I can provide you that explanation without compromising my contract; disclaimer, I'm a senior working for Yale ITS. Yale provides 2GB email inboxes, but keeps 7 days worth of daily (I believe midnight) backups. That way when someone goes over their 2GB quota and corrupts their inbox, and loses their mail, they've got 7 days to let us know and we can still restore 95% of their email. Better if our webmail service could simply bounce the excess email rather than corrupting the inbox, but c'est la vie. The 12GB of storage, I'm assuming, is the average; 7 times the average inbox size per student. Uncertain if the number is made up, or was discussed in the one meeting I wasn't present for, but it's a reasonable number either way. I suspect it came from the other meeting, because the people who originally spoke to the news aren't creative or intelligent enough to make it up.

(We didn't, incidentally. Google edu is free.)

Just a word of warning, ability-based tracking isn't a good idea without damn good aptitude tests (which don't exist). My girlfriend teaches in a piss-poor, underperforming elementary school, where the students are aggressively tracked (her 3rd-6th graders are all segregated into low- and high-performing classes). The high-aptitude kids benefit, there's no question; but all of the school's measurements for high-performing children heap poorly-behaved kids in with poorly-achieving ones. The result is that all of the unmotivated, bad-behavior students reinforce each other, so all the low-performing classes are behavioral train wrecks, and in a given day, the teacher's liable to waste anywhere between one- and three-quarters of the day on simple classroom management, every day. My girlfriend is one of the few teachers that moves around and sees all the kids, and half the time she gets so frustrated with the low-aptitude classes that she doesn't have the patience to do well with the good ones.

Ability-based education, like most education, only works when the students want to learn. And separating out a child's desire to learn from his ability to learn is damn near impossible, and something that aptitude tests just can't do.

Agreed. This poll is CLEARLY a nod do the people who've been agitating for more logarithmic polls lately. And I happen to agree with them; if we break it down to a regular interval, we'll just make the problem of accurate figuring out which category you belong to much harder, and make the poll as a whole less informative.

Those folks trapped behind

are almost certainly the ones the Chrome frame is targeted at, though. Only tech-savvy users will actually seek out this plugin, and tech-savvy users who still use IE almost always use it because they're ordered to.

This article is straight-up Microsoft FUD, the same bull they've been feeding us for twenty years now.

I am a student and tech support coordinator at an Ivy League university, and my school, for one, is very Linux friendly. Campus services are mostly platform-agnostic (currently, there's some talk of using Silverlight for some class video supplements, but I had a conversation with the administrator running that and he's promised that if they go with it, they'll also have quicktime and flash options available). The campus network is based on EHA/MAC address whitelisting, and is thus platform-neutral. Getting some site-licensed software is a pain on Linux (MATLAB requires several more hoops to download on Linux than Windows, but it's doable), but any and all required class programs are available in computer clusters (which have Windows and Mac machines, and a couple of specialized clusters have Linux). Our tech support group (the largest in the nation, at ~130 student employees and 3 full-time staff) doesn't totally support Linux machines, but we support it as we can; we keep a group of designated Linux specialists who offer limited tech support to Linux users with computer problems (we don't fully support just because of the difficulty of doing so, especially with a staff that's only 5-15% Linux users).

We have some non-savvy professors who will occasionally require closed solutions, but the average Linux user is smart enough to work around those restrictions, rather than suffer under them. Overall, we're very FOSS-friendly. It's a great place to use Linux.