I definitely agree with this - I'm a grad student in the physical sciences, and perhaps 9 times out of 10, when I need a brief introduction to a new topic, Wikipedia is the place to go.
No, the articles don't go into great depth... but they do get the essentials, which are often hard to parse out from the detailed info in textbooks, so the Wikipedia articles are a great place to start and get a feel for the topic!
Unfortunately, people from "upper-middle class" families don't get much in the way of financial aid. When they say that financial aid is guaranteed for admitted students, they really mean for admitted students that they think actually need the money which tends to exclude those we'd think of as upper-middle class. I come from such a family, and I got absolutely nothing, not even when I went to the financial aid offices and explained the tricky financial situation I'm in with my family.
I was lucky enough that others in my family saved money for me in a college fund when I was little, so I was able to make my college decision independent of financial considerations (I didn't end up attending MIT for totally different reasons, but I ended up somewhere in about the same price range), but it certainly wasn't easy, financially. (Now, I've been finding that now grad schools will actually pay me to attend, so it's all worked out in the end!)
that's what we do too, and it works brilliantly. I did a clean install for someone yesterday and, using our custom install disks, got the install up and running and only had to download 7 short updates from the M$ website. plus, we've added firefox, our site-licensed antivirus, and acrobat reader to the install CD, so the entire thing is pretty painless.
(that is, until I installed the wireless mouse drivers and the computer started giving BSODs... lovely.)
True! Last time I tried this, though, some of the kiosks on campus were pretty locked down and wouldn't run programs off my flash drive. I haven't tried it recently. But goodness knows my flash drive is connected to my keychain anyway, so it's not like I'd have to carry anything extra around to do this:-)
The one major advantage that I find to online systems even without document sharing is that it makes it incredibly easy to access my documents from multiple computers. As a college student, I often find myself working on a document (whether a paper, a to-do list, etc.) that I need to access from my computer, from my lab computers, and from kiosks in the library.
While I can put my file on my flash drive, some web kiosks on campus don't have Office or OpenOffice installed and thus won't open my documents. As such, I find it much easier to put simple documents that I need to open from many locations into my google docs account, and then I don't have to worry about the portability thing. For people like me, online systems really can be useful even if they don't include document-sharing capabilities.
I actually find Wikipedia very difficult to read in general, because the formatting squishes things together and my eyes have a difficult time following it on the computer screen.
That concern aside, I don't use wikipedia for mathematical proofs, but usually find it very useful for simple derivations of scientific facts/equations/whatever. I'm not sure all the derivations need to be IN the articles, because it can make articles difficult to follow, but it is very useful when the articles place a prominent link to them.
true - and furthermore, won't the new rankings affect all search engines the same way? even if google's ranking falls overall when taken in the context of the ENTIRE web, I don't see how it will have much affect when you look just at search sites.
but who knows, maybe it will become the big test of search engine effectiveness to see who can maximize page views while minimizing time spent on the site (i.e. looking for the search results one wants)...
I think SLAC actually does NOT follow the curvature of the earth. I remember touring it as a fifth grader and being rather amazed when they told us that you can get on rollerblades at one end & have gravity pull you (albeit very slowly) toward the middle.
Also, as one of the previous posters noted, if you have electrons going at relativistic speeds and you force them to curve to match the curvature of the earth, you're essentially going to be creating a sort of a syncrotron radiation source (SLAC does have one of these, but it's not in the main accelerator), and that energy loss isn't advantageous for the sorts of high-energy physics experiments they try to conduct in this accelerator.
Wikipedia is a great place to start your research. It can even be perfect for solving quick arguments on the Internets. I whole-heartedly agree with this. As a student, I've found that when I'm just starting to learn about a topic, Wikipedia can give me a quick overview of the subject, links to sources for further reading, and enough background info to understand what's going on. I've used it for this purpose both in the humanities (i.e. about the history of East Berlin) and in the sciences (i.e. this afternoon, for a quick overview of the Faraday Effect).
That being said, I would NEVER EVER cite Wikipedia as a source in a formal paper. It's not peer reviewed, and I don't always trust that the information is accurate. Furthermore, it can be edited so quickly that it might be hard for whoever reads my bibliography to know what information was on the page when I actually read it.
It's a great place to start, but frankly, I find it rather incredible that the professors at Middlebury even allowed students to cite Wikipedia to begin with. My professors have made it clear from the start that Wikipedia is never an acceptable source in a formal paper.
Hmmm, yes, I agree - I'm a college student and would LOVE to be able to use OO rather than MSO, but the charting capabilities and ability to export/import charts from one document to another is really what's holding me back. I'm a science student, and for the purposes of lab reports and the like, I need to be able to easily create readable charts/graphs and share them across documents. I also need to be able to integrate spreadsheets into text documents, etc.
While MSO's implementation of some of this stuff isn't great, I found when I switched to OO that I was often not able to get OO to do this for me at all. As such, I've switched back to MSO. I'll get back on the OO bandwagon if/when this stuff is improved.
Refractive index basically describes how fast light moves through a material. That's the "speed at which they propagate" part of the quote you cited - in materials with a high refractive index, which you might think of more "optically dense" or preventing more barriers to the "movement" of the light, light travels more slowly than it does in materials with lower refractive indices.
When you have two materials with different refractive indices up against each other, light bends by some angle (the angle depends on how close the refractive indices of the two materials are). I'm sure you've seen the effect where you put a straw or a pencil into a partly-full glass of water (if you haven't, go try it) and the straw/pencil appears to be bent - this property of refractive indices is what's causing this phenomenon.
Basically, a negative refractive index changes/reverses the angle at which light bends, which can lead to some pretty funky optical effects. If you go to the wikipedia page on "Metamaterial" there's a diagram indicating this concept.
Does that help? It's not a precise technical definition by any means, but then, I don't think a precise technical definition is what you were asking for, hm?:-)
Re. games and other interesting programs - I agree with this. My CompSci teacher in high school (teaching C++, for the record) taught us the basics (data types, arrays, I/O, some basic algorithms, all that jazz), then let us loose on a series of small projects. These projects included:
- a competition to see who could write the fastest program to compute all of the primes up to 1 million, with a prize for the best results
- a program to play Yahtzee (we were required to do a text-based version, but got extra credit for writing a graphics-based one)
- a small, functional database program
- whatever other projects we wanted to do; I got class credit for writing (from scratch) my own versions of Tetris and Minesweeper... I wrote these from the ground up, but it would have worked perfectly well as a smaller project if he'd written the framework and had me write specific functions
Having all of these fun little projects to do definitely kept me interested in the class and in the techniques we were learning, so I really do agree that some sort of projects like these are probably a good way to go when teaching high school students.
Yes - I have to second this. I do a reasonable amount of hardware support, and I've interacted with Lenovo support for broken Thinkpads on several occasions. I'm always impressed with their customer support. I haven't gone through their training, but I've had them send several replacement parts under warranty (both user-replaceable and non-user-replaceable) with a minimum of fuss. Fastest, most-helpful tech support calls I've ever made.
I haven't had to call Dell in quite a while, as I'm now Dell-certified & can order warranty parts directly online, but I have memories of spending half an hour to an hour on the phone with them trying to get them to send me user-replaceable parts for my own computer. In comparison, working with IBM/Lenovo is a breeze.
I've never worked with either of these manufacturers for out-of-warranty support, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ease of use & helpfulness is pretty similar to their in-warranty support.
I see a lot of people here suggesting Logo. I loved logo, but I think that was more useful in maybe 4th grade (age 8 or 9). For reference, here's the sequence that I went through... it seemed to work pretty well:-)
4th grade: LOGO. we actually had an entire "how computers work" module that my dad led a group of students through - lots of fun. learned a lot about the basics of computer systems in general (i.e. processor, memory, storage, I/O) as well as basic programming. this was really well targeted to our age group at the time.
8th grade: BASIC and HyperCard. Again, great stuff for that age. Hypercard let us create interactive/graphic stuff, while BASIC got us more into the actual programming side of things, as I remember. Hypercard was great for getting us involved though, because the ability-to-do-easy-graphics-and-interact-with-them thing was a big plus.
10th grade: C++ in AP CompSci. My school now teaches Java in this course, but C++ was just fine when we were doing it. Best part was when the teacher decided to go outside the AP curriculum and introduce a simplified graphics library so that we could program our own versions of things like minesweeper and tetris using the concepts we'd covered in class. probably learned more that way, too...:-)
Other possibilities that might appeal to the 10-13 age-group are:
flash - in a similar sense to hypercard, this is great because it lets you create graphics that you can interact with. Some simple actionscript might be a way (albeit not an optimal way, but...) to teach some programming, while still being something kids can get excited about. dunno if the learning curve woudl be too much though.
Javascript or PHP - two different ways to both introduce programming languages and things they can interact with on the computer. only problem with these two are that you'd probably have to teach some HTML first, which, while fun, may not be the "programming" that you're aiming for
I'm sure that there are a lot of other languages that would work really well, but based on my experience *learning* to program as a kid (in the not-too-distant past), I think that some sort of graphical/interactive element is really important for that age group. When you're ten years old, just seeing text output of a program isn't really all that exciting or attention-grabbing.
Yes - my university does this too. For us, the service is http://www.laundryview.com/, and I've found that it works really well. No more dragging all of my things down to the laundry room only to find that all of the machines are in use; instead, I can just go down when I know there are a few free. It also tracks peak usage hours (i.e. doing laudry at 2 am on a Wednesday morning almost always guarantees that the machines will be free, while you'll probably be out of luck on a Saturday morning) and will tell you how long a load has been sitting in a machine (ie. cycle finished 12 minutes ago) - helpful when deciding whether or not you've waited long enough to let that other person come get their stuff before you move it.
Actually, I should correct what I just said - we only have this service in the freshman dorms. I hope that it will be extended to the upperclass residences soon, though; it's really useful... not so much for telling you when your stuff is done, but for telling you when other people's stuff is done. Saves a lot of time waiting around in the laundry room doing nothing.
How much is your data worth? It's certainly not worth $12.50/hr to me or anyone I know.
-- It's worth $12.00 an hour to me since working as a student computer tech is one of the better-paying (and least boring) jobs on campus... On-campus jobs are different though - they can get good techs there for $12 an hour because we're a captive audience & don't really have anyone else who will pay us to do that kind of work (tech support is free for registered students & faculty, so they're sure as heck not going to pay a lot for support if they can get it "free" through the school). Plus, since it's one of the higher-paid jobs on campus and it comes with other sorts of perks, they are rewarding us in a sense anyway:-)
It's all relative, I suppose; I think it's true though that places like Best Buy don't pay enough to attract good techs.
ah, thanks. I think my confusion stemmed from an absolute lack of knowledge about the actual structure of nuclear devices of any sort, but what you've said makes a lot of sense. cool - thanks for answering my question!
I think that part of the difference is the "name brand." Once a person knows and likes Google, they might be more willing to try out a new alternative spreadsheet program. I've mentioned Google Spreadsheets to a few friends in passing over the past few days, and the response is usually something along the lines of, "Oh, Google's making a spreadsheet program? That's cool, I'll have to check it out." OTOH, I've tried to convince several people to switch to OpenOffice, and they tend to go, "what the heck is that? I've never heard of it. I'll stick with Microsoft."
Admittedly, this app needs a LOT of work before it's ready for the primetime (I have been using it to share a few spreadsheets, but given the overall state of Google Spreadsheets at the moment, it'll be a while before I'd choose it over OpenOffice and MSOffice for almost all of my spreadsheets), but it's a pretty cool idea, and if they fix the major glitches/user interface problems/etc., it could be a really useful app in a year or so.
i'm hoping it's going to turn out to be useful (as a college student, I do a lot of internet research as very preliminary work on essays etc, in order to get a feel for a topic or whatnot). i've been messing around with it for the past day or two - here are some preliminary thoughts:
so far, I really like the ease of adding notes to the notebook (it's nice that it's as simple as hilight and right-click with the firefox extension installed), but there are some things I'd change about the options for actually organizing notes within the notebook. i'd also appreciate some sort of comment feature on public notebooks - ie. what if I'm doing, for example, research on possible sites for a family reunion and want my family to be able to give feedback?
on the whole, though, i'm pretty happy with it as a brand new service, and i'll be interested to see what improvements they make on it in the future...
this is the full citation, if anyone (like me) is curious:
Science 12 May 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5775, pp. 892 - 894
An interesting related article, cited by the above article, is:
Phys. Rev. A 1, 305-313 (1970) (title: Propagation of a Gaussian Light Pulse through an Anomalous Dispersion Medium)
(I think both of the above require subscriptions to view, though. good lord, I don't know what I'll do once I'm not connected with a university that'll give me free access...)
Hm. Nobody's mentioned this yet, but the flash format enables them to put interactive ads into the episodes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more likely to respond to an ad if I can click on things & choose what extra information I want instead of having an ad lecture at me... When things are interactive I find I invariably spend more time playing with them, too:-)
Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...
Hm... but as a counter to that, consider people like me:
I'm a student. I use Macs in all the public computing clusters at my university, because I like the OS better. But when I bought a new computer in January, what did I get? A Dell running XP, because I've had much better experience with their hardware & warranty support.
Yet if Apple were to release OS X in a form that would run on my Dell (yes, I know that's a big stretch due to the drivers/hardware configurations issue, but let's just pretend for a moment), how long would it take me to go out and buy it? Probably less than 24 hours. Just a thought. Basically, Apple has me convinced to switch to OS X (has had me convinced for a long time, actually), but that's necessarily the entire story.
Now, let's pretend I were a die-hard Windows user. Would I buy a new Mac just because the ability to install XP on it would give me the chance to try out a Mac without losing the familiarity of Windows? Probably not. But I might buy an installation CD for OS X to try out on my current Windows machine, and if I liked that, then I might consider getting a mac in the future, after my current machine died. A few hundred bucks for an operating system is a heck of a lot less to shell out to "try a Mac" than two thousand to buy the operating system with the hardware...
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree with this - I'm a grad student in the physical sciences, and perhaps 9 times out of 10, when I need a brief introduction to a new topic, Wikipedia is the place to go.
No, the articles don't go into great depth... but they do get the essentials, which are often hard to parse out from the detailed info in textbooks, so the Wikipedia articles are a great place to start and get a feel for the topic!
Unfortunately, people from "upper-middle class" families don't get much in the way of financial aid. When they say that financial aid is guaranteed for admitted students, they really mean for admitted students that they think actually need the money which tends to exclude those we'd think of as upper-middle class. I come from such a family, and I got absolutely nothing, not even when I went to the financial aid offices and explained the tricky financial situation I'm in with my family.
I was lucky enough that others in my family saved money for me in a college fund when I was little, so I was able to make my college decision independent of financial considerations (I didn't end up attending MIT for totally different reasons, but I ended up somewhere in about the same price range), but it certainly wasn't easy, financially. (Now, I've been finding that now grad schools will actually pay me to attend, so it's all worked out in the end!)
that's what we do too, and it works brilliantly. I did a clean install for someone yesterday and, using our custom install disks, got the install up and running and only had to download 7 short updates from the M$ website. plus, we've added firefox, our site-licensed antivirus, and acrobat reader to the install CD, so the entire thing is pretty painless.
(that is, until I installed the wireless mouse drivers and the computer started giving BSODs... lovely.)
True! Last time I tried this, though, some of the kiosks on campus were pretty locked down and wouldn't run programs off my flash drive. I haven't tried it recently. But goodness knows my flash drive is connected to my keychain anyway, so it's not like I'd have to carry anything extra around to do this :-)
The one major advantage that I find to online systems even without document sharing is that it makes it incredibly easy to access my documents from multiple computers. As a college student, I often find myself working on a document (whether a paper, a to-do list, etc.) that I need to access from my computer, from my lab computers, and from kiosks in the library.
While I can put my file on my flash drive, some web kiosks on campus don't have Office or OpenOffice installed and thus won't open my documents. As such, I find it much easier to put simple documents that I need to open from many locations into my google docs account, and then I don't have to worry about the portability thing. For people like me, online systems really can be useful even if they don't include document-sharing capabilities.
I actually find Wikipedia very difficult to read in general, because the formatting squishes things together and my eyes have a difficult time following it on the computer screen.
That concern aside, I don't use wikipedia for mathematical proofs, but usually find it very useful for simple derivations of scientific facts/equations/whatever. I'm not sure all the derivations need to be IN the articles, because it can make articles difficult to follow, but it is very useful when the articles place a prominent link to them.
true - and furthermore, won't the new rankings affect all search engines the same way? even if google's ranking falls overall when taken in the context of the ENTIRE web, I don't see how it will have much affect when you look just at search sites.
but who knows, maybe it will become the big test of search engine effectiveness to see who can maximize page views while minimizing time spent on the site (i.e. looking for the search results one wants)...
I think SLAC actually does NOT follow the curvature of the earth. I remember touring it as a fifth grader and being rather amazed when they told us that you can get on rollerblades at one end & have gravity pull you (albeit very slowly) toward the middle.
Also, as one of the previous posters noted, if you have electrons going at relativistic speeds and you force them to curve to match the curvature of the earth, you're essentially going to be creating a sort of a syncrotron radiation source (SLAC does have one of these, but it's not in the main accelerator), and that energy loss isn't advantageous for the sorts of high-energy physics experiments they try to conduct in this accelerator.
That being said, I would NEVER EVER cite Wikipedia as a source in a formal paper. It's not peer reviewed, and I don't always trust that the information is accurate. Furthermore, it can be edited so quickly that it might be hard for whoever reads my bibliography to know what information was on the page when I actually read it.
It's a great place to start, but frankly, I find it rather incredible that the professors at Middlebury even allowed students to cite Wikipedia to begin with. My professors have made it clear from the start that Wikipedia is never an acceptable source in a formal paper.
Hmmm, yes, I agree - I'm a college student and would LOVE to be able to use OO rather than MSO, but the charting capabilities and ability to export/import charts from one document to another is really what's holding me back. I'm a science student, and for the purposes of lab reports and the like, I need to be able to easily create readable charts/graphs and share them across documents. I also need to be able to integrate spreadsheets into text documents, etc.
While MSO's implementation of some of this stuff isn't great, I found when I switched to OO that I was often not able to get OO to do this for me at all. As such, I've switched back to MSO. I'll get back on the OO bandwagon if/when this stuff is improved.
*snicker*
:-)
good one
Refractive index basically describes how fast light moves through a material. That's the "speed at which they propagate" part of the quote you cited - in materials with a high refractive index, which you might think of more "optically dense" or preventing more barriers to the "movement" of the light, light travels more slowly than it does in materials with lower refractive indices.
:-)
When you have two materials with different refractive indices up against each other, light bends by some angle (the angle depends on how close the refractive indices of the two materials are). I'm sure you've seen the effect where you put a straw or a pencil into a partly-full glass of water (if you haven't, go try it) and the straw/pencil appears to be bent - this property of refractive indices is what's causing this phenomenon.
Basically, a negative refractive index changes/reverses the angle at which light bends, which can lead to some pretty funky optical effects. If you go to the wikipedia page on "Metamaterial" there's a diagram indicating this concept.
Does that help? It's not a precise technical definition by any means, but then, I don't think a precise technical definition is what you were asking for, hm?
Having all of these fun little projects to do definitely kept me interested in the class and in the techniques we were learning, so I really do agree that some sort of projects like these are probably a good way to go when teaching high school students.
Yes - I have to second this. I do a reasonable amount of hardware support, and I've interacted with Lenovo support for broken Thinkpads on several occasions. I'm always impressed with their customer support. I haven't gone through their training, but I've had them send several replacement parts under warranty (both user-replaceable and non-user-replaceable) with a minimum of fuss. Fastest, most-helpful tech support calls I've ever made.
I haven't had to call Dell in quite a while, as I'm now Dell-certified & can order warranty parts directly online, but I have memories of spending half an hour to an hour on the phone with them trying to get them to send me user-replaceable parts for my own computer. In comparison, working with IBM/Lenovo is a breeze.
I've never worked with either of these manufacturers for out-of-warranty support, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ease of use & helpfulness is pretty similar to their in-warranty support.
Other possibilities that might appeal to the 10-13 age-group are:
- flash - in a similar sense to hypercard, this is great because it lets you create graphics that you can interact with. Some simple actionscript might be a way (albeit not an optimal way, but...) to teach some programming, while still being something kids can get excited about. dunno if the learning curve woudl be too much though.
- Javascript or PHP - two different ways to both introduce programming languages and things they can interact with on the computer. only problem with these two are that you'd probably have to teach some HTML first, which, while fun, may not be the "programming" that you're aiming for
I'm sure that there are a lot of other languages that would work really well, but based on my experience *learning* to program as a kid (in the not-too-distant past), I think that some sort of graphical/interactive element is really important for that age group. When you're ten years old, just seeing text output of a program isn't really all that exciting or attention-grabbing.Yes - my university does this too. For us, the service is http://www.laundryview.com/, and I've found that it works really well. No more dragging all of my things down to the laundry room only to find that all of the machines are in use; instead, I can just go down when I know there are a few free. It also tracks peak usage hours (i.e. doing laudry at 2 am on a Wednesday morning almost always guarantees that the machines will be free, while you'll probably be out of luck on a Saturday morning) and will tell you how long a load has been sitting in a machine (ie. cycle finished 12 minutes ago) - helpful when deciding whether or not you've waited long enough to let that other person come get their stuff before you move it.
Actually, I should correct what I just said - we only have this service in the freshman dorms. I hope that it will be extended to the upperclass residences soon, though; it's really useful... not so much for telling you when your stuff is done, but for telling you when other people's stuff is done. Saves a lot of time waiting around in the laundry room doing nothing.
How much is your data worth? It's certainly not worth $12.50/hr to me or anyone I know.
:-)
-- It's worth $12.00 an hour to me since working as a student computer tech is one of the better-paying (and least boring) jobs on campus... On-campus jobs are different though - they can get good techs there for $12 an hour because we're a captive audience & don't really have anyone else who will pay us to do that kind of work (tech support is free for registered students & faculty, so they're sure as heck not going to pay a lot for support if they can get it "free" through the school). Plus, since it's one of the higher-paid jobs on campus and it comes with other sorts of perks, they are rewarding us in a sense anyway
It's all relative, I suppose; I think it's true though that places like Best Buy don't pay enough to attract good techs.
ah, thanks. I think my confusion stemmed from an absolute lack of knowledge about the actual structure of nuclear devices of any sort, but what you've said makes a lot of sense. cool - thanks for answering my question!
... replaces its aging arsenal of about 6,000 bombs, which will become potentially unreliable within 15 years.
This leads me to two questions. Forgive me if they're stupid, but:
(1) what happens when a bomb becomes "unreliable"?
and
(2) how will the existing/"old" bombs be disposed of?
I think that part of the difference is the "name brand." Once a person knows and likes Google, they might be more willing to try out a new alternative spreadsheet program. I've mentioned Google Spreadsheets to a few friends in passing over the past few days, and the response is usually something along the lines of, "Oh, Google's making a spreadsheet program? That's cool, I'll have to check it out." OTOH, I've tried to convince several people to switch to OpenOffice, and they tend to go, "what the heck is that? I've never heard of it. I'll stick with Microsoft."
Admittedly, this app needs a LOT of work before it's ready for the primetime (I have been using it to share a few spreadsheets, but given the overall state of Google Spreadsheets at the moment, it'll be a while before I'd choose it over OpenOffice and MSOffice for almost all of my spreadsheets), but it's a pretty cool idea, and if they fix the major glitches/user interface problems/etc., it could be a really useful app in a year or so.
i'm hoping it's going to turn out to be useful (as a college student, I do a lot of internet research as very preliminary work on essays etc, in order to get a feel for a topic or whatnot). i've been messing around with it for the past day or two - here are some preliminary thoughts:
so far, I really like the ease of adding notes to the notebook (it's nice that it's as simple as hilight and right-click with the firefox extension installed), but there are some things I'd change about the options for actually organizing notes within the notebook. i'd also appreciate some sort of comment feature on public notebooks - ie. what if I'm doing, for example, research on possible sites for a family reunion and want my family to be able to give feedback?
on the whole, though, i'm pretty happy with it as a brand new service, and i'll be interested to see what improvements they make on it in the future...
this is the full citation, if anyone (like me) is curious:
Science 12 May 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5775, pp. 892 - 894
An interesting related article, cited by the above article, is:
Phys. Rev. A 1, 305-313 (1970)
(title: Propagation of a Gaussian Light Pulse through an Anomalous Dispersion Medium)
(I think both of the above require subscriptions to view, though. good lord, I don't know what I'll do once I'm not connected with a university that'll give me free access...)
Hm. Nobody's mentioned this yet, but the flash format enables them to put interactive ads into the episodes. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm much more likely to respond to an ad if I can click on things & choose what extra information I want instead of having an ad lecture at me... When things are interactive I find I invariably spend more time playing with them, too :-)
Think this could make a difference in the overall effectiveness of their ads? Just curious...
haha, somehow I think google can take it... :-P
Hm... but as a counter to that, consider people like me: I'm a student. I use Macs in all the public computing clusters at my university, because I like the OS better. But when I bought a new computer in January, what did I get? A Dell running XP, because I've had much better experience with their hardware & warranty support. Yet if Apple were to release OS X in a form that would run on my Dell (yes, I know that's a big stretch due to the drivers/hardware configurations issue, but let's just pretend for a moment), how long would it take me to go out and buy it? Probably less than 24 hours. Just a thought. Basically, Apple has me convinced to switch to OS X (has had me convinced for a long time, actually), but that's necessarily the entire story. Now, let's pretend I were a die-hard Windows user. Would I buy a new Mac just because the ability to install XP on it would give me the chance to try out a Mac without losing the familiarity of Windows? Probably not. But I might buy an installation CD for OS X to try out on my current Windows machine, and if I liked that, then I might consider getting a mac in the future, after my current machine died. A few hundred bucks for an operating system is a heck of a lot less to shell out to "try a Mac" than two thousand to buy the operating system with the hardware...