I think that it is pretty simple. It is not the number of security bugs that is the issue, it is their severity, and their remote exploitability. Despite the statistics from the article, my department (which has 500 computers, with a mix of windowsXP, OSX and Linux) has had not a single security breach of a Linux or OSX system, but lots of breaches of Windows systems. Part of it is that the OSX and Linux security problems are situations where a local user can escalate his priveledges, something which is serious, but does not necessarily cause security problems. The other part of it is that the worst WindowsXP security breaches come through ad- and spy-ware that come from routine web surfing. This is not considered a bug in WindowsXP (if we just classed ActiveX and IE as security problems, we would have to list that as a windowsXP bug every month/day/week, and the numbers would change pretty quickly).
Anyway, as we all know, don't trust statistics because 82.35% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I hate to question your reality, but I have installed a lot of Dell/Windows boxen for relatives for family, and it is never that easy. Now if you go with Unpack the computer, hook it up, pay $130 for Office and install it, subscribe to anti-virus, do updates for Windows and Office (including the mandatory 6 reboots), install ad-aware, install spy-bot search and destroy, install firefox and thunderbird, hide Outlook Express and Internet Explorer as best as possible, create limited use users for all users, explain why they sould never do anything as the administrative user, explain how to install software as administrative user but not to run it that way. If I do it all correctly I can usually go for six months before I have to re-install because of accumulated garbage. My personal XP system has run for 13 months on its current install, and it has several broken device drivers, and boots and runs slower than it used to. I go through the startup program list every month or two and delete things that are installed to auto-startup that I don't need, but it still builds up. I am not saying that Windows is awful, but the idea of installing a Windows box and having it run for 3 or 4 years with no maintenance is laughable.
Yeah, you may be generally right, but things are different this time. This is IBM's legal staff claiming it. Slashdot geeks may be willing to embarass themselves by repeating unfounded rumors, but this is the best legal talent that money can buy. They wouldn't bring it up unless they know that they can argue it in court, and that they can use it against TSCOG.
I've never understood this. If we all follow the exact same very detailed directions, what is the use of having a highly customized distribution? Given that most of us have a pentium 4 or AMD athlon system, if we all follow the same instructions, we should pretty much all end up with the same binaries. Why not just have pre-compiled binary distributions for the 4 or 5 common platforms, and save everybody's electric bill. Oh, because then it would be Ubuntu.
The ivtv drivers do require the binary firmware, but that really isn't an issue. Even if you compile them yourself, you need to get the firmware, so there is no difference. I suppose that I should do this myself, but there is no technical reason that a normal user shouldn't be able to do a simple synaptic/apt-get and have mythtv up and running with the most common cards. As I understand programming, if you can write a concise recipe to doing something, there is no reason that you cannot write a program to do them. Why isn't ther ea link that automatically downloads the driver, installs mythtv, puts the firmware in the right place, and leaves you with a running mythtv system. We are so close already.
Let me speak on both sides. I have been running Linux since 1994, and am not a noob by any stretch of the imagination. I just built a mythtv box, and things are bother better and worse that you might expect. First I chose to buy a PVR-150 card, and to use ubuntu as a base. Both decisions made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Most of the set-up was just adding the correct repositories and typing apt-get install. EXCEPT for getting the ivtv drivers running. I have no idea why there is no pre-compiled driver for ivtv for ubuntu. The instructions on the howto pages are detailed about which version of the ivtv driver to use, and how to compile it, so why not just have it available as a pre-compiled module. (I know why don't I pre-compile them and make them available) If the compiled ivtv module was available it would have taken less than 30 minutes to have everything up and running.
Overall I think that the thing that will hold Linux back from becoming really widely deployed is the lack of automation for simple tasks. I wanted to burn a DVD from a show that I recorded in mythtv. I can find several good recipes, including in the mythtv documentation, about how to do it. If it is so easy to write a detailed list of how to do something, then why not automate it.
As a chemistry professor at a medium sized university, this is an issue that I have thought about a lot. I have two comments on the discussion.
1. The problem with making lecture materials available after the fact is that it doesn't work, at least for the class overall. Well, I don't have good numbers for podcasts, but several years ago, we did a study of students in our large freshman general science class. These students all work from the same book, did the same homework, and took the same tests, but there were 7 different lecturers. We compared the overall grades of students with lecturers who made their powerpoint presentations available to students before lectures with students with lecturers who didn't make them available. The students who got the powerpoint slides did statistically worse on the tests. We assume that students used the availability of the powerpoint slides as an excuse to miss or at least ignore the lectures. Now I suppose that we could say the students are big boys and girls, and that they can make decisions on their own. Unfortunately I have been the recipient of way too may calls from mommy and daddy who are unhappy because they are spending thousands of dollars to have their child in my class, and he should be doing well, and way way too many students who are still in high school learning habits, and do not know how to learn on their own. They usually are way too far into the semester before they learn what isn't working for them, and then find it difficult to pull out.
2. Now, at the same time I am trying to use podcasts specifically in my teaching. The idea is to use podcasts to pre-lecture on material that I want to discuss. I completely agree that if all I am doing is speaking in a generic non-interactive way, I might as well be recorded. In fact the students will probably be more likely to listen if it is something more high tech than a book, though I am not sure that it will ultimatly have a different educational outcome than just reading, other than the cool factor. In the end my hope is that by getting students to think about the material before coming to class, we will have more time to work problems, and discuss concepts, making the class time interactive, which is something that is very hard to do in any other way.
I hate to bring in successful commercial companies, but apple has already solved this problem. Look at their dashboard program. They ship it with several very desirable, very easy to understand widgets built in to get people started working with it, and then a very simple interface for adding new widgets. Mozilla could do a similar thing by having a startup page that highlights some of the best plug-ins, and provides a simple interface for adding more. Those of us that know that program can easily figure out how to add more plug-ins, but we are talking about new users.
Yeah, but you do realize that you don't knit an afgan, you crochet it. You think that these guys know their technology, but they on't even know their point needles from their hooked ones.
My brother-in-law is a tuba player, who is experimenting with electronic music. After playing around with a loop pedal, he wanted to do his looping and effects on a computer, but he had no way to control it because both of his hands were busy playing the tuba. So we took an old shoe, and cut a hole in the sole. Then we mounted a small laptop cordless mouse in it. We had to turn the resolution way down, but he can point with his foot, and click with this big toe. It took him a bit of time to learn to use it, but my wife, who is an organist, learned to use it pretty quickly.
You're missing my major point. Microsoft has managed to convince users that security and stability problems are not Microsoft's fault. Thus they can get users to pay to get them fixed. It is the lowering of expectations that is at issue here. Windows users are happy to get 3-4 months, a feat that is dwarfed by LInux and Mac machines that stay up for years. The answer to your questions is that I am thinking of laptops, not desktops. My experience with laptops was that I dot a brand new Dell with XP, and it cannot go more than 10 or 20 cycles of sleep and resume before it starts to have problems. I called up Dell support, and they said that this was what to expect for XP on their hardware. Of course this is much better than my Dell laptop from 2001 where I called up to complain about sleep and resume problems, and the support person said that they do not suggest that people use sleep and resume on their laptops. Pretty bad.
Actually, it's worse than that. What Microsoft has managed to do is to convince people that crappy software is the only kind. I am amazed at people's low expectation of computers. I mentioned the other day that I hadn't rebooted my PowerBook for 3 or 4 months, and the person I was talking to didn't believe me. I mean he considered it completely impossible that a computer could function for that long without a major crash. Worse Microsoft has conviced people that the computer, and the internet are the problems. To most people, Microsoft needs a security program, not because they write crappy software, but because the internet is a messy place, and the internet isn't a problem that Microsoft created. A good analogy may come from the auto world. People were quite happy to take their car to dealer every year to get the spark plugs replaced, because that was what you did to take care of cars. It wasn't GM or Ford's fault, it was just that spark plugs wore out. Then Toyota and Honds cam along with cars that could go 100,000 miles on a set of plugs. People realized that they had been duped, and voted with their pocketbooks. What we need is to show everybody we can that OS X and Linux just work better, raise their expectations from where they just assume crap (what an early computer writer called the Laverne and Shirlyification of the computer world) that doesn't work. Of course how to do this is a little tricky.
As a current OS/2 (and Mac OS X and Windows XP and Fedora and Ubuntu) user I think that people overplay the OS/2 card. There are at least two important ways that OS X is different from OS/2 in this argument.
1. OS/2 required more resources to run (I remember building machines in the very early 90s and having to add $300 more in memory and disk to make OS/2 run, compared to MSWin3), and had pretty much no native apps. OS X requires about the same resources as XP, and has lots of native apps.
2. The is not the 90s. Having native apps is much less important than it used to be. On my powerbook I run MSOffice, an e-mail client, iTunes, and a web browser. And the e-mail client I could run on a web browser if I wanted to. I quite easily transition between my powerbook, my windows box at home and the Linux box on my desktop because 70% of what I run are web apps, delivered on my browser. As long as I have firefox I can use anything I want. Then there's 20% of office stuff that I can do on OpenOffice if I need. The remaining stuff is things like Quicken that really should be java/web app.
Having a popular platform was terribly important in the 90s, but today all you need is a port of Openoffice and Firefox, and you can use any operating system that you want.
More importantly, we can get the Blue Screen of Death in cool 3D, High Definition and with awesome sound. Kind of makes you want to crash the computer just to see it.
Actually, I just finished doing my taxes using Linux for free. How?? Intuit provides an online version of TurboTax that runs just fine with Firefox. That takes care of the Linux part. As far as free goes, I went through the interview portion, and entered all of my data. When I was done, I copied the data onto a paper form, and sent it in. With TurboTax you only pay if you print out a form, or file it electronically. The cool thing is that I did the same thing last year, and it even remembered all of my previous information, and filled it in this year too.
Having said that, I think that it is unconcionable for the government to require individuals to pay to file their taxes. Things are a bit better now that you can download fillable-in.pdf forms, but that's not quite the same. The worst part of it is that it costs the IRS more to process a paper form, and it is harder to scan them for auditable problems. From a financial standpoint, it would be cheaper for everyone (except for H&R Block and Intuit) if the IRS did do a simple online system.
Actually that is exactly why I don't use PowerPoint in my lectures. If the student doesn't see me abstracting what I say onto the board, than he/she will not learn. My colleagues think that I am a Luddite because I use chalk almost exclusively (ironic since I have been an avid slashdot reader since it was first put up in 1997).
The irony is that students beg for the pre-made notes, despite the fact that having them gets in the way of learning, the thing that they should be most concerned about.
Yeah, well us facutly have a tough time sorting out HTML and TXT.
I agree with your point of not repeating what is written in the book. Teaching has to be more than that. But teachers need to follow the book. They need to at least basically agree on terminology and order of material. The job of the student is to read the book, and learn what he or she can. The job of the professor it to a) Cheerlead to keep the students excited b) Provide additional perspective on the material, and c) go deeper when he/she can.
So I agree with you on that point. My point was that I don't need students to copy down every graph and equation that I put on the board if they have them in their book. And if students come to class having read the book, they can know what they do and don't have to write down.
As a university professor who teaches freshman chemistry, I wanted to throw in my $0.02. I have taught both large and small classes, and with both PowerPoint and chalk, and both freshman and upper division classes. When I use PowerPoint with a large class, I tend to have about 10-20% of people with their own laptops out. I cannot see what is on their computer, but I do know this: I never see them actively listening. Then tend to be hunched over their screens typing something. I don't know what they are typing, but if they aren't actively listening, it is unlikely that they are learning. I will take it a step further. When I have seen notes that they have typed, they are usually re-creations of the material in the book that they didn't need to type (I am the odd duck of a professor who feels that I should follow the book that I made my students spend so much money on). At my campus, a friend who teaches in the business school, where they require laptops, says that students want his work all in PowerPoint before the lecture so that they can make notes in the files. He points out that this is silly, since the whole idea of teaching is that it is interactive, and so he does not always know what he will say before he says it, but they just complaing that they spend $1,500 on a laptop, and so he needs to help them get their money's worth.
One of the courses that I teach is a large freshman GE class, which gives common tests and homework for all professors and sections. Several years ago, we looked at correlation of professors who give out PowerPoint slides and grades. It was a strong correlation that giving out slides leads to lower grades, not higher. Our interpretation of the data is that students feel that they don't need to pay attention to what you say in class, since they already have the most important part on their computers. Having taught many different ways, there is nothing better than the flexability of chalk and chalkboard, and a class that is prepared and ready to learn.
If you want to know why PowerPoint has proliferated in HigherEd, the answer is pretty simple. 1. Students give higher student evaluations to professors who have GeeWiz presentations that look like MTV, even if they learn less, and 2. Professors can get teaching relief if they are developing new electronic course materials (so they are using their love of teaching to get out of having to do it).
Not quite. OPEC has always worried that if oil was more than $30 per barrel, then it would cause severe ecomonic recession, conversion to non-petroleum energy sources or some other even that would undermine their position in the economy. What the last two years has proven is that that assumption is overly pessimistic. We have had two years of >$50/barrel oil, and we are still paying >$2 per gallon gasoline to feed our large cars, and the US economy is still growing. Given that it hasn't been the doomsday scenario that people had worried would happen, $50/barrel is the new equilibrium price. The great fear is that OPEC will ask the question "How high can the price of oil go before it starts to hurt?" The answer may be $60, but I don't know if we have really found it. Don't expect oil/gasoline prices to go down anytime soon.
They don't have to do anything. Simply threatening is enough to keep Microsoft paranoid, and that's what Google needs. I think that Google just has people trying to come up with crazy new ideas, and then leaking them to try to get Microsoft to do extra work trying to keep up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that it is pretty simple. It is not the number of security bugs that is the issue, it is their severity, and their remote exploitability. Despite the statistics from the article, my department (which has 500 computers, with a mix of windowsXP, OSX and Linux) has had not a single security breach of a Linux or OSX system, but lots of breaches of Windows systems. Part of it is that the OSX and Linux security problems are situations where a local user can escalate his priveledges, something which is serious, but does not necessarily cause security problems. The other part of it is that the worst WindowsXP security breaches come through ad- and spy-ware that come from routine web surfing. This is not considered a bug in WindowsXP (if we just classed ActiveX and IE as security problems, we would have to list that as a windowsXP bug every month/day/week, and the numbers would change pretty quickly).
Anyway, as we all know, don't trust statistics because 82.35% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I hate to question your reality, but I have installed a lot of Dell/Windows boxen for relatives for family, and it is never that easy. Now if you go with Unpack the computer, hook it up, pay $130 for Office and install it, subscribe to anti-virus, do updates for Windows and Office (including the mandatory 6 reboots), install ad-aware, install spy-bot search and destroy, install firefox and thunderbird, hide Outlook Express and Internet Explorer as best as possible, create limited use users for all users, explain why they sould never do anything as the administrative user, explain how to install software as administrative user but not to run it that way. If I do it all correctly I can usually go for six months before I have to re-install because of accumulated garbage. My personal XP system has run for 13 months on its current install, and it has several broken device drivers, and boots and runs slower than it used to. I go through the startup program list every month or two and delete things that are installed to auto-startup that I don't need, but it still builds up. I am not saying that Windows is awful, but the idea of installing a Windows box and having it run for 3 or 4 years with no maintenance is laughable.
Yeah, you may be generally right, but things are different this time. This is IBM's legal staff claiming it. Slashdot geeks may be willing to embarass themselves by repeating unfounded rumors, but this is the best legal talent that money can buy. They wouldn't bring it up unless they know that they can argue it in court, and that they can use it against TSCOG.
I've never understood this. If we all follow the exact same very detailed directions, what is the use of having a highly customized distribution? Given that most of us have a pentium 4 or AMD athlon system, if we all follow the same instructions, we should pretty much all end up with the same binaries. Why not just have pre-compiled binary distributions for the 4 or 5 common platforms, and save everybody's electric bill. Oh, because then it would be Ubuntu.
The ivtv drivers do require the binary firmware, but that really isn't an issue. Even if you compile them yourself, you need to get the firmware, so there is no difference. I suppose that I should do this myself, but there is no technical reason that a normal user shouldn't be able to do a simple synaptic/apt-get and have mythtv up and running with the most common cards. As I understand programming, if you can write a concise recipe to doing something, there is no reason that you cannot write a program to do them. Why isn't ther ea link that automatically downloads the driver, installs mythtv, puts the firmware in the right place, and leaves you with a running mythtv system. We are so close already.
Let me speak on both sides. I have been running Linux since 1994, and am not a noob by any stretch of the imagination. I just built a mythtv box, and things are bother better and worse that you might expect. First I chose to buy a PVR-150 card, and to use ubuntu as a base. Both decisions made the process much easier than it would have been otherwise. Most of the set-up was just adding the correct repositories and typing apt-get install. EXCEPT for getting the ivtv drivers running. I have no idea why there is no pre-compiled driver for ivtv for ubuntu. The instructions on the howto pages are detailed about which version of the ivtv driver to use, and how to compile it, so why not just have it available as a pre-compiled module. (I know why don't I pre-compile them and make them available) If the compiled ivtv module was available it would have taken less than 30 minutes to have everything up and running.
Overall I think that the thing that will hold Linux back from becoming really widely deployed is the lack of automation for simple tasks. I wanted to burn a DVD from a show that I recorded in mythtv. I can find several good recipes, including in the mythtv documentation, about how to do it. If it is so easy to write a detailed list of how to do something, then why not automate it.
As a chemistry professor at a medium sized university, this is an issue that I have thought about a lot. I have two comments on the discussion.
1. The problem with making lecture materials available after the fact is that it doesn't work, at least for the class overall. Well, I don't have good numbers for podcasts, but several years ago, we did a study of students in our large freshman general science class. These students all work from the same book, did the same homework, and took the same tests, but there were 7 different lecturers. We compared the overall grades of students with lecturers who made their powerpoint presentations available to students before lectures with students with lecturers who didn't make them available. The students who got the powerpoint slides did statistically worse on the tests. We assume that students used the availability of the powerpoint slides as an excuse to miss or at least ignore the lectures. Now I suppose that we could say the students are big boys and girls, and that they can make decisions on their own. Unfortunately I have been the recipient of way too may calls from mommy and daddy who are unhappy because they are spending thousands of dollars to have their child in my class, and he should be doing well, and way way too many students who are still in high school learning habits, and do not know how to learn on their own. They usually are way too far into the semester before they learn what isn't working for them, and then find it difficult to pull out.
2. Now, at the same time I am trying to use podcasts specifically in my teaching. The idea is to use podcasts to pre-lecture on material that I want to discuss. I completely agree that if all I am doing is speaking in a generic non-interactive way, I might as well be recorded. In fact the students will probably be more likely to listen if it is something more high tech than a book, though I am not sure that it will ultimatly have a different educational outcome than just reading, other than the cool factor. In the end my hope is that by getting students to think about the material before coming to class, we will have more time to work problems, and discuss concepts, making the class time interactive, which is something that is very hard to do in any other way.
I hate to bring in successful commercial companies, but apple has already solved this problem. Look at their dashboard program. They ship it with several very desirable, very easy to understand widgets built in to get people started working with it, and then a very simple interface for adding new widgets. Mozilla could do a similar thing by having a startup page that highlights some of the best plug-ins, and provides a simple interface for adding more. Those of us that know that program can easily figure out how to add more plug-ins, but we are talking about new users.
I seem to remember about a zillion companies in the 90s that did this. A good example is PeoplePC. Does this patent things have no sanity.
And a darning needle would definitely get you in trouble with the TSA folks. Those things are like little swords.
Darn, these slashdot geeks. Well, I don't care what wikipedia says, I still think of them as crocheted.
Yeah, but you do realize that you don't knit an afgan, you crochet it. You think that these guys know their technology, but they on't even know their point needles from their hooked ones.
My brother-in-law is a tuba player, who is experimenting with electronic music. After playing around with a loop pedal, he wanted to do his looping and effects on a computer, but he had no way to control it because both of his hands were busy playing the tuba. So we took an old shoe, and cut a hole in the sole. Then we mounted a small laptop cordless mouse in it. We had to turn the resolution way down, but he can point with his foot, and click with this big toe. It took him a bit of time to learn to use it, but my wife, who is an organist, learned to use it pretty quickly.
Just a strange suggestion
You're missing my major point. Microsoft has managed to convince users that security and stability problems are not Microsoft's fault. Thus they can get users to pay to get them fixed. It is the lowering of expectations that is at issue here. Windows users are happy to get 3-4 months, a feat that is dwarfed by LInux and Mac machines that stay up for years. The answer to your questions is that I am thinking of laptops, not desktops. My experience with laptops was that I dot a brand new Dell with XP, and it cannot go more than 10 or 20 cycles of sleep and resume before it starts to have problems. I called up Dell support, and they said that this was what to expect for XP on their hardware. Of course this is much better than my Dell laptop from 2001 where I called up to complain about sleep and resume problems, and the support person said that they do not suggest that people use sleep and resume on their laptops. Pretty bad.
Actually, it's worse than that. What Microsoft has managed to do is to convince people that crappy software is the only kind. I am amazed at people's low expectation of computers. I mentioned the other day that I hadn't rebooted my PowerBook for 3 or 4 months, and the person I was talking to didn't believe me. I mean he considered it completely impossible that a computer could function for that long without a major crash. Worse Microsoft has conviced people that the computer, and the internet are the problems. To most people, Microsoft needs a security program, not because they write crappy software, but because the internet is a messy place, and the internet isn't a problem that Microsoft created. A good analogy may come from the auto world. People were quite happy to take their car to dealer every year to get the spark plugs replaced, because that was what you did to take care of cars. It wasn't GM or Ford's fault, it was just that spark plugs wore out. Then Toyota and Honds cam along with cars that could go 100,000 miles on a set of plugs. People realized that they had been duped, and voted with their pocketbooks. What we need is to show everybody we can that OS X and Linux just work better, raise their expectations from where they just assume crap (what an early computer writer called the Laverne and Shirlyification of the computer world) that doesn't work. Of course how to do this is a little tricky.
Obs/HURD ??
As a current OS/2 (and Mac OS X and Windows XP and Fedora and Ubuntu) user I think that people overplay the OS/2 card. There are at least two important ways that OS X is different from OS/2 in this argument.
1. OS/2 required more resources to run (I remember building machines in the very early 90s and having to add $300 more in memory and disk to make OS/2 run, compared to MSWin3), and had pretty much no native apps. OS X requires about the same resources as XP, and has lots of native apps.
2. The is not the 90s. Having native apps is much less important than it used to be. On my powerbook I run MSOffice, an e-mail client, iTunes, and a web browser. And the e-mail client I could run on a web browser if I wanted to. I quite easily transition between my powerbook, my windows box at home and the Linux box on my desktop because 70% of what I run are web apps, delivered on my browser. As long as I have firefox I can use anything I want. Then there's 20% of office stuff that I can do on OpenOffice if I need. The remaining stuff is things like Quicken that really should be java/web app.
Having a popular platform was terribly important in the 90s, but today all you need is a port of Openoffice and Firefox, and you can use any operating system that you want.
More importantly, we can get the Blue Screen of Death in cool 3D, High Definition and with awesome sound. Kind of makes you want to crash the computer just to see it.
Actually, I just finished doing my taxes using Linux for free. How?? Intuit provides an online version of TurboTax that runs just fine with Firefox. That takes care of the Linux part. As far as free goes, I went through the interview portion, and entered all of my data. When I was done, I copied the data onto a paper form, and sent it in. With TurboTax you only pay if you print out a form, or file it electronically. The cool thing is that I did the same thing last year, and it even remembered all of my previous information, and filled it in this year too.
.pdf forms, but that's not quite the same. The worst part of it is that it costs the IRS more to process a paper form, and it is harder to scan them for auditable problems. From a financial standpoint, it would be cheaper for everyone (except for H&R Block and Intuit) if the IRS did do a simple online system.
Having said that, I think that it is unconcionable for the government to require individuals to pay to file their taxes. Things are a bit better now that you can download fillable-in
Actually that is exactly why I don't use PowerPoint in my lectures. If the student doesn't see me abstracting what I say onto the board, than he/she will not learn. My colleagues think that I am a Luddite because I use chalk almost exclusively (ironic since I have been an avid slashdot reader since it was first put up in 1997).
The irony is that students beg for the pre-made notes, despite the fact that having them gets in the way of learning, the thing that they should be most concerned about.
Wait !!! Jesus doesn't love covalent bonds.
Yeah, well us facutly have a tough time sorting out HTML and TXT.
I agree with your point of not repeating what is written in the book. Teaching has to be more than that. But teachers need to follow the book. They need to at least basically agree on terminology and order of material. The job of the student is to read the book, and learn what he or she can. The job of the professor it to
a) Cheerlead to keep the students excited
b) Provide additional perspective on the material, and
c) go deeper when he/she can.
So I agree with you on that point. My point was that I don't need students to copy down every graph and equation that I put on the board if they have them in their book. And if students come to class having read the book, they can know what they do and don't have to write down.
As a university professor who teaches freshman chemistry, I wanted to throw in my $0.02. I have taught both large and small classes, and with both PowerPoint and chalk, and both freshman and upper division classes. When I use PowerPoint with a large class, I tend to have about 10-20% of people with their own laptops out. I cannot see what is on their computer, but I do know this: I never see them actively listening. Then tend to be hunched over their screens typing something. I don't know what they are typing, but if they aren't actively listening, it is unlikely that they are learning. I will take it a step further. When I have seen notes that they have typed, they are usually re-creations of the material in the book that they didn't need to type (I am the odd duck of a professor who feels that I should follow the book that I made my students spend so much money on). At my campus, a friend who teaches in the business school, where they require laptops, says that students want his work all in PowerPoint before the lecture so that they can make notes in the files. He points out that this is silly, since the whole idea of teaching is that it is interactive, and so he does not always know what he will say before he says it, but they just complaing that they spend $1,500 on a laptop, and so he needs to help them get their money's worth. One of the courses that I teach is a large freshman GE class, which gives common tests and homework for all professors and sections. Several years ago, we looked at correlation of professors who give out PowerPoint slides and grades. It was a strong correlation that giving out slides leads to lower grades, not higher. Our interpretation of the data is that students feel that they don't need to pay attention to what you say in class, since they already have the most important part on their computers. Having taught many different ways, there is nothing better than the flexability of chalk and chalkboard, and a class that is prepared and ready to learn. If you want to know why PowerPoint has proliferated in HigherEd, the answer is pretty simple. 1. Students give higher student evaluations to professors who have GeeWiz presentations that look like MTV, even if they learn less, and 2. Professors can get teaching relief if they are developing new electronic course materials (so they are using their love of teaching to get out of having to do it).
Not quite. OPEC has always worried that if oil was more than $30 per barrel, then it would cause severe ecomonic recession, conversion to non-petroleum energy sources or some other even that would undermine their position in the economy. What the last two years has proven is that that assumption is overly pessimistic. We have had two years of >$50/barrel oil, and we are still paying >$2 per gallon gasoline to feed our large cars, and the US economy is still growing. Given that it hasn't been the doomsday scenario that people had worried would happen, $50/barrel is the new equilibrium price. The great fear is that OPEC will ask the question "How high can the price of oil go before it starts to hurt?" The answer may be $60, but I don't know if we have really found it. Don't expect oil/gasoline prices to go down anytime soon.
They don't have to do anything. Simply threatening is enough to keep Microsoft paranoid, and that's what Google needs. I think that Google just has people trying to come up with crazy new ideas, and then leaking them to try to get Microsoft to do extra work trying to keep up.