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Yeah, like Ctrl-Click...

Early Mac keyboards didn't even have a control button on them.

Picture of Mac Plus Keyboard

I remember what a weird arcane experience it was the first time I used a Mac.

> There is an English word pronounced "sequel" which means something entirely different from a database.

Correct. It also means Structured English QUery Language

This is why I always say "ess cue ell" for SQL, to be clear I'm not talking about SEQUEL.

The Grinnell Beowulf A group of students at Grinnell College recently did a translation of Beowulf as a project. It's online, and worth reading, and has good notes along with their translation.

Gimme a break; I was twelve, and had not yet heard of open standards. I just used the software that came on the computer. Now I'm a web services librarian. I write software too, and I sing the open standards gospel daily.

ASCII is great, though I'd actually prefer UTF, thank you, on the grounds that diacritics actually do matter, not to mention the ability to encode things in Cyrillic, Korean, or Scandinavian runes. Though even UTF has its limits. Let me know when you work out a way to store NTSC format video encoded in some damn proprietary codec as text, okay? Or, for that matter, video games, which are literary and artistic works worthy of preservation.

The simple fact is, computers are inherently more complex than older information storage methods. The information they store cannot be read directly by a human. Unless you can hold a hard drive to your head and sense the magnetic charges directly, the information must be interpreted by software first. That simple, undeniable requirement adds several layers of complexity to any attempt at long-term preservation of digital data. For ample demonstration, just go read Keeping Stuff, a delightful essay by a comp sci professor at Grinnell in which he discusses his attempts to preserve his own undergraduate work from the early '70s.

Oh, and you can wag your finger at me some more as soon as you've worked out an open standards solution to the fact that basically every non-geek does all their work in proprietary programs that spit out crappy proprietary files, and then expect them to last forever.

Harvard seems to offer only one course that would cover SQL and RDBMS. It's Comp Sci 165, "Information Management," and seems to be relatively theoretical in the sense that banging out SQL isn't the real focus. To wit,

Covers the fundamental concepts of database and information management. Data models: relational, object-oriented, and other; implementation techniques of database management systems, such as indexing structures, concurrency control, recovery, and query processing; management of unstructured data; terabyte-scale databases.

Upon reading the syllabus I see that two class sessions (of about 40) cover SQL specifically.

While I can't find the official list of requirements to complete the Comp Sci major there, I did spot a form that seemed to indicate that 165 is optional.

So as far as I can tell, it seems that you can complete a bachelor's in Comp Sci from Harvard without taking a database class at all. And the one and only undergraduate class on databases seems to be heavy on the sort of knowledge you'd need to implement your own server software--not so much on ordinary business applications that run on SQL.

I haven't given you an example of an Ivy that has no SQL or RDBMS on its curriculum at all. But I think I've illustrated a prestigious Comp Sci program that one could graduate from without much everyday practical knowledge of SQL.

My own background, I majored in pure mathematics at a near-Ivy while dabbling on Comp Sci. The Comp Sci major didn't exist until I was near graduation already, but ISTR that the CS program of the time didn't include SQL. Then again, it was the 1980s and industry was still pretty heavily into ISAM on mainframes. We had an "Exotic Programming Languages Study Group" that was going to do COBOL one semester--because to us, that was considered exotic. Comp Sci was Pascal and B-trees, combinatorial theory, computational complexity, stuff like that. Pretty darned theoretical if what you wanted was a programming job, but still quite useful.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned J.D. Stone, who holds the title "Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy" at my alma mater. Regrettably, I took none of J.D.'s classes and only participated in his Exotic Programming Languages Study Group in the mid-80s. But I have it on good authority that I missed out.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned J.D. Stone, who holds the title "Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy" at my alma mater. Regrettably, I took none of J.D.'s classes and only participated in his Exotic Programming Languages Study Group in the mid-80s. But I have it on good authority that I missed out.

"Surprisingly enough, daylight-saving time was thought up by Benjamin Franklin, not drunken voters. According to http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/, it seems that one day Benjy got bored and wrote a little something called An Economical Project. It was an essay mostly about "himself, his love of thrift, his scientific papers and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday," and it was meant to be a joke.

However, an Englishman named William Willett (how can you take someone with that name seriously? Come on!) was apparently too dense to realize that Franklin was joking. Therefore, he thought it would be a novel idea to set clocks back for 20 minutes on each Sunday in April, and then turn them back on the Sundays in September. Eventually, daylight-saving time came to be as we now know it."

Taken from here

So you're complaining because they are offering you a way to minimize getting screwed by your insurance company? If it's the junk mail that bothers you, trash it along with those pesky credit card "preapproval" offers. Seriously, when it comes to bad business practices, what you've described is saint-like compared to what I've seen and experienced.

Actually, it's the drug companies doing the screwing here. The makers of prescription allergy medicines have fought against the government making their drugs available without a prescription. They do this because once it's available without a prescription, the consumer will have to foot the entire bill. Since it's only available by prescription and the companies advertise directly to the consumer so the consumer demands it regardless of what their doctor might recommend, and the price they charge for it is a rediculous sum of money (I just called. It's $92 for a 30 day supply of Allegra at my local pharmacy.), the insurance company is paying huge amounts for it. To make up for this, they end up raising their co-pay for these medicines. The drug company starts offering rebates directly to the consumer who doesn't care how much the insurance company has to pay, not noticing the rise in premiums and increasing co-pays. I'm not looking at how much is coming out of my pocket this one time I get a prescription. I'm looking at how much is coming out of mine and everyone else's pocket and going into the drug company's pocket. We are paying the price to the drug companies because we are paying the insurance premiums to the insurance companies that end up paying the drug companies.

As for the credit card "preapproval" offers, I don't get them because I've asked the credit reporting agencies to not give out my information without my express written approval. No company has the right to dig into my credit history or bother me in my home to try to get my business. I'm not saying this is the worst business practice out there. I'm just saying I don't like their business practices and I won't deal with a company that does business like this.

Wow... all these posts and nobody mentions the many fine public community colleges!

Quality of courses and instructors varies widely--and with open admissions, I suppose many students may lack aptitude. But you have reasonable tuition rates, stability, and accountability. Not to mention accreditation.

I just started teaching Visual Basic programming (yeah, I know, I know...) at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I feel a place like CCC is a pretty good alternative to for-profit private tech schools, although as a liberal-arts snob myself I am glad I attended a very competitive four-year private college.

As with anything else, there are good and bad community colleges. But I'm surprised nobody mentioned them as an option.

Agreed. I like having my little B.A. in math from a liberal-arts school where I also took African-American history, music, economics, and Latin. I can usually find about five different ways to solve any "I.T." problem. :-)

Turns out they also have a hell of a basketball team, who knew?

Dude from Grinnell invented the integrated circuit.

Go Pioneers!

Dude from Grinnell invented the integrated circuit.

Go Pioneers!

We have two SmartBoards at my College's MathLAN I have never once seen them used, except when my prof brought his kid to class who had great fun playing with the special eraser. It's still missing.

josh

All of the sixty-nine workstations and servers in the Mathematics Local-Area Network at Grinnell College run Linux. (Twenty-two of them can also boot into Windows, but even those run under Linux most of the time.) We support about 1200 users.

Why does this article mention a 3.9 GPA at Stuyvesant? As a graduate ('98) the name jumped out at me. Is the idea that a 3.9 at Stuy is better than a 3.9 somewhere else? Well as a side note, they use a 60-100 point scale, with 60 being a failing grade. If the implication that a 3.9 is particularly impressive from Stuy, you might want to think twice. I have never met a place with a more serious case of grade inflation. In my AP Chemistry class my senior year, I did nothing, absolutely nothing. I don't think I got a grade higher than %85, yet I got a %90 in the class. Aside from that I scored a 1400 on the SATs, I did n't study. 1400 is a decent score I believe, but it was considered quite low amongst my friends and associates at Stuy. Now, while this may be construed as an argument as to why one should count a 3.9 from Stuy more than a 4.0 from East Troy, it is not. The important factor is to think about how I, and everyone else got into Stuy in the first place. We took a test, almost exaclty like the SATs. Those who scored well, got in, those with a slightly lower school got into Bronx Science, and then Brooklyn Tech. As you see, Stuyvesant students have been selected as excellent bubble fillers. I would argue that there is no finer group of American standardized test takers in the world. Because of that we were viewed as "smart" by our teachers, parents and the administration. It would not have been appropriate to asign us low grades, hence the inflation. josh p.s. I only took 1 english class at Stuyvesant, I managed to escape from all the rest. What does that say about my potential performance in college. Oh, and I'm doing pretty well in Grinnell College I have a 3.33 GPA, and I am a CS major. p.p.s. Stuyvesant has had a .edu domain ever since I attended. There is a professor there who runs his own ISP and staffs it with Stuy students.

i really feel like i have to comment on this. i'm on several key networking mailing lists, and one of those has repeated discussions about napster. the issue is more bandwidth than anything. our university has a fat pipe to the world, but a lot of places have only a T1 or not much more. when you consider that the traffic from napster consumes over 30% of that pipe in most circumtances, you'll quickly realize that there's not much room for anything else, be it pr0n, mail, w4r3z trafficking or whatnot.

whine all you want. really, go ahead and do it. "but this is infringing on our freedoms!" the reality is you're hogging bandwidth. and until you pay for that bandwidth, please don't talk about freedoms being infringed upon.

here's a typical school's item on why they banned napster: http://www.grinnell.edu/resnet/announc e.html... while copyright issues are of course taken seriously, it's *bandwidth* folks...

Don't waste your breath getting outraged about some advanced version of a script kiddie getting punished. You want a political prisoner? Try Leonard Peltier or Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Another site.)