It crops up all over the place. It is just about plausible, is the thing. My instinct is to say this is another bunch of crackpottery - but it could be the real deal, because electromagnetism is (compared to gravity) very powerful.
No, you got it wrong. The amount of junk work generated goes as the square of the number of programmers, while the amount of work done is linear. So tripling the number of programmers will make a project take three times as long - they may do three times as much work, but there will be nine times as much to do.
You only consider the portion of her decision quoted in the article.
Well, duh.
You did not consider the room size, seating room, desktop space, room acoustics, HVAC/power capacity, or more esoteric concerns such as the classroom decorum and tone the professor wants to set. Perhaps she purposefully wants a stodgy "old school" feel to her classes.
Not likely. If she was going for a complete setup she would have done so at the start of term, and I'm sure any other changes would have been mentioned in the article. For my money she's just taken against laptops - perhaps doesn't put the effort in to use hers, so thinks she can't use them and therefore they must be bad. I know that's not a very nice view to take, but it's an attitude I've seen time and time again.
Unless you feel it damages the classroom environment in some manner. My work laptop has a fan that could compete dB-wise with a business jet. Put a few of them in a subdued classroom setting, add keyboard clicking, and touchpad tapping and it could be quite disturbing to others.
Agreed. But that's not what she's taking issue with.
Then there is the inherent distraction of having dozens of TFT screens blocking sightlines
They shouldn't be blocking people's line of sight - if they are that's a room design problem, although, yes, one that should be worked around by not having laptops. But again, that's not what she's taking issue with.
and drawing student's eyes from the professor.
There are always plenty of things to look at. If you're willing to be distracted you will be, and if you're not you won't, regardless of whether there's laptops there or not.
Meanwhile, pencils scratching paper is comparitively minor distraction.
Only because it's one you're used to.
Not really. A laissez faire position is more of an acquiessence than an argument.
It's a recognition that students are different, and we should try and let them use what works for them. Regimentation is not the best solution.
Isn't your penmanship essentially a personal problem rather than a technologic problem?
I've found a technological solution - typing. That's what technology should be doing - empowering people to solve their problems.
Hell, if all of your gradeschool classmates have the same bad handwriting, I could accuse you of "blaming the technology for a social problem."
I think this is a case where the technology actually does make things easier though. Good handwriting requires a lot of effort, practice and teaching, and even then some people never get it - I know I haven't. Typing people take to with no teaching at all, and though practice makes you better, it's not necessary to be legible.
Lecture note organizational skill is a personal problem too.
There's a physical limit on how well organised you can be when you have to look up everything manually. Even if you made a card index with complete cross-references and so on, it would still take longer to look them up by hand than you can search a computerised version. The technology actually does solve the problem - and it's stupid to ban it.
On what basis do you consider this limitation arbitrary? Arbitrary is, of course, a very relative condition that describes most rules given the flexibility of one's perspective on it.
I consider it arbitrary because the solution she's proposing (banning laptops) is unrelated to the problem (students blindly transcribing without comprehension).
Doesn't an educator have the right, as well as the responsibility, to create what they feel is the most productive learning environment for students? Or must every classroom decision an educator makes be subject to the fractured will of the student body?
Decisions about the classroom are the lecturer's. But at this level you have to let the students bring what they want to it. Trying to control the students to this extent will just create conflict and get in the way of learning.
Yes, lecture transcribing in any medium can impact the amount of analysis and critical thought students can muster in the classroom, but that's not actually an argument "for" anything is it?
It's an argument for letting the students choose whichever medium they feel best suits them.
And what technology problem do student laptops solve in a first-year law classroom?
My notes are far more legible when I type them than when I write them. And having them in electronic form means I can search them quickly for the case I can't remember, rather than having to look through and try and remember which week I learnt it in. I'm sure there are more advantages.
Besides the obvious noise problem that many keyboards present,
That's possibly a genuine problem. But it's not the issue being raised here.
The difference, of course, is that the crossword-puzzle person wasn't holding up the piece of paper and distracting half the class... anyone sitting behind the laptop user will find it challenging to avoid looking at whatever-the-hell is being played on the laptop.
I saw people leaning over to help with the crossword. It's the same question of willpower with either - both will distract you if you let them, neither has to do so.
I've seen too many people automatically assume that just because something is "digital", it's somehow better than an older way of doing things. That's simply not true.
Technology, or at least successful technology, is empowering. It allows you to do what you were doing better, or it allows you to do what you couldn't do before. It's up to you to make that count.
immature and unable to control their own impulse to be counterproductive. College students with fully loaded laptops and WiFi are a disaster in the classroom. They need to be strictly controlled so that they don't waste their time doing stupid things with the technology.
College students will be college students. Trying to restrict their technology to stop them wasting their time is an exercise in futility. Those who will do stupid things will do them with or without the technology. All restricting the technology does is to hinder those who would use it well.
Precisely. But he didn't even need to rush it through - just fake the burning of the Reichstag and they voted him all the power he wanted. At least it's taking a little more effort to gain dictatorial power in Britain.
Up until a few years ago there was one UK parliament and that was it. Then there was this guilt-trip thing giving the various non-England parts their own parliaments. I suspect pretty soon we'll either close those back down or give England its own parliament.
with just pen and paper there is not a lot you can do to amuse yourself unless you have a really active imagination or like doing the box game or playing Tic-Tac-Toe for hours on end.
Write poems. Write notes to other people. Play word games. Throw paper aeroplanes at people. You've got a weak imagination if you need a computer to entertain yourself.
At university level we should be beyond trying to force people to work. There will be idiots who screw around, in ways that will be distracting to those around them, no matter what the equipment available.
The folks websurfing on the laptops are the ones who were doing crosswords on the paper. Both laptop and pen/paper are tools - a student who is willing to can take notes perfectly well with either, and neither will make a bad student start taking proper notes.
i) Too few of them are good enough typists to focus on whats being said properly.
Then they should be sensible and write if they can do that quicker. But if you take the option of the laptop away, it's more likely they just wouldn't bother to take notes at all.
ii) It's almost impossible for them to copy down diagrams or any complex equations, or make decent marginal notes.
See the first point. Or use paper to supplement it.
iii) It's much noisier than pen and paper
OK, this is a valid point. If it's disturbing the rest of the class it's unfair and should be banned. But that doesn't seem to be what she's taking issue with.
and paper is easier to highlight and annotate.
First point again
iv) They remember the content better if they make pencil notes, and type them up later.
They also remember better if they read through their typewritten notes. If they simply take pencil notes and don't look at them, they don't remember any better. Making students write their notes twice just to ensure they read them once is silly; if they won't read through their notes, more fool them.
What, because an arbitrary ban on the standard way of doing things automatically makes you a free thinker?
You can waste your time with a laptop just transcribing what the prof is saying. You can do that even more easily with a pen and paper. A luddite is precisely what she is, blaming the technology for a social problem.
They were married in one state, under that state's laws. That's fine. Would you say they should be able to marry in any state they pick over the internet?
Somehow I feel better imagining that my stuff is magnetically etched into a platter...
I certainly don't. It's too easy to kill magnetic stuff - magnets (duh) but also airport security, anything electrical,.... This is like the move from cassettes to CDs.
Try using UDF - it has a special mode for dealing with media where you shouldn't rewrite the same sector lots of times (it was pretty much designed for CD-RWs, after all)
The Singularity research OS is more or less public - papers are published, and so on. All done in.net, so I would expect it to be very cool, very secure and dog-slow. But maybe that won't matter if and when they decide it's ready for a public release.
I realize that the BSD license does place restrictions on the source. I do not see the authorship claim. Are you speaking about the fact of holding copyright on something or the old BSD license?
The way you're required to keep the license statement including list of copyright owners in the program source. Makes it a bit impossible to claim you wrote it.
In this scenario, the BSD ftp is still available. The Microsoft-tainted version is not. Behold! The power of fork.:)
Well, sure, but how do I know whether I'm safe sending confidential documents with the included version? This is probably irrelevant here as I can just use standard BSD ftp, but what if MS had had to modify it to get it to work on windows and the original version didn't? (And for all I know, they did)
Not utter but partial as noted in my correction.
Still possibly not quite right. You can sell the source - you only have to give it at distribution cost if you've sold binaries without source. The point of that is to make sure people don't end up with binaries without source.
Slashdot Mirror
It crops up all over the place. It is just about plausible, is the thing. My instinct is to say this is another bunch of crackpottery - but it could be the real deal, because electromagnetism is (compared to gravity) very powerful.
No, you got it wrong. The amount of junk work generated goes as the square of the number of programmers, while the amount of work done is linear. So tripling the number of programmers will make a project take three times as long - they may do three times as much work, but there will be nine times as much to do.
Well, duh.
You did not consider the room size, seating room, desktop space, room acoustics, HVAC/power capacity, or more esoteric concerns such as the classroom decorum and tone the professor wants to set. Perhaps she purposefully wants a stodgy "old school" feel to her classes.
Not likely. If she was going for a complete setup she would have done so at the start of term, and I'm sure any other changes would have been mentioned in the article. For my money she's just taken against laptops - perhaps doesn't put the effort in to use hers, so thinks she can't use them and therefore they must be bad. I know that's not a very nice view to take, but it's an attitude I've seen time and time again.
Unless you feel it damages the classroom environment in some manner. My work laptop has a fan that could compete dB-wise with a business jet. Put a few of them in a subdued classroom setting, add keyboard clicking, and touchpad tapping and it could be quite disturbing to others.
Agreed. But that's not what she's taking issue with.
Then there is the inherent distraction of having dozens of TFT screens blocking sightlines
They shouldn't be blocking people's line of sight - if they are that's a room design problem, although, yes, one that should be worked around by not having laptops. But again, that's not what she's taking issue with.
and drawing student's eyes from the professor.
There are always plenty of things to look at. If you're willing to be distracted you will be, and if you're not you won't, regardless of whether there's laptops there or not.
Meanwhile, pencils scratching paper is comparitively minor distraction.
Only because it's one you're used to.
Not really. A laissez faire position is more of an acquiessence than an argument.
It's a recognition that students are different, and we should try and let them use what works for them. Regimentation is not the best solution.
Isn't your penmanship essentially a personal problem rather than a technologic problem?
I've found a technological solution - typing. That's what technology should be doing - empowering people to solve their problems.
Hell, if all of your gradeschool classmates have the same bad handwriting, I could accuse you of "blaming the technology for a social problem."
I think this is a case where the technology actually does make things easier though. Good handwriting requires a lot of effort, practice and teaching, and even then some people never get it - I know I haven't. Typing people take to with no teaching at all, and though practice makes you better, it's not necessary to be legible.
Lecture note organizational skill is a personal problem too.
There's a physical limit on how well organised you can be when you have to look up everything manually. Even if you made a card index with complete cross-references and so on, it would still take longer to look them up by hand than you can search a computerised version. The technology actually does solve the problem - and it's stupid to ban it.
Try setup.exe /quiet. And so on. MSI is actually pretty decent, if you bother to figure it out you can use your commandlines quite effectively.
I consider it arbitrary because the solution she's proposing (banning laptops) is unrelated to the problem (students blindly transcribing without comprehension).
Doesn't an educator have the right, as well as the responsibility, to create what they feel is the most productive learning environment for students? Or must every classroom decision an educator makes be subject to the fractured will of the student body?
Decisions about the classroom are the lecturer's. But at this level you have to let the students bring what they want to it. Trying to control the students to this extent will just create conflict and get in the way of learning.
Yes, lecture transcribing in any medium can impact the amount of analysis and critical thought students can muster in the classroom, but that's not actually an argument "for" anything is it?
It's an argument for letting the students choose whichever medium they feel best suits them.
And what technology problem do student laptops solve in a first-year law classroom?
My notes are far more legible when I type them than when I write them. And having them in electronic form means I can search them quickly for the case I can't remember, rather than having to look through and try and remember which week I learnt it in. I'm sure there are more advantages.
That's possibly a genuine problem. But it's not the issue being raised here. The difference, of course, is that the crossword-puzzle person wasn't holding up the piece of paper and distracting half the class ... anyone sitting behind the laptop user will find it challenging to avoid looking at whatever-the-hell is being played on the laptop.
I saw people leaning over to help with the crossword. It's the same question of willpower with either - both will distract you if you let them, neither has to do so.
Technology, or at least successful technology, is empowering. It allows you to do what you were doing better, or it allows you to do what you couldn't do before. It's up to you to make that count.
immature and unable to control their own impulse to be counterproductive. College students with fully loaded laptops and WiFi are a disaster in the classroom. They need to be strictly controlled so that they don't waste their time doing stupid things with the technology.
College students will be college students. Trying to restrict their technology to stop them wasting their time is an exercise in futility. Those who will do stupid things will do them with or without the technology. All restricting the technology does is to hinder those who would use it well.
Precisely. But he didn't even need to rush it through - just fake the burning of the Reichstag and they voted him all the power he wanted. At least it's taking a little more effort to gain dictatorial power in Britain.
Up until a few years ago there was one UK parliament and that was it. Then there was this guilt-trip thing giving the various non-England parts their own parliaments. I suspect pretty soon we'll either close those back down or give England its own parliament.
I'm pretty sure GPL says all the copyright notices must be preserved - which includes those in the about box or similar.
"I am Gandhi of the Indians. Our words are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS
We have decided to rid the world of your worthless civilization. Prepare for WAR"
Write poems. Write notes to other people. Play word games. Throw paper aeroplanes at people. You've got a weak imagination if you need a computer to entertain yourself.
At university level we should be beyond trying to force people to work. There will be idiots who screw around, in ways that will be distracting to those around them, no matter what the equipment available.
The folks websurfing on the laptops are the ones who were doing crosswords on the paper. Both laptop and pen/paper are tools - a student who is willing to can take notes perfectly well with either, and neither will make a bad student start taking proper notes.
Then they should be sensible and write if they can do that quicker. But if you take the option of the laptop away, it's more likely they just wouldn't bother to take notes at all.
ii) It's almost impossible for them to copy down diagrams or any complex equations, or make decent marginal notes.
See the first point. Or use paper to supplement it.
iii) It's much noisier than pen and paper
OK, this is a valid point. If it's disturbing the rest of the class it's unfair and should be banned. But that doesn't seem to be what she's taking issue with.
and paper is easier to highlight and annotate.
First point again
iv) They remember the content better if they make pencil notes, and type them up later.
They also remember better if they read through their typewritten notes. If they simply take pencil notes and don't look at them, they don't remember any better. Making students write their notes twice just to ensure they read them once is silly; if they won't read through their notes, more fool them.
You can waste your time with a laptop just transcribing what the prof is saying. You can do that even more easily with a pen and paper. A luddite is precisely what she is, blaming the technology for a social problem.
I would do just that, but I never saw them offering refunds.
They were married in one state, under that state's laws. That's fine. Would you say they should be able to marry in any state they pick over the internet?
Rip, and then you don't need to worry about the drive when you're actually watching/playing. Or stream over the network from the drive upstairs.
Because it's good hardware and, believe it or not, post-2K windows is actually a decent enough OS. Especially if you install SFU :)
You forget that Apple has done this before.
What's this about a web browser?
I certainly don't. It's too easy to kill magnetic stuff - magnets (duh) but also airport security, anything electrical,.... This is like the move from cassettes to CDs.
Try using UDF - it has a special mode for dealing with media where you shouldn't rewrite the same sector lots of times (it was pretty much designed for CD-RWs, after all)
The Singularity research OS is more or less public - papers are published, and so on. All done in .net, so I would expect it to be very cool, very secure and dog-slow. But maybe that won't matter if and when they decide it's ready for a public release.
The way you're required to keep the license statement including list of copyright owners in the program source. Makes it a bit impossible to claim you wrote it.
In this scenario, the BSD ftp is still available. The Microsoft-tainted version is not. Behold! The power of fork. :)
Well, sure, but how do I know whether I'm safe sending confidential documents with the included version? This is probably irrelevant here as I can just use standard BSD ftp, but what if MS had had to modify it to get it to work on windows and the original version didn't? (And for all I know, they did)
Not utter but partial as noted in my correction.
Still possibly not quite right. You can sell the source - you only have to give it at distribution cost if you've sold binaries without source. The point of that is to make sure people don't end up with binaries without source.