Great - you're old, you're a girl, send me your resume. I'll hire you if you can do the job. Don't care about age, sex, preferences, etc. Anyone who throws away resumes based on any of that is an idiot and shouldn't be in the HR business. I've had some great hires that have said they were having trouble just getting past the front door at other companies. Me, I'm blind to all that - show me your good, you fit with my team, and you're in. That's it.
Really, too much cost? I had a friend with the EDTASM assembler for the Trash-80 Mod 1 ("16K" required!) and don't recall the price for the assembler being too much. Now, getting that required 16K RAM was fairly expensive, and if you wanted more then it was REALLY expensive because of the expansion case.
... from the constant barrage you can see on US networks (ABC, NBC, and especially CBS) with promo bumpers for "Watch our net HIT show...", and "On the NEW HIT SHOW this fall..." The thing hasn't even aired yet and it's a "HIT SHOW". Even if its crap, and it gets cancelled in half a season it's a "HIT SHOW". Garbage all...
There is a definite conflict between what the course encouraged and what the Harvard academic policy discourages when it comes to collaborative classwork. I ran into it headfirst at the last time a Harvard cheating scandal happened - and I was in THAT class, so had firsthand knowledge. I know people in CS50, so have some real knowledge here too - it will be interesting how/if it is resolved. The panel that does the academic honesty reviews is not something you want to face - it has some real bite, and students do get expelled.
Yeah, don't speak about what you know nothing of. This class is actually pretty tough - not a walk in the park by any means, and someone without some CS knowledge would struggle. I have a Harvard CS degree, and it's not a joke, and don't even get me going on how hard the courses are, because they are very rigorous. I earned my degree, and I think everyone who makes it out of that program has too. C
Yeah me too - but I know someone in this class, and I've looked over the material. It's the real deal here, no way someone with no CS background could pass this course from a cold start. I'm not surprised at cheating here, but there are some facts that haven't come out here (disclaimer, I'm a Harvard CS grad). First of all there's a grey area in this class on what was allowed - collaboration was encouraged but each student had to submit their own work. This leads to some ambiguity. Also the Harvard academic honesty policy is very discouraging of collaborative works - it's very each to cross the line. Outright blatant cheating does occur, and Harvard is very strict and DOES expel students over it (contrary to another comment here.) Here it's not quite so cut-and-dry I think. C
Not a panacea by any means. Sometimes it's harder to apply to general business programming in a meaningful and useful way - immutable objects aren't necessarily the best fit for data objects, to my mind anyway. Applied correctly and maybe less-than-completely the patterns and thinking from functional programming can be a good thing - but I'm not really a fan of pure functional programming and prefer the hybrid approaches like Scala.
Where are you going to put that kind of data, should you manage to fill one of these? In the cloud? No way, and your ISP will love the data cap overage charges if you try. Another drive? Well, unless you buy at least three of these then that will get expensive fast, requiring multiple older drives per one of these. Tape? Have you looked at LTO or similar prices? Not gonna happen for home users, even most businesses. So, when your rust stops spinning and the data is at rest, where do you turn?
I wouldn't read too much into the "no film zone". All Harvard classes that are recorded have that clause, and have had it for at least 10 years. Maybe longer, but I can't remember that far back.
I wouldn't read too much into the "no film zone". All Harvard classes that are recorded have that clause, and have had it for at least 10 years. Maybe longer, but I can't remember that far back.
"Storage corruption" is fairly vague. I've been bit by it in the past - once due to a vendor software bug (Oracle block corruption), and once due to hardware (flaky storage controller chip writing garbage (Supermicro MB)) I would like to hear more about the root cause.
I've had this position in other comments, but I'll say it again - College degrees don't teach you how to do a job, and don't necessarily equate to job performance. To that end, it really doesn't matter what kind of degree someone has. A college degree is about broadening horizons, teaching critical thinking, and exploring subjects in slightly more depth in a controlled environment. I had taken plenty what we now call "STEM" courses in the process of pursuing a Harvard undergraduate degree (of which they don't offer a "science" degree in the classical sense anyway!) A greenhorn college grad will have been exposed to many valuable situations, and a college degree says that they can think and have proven that to some number of accredited boards to their satisfaction. They will still need job training, additional learning, and just plan ole' experience. Some people will be just better at certain types of jobs, and not at others. Do people who choose a particular degree type self-select? Maybe, but there are plenty of medieval lit majors out there programming, and they do it just as well as an EE or CS major.
Oh, and grad school is about torture and the ego's of the adviser committee. It means you spent a lot of time as a serf eating ramen noodles. It may mean you know a lot about almost nothing...
We've been arguing this for more than 20 years. Not much has changed, and it's not a new question. Code Slinger vs. Book Knowledge. College of Hard Knocks vs College of Ivy. I'm a greybeard now, and while I won't pretend to answer the whole question, I will provide some perspective...
I was a code slinger type - Right out of high school with some programming knowledge, some commercial success (with the C64), and whole lotta balls. I did some college, but it wasn't for me at the time. It didn't connect with what I wanted to do, which was code. I joined a contracting house, and they sent me all over the country. I learned more in 10 years doing that than any college would ever teach. Databases, Integration, GUI's, network programming, mulithreaded programming, and real-world problems, both programming and political. C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, BASIC, assembly (various), and eventually Java.
In the late 90's, I went back to school. Why? Not to learn programming - I was already at the top of my game. I went back to learn all the other stuff, and to do other things. I took psych courses, math courses, art classes, electronics, music, law, languages (Living: French, Dead: Nahuatl)... I did it on my terms (Harvard Extension, no time limits.) I will graduate next year.
Do colleges teach some basics? Sure - Data algorithms and Graphics programming were very useful. Are they realistic? Not really - sometimes horribly so. Massively Parallel Programming was a mess of math decomposition problems I dropped quickly. Did I need them to enter a career of commercial programming? Nope.
I would say college education is not a prediction of coding ability. Having a college degree when you are entering the field can be useful, but having a CS degree IMHO is not any more useful than a general BA or BS. If you go to college, go to get a general education, learn how to think critically, expose yourself to some interesting things - but it is NOT a training program for coders. Technical schools are a whole 'nother thing, and I would avoid them like crazy. My experience is that they do train you, but the training is narrow and short-sighted. In the end, it would be throw-away time, and the student would have very little gained.
College? Sure - go do it. You will be a better person, and you will have some great social experiences. But if you want to code, you need to put the time in yourself and learn the skills. College won't teach you that.
No, I can imagine how electronics can be designed to handle audio in a PC environment. But I realize that it is not often not done well. Yamaha made a very nice series of audio cards in the 1990s that were clean and well designed, for instance. I think in the end it comes down to the price/performance tradeoff - there is not a need to provide top-notch audio on a motherboard because mostly people would not appreciate it enough to pay for it. It's simple enough to provide the digital chips, but the analog part costs a bit more, in both space and money. And my top-notch preamps that I use with some performances occupy boards almost as large as a typical small-factor motherboard all by themselves.
Integrated audio isn't good enough, isn't great, and isn't for me. I have a pro-level sound studio, and there's no way your going to tell me that the noisy environment that is the system motherboard is going to give me results I can be proud of. Not even for gaming, thanks.
Discreet card? Ok, maybe, but generally you need to jump up to RME or some such before you can really call it good. I have a an RME RayDAT - This means that that all my AD and DA happens somewhere else, and not in the computer. It all goes digital over ADAT to my mixer (a Yamaha DM2000) where the conversion happens. Or it goes digital over ethernet (audinate Dante) to an X32, again where the conversion happens.
There are a ton of good external boxes to handle sound - some quite reasonable. Stay away from the onboard and cheap USB sound dongles. If you have the speakers to handle it, then why put up with bad sound?
I'm not an expect in functional programming, but I am an expert in other (object, etc) styles. While I appreciate the functional toolbox in languages such as Scala (which I use every day), I don't really see a way to do my day to day job in a purely functional way. Others have mentioned the I/O dilemma, but I think it goes deeper than that. Functional != Efficient for many of the tasks I perform, which are rather iterative. For many of my tasks, the overhead of the functional structures required are either much more memory intensive, or impose a run-time overhead that isn't acceptable. In the end, when what I have to do is move 300 fields from one data structure to another with edits, COBOL would be sufficient...
In related news, Mr. Greenspan has no clue about inequity in stratified markets. If you push on the top, you just compress the layers into smaller layers, with the bottom filling until it can absorb no more. Then you get slums, riots, and chaos. The only way the market works is with a strong middle class with buying potential. Without that there is no market, and hence no profits or growth. Once that contract is broken, it's not a long way to the bottom for most.
FAIL. Try Interplanetary. Listen to the Beastie Boys...
Interstellar would be a cool trip also, and more probable of finding life than under 100 miles of ice on Europa. Of course there is that extra mileage charge on the rental, and the roaming fees would bankrupt you...
I was a big fan, and a game developer for the C64. Those were the days that a machine could be fully understood by an untrained person with a knack for programming. When the C128 came out, I was interested, especially in the 80 column screen and CP/M software compilers. But there were too many limits on the machine (no hard drive easily added, no real OS, etc.) and it didn't feel like enough of an advancement over the C64. My grandfather did buy one, and I had some time with his, but that never really sparked much either. My next machine would be the Amiga, and as soon as that become somewhat affordable by a college student (the A500), I never looked back.
This is all well and fine, until they herd us all into some kind of processing center and then hook us up like some kind of "D" cell in series to power the mastermind machine...
Richmond Science Museum, on the E&S DigiStar projector - we could play a space-war variant on the dome. No color, of course, but the resolution was pretty good if my memory serves me right. Plus the dials of the control panel were just about perfect for controls.
Among my customer base? Yes, it's used internally. A lot of them are IT shops dealing with very old equipment, like 10 year old PC's. Some of them have internal intranet apps that only work on IE6. It will be awhile before those move.
Slashdot Mirror
Great - you're old, you're a girl, send me your resume. I'll hire you if you can do the job. Don't care about age, sex, preferences, etc. Anyone who throws away resumes based on any of that is an idiot and shouldn't be in the HR business. I've had some great hires that have said they were having trouble just getting past the front door at other companies. Me, I'm blind to all that - show me your good, you fit with my team, and you're in. That's it.
Seriously, is this "news" or just ad copy? It sure does sound like product placement to me...
Really, too much cost? I had a friend with the EDTASM assembler for the Trash-80 Mod 1 ("16K" required!) and don't recall the price for the assembler being too much. Now, getting that required 16K RAM was fairly expensive, and if you wanted more then it was REALLY expensive because of the expansion case.
... from the constant barrage you can see on US networks (ABC, NBC, and especially CBS) with promo bumpers for "Watch our net HIT show...", and "On the NEW HIT SHOW this fall..." The thing hasn't even aired yet and it's a "HIT SHOW". Even if its crap, and it gets cancelled in half a season it's a "HIT SHOW". Garbage all...
There is a definite conflict between what the course encouraged and what the Harvard academic policy discourages when it comes to collaborative classwork. I ran into it headfirst at the last time a Harvard cheating scandal happened - and I was in THAT class, so had firsthand knowledge. I know people in CS50, so have some real knowledge here too - it will be interesting how/if it is resolved. The panel that does the academic honesty reviews is not something you want to face - it has some real bite, and students do get expelled.
Yeah, don't speak about what you know nothing of. This class is actually pretty tough - not a walk in the park by any means, and someone without some CS knowledge would struggle. I have a Harvard CS degree, and it's not a joke, and don't even get me going on how hard the courses are, because they are very rigorous. I earned my degree, and I think everyone who makes it out of that program has too.
C
Yeah me too - but I know someone in this class, and I've looked over the material. It's the real deal here, no way someone with no CS background could pass this course from a cold start. I'm not surprised at cheating here, but there are some facts that haven't come out here (disclaimer, I'm a Harvard CS grad). First of all there's a grey area in this class on what was allowed - collaboration was encouraged but each student had to submit their own work. This leads to some ambiguity. Also the Harvard academic honesty policy is very discouraging of collaborative works - it's very each to cross the line. Outright blatant cheating does occur, and Harvard is very strict and DOES expel students over it (contrary to another comment here.) Here it's not quite so cut-and-dry I think.
C
Not a panacea by any means. Sometimes it's harder to apply to general business programming in a meaningful and useful way - immutable objects aren't necessarily the best fit for data objects, to my mind anyway. Applied correctly and maybe less-than-completely the patterns and thinking from functional programming can be a good thing - but I'm not really a fan of pure functional programming and prefer the hybrid approaches like Scala.
Where are you going to put that kind of data, should you manage to fill one of these? In the cloud? No way, and your ISP will love the data cap overage charges if you try. Another drive? Well, unless you buy at least three of these then that will get expensive fast, requiring multiple older drives per one of these. Tape? Have you looked at LTO or similar prices? Not gonna happen for home users, even most businesses. So, when your rust stops spinning and the data is at rest, where do you turn?
I wouldn't read too much into the "no film zone". All Harvard classes that are recorded have that clause, and have had it for at least 10 years. Maybe longer, but I can't remember that far back.
... And post on the wrong story - oops.
I wouldn't read too much into the "no film zone". All Harvard classes that are recorded have that clause, and have had it for at least 10 years. Maybe longer, but I can't remember that far back.
"Storage corruption" is fairly vague. I've been bit by it in the past - once due to a vendor software bug (Oracle block corruption), and once due to hardware (flaky storage controller chip writing garbage (Supermicro MB)) I would like to hear more about the root cause.
RM
I've had this position in other comments, but I'll say it again - College degrees don't teach you how to do a job, and don't necessarily equate to job performance. To that end, it really doesn't matter what kind of degree someone has. A college degree is about broadening horizons, teaching critical thinking, and exploring subjects in slightly more depth in a controlled environment. I had taken plenty what we now call "STEM" courses in the process of pursuing a Harvard undergraduate degree (of which they don't offer a "science" degree in the classical sense anyway!) A greenhorn college grad will have been exposed to many valuable situations, and a college degree says that they can think and have proven that to some number of accredited boards to their satisfaction. They will still need job training, additional learning, and just plan ole' experience. Some people will be just better at certain types of jobs, and not at others. Do people who choose a particular degree type self-select? Maybe, but there are plenty of medieval lit majors out there programming, and they do it just as well as an EE or CS major.
Oh, and grad school is about torture and the ego's of the adviser committee. It means you spent a lot of time as a serf eating ramen noodles. It may mean you know a lot about almost nothing...
We've been arguing this for more than 20 years. Not much has changed, and it's not a new question. Code Slinger vs. Book Knowledge. College of Hard Knocks vs College of Ivy. I'm a greybeard now, and while I won't pretend to answer the whole question, I will provide some perspective...
I was a code slinger type - Right out of high school with some programming knowledge, some commercial success (with the C64), and whole lotta balls. I did some college, but it wasn't for me at the time. It didn't connect with what I wanted to do, which was code. I joined a contracting house, and they sent me all over the country. I learned more in 10 years doing that than any college would ever teach. Databases, Integration, GUI's, network programming, mulithreaded programming, and real-world problems, both programming and political. C, C++, Cobol, Fortran, BASIC, assembly (various), and eventually Java.
In the late 90's, I went back to school. Why? Not to learn programming - I was already at the top of my game. I went back to learn all the other stuff, and to do other things. I took psych courses, math courses, art classes, electronics, music, law, languages (Living: French, Dead: Nahuatl) ... I did it on my terms (Harvard Extension, no time limits.) I will graduate next year.
Do colleges teach some basics? Sure - Data algorithms and Graphics programming were very useful. Are they realistic? Not really - sometimes horribly so. Massively Parallel Programming was a mess of math decomposition problems I dropped quickly. Did I need them to enter a career of commercial programming? Nope.
I would say college education is not a prediction of coding ability. Having a college degree when you are entering the field can be useful, but having a CS degree IMHO is not any more useful than a general BA or BS. If you go to college, go to get a general education, learn how to think critically, expose yourself to some interesting things - but it is NOT a training program for coders. Technical schools are a whole 'nother thing, and I would avoid them like crazy. My experience is that they do train you, but the training is narrow and short-sighted. In the end, it would be throw-away time, and the student would have very little gained.
College? Sure - go do it. You will be a better person, and you will have some great social experiences. But if you want to code, you need to put the time in yourself and learn the skills. College won't teach you that.
No, I can imagine how electronics can be designed to handle audio in a PC environment. But I realize that it is not often not done well. Yamaha made a very nice series of audio cards in the 1990s that were clean and well designed, for instance. I think in the end it comes down to the price/performance tradeoff - there is not a need to provide top-notch audio on a motherboard because mostly people would not appreciate it enough to pay for it. It's simple enough to provide the digital chips, but the analog part costs a bit more, in both space and money. And my top-notch preamps that I use with some performances occupy boards almost as large as a typical small-factor motherboard all by themselves.
Integrated audio isn't good enough, isn't great, and isn't for me. I have a pro-level sound studio, and there's no way your going to tell me that the noisy environment that is the system motherboard is going to give me results I can be proud of. Not even for gaming, thanks.
Discreet card? Ok, maybe, but generally you need to jump up to RME or some such before you can really call it good. I have a an RME RayDAT - This means that that all my AD and DA happens somewhere else, and not in the computer. It all goes digital over ADAT to my mixer (a Yamaha DM2000) where the conversion happens. Or it goes digital over ethernet (audinate Dante) to an X32, again where the conversion happens.
There are a ton of good external boxes to handle sound - some quite reasonable. Stay away from the onboard and cheap USB sound dongles. If you have the speakers to handle it, then why put up with bad sound?
I'm not an expect in functional programming, but I am an expert in other (object, etc) styles. While I appreciate the functional toolbox in languages such as Scala (which I use every day), I don't really see a way to do my day to day job in a purely functional way. Others have mentioned the I/O dilemma, but I think it goes deeper than that. Functional != Efficient for many of the tasks I perform, which are rather iterative. For many of my tasks, the overhead of the functional structures required are either much more memory intensive, or impose a run-time overhead that isn't acceptable. In the end, when what I have to do is move 300 fields from one data structure to another with edits, COBOL would be sufficient...
In related news, Mr. Greenspan has no clue about inequity in stratified markets. If you push on the top, you just compress the layers into smaller layers, with the bottom filling until it can absorb no more. Then you get slums, riots, and chaos. The only way the market works is with a strong middle class with buying potential. Without that there is no market, and hence no profits or growth. Once that contract is broken, it's not a long way to the bottom for most.
FAIL. Try Interplanetary.
Listen to the Beastie Boys...
Interstellar would be a cool trip also, and more probable of finding life than under 100 miles of ice on Europa. Of course there is that extra mileage charge on the rental, and the roaming fees would bankrupt you...
I was a big fan, and a game developer for the C64. Those were the days that a machine could be fully understood by an untrained person with a knack for programming. When the C128 came out, I was interested, especially in the 80 column screen and CP/M software compilers. But there were too many limits on the machine (no hard drive easily added, no real OS, etc.) and it didn't feel like enough of an advancement over the C64. My grandfather did buy one, and I had some time with his, but that never really sparked much either. My next machine would be the Amiga, and as soon as that become somewhat affordable by a college student (the A500), I never looked back.
RM
This is all well and fine, until they herd us all into some kind of processing center and then hook us up like some kind of "D" cell in series to power the mastermind machine...
Richmond Science Museum, on the E&S DigiStar projector - we could play a space-war variant on the dome. No color, of course, but the resolution was pretty good if my memory serves me right. Plus the dials of the control panel were just about perfect for controls.
Drain the fuel, set it upright, patch it up, tow it to Atlantic City - Profit!
(Drop it Lake Mead - Profit!)
(Park it outside Boston - Lawsuit!)
Among my customer base? Yes, it's used internally. A lot of them are IT shops dealing with very old equipment, like 10 year old PC's. Some of them have internal intranet apps that only work on IE6. It will be awhile before those move.
C