CS 102 at my school is discrete math. And there's a whole lot of math built into the core. (3 calc courses, chemistry, physics, etc.) so I don't see how logic's that different. Plus it's a great way to weed out the kids who should really know this stuff for later courses.
If you have a bad coder fire them don't hamper everyone with a bad process so idiot's can become mildly productive.
If a person fires every bad coder working for him, soon enough he'll be the only one left to work on code. If the company is sufficiently large, maybe he'll be lucky and have a handful of coders whose skills could probably be utilized better if they had bad coders to pass on tasks to (and who hopefully can eventually become good coders.)
Dunno, I'm in my 4th year of computer engineering and what I see is that most students are somewhere between mediocre and horrible programmers. I assume weeding has made the industry scale a little better, but those programmers do come out of school so they have to be picking up skills somewhere.
College kids in the reserves or on a second tour or somebody studying for their GED/GRE/LSATS/whatever or some variant. There's a whole procedure at my school to deal with soldiers who get called up during the semester, so I assume it happens.
I believe the reasoning is that teaching in a private school is more desirable than teaching in a public school.
Depends on the school. In New York, the most prestiogous ones also pay really well (and come with tabs in the 20,000-30,000 per year range). A lot of the other schools (in most states) are parochial/religious and charge tuition that barely covers their operating costs. Most state/city governments actually give the public schools about the same per child as many private schools charge in tuition (before financial aid-I went to a school where nobody paid the actual rate and it was always in the red). The US-Census press release put the public school figure at around $8,287 for 2006 and the a href=http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_056.asp>National Center for Education Statistics puts the avg. 2003/2004 tuition at $5,049 (elem.) and $8,412 (sec.)). The rest of the costs at both schools are made up of gov't funding, which public schools probably have an edge in, and contributions (which vary widely by school.) Basically, a lot of private schools barely have the money to pay their teachers their current salary, much less a higher one.
I know a lot of religious school teachers, and, yeah, they do it 'cause they don't want to teach in public schools, but also 'cause the requirements are a lot lighter: They only need a masters if they want to get a higher pay grade. Often hours are flexible, and free tuition for their kids. (A lot of my friends are teaching at the same school they went to.) There's also a sense of community around it and just a variety of factors. The pay cut is big enough that it's not just the diserability factor.
Anyone who thinks college fully prepares someone to work in a corporate environment as a software developer must not have much experience.
I'll agree with you that it's not the same thing as working in an office, but it depends so much on what sort of project is being used for experience. Hell, I don't even think corporate experience fully prepares people 'cause every company's culture is a bit different and every project is different.
Because my school's a public one, I've worked with plenty of guys who've done corporate (hell, my team's project manager manages multi-million dollar projects for his real job) and I see various levels of skill, knowledge, and professionalism from them. Some of the guys who I'd steer clear of have years of experience, and some of the best guys around have no working experience. (But know their stuff, play well with others, and are reliable.)
There isn't a school that sits you in front of a computer for 8 hours a day with real people that need real results from you for their business to continue making money (ie, to keep their job). They don't have you work on huge projects that have been touched by dozens of people (each with their own ideas and practices)that have fundamental flaws, minor flaws, partially complete requirements, partial documentation, and obscure usage that you can't infer - you have to rely on the requirements
Bad design, implementation, documentation, and scheduling are creating all sorts of problems because this project is run on a year basis with overlapping teams, so we're the third team to get it and we work with the other (lead team) who aren't getting their work done and holding up our progress. (I get the joy of trying to explain to electrical engineers why the software team needs working hardware to test code and move to the next stage-I can only hope that the corporate world is more sane in this respect) The actual code is also plagued with lots of documentation gaps and lovely open-source libraries with vague documentation. The team mates have all sorts of skill sets that have to be worked with, and the professor is not really involved. There are plenty of partially done requirements that are sitting there and being held up by something.
Yeah, it's not corporate experience, but it's also not on the same playing field as rewriting pacman. The biggest difference I see is that there's less devotion/reliability 'cause it's just a grade. Lab work is even higher stakes in some way 'cause the work is done for a grant/stipend/pay check.
Collaborating with others, sharing ideas, designing, working with customers, leveraging your position to gain resources, convincing management why you're right, scheduling, so on and so on.. you don't get that coding at home and you don't get that at school.
Really? 'cause being on a senior design team doing a build for a competition means I've had to do all of that, plus budgeting & reimbursement nightmares. Add on being team leader for extra headachy fun. Throw out senior design and I've gotten a lot of that just working for a research lab, or at least the one my professor runs. (And filling out purchase orders, so I've got sympathy for the project manager.) It's kind of like what another poster was saying: experience is everywhere, a kids just gotta know how to recognize it and convey it on the resume and to the interviewer.
Or just have Jews donate to projects. At the least, 10% of any decent salary should cover the hosting fees. ('specially if the project can get company matched 503c status.)
What possible advantage does it have over the zillion alternatives?
It's already running on all their systems and works relatively decently. A lot of the software is already developed for it, so even those costs probably don't run too high. Plus I'm sure that there are plenty of coders who developed for it back when it was used by everyone.
does anyone else think that there is a great potential for disappointment for kids when they get their SuperCoolTM toy packed in a plain brown cardboard box?
They'll be too distracted by their shiny new toy to notice. Kids have very short attention spans and like to get to the good stuff fast. Seriously, they rip up the packaging in a minute to get to the toy anyway, and only seriously notice the packaging when they're at the store (and even then, mostly in so far as the packaging displays the product contained therein.) When I presented kids I've worked with new toys, they've never asked me about the packaging.
toys attached to cardboard boxes with dozens (sometimes over a hundred) wire twist-ties and highly strecthy rubber-band-like straps
So, just about every barbie ever? I don't remember my parents ever doing it for me, but it was kind of fun to slowly unbind my doll from her restraints, trying to do it all evenly. The rubber bands also made good hair ties. Make it a game and your daughter should have fun with it too. The playsets are way worse, utensils and stuff in that sheet of plastic, and you've gotta twist it out without wrecking the pot or plate or whatever that's in the plastic.
The support personnel are often as useful as a pseudo-intelligent set of predefined responses.
That's 'cause they're often reading from a script of psuedo-intelligent predefined responses. I think some companies have switched over to pure AI for level 1 support and the phone companies switched years ago in the hopes that one of the script answers will work and the customer won't need the techs.
Apparently the grand majority of people don't care (or at least the game companies don't think they care) about the music in a game as much as the other content.
*shrugs* I'm not a big gamer, so might not mean anything but yeah, I never cared about the music. Even when I like it, I've gotten annoyed after a while and tend to mute it and throw an mp3 instead (if I'm not at home and have something in the background.) I also do a lot of my gaming on my psp during a car ride, where I have to listen to other people talking. It wouldn't phase me if a lot of kids playing on gameboys/dses/psps are in the same boat.
Genre also matters. I like a lot of fighting and racing games, where the level is over fast and the music's good for mood, but changes too fast for there to be much impact. GTA music stands out as being cool 'cause it's weaved in through the radio.
I know using the tablet edition of Windows Vista I can get much higher than 90% recognition of cursive input on the tablet. However that is probably due to the fact that no scanning is needed:
You're also constantly teaching the computer to recognize the handwriting by accepting good texts and rewriting bad ones (or choosing the match.) And as the parent said, training the comp helps a lot. I've got an XP tablet and lousy handwriting, so my recognition is usually around %30, up to maybe %50 if I take my time to form clear letters.
But they do have somewhat useless screencasts. The frustrating part is that this is multimedia software, so they could put their manuals into the.sophie form, which would be cool and relevant. Then, they could just take some screenshots of those.sophies and throw 'em on the frontpage, and yeah that'd be way more informative than what's already there. And they totally need to find a way to display examples (html works just fine) without forcing people to download the software, 'cause the crowd they're aimed at (people who'd totally go for FOSS) is so not going to download random files and software to open those files.
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
But from what I can gather from the summary, the whole point of the grant was
to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java.
So in theory it's primarily a language swap, and the features and GUI shouldn't change much. Basically, I think the screenshotting is actually valid in this case, and honestly should be the guide for the new work.
Most of the boys will be playing video games, and most of the girls will have brothers who also play video games, or know what goes on.
Many of the girls will be playing video games too. I wanted to be a coder when I was in fourth grade 'cause I wanted to improve on my Barbie fashion/hair games. (I wanted way more options than my games were giving me.) Barbie, bratz, American girl-there are a ton of games out there marketed at girls. I also played some games just 'cause I had a brother playing them.
Careful though, you may leak the presence of Bob, Enzo and Megabyte.
A short reboot clip (30 seconds or so) may actually be a great opener, provided it's one that he can jump off of into a discussion of the city metaphor. (*shrugs* I thought reboot was cool in 4th grade, and it's what got me into computers.)
I know, I know, but I didn't want to add an off topic one-liner over that mistake. (Note to self: take the stupid karma hit to fend off grammar Nazis).
skipped the part about how to turn English nouns from their singular forms into their plural forms?
Considering that grammar isn't taught in most schools (2 weeks in sophomore year at mine), um yeah is was often skipped. There's also a bad trend of weighing ideas more than grammar/organization, so a lot of kids get through school with pretty bad writing. I've read plenty of A papers which had all sorts of problems with structure. In college it's even worse, and I've proofread plenty of horrors written by very bright people.
Right. John Hodgman does not represent a stereotypical PC user and Justin Long is not intended to represent a stereotypical Mac user. If you pay any attention to the ad, you'll realize that they represent personifications of a Mac and a PC. So that's why they say "I'm a Mac," and "I'm a PC."
The point of ads is to sell things right? So, one of the best ways is to make people really identify with the things they own, 'cause loyalty is good. Spinning that the chars just identify with the OS's may be technically accurate, but they're also very much supposed to represent the user: The "creative OS is used by the cool guy, the stale OS by the boring one", and to say that wasn't the whole point of the ad is well kind of naive.
Mark my words: These ads will preach to the choir (the people who already hate the Mac commercials) but will do nothing to asuage those commericals. If anything, Microsoft has just drawn MORE attention to Apple.
Way to go, Microsoft.
Dunno about that. I thought that the apple commercials were brilliant and that this is a great riff on them that is obliviously inspired by the formula but not a carbon copy. The ad co-opts apples hipster cool message by being about diversity, but tones it down into a more generic "everybody" message, which is actually great when going for more market share.
*shrugs* My brother loves the new commercials and he's pretty much Microsoft's target audience: into technology enough to boy new boxes every few years, but not into using linux. Granted, my brother also hated the Seinfeld ones, so yeah there's definitely a "this is better than the last" effect, but not a preaching to the choir one.
My high school was at least %50 Asian, and there's a decently high percentage in my college program.
have incredibly demanding parents.
So do I (I think it's an immigrant thing as much as a cultural thing), but having high expectations isn't the same as being on top of the kid all the time. There's an expectation that the kid will do well, and so long as good grades get brought home, no problem. (Bad grades create problems, but that happens for every kid.)
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CS 102 at my school is discrete math. And there's a whole lot of math built into the core. (3 calc courses, chemistry, physics, etc.) so I don't see how logic's that different. Plus it's a great way to weed out the kids who should really know this stuff for later courses.
If you have a bad coder fire them don't hamper everyone with a bad process so idiot's can become mildly productive.
If a person fires every bad coder working for him, soon enough he'll be the only one left to work on code. If the company is sufficiently large, maybe he'll be lucky and have a handful of coders whose skills could probably be utilized better if they had bad coders to pass on tasks to (and who hopefully can eventually become good coders.)
Dunno, I'm in my 4th year of computer engineering and what I see is that most students are somewhere between mediocre and horrible programmers. I assume weeding has made the industry scale a little better, but those programmers do come out of school so they have to be picking up skills somewhere.
School kids are getting sent out to fight wars?
College kids in the reserves or on a second tour or somebody studying for their GED/GRE/LSATS/whatever or some variant. There's a whole procedure at my school to deal with soldiers who get called up during the semester, so I assume it happens.
I believe the reasoning is that teaching in a private school is more desirable than teaching in a public school.
Depends on the school. In New York, the most prestiogous ones also pay really well (and come with tabs in the 20,000-30,000 per year range). A lot of the other schools (in most states) are parochial/religious and charge tuition that barely covers their operating costs. Most state/city governments actually give the public schools about the same per child as many private schools charge in tuition (before financial aid-I went to a school where nobody paid the actual rate and it was always in the red). The US-Census press release put the public school figure at around $8,287 for 2006 and the a href=http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_056.asp>National Center for Education Statistics puts the avg. 2003/2004 tuition at $5,049 (elem.) and $8,412 (sec.)). The rest of the costs at both schools are made up of gov't funding, which public schools probably have an edge in, and contributions (which vary widely by school.) Basically, a lot of private schools barely have the money to pay their teachers their current salary, much less a higher one.
I know a lot of religious school teachers, and, yeah, they do it 'cause they don't want to teach in public schools, but also 'cause the requirements are a lot lighter: They only need a masters if they want to get a higher pay grade. Often hours are flexible, and free tuition for their kids. (A lot of my friends are teaching at the same school they went to.) There's also a sense of community around it and just a variety of factors. The pay cut is big enough that it's not just the diserability factor.
Anyone who thinks college fully prepares someone to work in a corporate environment as a software developer must not have much experience.
I'll agree with you that it's not the same thing as working in an office, but it depends so much on what sort of project is being used for experience. Hell, I don't even think corporate experience fully prepares people 'cause every company's culture is a bit different and every project is different.
Because my school's a public one, I've worked with plenty of guys who've done corporate (hell, my team's project manager manages multi-million dollar projects for his real job) and I see various levels of skill, knowledge, and professionalism from them. Some of the guys who I'd steer clear of have years of experience, and some of the best guys around have no working experience. (But know their stuff, play well with others, and are reliable.)
There isn't a school that sits you in front of a computer for 8 hours a day with real people that need real results from you for their business to continue making money (ie, to keep their job). They don't have you work on huge projects that have been touched by dozens of people (each with their own ideas and practices)that have fundamental flaws, minor flaws, partially complete requirements, partial documentation, and obscure usage that you can't infer - you have to rely on the requirements
Bad design, implementation, documentation, and scheduling are creating all sorts of problems because this project is run on a year basis with overlapping teams, so we're the third team to get it and we work with the other (lead team) who aren't getting their work done and holding up our progress. (I get the joy of trying to explain to electrical engineers why the software team needs working hardware to test code and move to the next stage-I can only hope that the corporate world is more sane in this respect) The actual code is also plagued with lots of documentation gaps and lovely open-source libraries with vague documentation. The team mates have all sorts of skill sets that have to be worked with, and the professor is not really involved. There are plenty of partially done requirements that are sitting there and being held up by something.
Yeah, it's not corporate experience, but it's also not on the same playing field as rewriting pacman. The biggest difference I see is that there's less devotion/reliability 'cause it's just a grade. Lab work is even higher stakes in some way 'cause the work is done for a grant/stipend/pay check.
Collaborating with others, sharing ideas, designing, working with customers, leveraging your position to gain resources, convincing management why you're right, scheduling, so on and so on.. you don't get that coding at home and you don't get that at school.
Really? 'cause being on a senior design team doing a build for a competition means I've had to do all of that, plus budgeting & reimbursement nightmares. Add on being team leader for extra headachy fun. Throw out senior design and I've gotten a lot of that just working for a research lab, or at least the one my professor runs. (And filling out purchase orders, so I've got sympathy for the project manager.) It's kind of like what another poster was saying: experience is everywhere, a kids just gotta know how to recognize it and convey it on the resume and to the interviewer.
Depends. How old are you?
*shrugs* I actually have to give 10% to charity, so I didn't actually mean it in a flamebait way, but oh well.
Or just have Jews donate to projects. At the least, 10% of any decent salary should cover the hosting fees. ('specially if the project can get company matched 503c status.)
The basic rule of any con is that "You can't cheat an honest person".
Except for the "starving children" scams that prey on a person's honesty. Lots of those, and they like praying on religious communities.
What possible advantage does it have over the zillion alternatives?
It's already running on all their systems and works relatively decently. A lot of the software is already developed for it, so even those costs probably don't run too high. Plus I'm sure that there are plenty of coders who developed for it back when it was used by everyone.
does anyone else think that there is a great potential for disappointment for kids when they get their SuperCoolTM toy packed in a plain brown cardboard box?
They'll be too distracted by their shiny new toy to notice. Kids have very short attention spans and like to get to the good stuff fast. Seriously, they rip up the packaging in a minute to get to the toy anyway, and only seriously notice the packaging when they're at the store (and even then, mostly in so far as the packaging displays the product contained therein.) When I presented kids I've worked with new toys, they've never asked me about the packaging.
toys attached to cardboard boxes with dozens (sometimes over a hundred) wire twist-ties and highly strecthy rubber-band-like straps
So, just about every barbie ever? I don't remember my parents ever doing it for me, but it was kind of fun to slowly unbind my doll from her restraints, trying to do it all evenly. The rubber bands also made good hair ties. Make it a game and your daughter should have fun with it too. The playsets are way worse, utensils and stuff in that sheet of plastic, and you've gotta twist it out without wrecking the pot or plate or whatever that's in the plastic.
Maybe less linux units are being produced?
The support personnel are often as useful as a pseudo-intelligent set of predefined responses.
That's 'cause they're often reading from a script of psuedo-intelligent predefined responses. I think some companies have switched over to pure AI for level 1 support and the phone companies switched years ago in the hopes that one of the script answers will work and the customer won't need the techs.
Apparently the grand majority of people don't care (or at least the game companies don't think they care) about the music in a game as much as the other content.
*shrugs* I'm not a big gamer, so might not mean anything but yeah, I never cared about the music. Even when I like it, I've gotten annoyed after a while and tend to mute it and throw an mp3 instead (if I'm not at home and have something in the background.) I also do a lot of my gaming on my psp during a car ride, where I have to listen to other people talking. It wouldn't phase me if a lot of kids playing on gameboys/dses/psps are in the same boat.
Genre also matters. I like a lot of fighting and racing games, where the level is over fast and the music's good for mood, but changes too fast for there to be much impact. GTA music stands out as being cool 'cause it's weaved in through the radio.
I know using the tablet edition of Windows Vista I can get much higher than 90% recognition of cursive input on the tablet. However that is probably due to the fact that no scanning is needed:
You're also constantly teaching the computer to recognize the handwriting by accepting good texts and rewriting bad ones (or choosing the match.) And as the parent said, training the comp helps a lot. I've got an XP tablet and lousy handwriting, so my recognition is usually around %30, up to maybe %50 if I take my time to form clear letters.
no screenshot graphics,
But they do have somewhat useless screencasts. The frustrating part is that this is multimedia software, so they could put their manuals into the .sophie form, which would be cool and relevant. Then, they could just take some screenshots of those .sophies and throw 'em on the frontpage, and yeah that'd be way more informative than what's already there. And they totally need to find a way to display examples (html works just fine) without forcing people to download the software, 'cause the crowd they're aimed at (people who'd totally go for FOSS) is so not going to download random files and software to open those files.
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
But from what I can gather from the summary, the whole point of the grant was
to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java.
So in theory it's primarily a language swap, and the features and GUI shouldn't change much. Basically, I think the screenshotting is actually valid in this case, and honestly should be the guide for the new work.
Most of the boys will be playing video games, and most of the girls will have brothers who also play video games, or know what goes on.
Many of the girls will be playing video games too. I wanted to be a coder when I was in fourth grade 'cause I wanted to improve on my Barbie fashion/hair games. (I wanted way more options than my games were giving me.) Barbie, bratz, American girl-there are a ton of games out there marketed at girls. I also played some games just 'cause I had a brother playing them.
Careful though, you may leak the presence of Bob, Enzo and Megabyte.
A short reboot clip (30 seconds or so) may actually be a great opener, provided it's one that he can jump off of into a discussion of the city metaphor. (*shrugs* I thought reboot was cool in 4th grade, and it's what got me into computers.)
I know, I know, but I didn't want to add an off topic one-liner over that mistake. (Note to self: take the stupid karma hit to fend off grammar Nazis).
skipped the part about how to turn English nouns from their singular forms into their plural forms?
Considering that grammar isn't taught in most schools (2 weeks in sophomore year at mine), um yeah is was often skipped. There's also a bad trend of weighing ideas more than grammar/organization, so a lot of kids get through school with pretty bad writing. I've read plenty of A papers which had all sorts of problems with structure. In college it's even worse, and I've proofread plenty of horrors written by very bright people.
Right. John Hodgman does not represent a stereotypical PC user and Justin Long is not intended to represent a stereotypical Mac user. If you pay any attention to the ad, you'll realize that they represent personifications of a Mac and a PC. So that's why they say "I'm a Mac," and "I'm a PC."
The point of ads is to sell things right? So, one of the best ways is to make people really identify with the things they own, 'cause loyalty is good. Spinning that the chars just identify with the OS's may be technically accurate, but they're also very much supposed to represent the user: The "creative OS is used by the cool guy, the stale OS by the boring one", and to say that wasn't the whole point of the ad is well kind of naive.
Mark my words: These ads will preach to the choir (the people who already hate the Mac commercials) but will do nothing to asuage those commericals. If anything, Microsoft has just drawn MORE attention to Apple.
Way to go, Microsoft.
Dunno about that. I thought that the apple commercials were brilliant and that this is a great riff on them that is obliviously inspired by the formula but not a carbon copy. The ad co-opts apples hipster cool message by being about diversity, but tones it down into a more generic "everybody" message, which is actually great when going for more market share.
*shrugs* My brother loves the new commercials and he's pretty much Microsoft's target audience: into technology enough to boy new boxes every few years, but not into using linux. Granted, my brother also hated the Seinfeld ones, so yeah there's definitely a "this is better than the last" effect, but not a preaching to the choir one.
My high school was at least %50 Asian, and there's a decently high percentage in my college program.
have incredibly demanding parents.
So do I (I think it's an immigrant thing as much as a cultural thing), but having high expectations isn't the same as being on top of the kid all the time. There's an expectation that the kid will do well, and so long as good grades get brought home, no problem. (Bad grades create problems, but that happens for every kid.)