One of my most important realizations when I first started preparing lectures was that there are two things that people use "slides" for. The first is as a visual aid, for use during the presentation itself. The second is as a set of notes containing the important information that the presentation was meant to convey. The things that make for useful notes are very different from the things that make for good visual aids, and when people try and do both at the same time... you get the craptacular PowerPoint disasters described ad nauseum by Tufte, etc.
If I were giving a talk about various sneaky ways to recover from a borked chmod situation, I'd personally find the slides linked to in the parent to be just about right- each slide talks about one solution, and my audience would be able to focus on each solution as I was talking about it without a lot of extraneous visual noise. However, you're 100% correct that, for use as lecture notes, this format is suboptimal. As after-the-fact readers, it would be far more useful just to have a list of each solution, perhaps with a little bit of commentary for each one.
As everybody knows, Tufte hates the "title with lots of bullet points" school of slide design with the burning fire of a thousand suns. However, IIRC, he dislikes the "one thing per rapidly-changing slide" approach as well, finding it indicative of a patronizing and controlling attitude towards one's audience. I'm not sure I agree with him 100% on this point- I've had pretty good luck using this style for lectures, although I've learned that students who are expecting more "traditional" slides (and are planning on using them as lecture notes) are disappointed when they see that my slides won't work quite as well as other people's for that purpose. Tufte's suggestion of providing a printed outline or handout containing more detailed or supplementary information is a good one, and I've started sometimes putting together separate outlines or "cheat sheets" with stuff that I think my audience might want/need to refer to later.
One lovely piece of middle ground between the "minimalist" and "traditional" schools of slide design is Michael Alley's "Assertion-Evidence" slide structure ( http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html ). It's not always the right solution for every situation- in slide design, there's no one-size-fits-all "right" way to design a slide- but I've found that it works really well for presenting technical subjects, and the resulting slides make excellent ready-made lecture notes. On the other hand, preparing a presentation using his approach takes way longer, because you actually have to really think out exactly what it is you want to communicate and how you wish to do so- using either the "traditional" or "minimalist" approaches, it's possible to end up quickly filling a lot of space with empty and useless text, and that's absolutely not possible with Alley's approach. Of course, I personally see that as a feature of the Alley method rather than a bug, but there have definitely been times when I've been in a time crunch and found myself reverting to a less well-structured slide design just in the interests of getting the slides finished in time for a last-minute talk.
If I were giving a talk about various sneaky ways to recover from a borked chmod situation, I'd personally find the slides linked to in the parent to be just about right- each slide talks about one solution, and my audience would be able to focus on each solution as I was talking about it without a lot of extraneous visual noise. However, you're 100% correct that, for use as lecture notes, this format is suboptimal. As after-the-fact readers, it would be far more useful just to have a list of each solution, perhaps with a little bit of commentary for each one.
As everybody knows, Tufte hates the "title with lots of bullet points" school of slide design with the burning fire of a thousand suns. However, IIRC, he dislikes the "one thing per rapidly-changing slide" approach as well, finding it indicative of a patronizing and controlling attitude towards one's audience. I'm not sure I agree with him 100% on this point- I've had pretty good luck using this style for lectures, although I've learned that students who are expecting more "traditional" slides (and are planning on using them as lecture notes) are disappointed when they see that my slides won't work quite as well as other people's for that purpose. Tufte's suggestion of providing a printed outline or handout containing more detailed or supplementary information is a good one, and I've started sometimes putting together separate outlines or "cheat sheets" with stuff that I think my audience might want/need to refer to later.
One lovely piece of middle ground between the "minimalist" and "traditional" schools of slide design is Michael Alley's "Assertion-Evidence" slide structure ( http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html ). It's not always the right solution for every situation- in slide design, there's no one-size-fits-all "right" way to design a slide- but I've found that it works really well for presenting technical subjects, and the resulting slides make excellent ready-made lecture notes. On the other hand, preparing a presentation using his approach takes way longer, because you actually have to really think out exactly what it is you want to communicate and how you wish to do so- using either the "traditional" or "minimalist" approaches, it's possible to end up quickly filling a lot of space with empty and useless text, and that's absolutely not possible with Alley's approach. Of course, I personally see that as a feature of the Alley method rather than a bug, but there have definitely been times when I've been in a time crunch and found myself reverting to a less well-structured slide design just in the interests of getting the slides finished in time for a last-minute talk.