bet none of you have this luxury

[Mojojojo]

yeah, i'm sitting down in my schools cafe. playing w/ a laptop, thats mine till i graduate..hjahahahahahahahaha

Eric

[shartley]

Take care of it.... you break it, you BUY it. LOL

I think it is a good idea, and actually many schools are doing it... I hope it becomes standard.

Of course I have been keeping track of student test scores over the past 5 years and they keep going down... but our kids are getting smarter, right? Shows that technology is not the only answer to things, and does not make kids smarter.... it is just a tool. You need to build on a solid foundation.

Seems like the smartest students now days (by test scores) are about at the level of the average student when I was in school.... and we did not even HAVE computers. ;) Where does that leave the average student now days?

Want to look at something interesting? Check out your State's Educational Improvement and Assessment Program(s). My Son is bright, and gets A's... but even HE scored Novice to Basic... and that is while getting A's! I leave it up to each parent to check into this themselves.... it says a lot about our current Educational System.

Oh... sorry, I got sidetracked there, didn't I? LOL Back on topic... Yes, laptops are a great tool, and will help if used correctly. :)

[BlueMagRT]

i had a laptop in school it was nice to have during a study period or something to get work done but it was just more of a distraction in class. i always had some thing better to do on the laptop than to listen to the boring teachers:).

[cphilip]

I was about to agree with you Sam about the kids being dumber..um...er...I mean "more average" these days and then all the sudden I got a flash back to 1972 and me and Sally Martin (God bless her... wonder where she is today...um er I digress as well!) anyway its me an her skipping school and sipping a bottle of Boones Farm (remember that?) and trying to hunt Mushrooms out in a cow field up in Crestview Florida and getting run off at gun point by the Farmer...anyways... you get the point... Not smart eh? Some stuff never changes.

[shartley]

LOLROF!!!! PHIL! You brought back memories with that one. :)

I was not talking about "smarts".. LOL I was talking about.....

.... mushrooms... Yeah! THOSE red ones are okay to eat!

HeeHee

But check this out..... remember getting a smoking pass? And being able to go out to the smoke barrels? Those with permission slips could both chew tobacco AND smoke.

Times have changed for sure.

But that has nothing to do with our test scores. LOL

[bofh]

Originally posted by shartley
... could both chew tobacco AND smoke.

At the same time? That's crazy people talk. :)

[shartley]

LOL I guess OR would have been better, and more accurate. :D Unless they had some strong nicotine addiction. LOL

But they would definitely be dateless. :D:D:D

[cphilip]

Well...there are a few folks down here that will chew and chug beer at the same time...Ewwwwwww...

I remeber "Smokers Corner". It was across the street and you could only smoke off school grounds. But you were not allowed to leave school grounds. Confusing... Bright side is today no smoking in schools or on school proerty..again...history repeats itself.

Do Not Eat the Red Ones!!!!

[PyRo]

Problem with laptops is going to be theft, them breaking down due to either abuse or mechanical problems. Not everyone is going to have the $2000 to replace the thing (lots of low income Hispanics here), and what happens to them then, they arn't allowed to graduate or something?

[PyRo]

As for the good old days stories coughtSHARTLEYcough stop with them. When I was young I walked 7 miles to school barefoot, up hill both ways. When I was young we didn't have air, thats what wrogn with you kids nowdays, your always breathing. Back in my day we were all smart, we just forgot everything.
/me does a skit
Little Timmy- "Dad, can you help me with math"
Father- "Ok, but back in my day we didn't get help, we had to figure it out ourselves"
Timmy- "Heres the question, 3/4x+5/<2x+1 solve for X"
Father- "Umm uhh I ""forgot"" how to do this"

:)

[bornl33t]

Also back in the days you didn't move out till you were married, I've been living on my own for close to 5 years now and am only 22, I bought my first car straight up when I was 18, dad never let me use his. Paid my way through what collage I have compleated, ALONE. All this in a suburban community were the riches flow.... 'xept in my pocket.

Times change, there's a give and take to everything.
I specially like a little tune my Baz Luhrman: " you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were knoble and kids respecetd their parents, respect you're parents"

There's no denying it, we are the future, like it or not.

[$pam]

Yep I have that luxury, too. I have one that I got through a school program. I was picked as one of the top twenty students in the county and we were given laptops (Dell Latitudes, woohoo! these babies are 3000 dollars) and during the summer we go to a college for a week to take classes.

[irbodden]

Hmm.. the top 20 get labtops eh? Around here, kids with "special needs" get labtops, or those who hand writing is just too "darn" messy. Again, many kids carry around their own labtops and PDAs, but I dont think tugging a computer around with ya is the answer to messy handwriting. My school already has a disgusting amount of computers, I'll get the real numbers, but I'd say our school owns well over 2k computer and labtops. The technology is at our disposal, yet I dont feel its right to become dependent on a piece of plastic and wire.

[prikkaboo]

hehe thats funny, you guys get laptops to bring around with you and we have to use the old ibms where the monitor is built into the whole computer after theyve been rebuilt and had semi modern chips put in. hehe windows 95 with 16 colors. To make it worse they're computers that used to be from the one of the other high schools on the island so i guess they donated them to us. Our computer lab teacher doesn't even know how to work em he just tells us which one is working for the day. yup we've got it made.hehe

[gimp]

I have that luxury. I hook it up in class and play games and stuff. We have a bar on campus with ethernet connections in it too. By the time you graduate that things gonna be pretty darn old. I get a new one my junior year.

[jcarkeys]

Our school has a lot of technology, but it is very poor network and stuff. You couldn't plug a laptop into an ethernet port and do anything. It would block you out. The people at our school treat us like high schoolers. (Well, we are) I have a Palm 3x though.

[ThePatriot]

My school has 32ram dells all right next to eachother and he refuses to LAN them(personally i dont think he can, i kno so much more than he ever will about computers) and a laptop to carry around would be a pain in the arse...what if u lose it? what if ubreak it? what if it gets stolen? to much responsibility...

[845]

If i get the partial scholarship to Iona Prep Laptops are required.

In my school there idea of computer class is putting you on Mavis Beacon

:rolleyes: and making you type for 45 minutes. Now I can get 54 WPS I have a school record:)

[joeyjoe367]

54 WPM?!?!? BAH!

Hehe, I spend so much time on these forums and on AIM, MSN, and ICQ that my WPM has probably jumped up to about 70-80 depending on if I know what I'm typing or not.

But I personally think that having Laptops in class would be more of a distraction than an asset.

Like Jcarkeys, I have a PDA, a Handspring Visor actually. It's great, but I find myself playing Solitare All the time. I kinda wish that I'd learn to pay attention a bit more.

Note taking on my Visor isn't bad either, but sometimes a bit restrictive on the formatting, and slower than writing sometimes.

[Mojojojo]

hey, sorry for the late response...school calls ya know...yeah, i agree w/ some of the points made, but to tell you the truth, i'm probably not going to use this thing for much...but who know

[Failure]

We have good computers at my school but just one question.....If you were to set up a computer lab, would you install windows 98 on them!? No, I wouldn't....too unstable. The computers are loaded with junk, slow and bloated. Most are down every other day and the rest crash 4 times a night on average.

[Mojojojo]

actually, the ones each of us get, are not loaded w/ junk, nothing extra, just what they supplied, like word,powerpoint,imovie,the internet and some other stuff...and you can download stuff...its wireless connection...just needs charged every 4hrs or so

Eric

[MikeCouves]

Yeah our school is on welfare so it's really funny how bad the computers are. Haha when the mouse or something breaks the lab teacher missus tries to explain it so she sounds smart. Lol, then one of the dumb kids will pop up and say "Umm miss the mouse is plugged out". And she will be like "Uhh yeah I knew that". Haha, same situation as Failure, ours are really crappy.

I would bring a laptop to school, but you would get made fun of, because no one has one...not one person. All the teachers would be like "Out away that crazy black book away and take out your Social Studies textbook from 1894, or your going to write out the school rules!!!".

Our school is really "not high tech", they need to get up to speed. Wait a minute, rephrase that, "GET SOME FRIGGIN MONEY!!".

[jah871]

my school had a good amount of money until last year when they went overboard and bought a bunch of crap. we have these signs in the cafeteria on the ways saying nobody eats alone and some other junk. there prolly cost a couple hundred a piece. now were in debt. we dont get to go on any field trips except to washington D.C at the end of the year. its pretty funny..

[n1mr0d]

Originally posted by ThePatriot
My school has 32ram dells all right next to eachother and he refuses to LAN them(personally i dont think he can, i kno so much more than he ever will about computers) and a laptop to carry around would be a pain in the arse...what if u lose it? what if ubreak it? what if it gets stolen? to much responsibility...

Uh...you know more than he ever will about computers? wtf is a 32ram dell....i assume you are referring to old *** dells with only 32megs of ram. i don't see what you could do with [gee golly, you didn't tell us how many you had] dells that aren't networked....so you have x number of standalone machines?
at my school, we have wireless base stations everywhere....i have an apple iBook and most others in my class do, and for those that don't, they can borrow them or just use them during about half of my classes. i can browse the internet in the cafeteria, in the alcoves, in any class, at the athletic center, blah blah blah.

don't diss your sysadmin.....although i will say i know more than all of the IT people at our school, with the exception of one guy who knows c++, other than that, he doesn't know jack about most everything that goes on.

[ThePatriot]

N1mrod, i am so sorry, would u like me to go into some more detail?

He has 27 computers with 32megs of ram, 233mhz Pentium 2, with 13" monitors and a foolproof security system. The foolproof security system took me about 2 days to get the password, wasnt that hard, fool didnt even know about the swap file, its really simple, simply type in any password, its wrong, then you simply look in the swap file, do some minor editing, and it will compare the incorrect password you typed to the correct password, and its not even encrypted. He also thought removing the shortcuts from the accessories menu for the games, solitaire, minesweeper, freecell etc... would remove them from the computer, wrong again. Even with foolproof on simply open up MS DOS prompt and access the windows folder and run the program. O and in case any of you are wondering i can type 115WPM(i am online game person, got my typing skills there, not in the class room, those typing programs use such a pain in the *** way to type, the home row bull...do it your own way.)

[Mojojojo]

my school is sponsored by mac, which seams bad, but these laptops are probably their best creations, which is awesome.....but, like the first day everyone is like oo yeah they freeze left and right, but mine doesn't guess i got the good one

Eric

[n1mr0d]

Originally posted by ThePatriot
N1mrod, i am so sorry, would u like me to go into some more detail?

He has 27 computers with 32megs of ram, 233mhz Pentium 2, with 13" monitors and a foolproof security system. The foolproof security system took me about 2 days to get the password, wasnt that hard, fool didnt even know about the swap file, its really simple, simply type in any password, its wrong, then you simply look in the swap file, do some minor editing, and it will compare the incorrect password you typed to the correct password, and its not even encrypted. He also thought removing the shortcuts from the accessories menu for the games, solitaire, minesweeper, freecell etc... would remove them from the computer, wrong again. Even with foolproof on simply open up MS DOS prompt and access the windows folder and run the program. O and in case any of you are wondering i can type 115WPM(i am online game person, got my typing skills there, not in the class room, those typing programs use such a pain in the *** way to type, the home row bull...do it your own way.)

yeah that helps....and yes our school uses foolproof, all you have to do to hack it is boot up in safe mode, download a hex editor, and the password is stored in plaintext in the swapfile....simple as pie.

[the JoKeR]

Originally posted by n1mr0d


yeah that helps....and yes our school uses foolproof, all you have to do to hack it is boot up in safe mode, download a hex editor, and the password is stored in plaintext in the swapfile....simple as pie.

No matter how good the security, there's always people that are three steps ahead looking for a way in, and they upgrade their skills faster than schools/businesses upgrade their defenses. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And get hacked anyway!

[n1mr0d]

Originally posted by the JoKeR


No matter how good the security, there's always people that are three steps ahead looking for a way in, and they upgrade their skills faster than schools/businesses upgrade their defenses. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. And get hacked anyway!

Yes and the sad thing is that all of our tech department is messed up. We have two women who are 'mac people' and basically if something goes wrong, restart it. If that doesn't work, then the computer gets turned off :D The guy in our tech department knows a little bit, but definitely not sysadmin knowledge. He's a freak though, he's obsessed with Larry Bird and always has to make some stupid mnemonic device that involves the number 33.

[User]

Originally posted by n1mr0d

If that doesn't work, then the computer gets turned off


That reminds me of some of our computers around school. Instead of getting turned off, a paper printed "Out of Service" is stuck on the monitor. :D My school uses Fortress Guard on its Windows, and sadly, it's yet another program that is easily bypassable. If something as small as a simple boot error screws everything up and isn't fixed for 2 weeks, I'd like to see them on Linux. That'd be better for the computer at least. ;)

I only brought my laptop to school once or twice and found it to be more of a hassle than useful at the time. I'm waiting for 2 years to pass, and then a laptop will probably become my main tool in college. For now though, I guess I'll have to stick with the TI-83. :)

[n1mr0d]

That's EXACTLY what they do at my school. They tape something on the monitor saying 'broken' or something stupid like that, because they are angry some dumass tried to install aol on their computer.

stupid non-techs.

[fenris69]

man...makes me sad. I'm a lowly tech support at an ISP, and all day I get to talk to "techs". I'm now seriously convinced theres an even EASIER job than sitting on my *** for 10 bucks an hour looking at automags.org! To the ignorant anyone with an ounce of knowledge is a genius. "your ignorance is my job security"
but then...it's always been that way hasn't it?