Posted on 12/27/2010 10:24:19 AM PST by greatdefender
ORMOND BEACH, Fla. -- Some city commissioners in central Florida want to replace the stacks of paper they get before meetings with something more state-of-the-art -- the iPad.
Ormond Beach's city commissioners say their plan to have the city buy the mayor and four commissioners iPads will save taxpayers money.
Every two weeks, city leaders get stacks of documents before meetings at city hall. Officials say the paper alone costs $1,100 a year.
The five iPads could cost around $3,250.
It's not the first Florida city to phase out paper. Palm Coast city leaders replaced printed documents with iPads earlier this year.
iPad PING
As long as there’s a viable method for archiving legal documents, it’s a great idea. However, throughout the country, varying cities, counties and states have different requirements for legal documentation. Many require an original hard copy of said documents. This may not necessarily be limited to legal documents in some cases. My point being, in many such cases, you simply cannot go paperless. Still, an electronic archive is tremendously advantageous, provided you can pull the hard archive as needed.
(The Canadian Treasury Board in Ottawa has already gone iPad and paperless for their board meetings and found it very doable and useful... and is now considering outfitting all 6,743 Canadian treasury employees with iPads to go entirely paperless within their offices! Swordmaker)
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List,
Yep. 5 netbooks would cost $1500, less than half the cost of the iPads. The Roi is just over 1 year as apposed to 3 years with the Apple solution. Don’t get me wrong - i’m writing this on my new iPad, but for the money, the ipad is a luxury device. - not the most practical choice for government. Plus, a netbook won’t require a second computer to sync to.
It appears this is just for preparing what they read, from sources already in digital format. It shouldn’t change anything unless they start using the iPads to create official government content.
System Admin needs to try a Netbook. My wife’s gets 10+ hours between charging.
If you are concerned about them screwing up the settings, set them up with an account with restricted access. Windows 7 can be locked down by IS if desired.
The netbook has less cool factor and is much less likely to walk off.
Ok, but we have 3 net books in our family and get between 6-8 hours of battery for each one. BUt if the requirement is limited to documents, they should consider an eReader. We have a Kindle, Nook, and Sony eReader, and the Sony is the most flexible, by far. Lots of formats, the battery holds a charge for about 1 month, cheap ($140) . There are school districts looking at eReaders to replace textbooks.
The Netbook probably also requires training and security considerations, and the battery doesn't last as long. It's not really good as an e-reader, which is the apparent purpose. A netbook also isn't a brain-dead easy method of content delivery for computer-fearing old farts. And this case they can sync all five to the content producer's system and have all the docs ready.
For a better comparison, you could they should have used a Nook, but then that has a smaller screen and less storage as shipped. It even has a lower battery life, advertised 8 hours with Wi-Fi off vs. the iPad's 10 hours with it on. The iPad probably goes all day with no Wi-Fi and only light document reading.
Nah. You can’t make paper airplanes out of them.
“There are school districts looking at eReaders to replace textbooks”
My old high school in Fl. already does this. Great investment.
I’m guessing they want color, which leaves you with the Nook Color and its 8-hour battery.
It’s estimated that the low-end iPad costs Apple itself about $260 to make, and most of that is in the screen. This doesn’t count general corporate overhead, R&D, the operating system, advertising and profit. Thus you aren’t going to get anything near its capabilities at retail for an e-reader price.
Sorry, I wrote that wrong. The most expensive single component is the screen at about $80, the screen isn’t the majority of the cost.
With that said netbooks would make more sense for a lot of reasons. Cost, ease of hooking up to hard lines, ease of printing, USB port for data loading, etc. Most politicians use these types of devices for more than just reading pdf files so having something that uses flash is good. At these types of meetings when you have people sitting behind a diaz having something up in front of you and somewhat fixed makes more sense. I would not like to see our city council folks or county commissioners fumbling around with a frisbee during meetings.
My dad would not touch a computer. Ever. Us kids got him an iPad for Christmas and you would have thought we gave him a magic wand*. We were all shocked to see him using it this weekend. He is on facebook today! LOL! We got him the iPad and the book "iPad For Seniors for Dummies" and off he went.
* I hereby copyright the idea of advertising an iPad as a magic wand. If Apple does a commercial were they show a senior citizen using a magic wand that morphs in to an IPad or an Ipad morphing in to a magic wand I expect a check in the mail....:)
I had arguments with high-level managers, as they wanted to incriminate employees for things stated in emails. They would flash print-outs of emails to me as grounds for firing people. As an IT systems engineer overseeing our email systems I showed them how easy it is to spoof origination and target addresses with email. I could effectively make anyone look like a criminal, even these managers, by inserting faked emails into the system. And not just me, anyone with sufficient IT knowledge can fake electronic documents. That shut up the managers.
$279, ACES Eee PC. 8 hours of battery (6 cell)
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