen built in, but for $250 you get the mobility of the tablet, as well as all the functionality of the penabled software such as Smart or Promethean offer. You can mark up notes, documents, etcetera and save your notes, email them to your students, and so on.

But my money's on the tc4200.

the toilets use YOU!

This isn't complex tech. You launch a bunch of helium-filled weather balloons from bordering countries; under each one is a payload of wifi gear that repeats a transmission from ground-based terminals. 60,000 feet is nothing for consumer-grade wifi gear. At around $1000 a pop, they are cheap (disposable), and a turn-key package can be shipped out for deployment by regional hackers (hackerswithoutborders.org, for example). Alternatively, you spend a bit of real money and deploy Stratellites. Of course, those would probably be easier to shoot down, and the loss would sting a bit financially. Also, see "Still a Prototype".

What you are looking for is a proper archiving application. I suggest ICAAtom. Scan your documents as TIFFs if you are going to be saving them as images; if your hardware will do OCR nicely, then you would be better off scanning them to text, as they will be more searchable. ICA Atom supports all of the standard archiving metadata protocols, of course, so you will have good searching capabilities as long as you enter proper metadata.

EXACTLY! Someone please mod this up, already. It's a bloody CONCEPT, and futhermore, hideously impractical. Moving the cartridge by hand? Come on! It's a joke, people!

All you need to do is find a closet somewhere in the school. Pile the old computers in there (it's best to just fill the closet right to the ceiling, that way there's little incentive for anyone to ever clean it out), and lock the door. If you can lock it with a padlock, and then throw the keys away, even better. In fifty or even a hundred years, your 'time capsule' will still be intact. Given the amount of money schools are given for renovations, nobody will be tearing the closet out for a good while yet; and given the lack of money for IT support, anyone who did happen to stumble across it would merely shrug and shut it back up again.

I work a public school IT department, and we find little stashes of 30-year old computer gear often enough that it's not a surprise anymore- and that's in a tiny district with only four schools!

If your closet has an electrical outlet, even better. You can build a circuit to keep the BIOS battery charging the whole time and just leave it plugged in.

For redundancy, hide a few machines in some of these locations as well:

Above the ceiling tiles in the staff lounge
On top of the furnace/boiler in the basement
Beneath the bleachers in the gymnasium
Above the ceiling of the girls' change room (on second thought, bad idea. Some nerd will find them for sure, there)
On a shelf in the custodian's closet
Between two of your Dell blade servers in the NOC
In the closet with the overhead projectors and VCRs and filmstrip players- nobody ever goes in there anymore!

Sorry, fyngryz; but your reply needs to be downmodded for "Overkill", and "FUD".

Step 1) Buy a genset. Get 6000 watts or better, if you can afford it. Make sure it has a 220V twist-lock outlet on it, in addition to the usual dual-120V outlets.

Step 2) Buy a nice length of fat extension cable (10AWG or bigger), with a male twist-lock on one end, and a male dryer plug on the other. Your Home Depot or local electrical supplier can make it up for you if you lack the boxcutter-and-screwdriver skills necessary to assemble it.

Step 3) Bring it all home, fill the genset with gas. It will probably hold something like 20 litres (as you're in the States, I'll convert for you: ~5 gallons).

Step 4) Go to your breaker panel, and shut off the MAIN breaker, as well as any baseboard heaters and your hotwater tank. Those will all be 220V breakers (the double kind). Leave all the rest on, if you like. If you have sensitive electronics, feel free to shut off those breakers or unplug the devices- which you've probably already done anyhow, since when your lights went out, there was an accompanying surge which melted all your power bars, right?

Step 5) Plug the large plug into your dryer outlet. Yes, it might be awkward to reach. If you have the money and time, get an electrician to install a 220V dryer outlet on the outside of your house somewhere near where you'd park the genset. Your choice.

Step 6) Start the generator. Once it's running smoothly, plug the twist-lock in. If it stalls out right away, the chances are you forgot to shut off your mains breaker and are trying to feed power back onto the grid.

Step 7) Go inside and enjoy your warm, well-lit household. By being careful, you can use all the major appliances in your house, including your range and oven. If you run out of hot water, lower the rest of your load and turn the tank back on for a while. Just don't try and bake bread while your water tank is on (typical load for a hotwater tank is 3KW). You'll get a feel for it- if the generator bogs down really bad, it means you're overloading it. Back off a bit. Worst thing you can do (provided your extension cable is properly gauged) is stall the genset.

Step 8) In about 8 hours, go outside and feed the genset some more gas.

This response by fyngryz is ludicrous. Even in a professionally-installed backup power system, you never run feeds to each device, you merely use an automatic switch to shunt the mains from the utility to your genset. If you have money to burn, you shell out the $12,000 it costs and have a proper diesel or propane-powered generator installed (you don't need a shed, they come in their own housings these days). It will have an automatic starter so that within 3-5 seconds of the power failing, you'll be on backup.

When I lived in an isolated seaside village in northern Canada, where the power would go out regularly for days at a time, it would take me less than 3 minutes to bundle up, wade through the snow to the woodshed, pull the genset outside, plug in the cord, run it in through the back door to the dryer outlet, and be lights-on and surfing the web again. Backup power is NOT magic or scary or even expensive- you can get a 6KW genset for $500, brand new, add a couple hundred if you're lazy and want electric start.