[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 29 December 2011 - 08:57 AM, said:

Shoot kids these days would lost without all the gadgets. Heck I remember the days before pocket calculators. The kids taking advanced math courses such as Trig, used slide rules to figure out the calculations. I remember figuring out square roots without the benefit of anything, just what I learned. These days. all they do is teach you how you use the tools. What kind of education is that? I realize that these days you have to be computer literate, but not at the expense of a true education. By using computers for math problems for instance, you get no background in the actual problem solving method. The Middle & High schools in this County issue Dell Laptops to each student at the beginning of the school year. Without the internet, I would be forced to actually have to fight the people and shop in Brick & Mortar stores. I do go to the Grocery Store, Doctors appointments, and the Barbershop. Although i can keep up with current events on the internet, I also get a newspaper ( have to feed my crossword addiction as well ). To add a little annecdote here, I rarely took notes in class, but did pay attention to what was being said ( even if it was boring ). I had an ability to take it in and recall it. I can remember many times when the teacher thought I was daydreaming and would suddenly call on me and ask me what she or he just said about so and so and I would tell her or him. Now I had some History teahers who were WWII vets and they could really make history interesting, especially when we got to WWII, as then their personal experiences came into play. Yeah, it is a lot different today, but I can't say that it is better.

What the heck is a slide rule? Nowadays, you still need to learn quite a few concepts. Sure, I put a program to solve quadratics on my calculator, but I still need to solve them manually, and a calculator isn't really involved there. I wish we got issued laptops here - they have desktop computers in the library and some laptops, but that's it. People use their smartphones quite a bit when fooling around (yet I still don't have one and probably never will unless cell phone carriers quit being so greedy). I have brought my laptop to school a few times, though people generally don't do that.

[Evildave]

Should be 'an app for that', as far as calculators go. Or more likely hundreds of apps.

[LiveBrianD]

Evildave, on 29 December 2011 - 02:21 PM, said:

Should be 'an app for that', as far as calculators go. Or more likely hundreds of apps.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were, say, a TI-84 emulator for android or ios.

[waldojim]

LiveBrianD, on 29 December 2011 - 02:39 PM, said:

Evildave, on 29 December 2011 - 02:21 PM, said:

Should be 'an app for that', as far as calculators go. Or more likely hundreds of apps.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were, say, a TI-84 emulator for android or ios.

There is, I have it.

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 29 December 2011 - 12:15 PM, said:

coastie65, on 29 December 2011 - 08:57 AM, said:

Shoot kids these days would lost without all the gadgets. Heck I remember the days before pocket calculators. The kids taking advanced math courses such as Trig, used slide rules to figure out the calculations. I remember figuring out square roots without the benefit of anything, just what I learned. These days. all they do is teach you how you use the tools. What kind of education is that? I realize that these days you have to be computer literate, but not at the expense of a true education. By using computers for math problems for instance, you get no background in the actual problem solving method. The Middle & High schools in this County issue Dell Laptops to each student at the beginning of the school year. Without the internet, I would be forced to actually have to fight the people and shop in Brick & Mortar stores. I do go to the Grocery Store, Doctors appointments, and the Barbershop. Although i can keep up with current events on the internet, I also get a newspaper ( have to feed my crossword addiction as well ). To add a little annecdote here, I rarely took notes in class, but did pay attention to what was being said ( even if it was boring ). I had an ability to take it in and recall it. I can remember many times when the teacher thought I was daydreaming and would suddenly call on me and ask me what she or he just said about so and so and I would tell her or him. Now I had some History teahers who were WWII vets and they could really make history interesting, especially when we got to WWII, as then their personal experiences came into play. Yeah, it is a lot different today, but I can't say that it is better.

What the heck is a slide rule? Nowadays, you still need to learn quite a few concepts. Sure, I put a program to solve quadratics on my calculator, but I still need to solve them manually, and a calculator isn't really involved there. I wish we got issued laptops here - they have desktop computers in the library and some laptops, but that's it. People use their smartphones quite a bit when fooling around (yet I still don't have one and probably never will unless cell phone carriers quit being so greedy). I have brought my laptop to school a few times, though people generally don't do that.

The issueing of Laptops to students is not a staewide thing, but jurisdictional. This County does, although the City doesn't as far as I know, they have computer labs in the schools. At one time, the Middle schol kids got Apple laptops and the Hogh School kids the Dell Laptops, but they decide to run Dell across the board. You should have seen the three ring circus out at the fairgrounds when the County sold off those Apple laptops @ $50 a pop. The Elementary students in the County have Computers in the Classrooms to work with. My point was that at one time, everything was done with pencil and paper and the knowledge ( hopefully ) you had upstairs. Yeah, I agree that you do have to know the concepts on how to solve the problem, then the Calculator will do the math so to speak. If you don't know the concept, then the old acronym GIGO ( Garbage In Garbage Out ) takes over.

[myloginname]

Getting issued laptops???

Ha, our school has a lab with brand-new iMacs, but in the classrooms each room has a really old mac PC, and only one, though teachers are issued a macbook but even those are old and slow.

Good thing though, we just got shipped a Dell PC and our teacher wasn't sure what it was for, but it seems like each class got one so thats good. No more of those slow, useless Macs.

Mind you, I am still in elementary school (next year high school), but still, I've never heard of any school issuing laptops.

I do have a fat calculator that can do all these graphs and calculations, but in my opinion I would just rather use a phone or a laptop, calculators are way outdated.

LBD: Really, you wouldn't want a smartphone? I'm hoping to get a Blackberry or Android or something this summer as I head into high school, I would really like one.

This post has been edited by myloginname: 29 December 2011 - 08:14 PM

[LiveBrianD]

myloginname, on 29 December 2011 - 08:07 PM, said:

Getting issued laptops???

Ha, our school has a lab with brand-new iMacs, but in the classrooms each room has a really old mac PC, and only one, though teachers are issued a macbook but even those are old and slow.

Good thing though, we just got shipped a Dell PC and our teacher wasn't sure what it was for, but it seems like each class got one so thats good. No more of those slow, useless Macs.

Mind you, I am still in elementary school (next year high school), but still, I've never heard of any school issuing laptops.

I do have a fat calculator that can do all these graphs and calculations, but in my opinion I would just rather use a phone or a laptop, calculators are way outdated.

LBD: Really, you wouldn't want a smartphone? I'm hoping to get a Blackberry or Android or something this summer as I head into high school, I would really like one.

Personally, I see no need to get a smartphone, and on trips I prefer to bring my 11" netbook. Sure, it's bigger, but it's a lot more useful, and the keyboard helps when posting on forums here and stuff. I'm not willing to pay for the data plan required with one, and I don't think my parents are either. I don't think a smartphone is all that useful anyway. I'm not paying $840/year (for 450 minutes from verizon and 4GB data) just so I can use fart apps!

At school, they just got new machines in the library - SFF HP Compaq 8200s with an intel i5 2400, ati 6450, 4GB RAM, and windows 7 64-bit. They still have SFF HP Compaq 7600s in the computer lab with a Pentium 4 HT, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA, and XP. The laptops are also i5s now. We don't use them in classes much though, just for the occasional research project it seems. What do you mean you're in elementary school and will be going to high school next year? What about middle school? Here, it's K-5 in elementary school, 6-8 in middle school, and 9-12 in high school.

[myloginname]

Here we have middle school, but there are also some schools that are K-8 and then you go into high school 9-12, so sometimes it is a bit different.

I have a netbook but on an everyday basis, I think a phone would come in really useful.

[LiveBrianD]

myloginname, on 31 December 2011 - 02:48 PM, said:

Here we have middle school, but there are also some schools that are K-8 and then you go into high school 9-12, so sometimes it is a bit different.

I have a netbook but on an everyday basis, I think a phone would come in really useful.

What, an Atom one? I have an 11" AMD E350 one, and it is a little thicker and bigger than a typical 10" one, but it's faster, so I'm okay with that.

[myloginname]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 04:15 PM, said:

myloginname, on 31 December 2011 - 02:48 PM, said:

Here we have middle school, but there are also some schools that are K-8 and then you go into high school 9-12, so sometimes it is a bit different.

I have a netbook but on an everyday basis, I think a phone would come in really useful.

What, an Atom one? I have an 11" AMD E350 one, and it is a little thicker and bigger than a typical 10" one, but it's faster, so I'm okay with that.

Hmm don't even know. It's 10.1" ASUS, and pretty old. It was like $300 and we got it quite a while ago, came with XP because thats waaaaay better than Vista "Starter". I'll take a look at it later, right now it's 12:45AM (HAPPY NEW YEARS) and i really don't feel like it.

It's not too fast but it has a pretty nice keyboard and decent touchpad, and a pretty good battery life for what was a cheap price back then, and those are the most important things to look at in a netbook, and the speed of course.

[LiveBrianD]

myloginname, on 31 December 2011 - 09:46 PM, said:

Hmm don't even know. It's 10.1" ASUS, and pretty old. It was like $300 and we got it quite a while ago, came with XP because thats waaaaay better than Vista "Starter". I'll take a look at it later, right now it's 12:45AM (HAPPY NEW YEARS) and i really don't feel like it.

It's not too fast but it has a pretty nice keyboard and decent touchpad, and a pretty good battery life for what was a cheap price back then, and those are the most important things to look at in a netbook, and the speed of course.

Netbooks skipped over Vista altogether, and it seems that the cheaper 10" ones ship with the crippled Win7 Starter (no wallpaper changing, for instance), and only 1GB RAM (not enough), and a crappy Atom CPU...

It's about 10PM right now, so New Years hasn't occurred yet here. My 11" netbook doesn't have great battery life (4-5 hours), but I generally don't find it much of an issue.

[myloginname]

LiveBrianD, on 31 December 2011 - 10:08 PM, said:

myloginname, on 31 December 2011 - 09:46 PM, said:

Hmm don't even know. It's 10.1" ASUS, and pretty old. It was like $300 and we got it quite a while ago, came with XP because thats waaaaay better than Vista "Starter". I'll take a look at it later, right now it's 12:45AM (HAPPY NEW YEARS) and i really don't feel like it.

It's not too fast but it has a pretty nice keyboard and decent touchpad, and a pretty good battery life for what was a cheap price back then, and those are the most important things to look at in a netbook, and the speed of course.

Netbooks skipped over Vista altogether, and it seems that the cheaper 10" ones ship with the crippled Win7 Starter (no wallpaper changing, for instance), and only 1GB RAM (not enough), and a crappy Atom CPU...

It's about 10PM right now, so New Years hasn't occurred yet here. My 11" netbook doesn't have great battery life (4-5 hours), but I generally don't find it much of an issue.

Yeah ours is pretty much bottom end, 1GB, crappy CPU and 120GB HDD, but to get anything better it would cost $400, and we wanted to stick with $300. It was pretty good, typing on it is manageable for decent periods of time, and the battery life is 4-5 hours as well, some of the ones we were looking at had crappy 2hr battery lifes.

Oh yeah, and vista starter is basically a super stripped down version...theres a lot of things you can't do. Getting XP was a lot better.

This post has been edited by myloginname: 02 January 2012 - 07:19 PM

[LiveBrianD]

myloginname, on 02 January 2012 - 07:18 PM, said:

Yeah ours is pretty much bottom end, 1GB, crappy CPU and 120GB HDD, but to get anything better it would cost $400, and we wanted to stick with $300. It was pretty good, typing on it is manageable for decent periods of time, and the battery life is 4-5 hours as well, some of the ones we were looking at had crappy 2hr battery lifes.

Oh yeah, and vista starter is basically a super stripped down version...theres a lot of things you can't do. Getting XP was a lot better.

Nowadays, some of them can get 8hrs! I recall that when netbooks started shipping with w7 starter, people were wanting XP Home because it didn't have restrictions, but now it's completely obsolete.

[myloginname]

LiveBrianD, on 02 January 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

myloginname, on 02 January 2012 - 07:18 PM, said:

Yeah ours is pretty much bottom end, 1GB, crappy CPU and 120GB HDD, but to get anything better it would cost $400, and we wanted to stick with $300. It was pretty good, typing on it is manageable for decent periods of time, and the battery life is 4-5 hours as well, some of the ones we were looking at had crappy 2hr battery lifes.

Oh yeah, and vista starter is basically a super stripped down version...theres a lot of things you can't do. Getting XP was a lot better.

Nowadays, some of them can get 8hrs! I recall that when netbooks started shipping with w7 starter, people were wanting XP Home because it didn't have restrictions, but now it's completely obsolete.

Yeah, but now there are tablets. And I would still take XP over Vista starter anyday, but w7 is a lot better.

[coastie65]

Speaking of internet service, I have just been informed that as of 1 March, I will no longer have MSN Premium ( unless I want to pay a reduced fee ). Hopefully Verizon has something besides Yahoo and AOL. When I had Dial Up I used Earthlink which was pretty secure. Geez, what a mess this is going to be.

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 03 January 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

Speaking of internet service, I have just been informed that as of 1 March, I will no longer have MSN Premium ( unless I want to pay a reduced fee ). Hopefully Verizon has something besides Yahoo and AOL. When I had Dial Up I used Earthlink which was pretty secure. Geez, what a mess this is going to be.

Why do you use it anyway? Just use firefox or IE like the rest of us do! Note: comcast has told my grandmother several times that since she's paying for basic service but they're giving her a premium package, they'll downgrade it. Well, the date when they last said they'd do that passed, and she's still receiving premium channels. lol...

[myloginname]

LiveBrianD, on 03 January 2012 - 06:41 PM, said:

coastie65, on 03 January 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

Speaking of internet service, I have just been informed that as of 1 March, I will no longer have MSN Premium ( unless I want to pay a reduced fee ). Hopefully Verizon has something besides Yahoo and AOL. When I had Dial Up I used Earthlink which was pretty secure. Geez, what a mess this is going to be.

Why do you use it anyway? Just use firefox or IE like the rest of us do! Note: comcast has told my grandmother several times that since she's paying for basic service but they're giving her a premium package, they'll downgrade it. Well, the date when they last said they'd do that passed, and she's still receiving premium channels. lol...

MSN Premium? What's that?

[coastie65]

LiveBrianD, on 03 January 2012 - 06:41 PM, said:

coastie65, on 03 January 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

Speaking of internet service, I have just been informed that as of 1 March, I will no longer have MSN Premium ( unless I want to pay a reduced fee ). Hopefully Verizon has something besides Yahoo and AOL. When I had Dial Up I used Earthlink which was pretty secure. Geez, what a mess this is going to be.

Why do you use it anyway? Just use firefox or IE like the rest of us do! Note: comcast has told my grandmother several times that since she's paying for basic service but they're giving her a premium package, they'll downgrade it. Well, the date when they last said they'd do that passed, and she's still receiving premium channels. lol...

This isn't the FiOS TV. With FiOS internet, we had a choice of MSN Premium or Yahoo as an ISP as in Verizon FiOS with MSN Premium ( Co Branded ). They eventually dropped MSN and added AOL. Now they have dropped AOL as well as Yahoo, so it is just " My Verizon" now. I can keep MSN Premium at a cost for the MSN Premium subscription through Microsoft. I don't particularly like Verizon's Home page and stuff. I think with my email address, I'll maybe have access to it through Hotmail though. I'll have to change the security on the Vista machines though, as I am running Avast! with Webroot Spysweeper ( which came FREE with MSN Premium ). I'll probably just go with MSE and add Malwarebytes & SAS as back up on demand scanners. The New laptop is already configured that way. This thing is running Avast! and the paid version of SAS.

[compnovo]

coastie65, on 04 January 2012 - 11:23 AM, said:

This isn't the FiOS TV. With FiOS internet, we had a choice of MSN Premium or Yahoo as an ISP as in Verizon FiOS with MSN Premium ( Co Branded ). They eventually dropped MSN and added AOL. Now they have dropped AOL as well as Yahoo, so it is just " My Verizon" now. I can keep MSN Premium at a cost for the MSN Premium subscription through Microsoft. I don't particularly like Verizon's Home page and stuff. I think with my email address, I'll maybe have access to it through Hotmail though. I'll have to change the security on the Vista machines though, as I am running Avast! with Webroot Spysweeper ( which came FREE with MSN Premium ). I'll probably just go with MSE and add Malwarebytes & SAS as back up on demand scanners. The New laptop is already configured that way. This thing is running Avast! and the paid version of SAS.

Hey coastie,
I'm a Comcast subscriber, and my wife and I have set up our own home pages rather than use comcast.net. She set herself up with Google (www.google.com/ig), and uses gmail as her primary email account. I set mine to www.msn.com to make it easier to get to my secondary email account (Hotmail); my primary is a POP3 account I access through Outlook. That way neither of us pay for a web portal on top of our Comcast fees, it simply isn't necessary.
BTW, I use MSE like LB does. Free is good.

[LiveBrianD]

coastie65, on 04 January 2012 - 11:23 AM, said:

LiveBrianD, on 03 January 2012 - 06:41 PM, said:

coastie65, on 03 January 2012 - 03:56 PM, said:

Speaking of internet service, I have just been informed that as of 1 March, I will no longer have MSN Premium ( unless I want to pay a reduced fee ). Hopefully Verizon has something besides Yahoo and AOL. When I had Dial Up I used Earthlink which was pretty secure. Geez, what a mess this is going to be.

Why do you use it anyway? Just use firefox or IE like the rest of us do! Note: comcast has told my grandmother several times that since she's paying for basic service but they're giving her a premium package, they'll downgrade it. Well, the date when they last said they'd do that passed, and she's still receiving premium channels. lol...

This isn't the FiOS TV. With FiOS internet, we had a choice of MSN Premium or Yahoo as an ISP as in Verizon FiOS with MSN Premium ( Co Branded ). They eventually dropped MSN and added AOL. Now they have dropped AOL as well as Yahoo, so it is just " My Verizon" now. I can keep MSN Premium at a cost for the MSN Premium subscription through Microsoft. I don't particularly like Verizon's Home page and stuff. I think with my email address, I'll maybe have access to it through Hotmail though. I'll have to change the security on the Vista machines though, as I am running Avast! with Webroot Spysweeper ( which came FREE with MSN Premium ). I'll probably just go with MSE and add Malwarebytes & SAS as back up on demand scanners. The New laptop is already configured that way. This thing is running Avast! and the paid version of SAS.

I just use the Windows Live Mail program to access my hotmail accounts, and it's free. You could also use outlook (not free though). MSE is a great program in my opinion, though of course if you want you can still use Avast free.

compnovo, on 04 January 2012 - 12:09 PM, said:

coastie65, on 04 January 2012 - 11:23 AM, said:

This isn't the FiOS TV. With FiOS internet, we had a choice of MSN Premium or Yahoo as an ISP as in Verizon FiOS with MSN Premium ( Co Branded ). They eventually dropped MSN and added AOL. Now they have dropped AOL as well as Yahoo, so it is just " My Verizon" now. I can keep MSN Premium at a cost for the MSN Premium subscription through Microsoft. I don't particularly like Verizon's Home page and stuff. I think with my email address, I'll maybe have access to it through Hotmail though. I'll have to change the security on the Vista machines though, as I am running Avast! with Webroot Spysweeper ( which came FREE with MSN Premium ). I'll probably just go with MSE and add Malwarebytes & SAS as back up on demand scanners. The New laptop is already configured that way. This thing is running Avast! and the paid version of SAS.

Hey coastie,
I'm a Comcast subscriber, and my wife and I have set up our own home pages rather than use comcast.net. She set herself up with Google (www.google.com/ig), and uses gmail as her primary email account. I set mine to www.msn.com to make it easier to get to my secondary email account (Hotmail); my primary is a POP3 account I access through Outlook. That way neither of us pay for a web portal on top of our Comcast fees, it simply isn't necessary.
BTW, I use MSE like LB does. Free is good.

I HATE how comcast redirects 404 errors (the type that's shown by the browser itself, not a webpage's page that says it couldn't find it) to their own search page if you use their DNS server. I want to just let firefox give me its' 404 error so I can simply correct the url rather than have to type it all in again. grr... My dad doesn't like how comcast insists that he have at least one email account with them, so he doesn't use it, and has the billing stuff sent to another account. I don't use the security software they provide either, Mcafee or Norton I think, since those are just limited crappy versions, and MSE is better.