People have got used to the idea that buttons in apps have borders (and often pseudo drop shadows). Yet on the web, people are perfectly capable of realising which elements are clickable, usually without these pretend buttons. Look around here. (I'm looking at the classic slashdot UI) there are buttons, but they are a rarity. Most clickable things are coloured text, with no borders or shadows. Simply the highlight colour and the positioning related to other items gives the clue that it's a clickable item.

You'll get used to modern app guis exactly the same way you got used to hypertext content.

The benefits are a lighter feel and more focus on the content rather than the chrome.

No porn and no torrenting, and no hacker tools are not a disadvantage for schools use.

Well said. Also the different forms of education are better at different ages. The typing advantage only kicks in once students are writing long essays. At Kindergarten, the educational activities possible with a touch screen tablet are much more rich. Between the two, there's a changing dynamic of advantages.

It would be hardly surprising if schools prefer tablets with touch screens, as students are expected to do a lot of drawing and diagramming.

Whilst you can type modest amounts of text on a touch screen, drawing with a keyboard and trackpad or mouse is not practical.

Further: Keyboards are only better for typing. The direct manipulation of objects that a touch screen enables is far better for most kinds of educational software.

When kids get to college, and they have to write long essays, then the laptop becomes better. But for most of the school years, a tablet is a better machine.

Don't blame it on the writing. There was a chart, and a table at the end, both perfectly clear. And terseness means they were both very easy to find. I expect slashdotters to be able to read a simple bar chart - to read the labels as well as the length of the bars. If they can't, GTFO.

The rate last year was 130 vulns per six months. The rate this year is 266 per six months.

Now what are you quibbling about?

The rate has increased precisely 104% already. There is no need for a common divisor when calculating rates.

Not true. You can work out the average speed of a car over 10 miles and do a straight comparison with compare another car over 20 miles. There is no difference here. It's simply a rate. You don't need a common divisor.

It wouldn't be a /. meme if there weren't people like you to repeat them.

That's a bit of a giveaway that your problem is lack of good prewritten tools. Don't mistake the paucity of decent IDEs on Linux for an advantage.

The Unix way was a huge step forward and a great way to work in the 1970s and into the 80s. But it's not the 1980s any more. We don't have to emulate glass teletypes. GUIs can do everything that command line utilities can and a hell of a lot more. And they do.

Because of all the domain specific tools you'll be missing if you don't use the IDE. Because the syntax highlighting and autoformatting is made for purpose and therefore probably better in the IDE.

It's a good idea to have a good general purpose text editor in your toolbag for when you want to do some interesting editing task on a text file - often data rather than code. But developing applications - you're usually best off with a dedicated IDE for the platform and language in question.

It's one of those stupid /. memes that vi,, vim or emacs is better for all situations.

We seem to be having a lot of astroturf from MS today.

IE Exploits.
2013 = 130
H1-2014 = 133.

Bearing in mind the year vs half-year, that's a 104% increase. So no it's not an odd conclusion at all.

Looking at the graphic the raw number looks like about 130 for all of 2013, and slightly more for the first half of 2014.

What are you finding unclear about this graphic?

http://www.net-security.org/im...

Sure they can. You can pay technicians to make sure they are locked down and patched in the same way that iPads are locked down out of the box.

Do you actually own an iPad? Because I can assure you that's not the case. Movies will fill it up, as will the entire MP3 collection that some teenage kid has ripped off. But there's no chance of making a dent on it with a years worth of educational materials.

You like laptops. I get it. So do I. But they are not the best thing for school level education. The educational content available for the iPad is endless and far outdoes what's available for PCs. The great thing is that kids use direct manipulation through the touch screen. There is no level of indirectness as their is with using a mouse and keyboard to control software.

You're really playing through your biases now aren't you. You do realise those laptops you are suggesting cost money. And in most cases the content creation software you refer to is Microsoft Office.

Probably in your mind it's Linux. But that's not the real world of school education in most cases.

As to creating content, school has always had more consumption than creation. What do you think text books are? Stuff done by the teacher on blackboards, whiteboards, and these days projector screens? Thats consumption too. Of course they have to do tests based on that content. For which the iPad is a better option than a laptop. And any artwork or design work is better done with an iPad than a laptop (of course in actual art classes they'll mostly use paper).

At some point they'll be writing of course. And there, finally you do have something that the laptop is better for. But school writing tops out at about 500 words. And kids don't have a problem with typing on a screen.

Well first of all, there's no such thing as "at will employment" here. So you don't lose your job on an employer's whim. There have to be reasons, and there are processes that need to be followed, and if as an emplyee you are not at fault there's normally redundancy payments made relative to your years of service.

Then, if you lose your job, you aren't normally foreclosed on. This is a combination of mortgages being switched to interest only payments, welfare paying towards those payments, and eviction notices taking a long time to be granted.

Of course countries differ. But isn't it odd how America is so wealthy, yet treats employees as serfs.