So we have a new professor who's interested in doing neat things in Music Ed. He'd like to use a SMART board or some similar interface to be able to mark up music and take notes. Great.
The physical layout of the room makes a touch screen or standalone unit not really viable, but SMART markets a wireless slate that he's really excited about using. We order one and install it and get ready for interactive goodness.
Pen works, highliter works, camera does the neat little snapshot animation. Hmm, the Notebook icon doesn't seem to be working. That's a problem- without that you can't save your files, edit them, put up backgrounds (like musical staves) and so forth- the device is close to useless without it. So I go to the SMART site and try and download the software.
"This product is not eligible"
I spent a while going around in circles with tech support yesterday- the Notebook software is *not* included because, quote "People are using the Notebook software with non-SMART hardware"
Hunh? I just bought a $400 piece of SMART hardware and I want to actually, you know, use it. Instead, I'm being told that I can only use it if I purchase yet another piece of SMART hardware that does come with a license. If you read carefully the web page you'll find hints of that, but given that every other piece of SMART hardware comes with the Notebook software it's not exactly what you might expect.
Anyone know another good vendor, because I'm not so sure these folks are very SMART.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Rant time1; Microsoft
What is it with companies and interesting interfaces?
A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.
I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"
A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.
I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"
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