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Netbooks and the CyberSaturated Society

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psikeyhackr
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Post #59458
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Comrade Ogilvy Citation for Continued Confrontation - 2nd class

Comrade O’Brien Prize for Persistent Proselytism - 3rd class

Winston Smith Wordsmith Award - 1st class

Posted: Wed 2009-09-23 00:25

Politics: Friggin Wacko!

Country: United States

Netbooks and the CyberSaturated Society

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Post Rating: 1.0/4 (2 votes cast)

New South Wales has just done the biggest leap into computerized education that I know of:

From http://www.linuxtoday.com/it_management/2009082800235NWDPSW

Australian State Rolls Out Windows Netbooks but Adds FOSS
Aug 28, 2009, 01 :33 UTC (3 Talkback[s]) (2285 reads)
(Other stories by Dahna McConnachie)

[ Thanks to Inkslinger for this link. ]

"Over the next four years, each Year 9 student will receive one of the devices as a gift, which they can keep once they have left school. A total 267,000 netbooks will be handed out over the course of the program, which is part of the Rudd Government’s $2.2 billion Digital Education Revolution.

I have been following netbooks for a few months and have gone to a show for VARs and tested a couple with the Byte benchmark from 1983. That is not how most people test. Laughing

From http://www.netbookation.com/netbkbnch.htm

Code:

Computer Language Seconds

IBM 3033 Assembly Language 0.0078 fastest CPU+SWare tested
IBM 3033 PL/I 0.036 21.7% efficient
IBM 3033 COBOL 0.0824 9.5% efficient
68000 8 MHz Assembly Language 0.49
VAX-11/780 C (UC Berkley) 1.42
8086 8 MHz Assembly Language 1.90 100%
8086 8 MHz C (Digital Research) 2.8 67.9% efficient
8086 8 MHz C (Microsoft) 6.0 31.7% efficient
8086 8 MHz C (Computer Innovations) 7.2 26.4% efficient
8088 5 MHz Assembly [CPU of IBM PC] 4.0 100%
IBM PC 5MHz C (Computer Innovations) 22.0 18.2% efficient

---------- New tests on modern CPUs ----------

TI OMAP5910 150 MHz GNU C Pocket CPU 0.0522 Archos PMA400 Linux
Pent 2 300 MHz GNU C 0.0148
AMD 433 MHz GNU C 0.0122 OLPC-XO 1
Pent 3 500 MHz GNU C 0.0087
Pent 3 1.3 GHz GNU C 0.0035
Pent 4 1.8 GHz GNU C 0.0024
Atom 1.6 GHz GNU C *NETBOOKS 0.0022 Asus/Lenovo
Pent 4 2.66 GHz GNU C 0.0020 Single-Core 1 program
Pent 4 2.66 GHz GNU C 0.0040 Single-Core 2 programs
Pent 2D 2.8 GHz GNU C 0.0019 Dual-Core 1 program
Pent 2D 2.8 GHz GNU C 0.0019 Dual-Core 2 programs

So how much power do grade school kids really need and what is this stuff going to really do to society?

psik
_________________
Physics - can't - LIE!

carldiesturmer
Minister of Truth
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Post #59459
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Posted: Wed 2009-09-23 02:01

Politics: Oligarchical Collectivist

Country: United States

Re: Netbooks and the CyberSaturated Society

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psikeyhackr wrote:

New South Wales has just done the biggest leap into computerized education that I know of:

From http://www.linuxtoday.com/it_management/2009082800235NWDPSW

I have been following netbooks for a few months and have gone to a show for VARs and tested a couple with the Byte benchmark from 1983. That is not how most people test. Laughing

From http://www.netbookation.com/netbkbnch.htm

Code:

So how much power do grade school kids really need and what is this stuff going to really do to society?

psik

You need that to run the basic MS Office Suite.
Yes the more the merrier, what to worry? It is keeping up with the rich kids from private schools, case you didn't know RESOURCES.
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RAK
Minster of Plenty
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Post #59479
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Posted: Fri 2009-10-02 21:36
Politics: Democratic Socialist	Country: Ireland

	Currently 3.00/4 Post Rating: 3.0/4 (2 votes cast)


As you might be aware, I've been examining the integration of technology into education, and like you, I feel it's lagging far behind its capabilities. However, I can offer a reasoning into why people might suggest that netbooks "don't have enough power"'; despite the massive increase of raw computational power that computers have acquired over the last thirty years, operating systems have not been able to take advantage of that power. I began using computers in the era of 486s and early Pentiums; not the IBM 3033 or System/34 days that you were present for, but the gap in computational power, memory, hard drive space, et cetera, will do for the comparison. My first computer was a 25MHz 486 with 8MB of RAM and 80MB of hard drive space. It ran Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS 6.0, which took up a combined total of about 20MB of that hard drive. It didn't run particularly quickly, but some of the slowdown was due to my practice of running .WAV files through the PC speaker in lieu of a working sound card. Now, let's move to the netbook, which I'll take as having an Intel Atom running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM and 160GB of hard drive space (well, the OS recognises it as 137GB, because hard drives are sold in decimal gigabytes, and operating systems use binary gibibytes, but I digress). If Windows Vista were used on such a netbook, it would probably take up 20GB of hard drive space to begin with, before we got to swap files, Aero effects and whatnot, and with only 1GB of memory and the Atom processor, it would probably run as quickly as my old 486 did when it was running Windows 3.1. Not good. As it stands, most netbooks run Windows XP Home. I don't see why they don't just use WinXP Professional; I successfully and smoothly ran it on a computer with less RAM than most netbooks have, and I still run it today - not a bad run for an operating system that's eight years old. I suppose it's the cheaper cost of licensing for the Home variant; when Windows 7 comes out, I won't be surprised to see Home Basic variants being used. This runs somewhat more quickly than using Windows Vista, but considering the massive increase in computing power, you'd expect more of an improvement. I'm considering this to be a case of the computer being hamstrung by the OS. Anyway, I don't see a particularly useful future for the educational computer myself; there are plenty of possible uses for the netbook, such as the ready availability to carry a huge amount of media, including books, on a single lightweight device. Unfortunately, few publishers want to risk entering the world of e-books until they have to, especially the makers of university textbooks and other technical literature. Understandable, when they can make €60 a book and rake it in when every university science student or whatnot needs to buy a copy of some of these books. Then, there's the always-present difficulty of following a book on a screen instead of in a hard copy form. Any person familiar with reading books on a computer screen or a portable device (and I'm certainly one of them - I've read whole books on a mobile phone with a 2.5" screen) knows that it isn't exactly the most pleasant way of intaking the literature. It often makes it more difficult to follow, and you have the trade-off between flexibility of motion and comfortable screen size. Even the lightest netbook couldn't be considered to be as handy as a paperback novel, and when you get down to the PDA-size devices, you can start saying "hello" to eyestrain. Personally, I'd much rather carry a single device into university containing all of my textbooks and various pieces of literature, safe in the knowledge that I'd have space to carry thousands of extra books. Unfortunately, as a current university student studying a course with no direct connection to computing, I can tell you that my experience is that computers, as they stand, are mostly useless for educational purposes. Until somebody with the imagination to integrate education with computers in the correct manner, third-level students are just going to waste all of that potential on Facebook and YouTube. I should know - I've wasted two years on my life on devices which have not only failed to help me progress in my education, but have actually held me back because of my weak will and high tendency to procrastinate. _________________ "Rejection of technology ruins a good mind." - RAK * * * * * * * * * * INTERNET NEWS SERVICES [ Online Radio Resources: RTE: www.rte.ie BBC: www.bbc.co.uk ] [ The Irish Times Online: www.ireland.com ]

carldiesturmer
Minister of Truth
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Post #59480
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Posted: Sat 2009-10-03 00:19
Politics: Oligarchical Collectivist	Country: United States

MS Vista is the New Dinosaur	Currently 0.00/4 Post Rating: 0.0/4 (0 votes cast)


I am with ya on this, basically the screen interface, without being touch-screen, it could be more page-like, so some form of tactile knob to offer feedback in portrait form as it is too easy slip off off-page. Touch-pad and mouse don't do it for me, so cursor keys on the screen edges just with one thumb. I believe there is the swivel screen but that's off the netbook price range for the time being ohcrap. PS: there are series of netbooks running a custom distro of Linux OSs at lower prices (Ubuntu * current edition 9.04,* is neat with very low power specs which I run as Live OS disc and flash-memory at a min. 2 Gigs), which could bring the extra functions within the netbook price range. Licensing is cheaper but the OS could be unsupported(?) by Asus, so there is MS CE XP yet again. * to create a bootable disc or USB memory stick, download unetbootin plus the .ISO file. Bang you have an OS on a portable USB memory stick, which can be replicated license-free into any PC/Netbook, neat shit. Have fun with those old PCs' low/old specs. http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ubuntu.com/GetUbuntu/download comes packaged with Open Office's main utes plus Acrobat Reader, unlike Fedora O/S. * fine grain brightness control for those suffering eye fatigue _________________ WARNING & DISCLAIMER THIS SITE ADMITS NO LIABILITY AS TO STATEMENTS MADE BY THE FORUM MEMBERS, SITE UNSUITABLE TO MINORS. THIS IS FORUM IS FREQUENTED BY MENTALLY-ILL PERSONS, SCHIZOPHRENICS, HOMOSEXUALS, PEDERASTS AND EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE USERS, DEEMED AT RISK. CAUTION ANY INFORMATION GIVEN TO FORUM USERS CAN BE MISUSED. BY HAVING READ THE ABOVE, YOU HAVE RELEASED THE FORUM FROM LIABILITY forums.newspeakdictionary.com 2008(c) alpineethan@gmail.com ethan jeff grupp Jeff Majdic sexual pervert majdic2136 nicholas.burd@yahoo.com RYE:VIRGIN DUNCE "if you believe in reality please put this in your signature "LY" as the qualified weasel worded statement for extra vagueness"

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