when he learns someone his cloning his file manager.
I'm interested to hear from MC users the advantages of MC over say konqueror with frames and fish to do remote file management.
I agree. I find that students who have become dependent on the calculator to draw graphs are missing a valuable skill. Throw a problem at them with parameters and they can't graph a thing. It isn't generally fatal: students can learn to graph just fine, but I don't want to spend time in a college course teaching graphing. (That said, I almost always go through a graphing algorithm during examples so that students can pick it up).
But there's room for computers in doing scientific computing. In my experience, the students really dread that topic, though. The trouble is that most have received NO computer science education in highschool. It's a major oversight of the american highschool curriculum. I don't care if they're learning BASIC. They need to understand boolean logic, branches, and iteration.
I think a lot of this is snakeoil. If it isn't immediately clear what advantage the computer will bring to the lesson, don't use the computer. There are cases when it is clear that the computer brings a lot of positives, but it isn't all cases by a longshot.
Computers can eat up class time with distractions and technical problems. And digital work lacks tangibility. Students respond better to paper homework with actual scores than to digital assignments with scores appearing on some webpage.
I know that these problems may be solvable in the future, but they aren't solved now.
"I may need features you don't, and rather than having to hunt for them online and download a virus posing as a function... "
Man, if only there was some way of handing out files from a central trusted repository and doing some sort of hashing to see that they're what they should be. We could call that system "apt".
Also, for linux, I could get Puppy linux, or even just the
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD
But for the most part, most people agree that they'd like the system pre-loaded with software, hence the base distribution for most distros comes with goodies like Open Office.
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/
If you think you'll need it, get a recent static copy. Most things you will look up won't change much over a few months.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
With the size of microSD these days, you might be able to send really big packets too...
Spreadsheets generally annoy me because many programming concepts I'm used to are watered down. I find most of the formula stuff to be a pain. Maybe somewhere out there is some sort of "spreadsheet for smart people" where I can use say python expressions to manipulate a big table of data.
As for spreadsheets leading to bad decisions -- it's really the fault of bad models. Just because you can extrapolate into the future doesn't mean that prediction is worth a darn. The phrase "if this trend continues" usually makes my ass twitch. Shouldn't you first do some check to see if that extrapolation means something?
"Do Twitter Phishing Scams Herald the End of Microblogs?"
*Crosses fingers*
A man can dream...
Beyond the style of model, the trouble in finance is the feedback nature. If a big impressive model is developed to price an asset and all of the big boys buy in and use the model, then the model DOES describe the assets price. Because everyone is making decisions based on the model.
That's all great until reality intervenes. Then you have a bubble.
That sort of model feedback has always made finance seem "iffy" to me.
Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie