It reminds me of Radiant[0], which does the same thing for Google Music.
Google has bet big on web apps. They are pushing hard to make the web app the way of the future. I don't have a problem with that, and to an extent I'm getting used to it (while simultaneously moving my clients in that direction like I've been doing for ten years), but in an age when it's still very transitional, it is nice to have these wrappers to make everything a little smoother.
If they published desktop apps, folks would never migrate. They would complain about the poor experience on the Chromebook, etc.
I had the same reaction as you, so I googled it. According to Wikipedia[1] the eruption did indeed take two days, with shocks starting in the morning and ash starting to fall in earnest at 1 p.m., with "pyrocastic flows" beginning in the middle of the night. People were able to escape and be rescued during the afternoon.
Is anyone aware of an enterprise(ish?) product that does encrypted off-site backups from a Windows environment to something like Glacier or B2? We're 75/25 Windows/Nix, and our backups (VMWare, NetApp) are all managed on the Windows side. We'd like to just fling weeklies at B2.
AltaVault is a backup target, but not a backup product that the OP was likely asking for. But many companies use products like Arq, BackupExec, or NetBackup in combination with AltaVault to achieve what the OP described.
Disclaimer: I worked on the predecessor to AltaVault at Riverbed
As someone who is still, 17 years later, running a large-ish production CF site on a daily basis, and still teaching new hires and interns to use CF every summer, I'm happy to see a little (!) CF love on HN.
I've built production apps in Rails, PHP, and CF, and I've tinkered with Go, Python, etc. I still haven't found a language that gets interns from "don't know HTML" to "working dynamic web thing" faster than ColdFusion.
Our school (K-12, east coast, I'm IT director) has purchased hundreds of both devices in the past 4 years. We started with 3:1 iPads in the first year, distributed evenly throughout the school. We very quickly realized that the iPad is not the right device for any student who ever needs to type anything, and the "enterprise" management from the MDM providers (who are handcuffed by the atrocious tools, including Apple Configurator, that Apple provides) is pretty awful compared to the outstanding and couldn't-be-easier management through the Chrome Management Console.
So now we purchase iPads for prekindergarten through second grade, and Chromebooks for 3 and 4. Starting in grade 5, we have a mandatory BYOD and the Chromebook is our recommended device. In the middle school (5-8) the Chromebook takes 65% of the market share (versus Apple 30% and other <5%). In the upper school (9-12) it's more a 50/50 split Apple/Google.
It's just so hard to discount the functionality of a real keyboard in any school where typing (and consequently writing) matters. Google Docs on an iPad is still awful, despite lots of improvements in the past few years. Still, if it were up to me, the lack of management tools for the Apple side (each device requires a LOT of manipulation by hand to install apps, update software, manage accounts, etc) would be the deciding factor and I'd never buy another iPad again.
Edit: I just wanted to clarify that our "BYOD" program 5-12 is a laptop program. That's 65% Chromebooks and ~30% Mac laptops in grades 5-8, not iPads. We don't allow the iPad for the program requirements, though we permit their use as long as the student also has a full-sized laptop.
> It's just so hard to discount the functionality of a real keyboard in any school where typing (and consequently writing) matters.
Not to mention only having to charge one device (laptop) instead of two devices (keyboard, iPad), and not having to deal with any bluetooth connectivity issues with the keyboard.
My experience as a teacher, first in a school with iPads and now in a school with laptops, as that iPads are generally viewed as toys and laptops are generally viewed as work tools. I would never recommend that any middle school or high school buy iPads.
Having said that, I would love to hear about any notably positive experiences other teachers here have had with either iPads or laptops in class (email in profile).
> Starting in grade 5, we have a mandatory BYOD and the Chromebook is our recommended device.
Is this a public school or private? In a public school I cannot imagine that that is legal since it is highly regressive. And before you say a Chromebook is "only" $150-200, that is 1/2 of someone's pay cheque and many are living pay cheque to pay cheque as is.
Even school uniforms are seen as a hardship for the poor. Doing freaking computers is just mind boggling to me.
We are a private school, but 25% of our population is here on scholarship. Those families who cannot afford one are provided a computer by the school (and often books, supplies, uniforms, and even money to go on the "optional" trips like the class ski trip, etc.)
As cableshaft said, many of our peer public schools do require students to purchase expensive supplies like calculators. We are actually moving away from requiring students to purchase a graphing calculator; instead we ask them to buy the computer (good for all subjects) and we have been providing graphing calculators in math classes for a while now.
Buying a TI graphing calculator was mandatory for my math class in 7th grade ~20 years ago, and those were around $120, or $200 if adjusted for inflation. That was at a public school, and that was only useful for a single subject, not every class in school.
This is the season for forms and fees day for us (few?) parents. Two kids in a top level public school system (aka a rich area, plenty of prop tax revenue) and I still had to pay $224 for two grade school kids for one year of books and technology fees and PTO "contributions" and stuff.
If you make over $100K its a rounding error, and if you make under $25K (or whatever) then absolutely everything is free covered by the state, including free lunches, the real people to pity are the remaining few middle class folks. The government will get rid of them soon enough... then what?
If you read the school paperwork VERY carefully you'll find the monetary payments are technically voluntary. They're not allowed legally to not educate your kids if you don't pay until they're over 18 at the start of the school year. This probably varies greatly by state and district.
One interesting side effect I've seen is massive price increases for school supply list products... Come on Target, $3.88 retail for small pack of postit notes during "school supply season"? Talk about profiteering. Damn. A twelve pack of the same product is $3.48 at Amazon with free prime delivery. Feel sad for poor folks who can't buy at Amazon, so stuff that costs me 34 cents costs them almost ten times as much retail. I saw a lot of stuff like that, $2.99 for a dozen pencils, etc. I walked thru Target with my phone out the whole time putting in the order for supplies and buying what little was cheaper, retail.
Did you consider using a Raspberry Pi 2 desktop setup or is a portable laptop much better for classrooms? I imagined it might be an advantage to have things less portable so they can be bolted down. I've been looking into http://pinet.org.uk to manage a set of Pis with an Ubuntu server.
I'm volunteering to run a code club this term but things have changed a lot since I was at school. Trying to work out what to expect although I'm in the UK so it might be different.
A portable laptop means a kid can take it home with them for homework and the like, and for older kids, means they can take it between classes. Computing's pretty ingrained in a lot of modern teaching techniques, including things like turning in homework, so anything bolted down just isn't going to work.
iPad or Chromebook, it is a loose-loose situation for the next generation.
You are training kids to use expensive device with a walled ecosystem or you are training kids to use subsidised device with in practice walled ecosystem and with a questionable privacy policy.
The future generation will have it even worse than generation who grew up with Microsoft.
Other environments don't have the ease of administration that chrome os and apple devices have. If a device is stolen, you can lock it down. The settings are automatically pushed to the device, so kids and teachers don't need to fumble with trying to figure out how to print to the classroom printer. Because it's using google apps, sharing documents is built-in, so kids don't need easily-lost thumbdrives, and don't have the frustration of losing homework due to computer problems. Finally, it's relatively inexpensive. You can get a chromebook for $150, which is a lot easier on the budget if a kid accidentally breaks their laptop.
If you want to give another option, you need to bring something to the table that's as easy to use, as easy to administer, as easy to share content, and as inexpensive. Until you can bring those things, then all you have is an inferior product for the average teacher.
We permit any kind of laptop so long as it has a "modern" browser. I've got a few kids running Ubuntu or some other form of Linux on their PC laptops. We don't discriminate if they want to use something more complex; that said, the market speaks for itself. For early middle school, almost all parents choose the simplest option, the Chromebook.
> Still, if it were up to me, the lack of management tools for the Apple side (each device requires a LOT of manipulation by hand to install apps, update software, manage accounts, etc)
I remember that being the case a few years ago, but doesn't apple have zero-touch device enrolment and MDM these days?
That's relatively new. We haven't had to provision iPads yet this year. This is the first year in several I haven't bought any (yet). Given Apple's track record (they obviously hate schools, they do everything they can to upset school IT departments, like getting rid of their servers, breaking their directory services, making device enrollment as painful as possible) I don't have high hopes. (Sent from my Mac Pro.)
> It's just so hard to discount the functionality of a real keyboard in any school where typing (and consequently writing) matters.
Kids at that age should spend less time on a computer of any sort and more time learning penmanship so they can actually write.
When global warming/peak oil/the zombie apocalypse/other finally hits and your technology doesn't work, civilization will belong to those who learned penmanship. And like language acquisition, there is a small window of time during which a child can develop a competent hand.
Which is why we specifically target cursive handwriting skills. We're actually doubling-down with a newly revamped cursive curriculum, with the goal to graduate elementary students who can "write beautiful cursive" per the official goals. It's not an either/or proposition.
We built something similar to this a few years ago for our campus (we are a school). Hired an illustrator to do a watercolor of the campus on large tiles (maybe 8" by 11") and then scanned them in at high resolution and created a large image that we ran through OpenLayers [1] and built a searchable campus map. Neat project. Unfortunately, maintaining the watercolor (even with the tiles) as we changed the campus (e.g. construction, new roadways, new names for old POIs) was difficult, and we had to move back to just a PDF.
Yeah look, I haven't experienced the problem, therefore I wonder about the solution. Learning about the problem it solves (i.e., sending formulas to friends for homeworks etc) allows me to understand it. It's quite hard to see problems you haven't had yourself, if you only see the solution, right?
Thank you for clarifying here. I wasn't immediately sure what the use-case would be for this. You might want to consider adding something like this (rationale, use-case, explanation) to the README.
Google has bet big on web apps. They are pushing hard to make the web app the way of the future. I don't have a problem with that, and to an extent I'm getting used to it (while simultaneously moving my clients in that direction like I've been doing for ten years), but in an age when it's still very transitional, it is nice to have these wrappers to make everything a little smoother.
If they published desktop apps, folks would never migrate. They would complain about the poor experience on the Chromebook, etc.
[0] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac