Some windows-specific professional software that cannot run on Linux.
Also, work-related stuff. I may be able to make a custom setup of Linux if I try hard enough, but when it comes to dealing with servers and VPNs it’s a bit beyond me. Not to mention the time it takes to figure it out and set up.
Although, the more I hear about subscriptions from Microsoft the more I want to switch.
“fact-checking” was a bit of a crude way of putting it on my part. I’m not native, so there could’ve misused it.
(Went a bit overboard with a wall of text again, but of well)
Although it wasn’t without the fact-checking in it’s normal sense. Take “English as a foreign language”, for example. One teacher will say the word is pronounced one way, the other will say its different. Who’s right? Let’s check Cambridge dictionary. Although it isn’t always teacher’s fault as a professional. Sometimes you just forget things no matter how well you know them.
The other part that I may have failed to convey is looking information up, be it a math formulae, a word, some sort of rule, name or a date.
It’s way quicker than going through your books and is actually not a bad way to remember something. You either have a tab left off or you’re seeing it when using the search, which makes you remember that you did look that up a while back. It’s very minor, but because you’re still being reminded about it from time to time, the information sticks. Essentially you’re doing unintentional passive memorisation.
That’s why I think that maybe not in primary, but definetly in secondary and high school banning technology is not the way to go about it. If the student uses it for entertainment during class, they won’t suddenly start studying if you prohibit them from usining it. You’re essentially solving a non-issue, because the majority of students aren’t even using phones during classes (Well, maybe to cheat on tests, but that’s hurting the quality of assessment and not education itself).
Banning phones is easy, but it’s also the least impactful thing you could to to “improve” educational system. It would be of more sognificance you were to reduce classes to 8 pupils, lessen teacher’s paperwork, introduce new active teaching practices, reward students for persuing their endevours and so on. But that’s difficult, banning phones is easy and brings you more polical approval.
I would still disagree about phone usage.
Even when in school, phone helped me quite a bit with education. Having a way to do a quick fact-check is invaluable.
Now as I’m finishing getting my degree such devices became an inseparable part of the process.
Yes, you may not always listen to what’s being said whilst using them, but lets be frank, you wouldn’t be listening to those parts either way.
School education in a lot of places is fundamentally flawed. It’s extremely difficult to learn when you’re expected to absorb information just by listening and writing.
I’d agree with OPs sentiment here, off-topic smartphone usage isn’t the cause for worse education, but instead is a result of poor engagement in the first place. Should people be more engaged in the topic then suddenly smartphones start being used as a studying tool and not for entertainment. There are many ways of achieving that, but that’s a whole different story.
Another way that I became quite fond of using is Rufus.
When creating a distro it allows you to customize it. Set up language beforehand, a local account, remove hardware requirements and data collection by simply checking some boxes.
It’s a very handy tool, saves a lot of headache with this bloody install.
Not every digital signature is legally binding, I’m afraid.
In my country, there are 3 types of it. A simple one (login/password), unqualified (encrypted series of numbers), and qualified (same as unqualified, but encrypted using certified means by government). The last two are stored on a physical drive.
The higher the grade, the more legal power the signature holds.
When signing it by hand from a tablet it’s the same as signing it personally where I live. Which, unlike qualified digital signature, can be used for any document.
I used to think the same.
Turns out they are a good alternative to laptops.
If you don’t need powerful hardware, then tablets allow to save space in the backpack, are way lighter and always have a touch screen, which in connection with a stylus is big deal for taking notes. Laptops with a touch screen, in comparison, cost way more (at least where I live they do).
Personally, I use it for studying and media consumption. It replaced almost all of my paper. You can also sign documents using those (depends on laws in your country). Inserting photos into documents is one thing you can’t do as easily with laptops as well.
And when I do need access to better hardware, I just remote to my PC at home.
A lot, actually
In Russia change org was one of very few channels to bring change into politics.
For some reason our politicians actually listened to those. So it was a very useful tool.
Unfortunately, I don’t have much idea how effective it is since Feb of 2022. Imagine our gov as an armodillo. It has a sturdy shell, so it is very hard to get good changes through it’s head. Now that armodillo closed up in a ball, it lives in it’s own bubble, its being fed by it’s own lies. Nothing good can come out of that head. And it doesn’t.
Russia trying to ban Telegram is a whole epopeya that produced a lot of memes and animated videos back in the days.
Now it’s a piece of history.
A story about what heppened (it’s hilarious, read it):
Essentially, there’s a gov agency called Roscomnadzor (from Russian communication surveillance) that is responsible for “keeping the internet a safe space”, so to say.
After another law, wanted by nobody, was passed, it allowed for Roscomnadzor to request the encryption keys from all social media. Since Telegram “doesn’t have those”, Roscomnadzor took it to court for non-complience.
Telegram lost the case and was ordered to pay 1mil rub (about 17000USD at the time I believe) and to provide the keys. The society started joking about how that’s the cheapest PR a company could get for such outreach. Overall sentiment was “Not only do they get so many people to hear about Telegram for pennies, but they also make Telegram look like a safe place to chat” (which is debatable, but w/e, that’s what people thought, mind you Telegram was a very new product then)
It’s also important to note that Telegram’s creator, Pavel Durov, is also the creator of largest Russian social medial called VKontakte (tl. InContact) which he was robbed of and forced to leave the country.
And so, once Roscomnadzor started trying to block Telegram for, yet again, non-complience, people started beeing dissatisfied and set up a date to let paper planes out of their windows to show their support for Telegram.
Now starts the fun part.
Just in one week over 18mil IP adresses were blocked. Whilst trying to block Telegram, Roscomnadzor managed to accidentially block: Viber, some paying services, some services for selling airplane tickets, a service selling OSAGO (mandatory car insurance), ResearchGate, central repository of Java, Skolkovo Tech websited (aka Russian Silver Valley), a lot of universities’ websited (including the biggest ones), some scientific archives.
They even managed to block some of Google’s services, like YouTube or it’s main page, Twitter, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki (Russian social media for boomers and country bumkins, tld as “Classmates”), Yahoo, Some Russian gov sites and I believe even it’s own website.
What did you not see on that list? That’s right! Telegram is still fully operational.
This has caused a massive surge of memes and videos portraying Roscomnadzor as an anime character Roscomnadzor-chan trying to block all of the wicked stuff off the net, but ultimately failing all the time. She has goons, which look kinda like those half life solders, which are all secretly into all that stuff they block.
Roscomandzor also acquired a new nickname, “Roscompozor”, where “pozor” means “disgraceful”, think “I"m ashamed of you and I mean it” kind of meaning.
Since then Telegram was finally blocked, but through use of VPN many people still accessed it. Including government officials (a lot of them). In fact, it was used so much that some years after they striked a deal (involving giving users’ data to Russia ofc) where Telegram was fully unblocked and still is to this day.
Just a couple years ago Meduza was a very prominent news outlet in Russia.
There weren’t that many and they weren’t allowed on TV, but you could always see their presence on the Internet.
Since adoption of a law about foreign agents in 2017 many if not most of such news outlets were deemed as “foreign agents” and faced problems with funding. And yet persisted.
2022 was the breaking point. In February all of the remaining oppositional news started to get blocked. One by one.
By 2023 all of them ceased operation as Russian media and migrated abroad due to de facto being outlawed.
Taking control over media is how Putin started his presidency. This is what came out of it.
If there is nobody to speak, then there’s nobody who’ll listen.
I think it works best in combination with fingerprint scanner.
Like when your fingers are wet and are difficult to scan. Whilst trying to make the scanner work, face unlock just does it for you.
But, yes, if it were one or the other, fingerprint scanner is simply way more convenient.