We can no longer count on school computers

School Computers: Time For a Revolution.

By Tyler A. 

Ever since computers were made for the general public in the early 1990’s, schools and school districts across North America have worked tirelessly to integrate these technologies into their systems.  This gave students a unique learning experience considering not many households could afford a personal computer. 

Schools across Canada and the United states jumped on the idea, quickly purchasing hundreds of computers, costing thousands of dollars. It should have been obvious that this approach could not work forever, and we’re now at the point where only the richest schools can keep their information systems up to date and running properly.  

We soon found that we were fighting a losing battle to keep our schools technology from becoming obsolete, and eventually the funding ran out, and many schools, including Fredericton High, now find themselves with computers that were produced as far back as the early 2000’s. This means that many of the newest features in the field of technology either don’t work, or run extremely slowly on our school computers. It won’t be long before our circa 2005 Dell towers are considered obsolete, and when this happens, the schools will have to make a big decision, continue in the wasteful and expensive cycle they’ve been in since the late 20^th century, or evolve to a new way of technology integrated learning, one that’s literally in the palm of the students hand.      

 

 

However, the technology industry is a fast moving one. Some computers are out-dated by the time they even hit the shelves. The processing power of computers is increasing exponentially, and has been since the late 1980’s. This makes it extremely difficult for consumers, let alone schools, to keep up with the rapidly evolving industry. In the wake of a global economic recession, schools are already facing some of the lowest budgets they’ve ever seen. Our school system here in New Brunswick is already in the process of eliminating and merging certain districts, it is doubtful they’ll be able to conjure up the tens of thousands of dollars that will be required to bring adequate computers into the schools.         

This means that it is time to drop the broken and inefficient computer lab system, in favor of letting students use their own devices, which are in many ways vastly superior systems to the ones we find ourselves using in school. 

“It’s just a waste of time.”, says Evan Grey, a PCMT student at Fredericton High School, “Once we’re in the computer labs we spend half the time waiting for the computers to log us in, and waiting for the internet to load.” 

According to wikipedia.org, 90% of the developed world has a cell phone. Most of which are enabled with camera, internet browsing, video, and word-processing functions. Powerful and state of the art technologies are entering the classrooms every day. In students pockets. It seems like the school system is going about this issue the wrong way, instead of punishing students for using their cell phones in the classroom environment, they should be encouraged. The processing power and data storage capabilities of these small devices dubbed “smart phones” are being totally overlooked by the public school system. Smartphones and tablets can have in excess of 64GB of hard drive storage, if allowed to use them in the classroom, they could store entire text books on these devices. Imagine students not having to carry around pounds of texts books to every class and instead being able to use their own devices instead, it would be much more efficient and save money and paper.          

The outdated computers in the school act as a double edged sword: not only are they a waste of time for the students who use them, they require hours of maintenance, software and firmware updates, new programs, broken hardware, all need to be dealt with somewhere in FHS every day. This requires money and time to deal with, both of which could be better spent if students didn’t have to use the school provided technology.          

This may be the best time to make the transition from school computer labs to using the students own technology, with the emergence of cloud data. Cloud data allows a huge number of computers to access internet hosted files, which would eliminate the need for massive servers and domains, and all the repair and maintenance that they require. This would allow students to save their work in the schools “cloud” without it needed to take up storage space on their own device. They could then access that file the next time they’re in school, or allow it to be shared with other students, which would be useful for group projects, research, and so on.          

The most common computer in Fredericton High is the Dell Optiplex gx240, which comes equipped with a Pentium 4 dual core processor which runs at 1.8 Ghz/s, 512 Mb of RAM and a 40gb hard drive. The iPhone 4, the most popular and best selling cell phone ever produced, uses the A4 1 Ghz/s processor, contains 1GB of RAM and up to 64GB of flash memory storage. As we can see, the iPhone 4 even in pure comparison of computing power is almost entirely superior to the Dell. It has a slightly less powerful processor, but taking into consideration that is does not need to run a huge operation system such as the Windows XP SP3 that all of our Dells run, there is much more processing power at hand with the iPhone. The iPhone actually has more Random Access Memory (RAM) than the dell, which makes for faster application load time and smoothness, as well as quicker access to saved files and websites. As we can see, the ultra-thin, super light iPhone 4 smartphone is vastly superior to the confusing, 35 pound dell optiplex. The iPhone 4 is also cheaper in pure numbers, but if you add in the undisclosed amount of money we’re paying for software and technicians, it almost seems crazy that the in school computer system has survived this long.  

“All the computers are so old and slow”, says Erika LeClair, a grade FHS student “we’d be able to get so much more work done if we could use our phones and laptops”.

This does seem to be the prevailing opinion of almost all of the students in Fredericton High. Out of the fifteen students I polled, not a single one of them thought that classes spent in a computer lab were productive.          

Fredericton High School is in a position to pioneer a new form of education. Students are being forced to work with outdated technology every day. It is time to eliminate the computer lab system, and move into the future. Smartphones, tablets, WiFi, cloud storage, these will be the learning tools of the future.

Call of Duty calls out to gamers

Call of Duty is the best one yet, says our reviewer.

MW3 Has Arrived, Better Than Ever.

By Tyler A.

 

People love to hate it. Yet, year after year, the Call of Duty video game series continues to out sell it’s competition by almost a three to one ratio. And this year is no exception.  According to wikipedia, only a week into the newest installment of the series, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has already sold upwards of 800 million dollars, 400 million of which was sold within 24 hours of release. Making it the highest grossing release date in video gaming industry history.

 Modern Warfare 3 comes to us from the famous Infinity Ward gaming studio, the developer of Modern Warfare and it’s sequel, Modern Warfare 2, both of which became the best selling game of all time. Infinity Ward was joined by co-developer, Sledgehammer Studios, the creators of the largest online game in the world, World of Warcraft.

The game itself is presented by the IW 5.0 gaming engine, which was the same engine used in the previous installment, Modern Warfare 2, in 2009. This means that we unfortunately will not be seeing an improvement in graphics. While the game may not render at as high a resolution as some of its competitiors, the IW engine continues to lead the way in the responsiveness and quick reaction to player controls, this is made possible by sacrificing some of the display quality. Which allows the the game to run at an impressive 60 frames per second on the console versions.

Modern Warfare 3’s single player campaign is riddled with similar highs and lows to it’s two predecessors. It does have an amazing story line which finally wraps up the story that began in 2007 with the nostalgically famous CoD:4 Modern Warfare. The story line is immersive and has a solid blend of action, gameplay and cinematic cutscenes. However, since the game runs on the same engine as it’s infamous sister, CoD MW2, we do see the reimergence of some of the same problems. The enemy in-game spawn system is still sporadic at best. Which in some cases will cause the player to fight against endless waves of enemies,  until he or she chooses to move along. A well seasoned Call of Duty player will find the single player campaign to be fun, emotional and fullfilling, aside from some minor technical issuses.

If we are to consider the MW3 single player mode to be good, then the improved multiplayer mode is fantasic. Any Call of Duty player can tell you that the predecessor to Infinity Wards new game, Modern Warfare 2,’s multiplayer was fun at the best of times, and infuryating at the worst. A mixture of bad balancing techniques during development and little to no developer support post-release made Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer infamously bad. However, at least for the time being, Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer seems like huge improvement over the previous game. The online multiplayer mode will have you addicted with it’s fast paced, energetic gameplay, and its interactive ranking system. The multiplayer mode comes with a record breaking sixteen different maps to play, along with over 50 new and returning weapons to unlock. All new acheivements and challenges will always keep a new goal in your sights, and have you not wanting to put down the controller. One of the most noteworthy intuitions that is helping Infinity Ward redefine the genre, is the weapon leveling system. Which allows you you level up your weapons separetly from your personal rank to speed the process of unlocking new sights, camoflauges and attachments for your favorite guns.

Despite some simliar flaws to it’s predecessor, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 takes the series in a whole new direction, with it’s immersive story-line, amazing response time, which makes up for the lack of full HD rendering. As well as the groundbreaking innovations found within the online multiplayer experience.  This game will provide hours of entertainment for the novice and pro player alike. 

Tyler A. is an avid gamer and frequently beta-tests games for developers.

Pain At The Box Office

Teens struggling with the cost of entertainment.

By Tyler A.  

Let me start by asking where did the good times go? What ever happened to the cheap entertainment enjoyed by youth in the later decades of the twentieth century? Recently, I decided to take my girlfriend out to see the Disney movie The Lion King, which had been re-released to theatres in 3D. I was astonished when I saw my total come to nearly thirty dollars.

Thirty dollars to watch a movie!

A brand new copy of the Lion King dvd sells for eighteen dollars on the media sales website amazon.com. For less than twenty dollars you could buy this movie, and have as many people over to watch it as you want. So where is all this extra cost coming from? Why is it more expensive for two people to go see a movie once, than it is to buy the film outright and be able to watch it as many times as I want? The ridiculous prices however, don’t stop there. My next stop on this adventure through my bank account, was the concession stand. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept of supply, demand, and pricing. All companies are looking to make profit and I think we can all respect that as a capitalist society.

But there is a line. Seven dollars for a bag of popcorn, and four dollars for a soda was my next shock. If I drove five minutes to the nearest convenience store, I could buy eight bags of popcorn and two full liters of soda for well under what I paid at Empire Theatres. However I almost feel like I shouldn’t be the one complaining about this. I can only imagine how the families of five feel every time they decide to visit their local theater. They would easily spend over one hundred dollars before they even reached the concession stand, it’s absolute madness.

We know that no company would ever have their prices so high for no reason, so where are these unexpected expenses coming from? Every year the North American film industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on their anti piracy programs to try and halt the illegal distribution of their movies. Not only are these programs ultimately failing, according to BBC news’ website, they are also doing nothing to try and increase revenue.  The film industry needs to realize that it is doing nothing but putting itself in a situation where, at the very best, their profit will remain the same forever. 

Instead of funding so many anti-piracy programs, they need to start spending that money on improvements to their theaters, and lowering their prices. People love going to the movies, the big screen has been a weekend tradition in North America since as early as world war two, and we still love it. The reason piracy is on the rise, is not because people all of the sudden want to be criminals, it’s because they can no longer afford to watch the movies how they want to, on the big screen.

The film companies need to start giving us reasons to go back to the theatres. Continuing to exponentially raise their prices is not the right way to do it. We need to let them know that we still love the movies, but that we refuse to overpay for an experience that has been virtually unchanged since it’s birth in the early 1900’s.

We need to let it be known, as a community and a nation, that we want to be able to afford going to the movies again. Despite what the film industry thinks, raising prices to all time highs, is not the way to earn money in these harsh economic times. We go to the movies to be entertained, to laugh, to scream, or to cry. We are supposed to be able to leave our problems at the box office and enjoy a few hours of fun with our family and friends. It seems that this is no longer the case, it is time for the industry executives to give us back our Friday night tradition.