I attended a conference once several years ago where Alexander Stepanov - father of the C++ STL - spoke on math and CS. He recomended a personal indepth study of algebra and geometry, not because they were particularly related to computer science, but because the teach (resp) problem solving skills and architecture. I suspect the basic rationale behind requiring advanced math for a university degree in any field of science is to enhance your thinking muscles. Rather than fight against it because you don't understand the reasons why, try to embrace it and get more than you paid for from your education. Hire a part time tutor to help you understand the ellusive concepts. You can never learn too much in this life.
Too bad we can't get the USPTO to use the software development community for open peer review of patent applications before they're granted. The field is too complicated for a handful of people to make all the decisions anyway. We'd get the sort of results we get from IETF or other standards organizations then.
No one "knows how to program" when they graduate. Go get a job with IBM, HP, Sun, Novell or one of the other larger world-wide companies. They actively seek out new graduates. They fully understand that these graduates don't have a clue about writing proper code. They hire them as an investment. Both sides win. The new graduate gets a real education, with a reasonable ramp-up (in terms of months to years), and the company gets some employee loyalty (hopefully).
I've been in the industry for 20 years. After 20 years, I know something about writing software. In retrospect, I knew NOTHING about writing software when I graduated.
I used to work for Novell. Now, I know they're an open source company, owning a linux distro and all, but I worked for several years on the eDirectory team. The database used by eDirectory was minded by a couple of my friends. Eventually, eDirectory moved off into the dark corners of the company, and the FLAIM database was still being maintained by these two fellas. They asked, and were granted permission to open source FLAIM. It's a great tool, and we had a lot of great response to this move. I myself used to work on the foundation layer for eDirectory - an abstraction and portability layer that we called SAL. I asked, and SAL is now open source. You can find both of these projects on the Novell forge site at http://developer.novell.com./
Novell is a pretty forward thinking company, and has a vested interested in open source and the open source world. Your company might be different, but as many have commented so far, it can't hurt to ask. Just present your argument in a rational manner - and it wouldn't hurt if you could present some benefit to the company for making your project open source. If they say no, well, they have that right. Don't get angry with them, but don't feel ashamed for asking either.
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I attended a conference once several years ago where Alexander Stepanov - father of the C++ STL - spoke on math and CS. He recomended a personal indepth study of algebra and geometry, not because they were particularly related to computer science, but because the teach (resp) problem solving skills and architecture. I suspect the basic rationale behind requiring advanced math for a university degree in any field of science is to enhance your thinking muscles. Rather than fight against it because you don't understand the reasons why, try to embrace it and get more than you paid for from your education. Hire a part time tutor to help you understand the ellusive concepts. You can never learn too much in this life.
Too bad we can't get the USPTO to use the software development community for open peer review of patent applications before they're granted. The field is too complicated for a handful of people to make all the decisions anyway. We'd get the sort of results we get from IETF or other standards organizations then.
No one "knows how to program" when they graduate. Go get a job with IBM, HP, Sun, Novell or one of the other larger world-wide companies. They actively seek out new graduates. They fully understand that these graduates don't have a clue about writing proper code. They hire them as an investment. Both sides win. The new graduate gets a real education, with a reasonable ramp-up (in terms of months to years), and the company gets some employee loyalty (hopefully). I've been in the industry for 20 years. After 20 years, I know something about writing software. In retrospect, I knew NOTHING about writing software when I graduated.
I used to work for Novell. Now, I know they're an open source company, owning a linux distro and all, but I worked for several years on the eDirectory team. The database used by eDirectory was minded by a couple of my friends. Eventually, eDirectory moved off into the dark corners of the company, and the FLAIM database was still being maintained by these two fellas. They asked, and were granted permission to open source FLAIM. It's a great tool, and we had a lot of great response to this move. I myself used to work on the foundation layer for eDirectory - an abstraction and portability layer that we called SAL. I asked, and SAL is now open source. You can find both of these projects on the Novell forge site at http://developer.novell.com./
Novell is a pretty forward thinking company, and has a vested interested in open source and the open source world. Your company might be different, but as many have commented so far, it can't hurt to ask. Just present your argument in a rational manner - and it wouldn't hurt if you could present some benefit to the company for making your project open source. If they say no, well, they have that right. Don't get angry with them, but don't feel ashamed for asking either.