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There are buttheads everywhere. But there are certain things that work better for largescale program development. Object-Oriented code and strong typing are good things for larger programs on the back end. Web technologies are still intrinsically ugly, but at least that part of the stack is a huge improvement. Moreover, because PHP has no structure, lots of idiots learned to hack it. The barriers to entry for .Net and Java are higher so the quality of programmers are often better. For a quick graph I would write a couple of lines in Matlab, not write a Java program, but I would never write a several thousand line program to build thousands of graphs per day in Matlab unless forced at gunpoint. Oh, look: http://hudson.dl.stevens-tech....

If it is a school requirement, it's a school requirement. Can't afford it? Don't want to borrow money for it? Go to a different school.

My alma matta required every student to own a computer; believe me, back in '94 a 486DX2 cost a hell of a lot more than most mid- to high-end laptops do these days. But I knew it was a requirement when I applied, and I was excited to actually own a computer ("what's this 'DOOM Deathmatch' I keep hearing about?").

Now, there are other drawbacks to the "must have a laptop" scenario: labs have always been home to expensive hardware and software (Pro/Engineer, SGI machines, trick little AutoCad-specific pointing devices), and now you will burn a lot of money on software and mobile hardware that will spend most of it's life folded up in a book bag -- instead of in a shared envirornment getting constant use. But to address your issue:

If you don't like the laptop requirement, go to a different school.

Is it the devil you're talking about?

Where I went to School 20 credits a semester was considered a normal course load. I needed 146 credits to graduate. However, I don't have a CS degree, I have a BE in Civil Engineering. You'll notice in many IT job postings employers ask for candidates with a CS or any engineering degree. I had no trouble making the shift from Engineering to IT.

Obviously I read your link. That is why I said there is not one scientific study. Your anecdotal "studies" by "doctors" are nothing more than bullshit. Perhaps you (and they) need a lesson on the scientific process. These studies use anecdotal evidence, back into conclusions, don't include control groups, don't do double-blind tests, and don't use significant sample sizes.

I am fine with your opinion of pornography so long as we agree the government shouldn't be used as a substitute for good parenting. I have no problem with you keeping porn from your children. Just don't tell me how to raise my kids. I'd rather discuss sexuality and porn with my children. It may be awkward but I believe it is better than just saying it is outright bad.

I've been to a couple of colleges along the East Coast & in the Mid-West; by far the best times I've had (besides being home) were hanging out at MIT.

I mean, you have to be of that bend... but if you're a geek and enjoy the company of other geeks, MIT rocks.

I just read an article about this,
the x86 design was all based on minimizing chip real estate and not in on providing the best way to do every function. RISC and now IA-64 is a consequence of this philosophy where all tough problems and complexity is pushed onto higher level compilers. On the higher level it becomes to complicated to take care of the problems and it is pushed further up to the operating systems and script languages of today.

Four principles that will inevitably lead to a failed project:
PRINCIPLE 1. If you can't solve a problem, give it to someone else.

PRINCIPLE 2. If you can't choose an alternative, let the user get access to all.

PRINCIPLE 3. If there's an adaptable tool, use it rather than developing a new one.

PRINCIPLE 4. If a bug is found during implementation, try to get around it instead of solving it.

These were formulated in 1976 and translated from the article in Swedish

Not knowing anything about Parrot, there seems to be some support for identifying what programs really does and solve the problems at a really low level. Redundant OP's was a bad thing by the same principles, but an underlying hardware implementation might be able to divide the problem even further.

Other work by Bud Lawson Proper function distribution in computer system architectures, Open complex based systems, (I might even read them some time...)

The curriculum that you have posted sounds like something out of DeVry or Chubb and not something that you'd find at a college. Instead of having particular courses in .NET/Java/C++, have generalized data structures and algorithm classes that teach the basics of low-level software design and hammer the importance of efficiency home.

Having theoretical coursework may seem lame and not usefull post-graduation, but they often teach the concepts that are the most used in a CS position. These concepts can be enforced with projects, homeworks, and, most importantly, through internships or co-operative education experiences.

I am a computer scientist in the defense industry and I have seen other 'computer scientists' with degrees from schools whose curriculum approaches what you are proposing. They have a lot harder time thinking in terms of the problem and are 'hard-wired' to use certain technologies to solve every problem. They rely on the SKILLS they were taught in college rather then on the KNOWLEDGE they learned through theory and the application of the theory through constructive coursework.

Here's a link to the current CS curriculum of the school I attended, it has changed a lot since I went there but the focus on theory and knowledge is still present.

If you are interested, you can take a look at a paper I wrote (back in 1997) on the power of cracking with ten 200MHz Pentium Pro machines.

I would much rather lose the backtick and tilde keys

Are you on crack? Back in '94, you'd miss a lot of websites if you didn't have a <~> key; take http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~khockenb/ as an example.

And as for the back tick, all the 1337 d00dz use it to open quotes using straight ASCII:
``Linus said, `real men don't make backups,' but you have to,'' quiped the SysAdmin.

>I'll start w/ 20 million in the Soviet Union,
>65 million under Mao and 2 million in Cambodia.

Again, meaningless statistics. You can no more blame every death on "atheism" than you can blame the deaths of those 15 million or so killed in the Pacific theater during WWII on Buddhism. Modern butchers have had a lot more raw material to work with than those in the past did, as this graph from the US Census Bureau demonstrates. Global population didn't hit 1 billion until around 1800. By the time of Stalin, Hitler, Mao and WWII, it was at over 2 billion. That, along with technological advances, made it possible for a truly stunning number of people to be slaughtered.

Your numbers for Mao and Pol Pot look a bit high according to this site, which provides pretty extensive analysis of 20th century bodycounts for various wars and atrocities.

Mao didn't set out to slaughter 65 million, by the way. 30 million were killed accidentally, during the ironically-named "Great Leap Forward," due to the famine caused by the idiotic economic "reforms" initiated by the Maoists. Although when dealing with human suffering on that scale, I don't think it matters much whether it's 30 million dead or 65 million dead. Either number is inconceivable.

Mao. Stalin. Pol Pot. Seems to me this is more an indictment of dictatorships than it is an indictment of any religious system (or lack thereof).

As for the proportion of population killed (which seems to me to be a more relevant measure, if you're attempting to compare religious, political or economic systems), check out the section on Proportionality from the same site mentioned above.

Things are pretty much the same at Stevens Tech, $1500-$2000 craptops for all incoming freshmen, but no class ever uses them in a meaningful or useful way, and most profs tell people to not bring their laptops to class.

I took the traditional route and went to a brick and mortar school for my CS degree. While there, I met a number of very interesting people. Some of these people asked me to help them revive the school's sailing team. A boatload of CS and physics students engaged in a non-profit startup in the middle of the Hudson river is hardly what I expected, but I'm very glad that it happened to me.

Along the way I learned that graduate work is fun and picked up an MS degree as well.

While my education allows me to check the "has a BS" and "has an MS" boxes on job applications, the real benefit came from the faculty and students I met over the course of my four years.

That having been said, I think there is an enormous opportunity for online education. My education was expensive, and in this economy there is no guarantee that you will have a job on graduation. High quality schools have can accept only a limited number of students. The Internet is an incredible way to inexpensively disseminate information to a large number of people.

The original universities expanded substantially as books and paper became more and more available. Surely the internet will change education to an even greater extent.

I took the traditional route and went to a brick and mortar school for my CS degree. While there, I met a number of very interesting people. Some of these people asked me to help them revive the school's sailing team. A boatload of CS and physics students engaged in a non-profit startup in the middle of the Hudson river is hardly what I expected, but I'm very glad that it happened to me.

Along the way I learned that graduate work is fun and picked up an MS degree as well.

While my education allows me to check the "has a BS" and "has an MS" boxes on job applications, the real benefit came from the faculty and students I met over the course of my four years.

That having been said, I think there is an enormous opportunity for online education. My education was expensive, and in this economy there is no guarantee that you will have a job on graduation. High quality schools have can accept only a limited number of students. The Internet is an incredible way to inexpensively disseminate information to a large number of people.

The original universities expanded substantially as books and paper became more and more available. Surely the internet will change education to an even greater extent.

No, not usually. Professors are at a school for a variety of reasons, and it's not uncommon for them to regard teaching as the least important of them. Often they're there mostly to do research. Publication enhances their prestige and that of the school, which is why successful research and publication is so important in achieving a professorship. Less so actual teaching in most cases, although one of the the burdens that must be shouldered by the up-and-coming in academia is the lion's share of the instruction, mainly when the professors don't want to deal with it.

I was fortunate enough to have attended a private college where I never encountered a single professor who was uninterested in teaching or who ever tried to avoid the students. (This was also a place where the huge lectures with the professor followed by smaller recitation sessions with TAs were the norm only during freshman year. After that, the professors mostly taught their classes personally.) But I've heard enough horror stories to understand that this is far from being the case everywhere.

My alma mater called itself a College when I earned a Bachelor degree there, but it's since recast itself (aided by a number of sizable endowments and subsequent land purchases and building expansions) as a University, relabelling its three academic curricula as Schools. It's still essentially the same place, with the same academic programs and offering the same degrees, but with a different label. I'd call it more of a marketing ploy than anything else. Which is just as well; you do have to attract students somehow, and when you have a very strong academic program it helps to point that up.

A US resident attending a University or (academic) College will usually say he's "going to college" in exactly the same sense a Brit would say "going to Uni." It's nothing more than a regionalism.

At Stevens Inst. of Tech., you have to have your MAC address registered to get an IP from DHCP after the first month or so of the semester. Since everyone with other computers is lazy, we just set up static IP addresses in some unused space, and it works just fine.

Never happened to me though, but then I run a firewall (and just disabled the Messenger service).

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1. French

Naturally all this came at a price. I was carrying more than 20 credits in my busiest semester, and that was for a Comp Sci degree which was heavily math oriented and for which I needed to take many classes that were otherwise graduate level in order to fulfill the requirements. (At only 2.5 credits instead of 3.) Students in the more traditional engineering disciplines carried an even heavier courseload. It builds character, or so I was told...

At Stevens, students often found themselves working in teams. Even outside the classroom, it proved helpful to use a team approach in studying for exams in the more challenging subjects, but besides that I can recall no lab course where I was working alone. In many of the engineering curricula, a major feature of the Senior year was "Superlab", where teams of students would work on individual projects of their own design. I don't imagine a team-based approach to labs and major projects can be all that uncommon in engineering schools. In RL, engineers almost never work alone. An engineer trained to go solo would be woefully unprepared for the working world.

So the only thing we are left with that's actually unique about the Olin curriculum is the practical approach to every technical subject. This, IMO, cannot work. Not every technical subject can be approached this way. Much of mathematics is just too abstract to monkey with in concrete terms, and many physics concepts can't be directly experimented with at all without large-scale, very expensive equipment. That means the resources to teach some subjects will be extremely limited. In either case, they will have to fall back on traditional methods -- methods, by the way, that we know are effective. Which makes me wonder why the Olin faculty believes they need to be discarded in the first place.

And frankly, I'm not altogether confident they know what they're doing. They debated for 2 months on what an engineer is? Puh-leeze!

My advice is to take your money and hire a starving college student or two. Hell, set up an internship and have them work for free (or give them ~$10/hr. They'll still love you).

here.

It'll be off the front page tomorrow, so all these mirrors shouldn't be needed...

Stevens Institute of Technology has both stevens-tech.edu & stevens.edu; they've had 'em at least as long ago as '94...

Stevens Institute of Technology has both stevens-tech.edu & stevens.edu; they've had 'em at least as long ago as '94...

Take a look at Snevets vs. Stevens Tech. Something that has been passed from generation to generation of students here is the habit of reversing the school name when mocking it... Is Drexel going to also register every iteration of LexerdSux.com?

I'm consistenly amazed why the /. crowd, which is usually open-minded about many issues, fails to even consider the other side of this censorware coin:

• Do schools and libraries actually need Internet access in the first place?
• If they do, do they need unlimited access?
• How is installing censorware any different than just not buying a book?

At my engineering school, the same test administered by the same professors for the last 50 years has lower scores today than in the 1950's, when Internet access, calculators and personal computers were unheard of. For all our clever technology, when it comes to our intellectual aptitude we're stupider than our grandparents.

If anything, censorship in schools needs to go further. Instead of blocking certain sites and locations, censorware should only allow certain sites and locations.

But with regard to Bess, if you think you can form a lawsuit because a company whose software you used compiled statistics on your usage patterns, you need to have another think. Would you also want to sue Mobil for compiling information on its SpeedPass users? Or Ford, for tracking information on people who purchase its cars? Do you seriously think that you can launch a lawsuit against Home Depot for counting how many people purchased vinyl siding? Of course not. And so you can't with N2H2, either.

Quit thinking you're so important that your browsing habits actually matter. They don't, and it is the mark of the self-absorbed to be paranoid, because paranoia makes people feel that their cause is that much nobler. But in your case, there is no data that even ties you as an individual to any marketers, so claiming damagers--the basis of any lawsuit--isn't even a plausible option. It's time to drop the ideas of removing Internet access blocks from your school's browsers. It's time to stop spending time surfing the web. And it's time to start studying for your classes, which is how you will get into a good college, where you will continue to study for your classes, which is how you will get a good job, where you will continue to study, which is how you will do something good and make a difference in this world.

(If I've been harsh in my wording, I apologize. My intent was not to troll or throw out flamebait, but to seriously present another facet--one which is rarely seen here--of this issue.)
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Gee, not a single reference to "The Network Nation", a 1974 book describing past and possible computer-mediated communications. It's old enough that in 1994 it was examined for its historical value. However, web-based interfaces are more recent than that. I think a better network communication summary is this paper.

This /. BBS has a prettier look but is very similar to forums back then (and PLATO had graphics then, even if only in orange-on-black), although now there's a Web to point links at. IRC is old hat also, there were talk programs on hundred-user systems with dozens of participants -- using a network instead of a central computer is only an implementation detail.

The Mitsubishi engineers wanted a certain level of performance out of his Zero, mostly very high maneuverability. They found that they couldn't make his design because using the materials handbooks, it would end up too heavy.

So they bypassed the engineering materials handbooks, retested the materials they wanted to use, discovered some were underrated in the handbooks, and designed the Zero.

When the Allied forces tried to reverse engineer the Zero, they discovered it was an impossible plane, it performed better than it was physically possible. But then, they used the old handbooks.

I recall reading this in an old Air and Space Magazine, but no luck finding a link.

Bonus airplane hack,the P-51.

One, the wing.

Wind tunnel tests showed that for certain shaped airfoils, laminar flow could be maintained far back along the wing, resulting in much decreased drag. The Mustang has these wings, giving it less drag, higher speed and greater range. Of course, they had to be kept clean of bugs and debris.

Two, the radiator.

The radiator/oil cooler was positioned to add a little more thrust to the plane, cool air came in the front, removed heat from the oil, became hotter, and became a primitive jet engine.

George

See http://attila.stevens-tech.edu/~khockenb/ken_thoms on_trojan_cc.txt for the full story.

Things Hackers Detest and Avoid

IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness. Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television (except for cartoons, movies, and "Star Trek" classic). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces.

~from The New Hacker's Dictionary by You Know Who

Exercise: Construct a sentence using at least three of the things hackers detest and avoid.

Example:

Due to the OSI's dishonesty and incompetence, stupid people in business suits have taken to associating themselves, their businesses, or their political campaigns with ``open source'', in speeches or writings dripping with offensive cuteness; additionally, they (the OSI) seem to believe an organization, acting in no doubt with the efficiency and effect of most bureaucracies, rubber stamping licenses proffered by corporate lawyers*, is the best way to ensure the widespread use and general quality of free software.

*See Aesop's Fables; specifically, those relating to the Fox.

/*remember.c

The quote contained herein is derived from the campaign slogan of the 1992 Democratic party candidates for the presidency of the United States; William Clinton and Albert Gore. It is believed to be in the public domain, and thus derived works do not present any legal problems. If that is not the case, fuck you.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
*/

/* Compile with '-o remember'. Run at least once a day for best results.
*/

main(){

printf("It's the free software, Stupid. \n");

}
---------------------------------
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage,