Sad but true... We have a duty phone on our help desk that rotates weekly, and for as long as I've been working here, you would get a comp day in exchange for your week on call. The last few requests for comp days by my coworkers have been denied, and the rumours are going around that comp time is a thing of the past.
Is it really possible that no one's made a "nuke the fridge" comment yet?
Ah, well. I'll be the one to say it - looks like Lucas really nuked the fridge with this one.
I feel like a lot of people are ignoring the main point of the OP - the difference appears to be cultural, not gender-based. Instead of arguing about discrepancies in teaching methods geared towards one gender or the other, we could be discussing the importance placed on math in Eastern vs. Western culture, or something along those lines. But simply arguing back and forth isn't going to bring anything new to light.
I'm glad someone else brought up QBasic. When I was about 7 years old, my dad helped me learn how to write a program in QBasic that converted inches to centimeters and vice versa. It's not much, but it's what first got me interested in computers. I'm not much of a programmer now, but I know enough to get around in Java and VB. I even took a class in Delphi. Delphi's not bad either. It may not be terribly useful these days, but it's simple and straightforward and easy enough to manipulate. Our teacher had us recreating games like pong and breakout in just a couple weeks.
I think another thing that really helps keep interest peaked is having a specific project in mind no matter what language you're learning. You're much more motivated to learn if you have an end goal of what exactly you want your program to do, even if it's as simple as converting inches to centimeters.
...about this not being a solution for the multitudes of people who simply choose not to take their medications, but that's not the only goal of a system like this. It could go a long way towards helping people keep up with their doses. My mom died at 45 because one of the medications she was on gave her memory issues and one day she overdosed because she simply couldn't remember that she had already taken the drugs. If this helps anyone avoid that fate, it will be successful in my opinion.
'Math Doesn't Suck' is done in the style of a teen magazine. It even includes a horoscope, cute doodles of shoes and jewelry, and testimonials from attractive young career women that use math at work. It focuses on fractions and pre-algebra and uses mnemonics like calling a reciprocal a 'refliprocal', because you just take the fraction and flip it upside down.
Degrading and condescending, indeed. While it is great that she's trying to get girls more interested in math, this is sending completely the wrong message. I think it's horrendous that society thinks the only way to interest teenage girls in things like math and science is to trick them into it with horoscopes and shoes. And math shouldn't be dumbed down by renaming things because words like 'reciprocal' are just too hard. Things like this disgust and insult me. I don't enjoy being treated like a less-intelligent species just because I don't have a penis.
How is it FUD if I'm just relaying personal experience with Vista? I never said anything about Vista being a horrible operating system or never working for anyone or anything along those lines - I just said it was having problems handling my friend's computer, problems that Ubuntu didn't have. I know Vista has been working just great for a lot of people, and I'm glad they have an operating system that works for them, you included.
And just for clarification, how does my post show my incompetence? Incompetence with what?
I had a similar experience a couple days ago. My friend had a brand new Thinkpad R61 with 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM. He said he was having problems with his display and his network card. I booted up the system and was appalled by the fact that it took this new installation of Vista Home basic even longer to start than my 5 year old XP box. Now I've read all the "zOMG teh vista has popups on EVERY CLICK!" comments on/. and was pretty sure that much exaggeration was going on, but I quickly discovered that these comments were barely a stone's throw from reality. I'm very well aware that you can turn off all the popups, but for someone who's just trying to get a network card working on the first boot-up of the machine, it was extremely aggravating. On top of that, the machine was running unbelievably slow. There's no excuse for that - brand new installation, brand new machine - 2GB of RAM!
I asked him how attached he was to Vista, and he said he wasn't - he would have chosen XP if there had been an option for it, and he'd just as soon have Linux. I put Ubuntu on there faster than you could blink and set him up with XP in VMWare for running Photoshop and things (yay art school). Ubuntu detected the native resolution for the display no problem. I had to do a little fiddling to get the network card working properly, but it didn't take any longer than five minutes. Long story short, Ubuntu saves the day again ftw! He can now do absolutely everything he needs and wants with his laptop, and it's running at a much more reasonable speed and required very little effort on either of our parts to get it that way.
I can only speak from personal experience, but I definitely think that LUGs are still relevant. There's a great group that gets together weekly in Ohio on an IRC channel, and this coming school year we're starting a LUG on campus (University of Cincinnati). Aside from putting you in touch with more people who may be able to help you solve a problem, LUGs are great for general discussion about FOSS and and all kinds of things. It's a great venue for people to share new discoveries and have active dialogue about current topics in the field.
It may work well for sharing pictures, but I don't think everyone who likes sharing pictures is going to run out and buy a Zune just to be able to share pictures with each other. It might be a little more useful if Zunes could connect to anything other than other Zunes, but they can't. Once again, MS has crippled what could be a really useful feature.
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Sad but true... We have a duty phone on our help desk that rotates weekly, and for as long as I've been working here, you would get a comp day in exchange for your week on call. The last few requests for comp days by my coworkers have been denied, and the rumours are going around that comp time is a thing of the past.
Can an entire network nuke the fridge?
There, I fixed it for you.
Is it really possible that no one's made a "nuke the fridge" comment yet? Ah, well. I'll be the one to say it - looks like Lucas really nuked the fridge with this one.
I feel like a lot of people are ignoring the main point of the OP - the difference appears to be cultural, not gender-based. Instead of arguing about discrepancies in teaching methods geared towards one gender or the other, we could be discussing the importance placed on math in Eastern vs. Western culture, or something along those lines. But simply arguing back and forth isn't going to bring anything new to light.
I'm glad someone else brought up QBasic. When I was about 7 years old, my dad helped me learn how to write a program in QBasic that converted inches to centimeters and vice versa. It's not much, but it's what first got me interested in computers. I'm not much of a programmer now, but I know enough to get around in Java and VB. I even took a class in Delphi. Delphi's not bad either. It may not be terribly useful these days, but it's simple and straightforward and easy enough to manipulate. Our teacher had us recreating games like pong and breakout in just a couple weeks.
I think another thing that really helps keep interest peaked is having a specific project in mind no matter what language you're learning. You're much more motivated to learn if you have an end goal of what exactly you want your program to do, even if it's as simple as converting inches to centimeters.
...about this not being a solution for the multitudes of people who simply choose not to take their medications, but that's not the only goal of a system like this. It could go a long way towards helping people keep up with their doses. My mom died at 45 because one of the medications she was on gave her memory issues and one day she overdosed because she simply couldn't remember that she had already taken the drugs. If this helps anyone avoid that fate, it will be successful in my opinion.
'Math Doesn't Suck' is done in the style of a teen magazine. It even includes a horoscope, cute doodles of shoes and jewelry, and testimonials from attractive young career women that use math at work. It focuses on fractions and pre-algebra and uses mnemonics like calling a reciprocal a 'refliprocal', because you just take the fraction and flip it upside down.
Degrading and condescending, indeed. While it is great that she's trying to get girls more interested in math, this is sending completely the wrong message. I think it's horrendous that society thinks the only way to interest teenage girls in things like math and science is to trick them into it with horoscopes and shoes. And math shouldn't be dumbed down by renaming things because words like 'reciprocal' are just too hard. Things like this disgust and insult me. I don't enjoy being treated like a less-intelligent species just because I don't have a penis.
How is it FUD if I'm just relaying personal experience with Vista? I never said anything about Vista being a horrible operating system or never working for anyone or anything along those lines - I just said it was having problems handling my friend's computer, problems that Ubuntu didn't have. I know Vista has been working just great for a lot of people, and I'm glad they have an operating system that works for them, you included. And just for clarification, how does my post show my incompetence? Incompetence with what?
I had a similar experience a couple days ago. My friend had a brand new Thinkpad R61 with 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM. He said he was having problems with his display and his network card. I booted up the system and was appalled by the fact that it took this new installation of Vista Home basic even longer to start than my 5 year old XP box. Now I've read all the "zOMG teh vista has popups on EVERY CLICK!" comments on /. and was pretty sure that much exaggeration was going on, but I quickly discovered that these comments were barely a stone's throw from reality. I'm very well aware that you can turn off all the popups, but for someone who's just trying to get a network card working on the first boot-up of the machine, it was extremely aggravating. On top of that, the machine was running unbelievably slow. There's no excuse for that - brand new installation, brand new machine - 2GB of RAM!
I asked him how attached he was to Vista, and he said he wasn't - he would have chosen XP if there had been an option for it, and he'd just as soon have Linux. I put Ubuntu on there faster than you could blink and set him up with XP in VMWare for running Photoshop and things (yay art school). Ubuntu detected the native resolution for the display no problem. I had to do a little fiddling to get the network card working properly, but it didn't take any longer than five minutes. Long story short, Ubuntu saves the day again ftw! He can now do absolutely everything he needs and wants with his laptop, and it's running at a much more reasonable speed and required very little effort on either of our parts to get it that way.
I can only speak from personal experience, but I definitely think that LUGs are still relevant. There's a great group that gets together weekly in Ohio on an IRC channel, and this coming school year we're starting a LUG on campus (University of Cincinnati). Aside from putting you in touch with more people who may be able to help you solve a problem, LUGs are great for general discussion about FOSS and and all kinds of things. It's a great venue for people to share new discoveries and have active dialogue about current topics in the field.
It may work well for sharing pictures, but I don't think everyone who likes sharing pictures is going to run out and buy a Zune just to be able to share pictures with each other. It might be a little more useful if Zunes could connect to anything other than other Zunes, but they can't. Once again, MS has crippled what could be a really useful feature.