Since when are MIT and Stanford in the Ivy league? Actually Cornell is the only mentioned Ivy league school.
And... my my are we offended today. Somebody said something that could be interpreted as programmers not being the smartest people on the planet. Oh the humanity.
By the way, have you been to China? Have you tried to breathe in Beijing? Actually have you even tried looking across a street in Beijing? If they took our pollution, they can have it. Also, it didn't seem like they were so much wealthier on the whole.
Ahhh exactly the example of a perfectionist. The same person who's probably willing to pay via credit card at a supermarket. Typical paranoia. Either everything or nothing. When it's snowing outside I'll put on whatever clothes I have, even though they are not designed exactly for the weather. Yes I might be a little cold after a while, but oh well. You on the other hand will either not go outside at all or run around naked, because if you dont have everything designed for exactly the right conditions, you might as well not put on any clothing at all.
Look, there are two thing, encryption and authentication. Don't conflate the two. Encrypted connection is for protecting against different things than authenticated connection. Saying that you can't have one without the other is stupid. There's no reason to ever send anything cleartext. Yes, it might be better to authenticate, but it is not all that difficult to obtain a certificate for a domain if you can control the domain for a bit, which is exactly what you need to impersonate a site that google would be connecting to. The thing is as long as you have any certificate given for that domain, then you're Bob.
Authentication and Encryption are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
Also this is google we are talking about. They FOR YEARS could not cobble a two factor or one time password authentication together. So I won't take any lecturing about how concerned they are about security.
BTW, google has been using quite a bit of software I wrote, for free, even android apparently used a bit of my software as my website pops up in their license files. I don't feel at all bad for them giving something to me for free. Plus it's not free. They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (you did notice those ads in gmail did you not?). They are making quite a bit of money. Enough to not pay taxes on lot of it and make lots of people angry.
If you only do these things once a year at most you forget how everything works. The documentation is terrible. So if you understand how to set everything up and what all the acronyms are. I am a mathematician and I understand the mathematics of public key crypto really well. I don't know the little pointless details. Yes onc eyou know what to do and what to get and where to install it etc... yes it's not that much busy work. But rereading all the documentation every year (yeah understanding what e.g. "CSR" is, is pointless unless you do it often).
It's not just startssl, it is the combination of badly written documentation starting with the pop3 server, through the doc on startssl. The problem with these docs is that they only explain anything once you know exactly what to do. At which point they are useless as well.
Plus the startssl website kept freezing. It's an incredibly badly designed UI. very intolerant of pressing the wrong thing for example.
You know, I'm not as smart as your regular user I guess. I only have a phd. Dropped out of school after that.
Yeah, apparently no security is better then some security according to google.
Got certificate from startssl, but it's a pain. Couple of hours of totally pointless work.
Another example where perfection is the enemy of good. This is my gripe with most computer security people. One of the reasons why encryption is not as widely deployed as it should be is this attitutude that "it must only be perfect".
I think a combination of tools might be the answer. I use maxima (wxmaxima frontent) when I need a cas. I use my own software Genius when I need to compute something numerically, and I often use it for in-class demonstrations (I often end up implementing whatever it is I need at some particular point). I can't remember when I last used octave, but that also sometimes happens when tehre's something genius can't do. I tried to make the interface to genius friendly, though of course there's always plenty of room for improvement. Generally it's a "command line" type interface, but I think it can do some pretty graphs. Too friendly tools generally end up being not very flexible. So it is worth it to spend a bit of time learning the less friendly ones.
By the way, I am getting ready to make a new genius release this weekend, I have just one more thing to do on my list before a release.
Your trolling powers are good; a good one with the "30 page thesis on Hilbert" that 1) nobody would assign in a class that's not math history, and not even then because nobody wants to grade a bunch of horribly written 30-page papers 2) completely avoiding the topic of studytime that the original post was about as if all the classes you took had 30 page papers on Hilbert to write.
I give that a C for effort and conclude that you never actually went for a Masters in math. What you wrote sounds like a bad extrapolation of a non-math undergrad, possibly out of school for some time, about what masters study in math would look like. Just from your comments I assume you are a disgruntled student who spends (wastes?) a lot of time on slashdot and tries to blame everything on others. Or perhaps you just like trolling.
"YOU WORK FOR ME" (even capitalized to add volume) really tells me what kind of a student you are. You are exactly the kind of student who spends about 15 minutes out of my office hours every week complaining about random nonsense that has nothing to do with the material (e.g. why was this worth 5 points and not 3 points) wasting time that other students could use to actually ask useful questions and learn in the class. Yes, everything is somebody elses fault, and the professor goes out of his way to make your life miserable. Because it is his (or her) only reason for living. He (or she) spent half their life with very little pay for lots of work studying and perparing for a job where he could finally annoy you in particular.
BTW, you have just blown quite a bit of time reading slashdot, and responding, though I dare say not insightfully. Perhaps time better spent studying.
PS: Apparently in 1960s students had no real lives.
He thinks algebra is bad but thinks all kids should learn something so fundamentally nonuseful as long division? (Yes I know it's useful once you get to polynomial division, but that's algebra... It's often not even taught in calculus where it becomes useful to integrate rational functions.)
I teach at the university level, and from time to time I teach non-math majors, and I don't think the problem is that algebra is too hard. It is that the amount of effort students put into studying has gone significantly down. See:
On average, students now spend 15 hours studying per week compared to 24 in 1960. The problem is not algebra, it is facebook, iphone, internet in general, grade inflation, and role models nowdays being those that made a lot of money with no effort compared to astronauts in the 1960s.
I had my wife visit one of my calculus classes once and she sat in the back row. There was about half the class present (normal if you don't require attendance in a large lecture). Half of the remaining half was playing with their iphones and ipads or whatnot (no, not taking notes on them). And that was a calculus class where majority were engineers, students who are generally more interested in math. I know how pre-calculus can run and it can be depressing that no matter how hard you try to make the subject interesting (and approachable) you have at most one or two people in a class who pay attention and do what one would consider "well". Then due to grade inflation, most of the students pass anyway without getting much out of the class.
I had to take all sorts of classes as an undergrad (including political science) and I enjoyed every one of them. I had to work more in some than in others, though of course liberal arts classes were usually easiest to get an A without an effort. It's easy to get an A in art class for example, without having a shred of artistic talent. I found almost all these classes were doable with just going to class, doing homework and no extra studying. Comparing grades of different subjects is total nonsense. Would we improve the situation if we just gave everyone an A in math?
In summary, I don't think that anyone capable of being good in any field taught in a university can't pass an algebra class given a bit of effort. If it is not important to you to put in the effort, then your own field is not very important to you either. Why would it be an advantage to have an unmotivated person like that graduate?
Compete with what? Did anyone notice that about 1/4 or 1/3 of all computer users still use XP? So XP is still "competitive", whatever that means. Large part of the remaining users will run whatever is installed on the computer they buy regardless of how "modern" the UI is. Most people are using the computer to do something else than play around with their desktop. Just because a few geeks apparently can't work without wobbly windows and new window decorations every week, doesn't mean that the rest of humanity cares about those things too.
Everybody is always switching over to the mac for the past 10 years or so. One would think that over that time period, somebody would have actually switched over.
BTW, does anyone else feel like "modern" is such a stupid concept? Modern doesn't mean good. Modern doesn't mean better. It simply means different from before. I don't want a "modern" desktop. I want one that works well enough so that I can happily totally ignore it and get on with whatever I actually want to do.
That's the persistent bullshit about NSA. No, a mathematician in the top of his/her field is at a research-one university (secrecy is never a good way to attract good scientists). NSA has lots of people at all levels, from BA to PhD.
Actually I'd much more recommend one of the government labs than NSA itself if you want to go for a government job. At NSA you'll probably need to have too much clearance for comfort.
There are lots of industry jobs where they'll be delighted you have a bachelors in math.
Well, that's unique IPs based over a long time. I would assume most active desktop users probably run within one or two of the latest versions. So it is certainly not 35 mil. Not to mention that I probably count as about 5 or 10 of their users given all the places I've run yum at on my laptop.
Anyway, who cares. It is on the order of 10s of millions, and that was my point.
I could be a bit out of date (yeah I am getting older...)
If I'm reading the statistics correctly (http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/) then about 14 million US households had computers in 1989. Given Ubuntu says they have 20 mil users and fedora seems to have about 4-5 mil based on their yum stats, I guess opensuse about the same, and debian and mint also takes some. Some of those are servers, but I assume there is a lot fewer servers than desktops in general, and I bet most ubuntu computers are desktops (I wouldn't be so sure). I guess it would be then conservative to say 14 mil linux desktops or the same number as us households in '89 (a bit more than 20 years ago and only counting US).
Anyway, my point was that if it is 10 to 20 million, that is a lot. Just because percentage-wise it is not everyone, it doesn't mean that it is insignificant.
If you give a whole bunch of money to a charity and save a hundred thousand people from starvation, you'd just save 1% of those that die every year. But would you consider it insignificant?
For whatever reason, when talking about software and technology people always talk about percentage of the market, rather than any absolute numbers. In other contexts people often take the absolute numbers.
If we discover an alien race in another galaxy that we have no way of contacting uses linux and has 100 times more people, will suddenly Mac and Windows become insignificant?
Well, there's probably more people using Linux on the desktop now than there were people using computers 20 years ago. 1-2 percent is a LOT of people (millions). If I publish a piece of software and millions of people use it, I'd say it is successful. Who cares about what percentage of the entire market it is. In absolute terms, there is an assload of desktop users.
And now MS office went straight to 365... it'll be hard to find easily recognizable numbers that are higher... Hmm wait... they actually have gone down, they had 2010 just before. Isn't 365 2010?
This is "version masturbation." There seem to be lots of people who all they do is upgrade their computer all the time. Then they are somewhat unhappy when a new version comes out once every few years rather than once every few months or days. If you don't actually use your computer, then yes, upgrading every few months is fine. If all you use your computer for is browsing porn, then yes, it is fine. But if you really don't care what version you have, you just want it to keep working, then this is nonsense.
Did anyone notice that Win XP is still very popular, and not just among businesses. Still it is the most used system. Why? Because why change if it works. The problem with upgrading is that it will inevitably lead to something breaking. If the computer is a tool, you don't want it to update automatically all the time.
Why is TeX/LaTeX still heavily used (e.g. in Physics, CS and Math community, the community it was intended for). It is not because a new version comes out every year. In fact, a new major version has really not come out in 17 years. Nobody is complaining. There is a LaTeX3 project, but it has been around for more than 20 years. A new version is not likely to come out. OK, some new macros have appeared in the meantime, but you don't have to use them. In fact, I know someone who still uses plain TeX to write papers (and uses unix "mail"), and is very productive with them (I have gotten him to use LaTeX for some of our collaborations though, and he does sometimes start "pine" for mail to send/receive an attachment).
But TeX/LaTeX is used by the scientific community that uses it as a tool. If a new version comes out, it will be years before it would get adopted.
The upside of updating to new firefox is minimal. Actually one can't really see much of a difference over all the firefox versions really. There are very few websites that won't work even with very old firefox. The downside is work interruption.
Some countries do better, but the rest of the world is moving towards how the US does it (some are already worse). The US is not the worst in the world in primary education. I can see the trend in Czech when I go back. Under socialism, there was no incentive to water down curriculum. There was a protected group (kids of communist party cronies and friends) and there was a repressed class (those people that didn't agree with the system or happened to be born into such families). But if you happened to have parents that didn't piss off the commies (majority of the population), then the system was rather fair to you (within that class of people).
With capitalism, there is a movement away from "schooling is a right" to "grades are a service to be paid for." If you have rich parents, then the teacher doesn't want them complaining in all the wrong places. So quality of education (on all levels) is slowly declining even there. When colleges start being run primarily from private funds, then those providing the funds might stop unless their kids get the degree. It seems that majority of people do not see the folly with this approach.
I would partly blame grade inflation. Nowdays it is possible to pass all your classes without doing much work at all. Given that certain counties (according to the census) have nearly universal college attendance (95% in orange county in CA if I remember correctly) means that college curriculum must be brought to a level such that only the dumbest 5% of the population cannot obtain a degree (unless you make a convincing argument that being born in a richer county automatically adds braincells).
Point is, that the half that didn't get it wasn't supposed to get further. This isn't going to fly if current political climate all over the western world treats college education as a service to be provided for a fee.
The main problem with linux is how terribly quirky it is. this will not be solved by moving to a new graphical platform which will yet again not work on many machines simply because it is not getting tested enough.
If instead of focusing on blue sky nonsense, they focused on making things work. Making sure the software works out of the box FOR EVERYONE. Right now Ubuntu installs and works for many people but it does not handle corner cases. Lots of things remain difficult or broken. Try plugging in a new display (on my computer the xrandr stuff tries to be really smart and generally screws up). About 1 out of 5 times I boot up I get an interrupt storm that leaves the display unsable (bugs have been files by many people in all kinds of places, this seems to be a bug that is at least a year out there... no fix coming). About 1 out of 20 times I boot up I get no mouse. Running windows software is very quirky, and wine adds weird items to my menus. Most of the games I installed for my 4 year old either crash at various times or have really bad usability problems. Starting abiword takes about as long as starting openoffice nowdays. Gedit is also not instantaeous. Damnit, a text editor started up IMMEDIATELY on an XT 20 years ago. The screensaver keeps starting up at random times (sometimes even while I am typing). Not all movie players disable the screensaver. Pretty much every music player I tried chokes at some point on my mp3 collection. Either it crashes, stops playing, or does something odd such as the UI freezes and Chuck berry keeps playing (my wife now hates chuck berry because of this). The list just goes on and on.
I know windows has many problems, so does the mac. But if linux is to become maistream, first it needs to work 100%, not 95% or 90%. I don't actually see much difference in usability since about the year 2001 or so. Some things have more graphical effects now, take longer to load and have more bugs. But that's it.
Moving to Wayland (or even working on Unity) will not solve ANY these problems.
I have recently moved back to Fedora. Fedora is still as user unfriendly as it was before and has all these same problems, but at least it's OK for a geeky me. But I assume Fedora has been focusing on the server, and presumably they might have gotten ahead in that department. On the desktop though... things suck (they would suck for me a lot more on windows or mac though... so...)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, CS students are the smartest there are. There is nobody smarter and more passionate on the planet. Anybody that says otherwise is jealous.
You!
I teach mathematics to (among others) CS majors. I do not share your optimism.
Since when are MIT and Stanford in the Ivy league? Actually Cornell is the only mentioned Ivy league school.
And ... my my are we offended today. Somebody said something that could be interpreted as programmers not being the smartest people on the planet. Oh the humanity.
By the way, have you been to China? Have you tried to breathe in Beijing? Actually have you even tried looking across a street in Beijing? If they took our pollution, they can have it. Also, it didn't seem like they were so much wealthier on the whole.
Ahhh exactly the example of a perfectionist. The same person who's probably willing to pay via credit card at a supermarket. Typical paranoia. Either everything or nothing. When it's snowing outside I'll put on whatever clothes I have, even though they are not designed exactly for the weather. Yes I might be a little cold after a while, but oh well. You on the other hand will either not go outside at all or run around naked, because if you dont have everything designed for exactly the right conditions, you might as well not put on any clothing at all.
Look, there are two thing, encryption and authentication. Don't conflate the two. Encrypted connection is for protecting against different things than authenticated connection. Saying that you can't have one without the other is stupid. There's no reason to ever send anything cleartext. Yes, it might be better to authenticate, but it is not all that difficult to obtain a certificate for a domain if you can control the domain for a bit, which is exactly what you need to impersonate a site that google would be connecting to. The thing is as long as you have any certificate given for that domain, then you're Bob.
Authentication and Encryption are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
Also this is google we are talking about. They FOR YEARS could not cobble a two factor or one time password authentication together. So I won't take any lecturing about how concerned they are about security.
BTW, google has been using quite a bit of software I wrote, for free, even android apparently used a bit of my software as my website pops up in their license files. I don't feel at all bad for them giving something to me for free. Plus it's not free. They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts (you did notice those ads in gmail did you not?). They are making quite a bit of money. Enough to not pay taxes on lot of it and make lots of people angry.
If you only do these things once a year at most you forget how everything works. The documentation is terrible. So if you understand how to set everything up and what all the acronyms are. I am a mathematician and I understand the mathematics of public key crypto really well. I don't know the little pointless details. Yes onc eyou know what to do and what to get and where to install it etc... yes it's not that much busy work. But rereading all the documentation every year (yeah understanding what e.g. "CSR" is, is pointless unless you do it often).
It's not just startssl, it is the combination of badly written documentation starting with the pop3 server, through the doc on startssl. The problem with these docs is that they only explain anything once you know exactly what to do. At which point they are useless as well.
Plus the startssl website kept freezing. It's an incredibly badly designed UI. very intolerant of pressing the wrong thing for example.
You know, I'm not as smart as your regular user I guess. I only have a phd. Dropped out of school after that.
Yeah, apparently no security is better then some security according to google.
Got certificate from startssl, but it's a pain. Couple of hours of totally pointless work.
Another example where perfection is the enemy of good. This is my gripe with most computer security people. One of the reasons why encryption is not as widely deployed as it should be is this attitutude that "it must only be perfect".
I think a combination of tools might be the answer. I use maxima (wxmaxima frontent) when I need a cas. I use my own software Genius when I need to compute something numerically, and I often use it for in-class demonstrations (I often end up implementing whatever it is I need at some particular point). I can't remember when I last used octave, but that also sometimes happens when tehre's something genius can't do. I tried to make the interface to genius friendly, though of course there's always plenty of room for improvement. Generally it's a "command line" type interface, but I think it can do some pretty graphs. Too friendly tools generally end up being not very flexible. So it is worth it to spend a bit of time learning the less friendly ones.
By the way, I am getting ready to make a new genius release this weekend, I have just one more thing to do on my list before a release.
Dude, Hilter obviously used KDE; it was Stalin who used GNOME, though I think this was before GNOME-Shell came out.
Your trolling powers are good; a good one with the "30 page thesis on Hilbert" that 1) nobody would assign in a class that's not math history, and not even then because nobody wants to grade a bunch of horribly written 30-page papers 2) completely avoiding the topic of studytime that the original post was about as if all the classes you took had 30 page papers on Hilbert to write.
I give that a C for effort and conclude that you never actually went for a Masters in math. What you wrote sounds like a bad extrapolation of a non-math undergrad, possibly out of school for some time, about what masters study in math would look like. Just from your comments I assume you are a disgruntled student who spends (wastes?) a lot of time on slashdot and tries to blame everything on others. Or perhaps you just like trolling.
BTW, see my comment about "insightful" above.
"YOU WORK FOR ME" (even capitalized to add volume) really tells me what kind of a student you are. You are exactly the kind of student who spends about 15 minutes out of my office hours every week complaining about random nonsense that has nothing to do with the material (e.g. why was this worth 5 points and not 3 points) wasting time that other students could use to actually ask useful questions and learn in the class. Yes, everything is somebody elses fault, and the professor goes out of his way to make your life miserable. Because it is his (or her) only reason for living. He (or she) spent half their life with very little pay for lots of work studying and perparing for a job where he could finally annoy you in particular.
BTW, you have just blown quite a bit of time reading slashdot, and responding, though I dare say not insightfully. Perhaps time better spent studying.
PS: Apparently in 1960s students had no real lives.
He thinks algebra is bad but thinks all kids should learn something so fundamentally nonuseful as long division? (Yes I know it's useful once you get to polynomial division, but that's algebra ... It's often not even taught in calculus where it becomes useful to integrate rational functions.)
I teach at the university level, and from time to time I teach non-math majors, and I don't think the problem is that algebra is too hard. It is that the amount of effort students put into studying has gone significantly down. See:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/five-colleges-where-students-study/2012/05/22/gIQAK0gvhU_blog.html
On average, students now spend 15 hours studying per week compared to 24 in 1960. The problem is not algebra, it is facebook, iphone, internet in general, grade inflation, and role models nowdays being those that made a lot of money with no effort compared to astronauts in the 1960s.
I had my wife visit one of my calculus classes once and she sat in the back row. There was about half the class present (normal if you don't require attendance in a large lecture). Half of the remaining half was playing with their iphones and ipads or whatnot (no, not taking notes on them). And that was a calculus class where majority were engineers, students who are generally more interested in math. I know how pre-calculus can run and it can be depressing that no matter how hard you try to make the subject interesting (and approachable) you have at most one or two people in a class who pay attention and do what one would consider "well". Then due to grade inflation, most of the students pass anyway without getting much out of the class.
I had to take all sorts of classes as an undergrad (including political science) and I enjoyed every one of them. I had to work more in some than in others, though of course liberal arts classes were usually easiest to get an A without an effort. It's easy to get an A in art class for example, without having a shred of artistic talent. I found almost all these classes were doable with just going to class, doing homework and no extra studying. Comparing grades of different subjects is total nonsense. Would we improve the situation if we just gave everyone an A in math?
In summary, I don't think that anyone capable of being good in any field taught in a university can't pass an algebra class given a bit of effort. If it is not important to you to put in the effort, then your own field is not very important to you either. Why would it be an advantage to have an unmotivated person like that graduate?
Compete with what? Did anyone notice that about 1/4 or 1/3 of all computer users still use XP? So XP is still "competitive", whatever that means. Large part of the remaining users will run whatever is installed on the computer they buy regardless of how "modern" the UI is. Most people are using the computer to do something else than play around with their desktop. Just because a few geeks apparently can't work without wobbly windows and new window decorations every week, doesn't mean that the rest of humanity cares about those things too.
Everybody is always switching over to the mac for the past 10 years or so. One would think that over that time period, somebody would have actually switched over.
BTW, does anyone else feel like "modern" is such a stupid concept? Modern doesn't mean good. Modern doesn't mean better. It simply means different from before. I don't want a "modern" desktop. I want one that works well enough so that I can happily totally ignore it and get on with whatever I actually want to do.
That's the persistent bullshit about NSA. No, a mathematician in the top of his/her field is at a research-one university (secrecy is never a good way to attract good scientists). NSA has lots of people at all levels, from BA to PhD.
Actually I'd much more recommend one of the government labs than NSA itself if you want to go for a government job. At NSA you'll probably need to have too much clearance for comfort.
There are lots of industry jobs where they'll be delighted you have a bachelors in math.
Well, that's unique IPs based over a long time. I would assume most active desktop users probably run within one or two of the latest versions. So it is certainly not 35 mil. Not to mention that I probably count as about 5 or 10 of their users given all the places I've run yum at on my laptop.
Anyway, who cares. It is on the order of 10s of millions, and that was my point.
I could be a bit out of date (yeah I am getting older ...)
If I'm reading the statistics correctly (http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/) then about 14 million US households had computers in 1989. Given Ubuntu says they have 20 mil users and fedora seems to have about 4-5 mil based on their yum stats, I guess opensuse about the same, and debian and mint also takes some. Some of those are servers, but I assume there is a lot fewer servers than desktops in general, and I bet most ubuntu computers are desktops (I wouldn't be so sure). I guess it would be then conservative to say 14 mil linux desktops or the same number as us households in '89 (a bit more than 20 years ago and only counting US).
Anyway, my point was that if it is 10 to 20 million, that is a lot. Just because percentage-wise it is not everyone, it doesn't mean that it is insignificant.
If you give a whole bunch of money to a charity and save a hundred thousand people from starvation, you'd just save 1% of those that die every year. But would you consider it insignificant?
For whatever reason, when talking about software and technology people always talk about percentage of the market, rather than any absolute numbers. In other contexts people often take the absolute numbers.
If we discover an alien race in another galaxy that we have no way of contacting uses linux and has 100 times more people, will suddenly Mac and Windows become insignificant?
Well, there's probably more people using Linux on the desktop now than there were people using computers 20 years ago. 1-2 percent is a LOT of people (millions). If I publish a piece of software and millions of people use it, I'd say it is successful. Who cares about what percentage of the entire market it is. In absolute terms, there is an assload of desktop users.
I put a less than sign between 365 and 2010, but slashdot ate it
Sun did even better with solaris ...
And now MS office went straight to 365 ... it'll be hard to find easily recognizable numbers that are higher ... Hmm wait ... they actually have gone down, they had 2010 just before. Isn't 365 2010?
This is "version masturbation." There seem to be lots of people who all they do is upgrade their computer all the time. Then they are somewhat unhappy when a new version comes out once every few years rather than once every few months or days. If you don't actually use your computer, then yes, upgrading every few months is fine. If all you use your computer for is browsing porn, then yes, it is fine. But if you really don't care what version you have, you just want it to keep working, then this is nonsense.
Did anyone notice that Win XP is still very popular, and not just among businesses. Still it is the most used system. Why? Because why change if it works. The problem with upgrading is that it will inevitably lead to something breaking. If the computer is a tool, you don't want it to update automatically all the time.
Why is TeX/LaTeX still heavily used (e.g. in Physics, CS and Math community, the community it was intended for). It is not because a new version comes out every year. In fact, a new major version has really not come out in 17 years. Nobody is complaining. There is a LaTeX3 project, but it has been around for more than 20 years. A new version is not likely to come out. OK, some new macros have appeared in the meantime, but you don't have to use them. In fact, I know someone who still uses plain TeX to write papers (and uses unix "mail"), and is very productive with them (I have gotten him to use LaTeX for some of our collaborations though, and he does sometimes start "pine" for mail to send/receive an attachment).
But TeX/LaTeX is used by the scientific community that uses it as a tool. If a new version comes out, it will be years before it would get adopted.
The upside of updating to new firefox is minimal. Actually one can't really see much of a difference over all the firefox versions really. There are very few websites that won't work even with very old firefox. The downside is work interruption.
Some countries do better, but the rest of the world is moving towards how the US does it (some are already worse). The US is not the worst in the world in primary education. I can see the trend in Czech when I go back. Under socialism, there was no incentive to water down curriculum. There was a protected group (kids of communist party cronies and friends) and there was a repressed class (those people that didn't agree with the system or happened to be
born into such families). But if you happened to have parents that didn't piss off the commies (majority of the population), then the system was rather fair to you (within that class of people).
With capitalism, there is a movement away from "schooling is a right" to "grades are a service to be paid for." If you have rich parents, then the teacher doesn't want them complaining in all the wrong places. So quality of education (on all levels) is slowly declining even there. When colleges start being run primarily from private funds, then those providing the funds might stop unless their kids get the degree. It seems that majority of people do not see the folly with this approach.
I would partly blame grade inflation. Nowdays it is possible to pass all your classes without doing much work at all. Given that certain counties (according to the census) have nearly universal college attendance (95% in orange county in CA if I remember correctly) means that college curriculum must be brought to a level such that only the dumbest 5% of the population cannot obtain a degree (unless you make a convincing argument that being born in a richer county automatically adds braincells).
Point is, that the half that didn't get it wasn't supposed to get further. This isn't going to fly if current political climate all over the western world treats college education as a service to be provided for a fee.
So only US state department employees won't know the leaked US state department cables but everyone else will? Sounds like a winning plan.
The main problem with linux is how terribly quirky it is. this will not be solved by moving to a new graphical platform which will yet again not work on many machines simply because it is not getting tested enough.
If instead of focusing on blue sky nonsense, they focused on making things work. Making sure the software works out of the box FOR EVERYONE. Right now Ubuntu installs and works for many people but it does not handle corner cases. Lots of things remain difficult or broken. Try plugging in a new display (on my computer the xrandr stuff tries to be really smart and generally screws up). About 1 out of 5 times I boot up I get an interrupt storm that leaves the display unsable (bugs have been files by many people in all kinds of places, this seems to be a bug that is at least a year out there ... no fix coming). About 1 out of 20 times I boot up I get no mouse. Running windows software is very quirky, and wine adds weird items to my menus. Most of the games I installed for my 4 year old either crash at various times or have really bad usability problems. Starting abiword takes about as long as starting openoffice nowdays. Gedit is also not instantaeous. Damnit, a text editor started up IMMEDIATELY on an XT 20 years ago. The screensaver keeps starting up at random times (sometimes even while I am typing). Not all movie players disable the screensaver. Pretty much every music player I tried chokes at some point on my mp3 collection. Either it crashes, stops playing, or does something odd such as the UI freezes and Chuck berry keeps playing (my wife now hates chuck berry because of this). The list just goes on and on.
I know windows has many problems, so does the mac. But if linux is to become maistream, first it needs to work 100%, not 95% or 90%. I don't actually see much difference in usability since about the year 2001 or so. Some things have more graphical effects now, take longer to load and have more bugs. But that's it.
Moving to Wayland (or even working on Unity) will not solve ANY these problems.
I have recently moved back to Fedora. Fedora is still as user unfriendly as it was before and has all these same problems, but at least it's OK for a geeky me. But I assume Fedora has been focusing on the server, and presumably they might have gotten ahead in that department. On the desktop though ... things suck (they would suck for me a lot more on windows or mac though ... so ...)
Jiri