If you’re like many of the millions of American parents who have been directly affected by the Global COVID-19 Pandemic beginning in the United States around early 2020, then you understand the challenges and frustrations that have invariably come with remote learning for your kids. Virtually, in the blink of an eye, parents went from breadwinners and caregivers to homeschoolers and the resident IT help desk. The latter being no easy chore even for actual IT professionals! When the pandemic first hit here in The Bay State, schools immediately closed. In my family’s town, it was on Friday, March 13th. How apropos! First, there was two weeks off for kids as the school system attempted to figure out how to go forward with a remote learning model that had not existed in any appreciable form before for the grade schoolers. Needless to say, it was a bit of an expected technical challenge. Most of the work assigned to our kids were in the form of review material with no appreciable new materials being taught. Couple that with technological challenges almost equal to the quest of how to lockdown that states, test, trace, and develop a vaccine all to fight COVID-19. As well as, Congress figuring out a way to help small businesses and individuals alike with some form of comprehensive COVID relief package. So many things were happening at once. And providing some kind of technology equity for lower-income students to have both Internet bandwidth along with a working Internet-capable computer (most likely a Chromebook laptop) was also part of that challenge. This was because it quickly became evident that students were going to be staying home and learning remotely—to the end of 2020, and most likely hybrid (remote and in-person combo) until the end of the 2021 school year...
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December 10, 2019When you think of what $52,000 can buy, you probably think of things like a high-end luxury car (like a Tesla), a boat, or maybe a 5-star trip around the world. Regardless, the last thing you’d probably want to spend $52K on is a computer! Well, Apple Inc. is back in the news with it newest—and most expensive—product yet. The all new Mac Pro is set to be available for pre-order starting next Tuesday. However, this machine might not enjoy the same “early adopter” success that say a new iPhone does. Don’t get me wrong, the specs on this machine are astounding*: Up to a 28-Core Intel Xeon W processors Up to 1.5TB (that’s TERABYTES!) of DIMM RAM, running at 2933MHz AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo graphic cards (configurable with up to four GPUs) Up to 8TB of SSD storage Tons of the latest, most powerful PCI expansion slots and others Tons of USB 3, Thunderbolt, and Ethernet ports And the most powerful WiFi (A/C) and Bluetooth (5.0) available *Note: These specs are based on the most expensive configuration options. This machine is a monster! But that’s not all… If you want THE most powerful monitor to go with this Macintosh behemoth, you’ll be looking at the Pro Display XDR. And it too is a monster! It’s a 32-inch Retina 6K display capable of presenting over a billion (that’s BILLION with a B) colors! Now given the fact that human beings can only perceive an estimated 10 million colors, what would the remaining 990,000,000 colors be used for? Oh, and let’s not forget the $1000 dollar monitor stand that caused quite a stir at the WWDC (i.e. World Wide Developers Conference where Apple announces all its new products) earlier this year. All told, this system (and we haven’t even...