Posts by 404

<no catchy title>

So many paths crossing lately - El Reg ran a story 'Kids' tech skills go backwards thanks to tablets and smartmobes' a few weeks ago and I said then that my local school district was using tablets and chromebooks to replace paper, pencil, and textbooks - not really addressing 'digital' literacy.

I've been bitching for a while now about it because of serious concerns I have about the loss of certain aspects of my kids education due to the total reliance on electronic gadgets and huge issue with their privacy via Google. Appreciate El Reg for giving me another stick to use at the next school board meeting.

;)

Replacement card policy

My banks have proactively replaced my cards three times already this year, two at one, one from another, just from a sniff of shenanigans. Seems to be their rather smart response to online theft instead of leaving possibly compromised cards active.

Only gotcha is I don't know *who* was molested for my data - that's something I'd like to know since I don't randomly buy random items from random sites, my purchases are from biggish companies* with reputations to protect.

*Edited to say sites like Staples, Amazon, NewEgg, Dell, Cisco, etc

Problem here is...

.. that the schools are using iPads, Chromebooks, etc to replace paper, pencil, and textbooks - not anything IT related. New tools to replace old tools and in so doing, losing cursive writing, basic math, and memory skills.

We've had to supplement our kid's education with multiplication table memorization, history, and much to my dismay, cursive writing*. We have 6-7 Raspberry Pi's running around the house doing media, minecraft server, and development duties - gigabit wired/wifi network with draconian user rights*** - fully digital with everything they could want - and chickens**. Point is, as parents, you better pay attention to your school system, just because they may have the latest tech shineys - it doesn't mean they're teaching your children anything useful.

*Learned the school system didn't teach cursive when one of my boys couldn't sign a vehicle title transfer properly. Both of us were embarrassed.

** 4H project that got out of hand - have a dozen hens and one rooster. Lots of eggs.

*** Kids found a way to bypass the family AD user rights and surf late at night years ago.

Point taken

However, in our defense, we do have a 'power station' in a central area for the kids* to put *all* their devices on at bed time and mealtimes. Router set up by MAC address to kill network access at preset times for school days and weekends.

Occasionally we'll hangout each other since our floor plan has the kids on one end of the house while we're on the other, but the tech does help bring everyone together too. We have a family Minecraft server 'The Lonely Mountain' on the home network, CounterStrike LAN parties, neighborhoods in Hayday, clan in Clash of Clans, guild on Everquest, etc, so we actually play together too. Everything has it's +/-, moderation in all things= !Win!

*We have normal, sneaky, kids who don't believe parents were ever kids... and I was kinda an ass when I was young lol. Still am in a lot of ways lol.

Crazy...

Who/why would somebody design an ATM like that? Even my godforsakenly secure CF-53 Toughbook won't say 'Boo!' without a BIOS/hard drive password*. Mebbe Panasonic should make voting machines & ATMs...

*Sad torrid story concerning my 5-year-warranteed baby, a $100 4GB RAM upgrade at a 'Panasonic Authorized Service' computer store, a suddenly missing owner, suddenly missing money, a deputy sheriff handing me my partially disassembled Toughbook, a bag of parts, a 2 month possession of half the dining room table, eventual successful assembly, encountering lockout, overnighted box from Panasonic NSC, and week later evening phone call requesting $800+ to finish RAM install. Final chapters not written yet, have a phone call to make, maybe several. /sigh

My current rule of thumb is pretty simplistic

i7 = Gaming, engineering, programming, data manipulating

i5 = Business

i3 = Consumer

AMD = Consumer, get_the_intel_instead_if_possible

It wasn't always that way, I was an AMD fanboi for a long time. but let's face it, intel came back. Is that intel cpu thermal patent still valid? I've seen the magic smoke when an overclocked AMD or Cyrix processor popped, usually because the motherboard thermal sensor was bad or gave incorrect readings. Intel never had that problem due to internal thermal protection and would shut down rather than go 'pop'. When the Athlons came out, that scared the pee out of intel and they had the resources to pursue then surpass AMD. I mean AMD has done it twice to intel, back in the 486/586/686(Cyrix) days, then with the Athlon x64. Fast forward to today and AMD needs to pull a third rabbit out to stay in the game. I just replaced my dev workstation with an i7 Acer Predator I juiced up about 6 months ago, gave my wife my old one, an HP AMD Phenom II Black X4 945 3.0Ghz, and my work laptop is an i5 - major difference in speed between processors and I was pretty proud of my Phenoms.

Enough. Wife is looking at me funny because she doesn't believe I can listen to her and type at the same time (I don't care for the Kardasians, honestly. But I nod and make appropriate noises)

Just the other day on El Reg

I made the complaint(?) that with my contract renewal coming up, I didn't see new phones compelling enough to replace our Note 3's - now I do.

Ran across my old BB Storm2 the other day and had to fondle it... sigh. Would be nice to run BES again too, I've been uncomfortable with security since reluctantly relinquishing those duties to Verizon and Google (security/Verizon/Google... those words shouldn't be in a single sentence). -

Biggest issue? The new BB Priv isn't compatible with Verizon - I've already started bitching at them on their boards ;)

Only three year warranty?

I've been replacing my office and home HDs with Samsung Pro 850 SSDs for OS/program drives after comparing all the manufacturers. Of all the SSDs I looked at, only Samsung & Sandisk offer a 10 year warranty, but the Samsung Pro has a higher endurance spec than the Sandisk and has faster read/writes than this new Micron product.

Love the Samsung 850 Pro, my office dev machine goes from cold boot to Win8.1 login in <6 seconds - color me impressed.

US Public schools

... who actually have an IT dept probably freaked right out upon hearing Chrome OS was going away - they've spent quite a few tens of k's worth of dollars on chromebooks - at least around here.

Who?

I'd remember the glasses if I ever saw/heard of this guy before - besides, it's Hillary's 'turn' & she has a vagina.

:|

Those Dysons look pretty cool

However, I'll stay with my Kirby Ultimate G - can suck the paint right off the wall and is rebuildable. I craigslisted this one for $200 after I lost my other Kirby in the divorce. Funny thing that, I got custody of the kids and received child support from her, she got the house, my truck, and my Kirby. Priorities...

Don't buy one new, they're like $1500. Paid $1300 for the one I lost.

Slight cast change

'John Lettice will be played by Keira Knightley'

Shouldn't Keira Knightley play Lester Haines? Since he actually is a twat?*

*This goes back to the late 90's and a particular El Reg pin... John is one of the good guys.