I wouldn't say the Wii U aimed for the poor people crowd. It's original price point was way above what the original Wii was, even though it was still lower than it's competitors. My opinion was that the reason the Wii was a hit, and the Wii U wasn't was simply the price point. The hidden competitor here is the cheap gaming PC.
...it's the having to "charge my watch" that makes me not buy one. Until they somehow fix that, smartwatches will always be more inconvenient that convenient.
Granted I like firefox over any MS browser... but come on now. That letter has just as much business intent for Mozilla as the the default browser switch does for MS.
I think the root cause in a lot of this comes from the fact that the govt. funding and solicitation of college students for colleges/universities as their income streams heavily shapes the "ivory tower" mentalities found there, which hardly maps at all to how money is made outside of there. What you are taught in the ivory tower is what works well inside the ivory tower.
That argument assumes a level playing field when negotiating terms for employment to be valid, which does not exist for that level of employees. You could justify just about any type corporate practice using that argument.
Coding a prototype of something that's rapidly changing in huge ways should be done differently than production code that's worked on by lots of different developers. One will not be optimal for the other.
Give your estimate, but also give the variance on that estimate. If it's low, they will ask why. This will lead into the technical barriers and uncertainty discussions, which is really what the business types and PMs need to do and don't do enough of.
This is actually also prevalent in academia. You get profs. who write Ph.D. qualifying exam questions that narrowly focuses on whatever sub-area they specialize in and just expect that everyone should be fluent in it, but in fact most of the other profs in the department couldn't answer them correctly.
I've heard this before, but the problem is that those items that are referred and somewhat spun in a positive light are cherry-picked. In particular, they don't talk about the "items" of how this all gets paid for (more taxes, more deficit, taken out of medicare, etc...) and the general downstream ramifications of the law. Sure, there is partisanship going on, but it's not what this study suggests.
...to be met, like being able to be completely interchangeable with other members on your team, and having prior art to reasonably predict every aspect of effort. If that's not the case (say, in an R&D project where certain people are specialists in certain areas), this method does more harm than good. My best suggestion for using which method is to let the nature of the project choose the method, rather than the other way around.
..several years ago, without the C++ experience. I was applying for a good 5+ months. I was fortunate to get hooked up with a research institute associated with the university for a year doing more grunt-workshy stuff while I finished up my dissertation. It gave me some experience in image processing, which IMO is one of the most in-demand fields to get into if you want to stick with industry research. That was that on top of the Ph.D that got me my current position.
...but it also puts more and more pressure on principal investigators to color their conclusions in the direction of whatever is currently trendy in the eyes of the grant reviewers in that field in order to get future grants. It's not good.
Your complaint about C++ is like a CGA not knowing how to use Simply Accounting. You got a degree in computing science. Not C++ programming. Yes, C++ programming is useful, and yes, you might have wanted to take a course in that, but its not related to the degree.
And who's defining what a CS degree this way? My point is that if we re-define that to include more on-the-job elements, the overall value of the education will go up. Any time you have an organization (not just higher education) be the primary evaluator of itself, over time you will get policies and groupthink are more and more out of touch with reality.
True, but industry wants the other extreme, and nothing will satisfy them. Bottom line is if they want an employee who can do X. They can train that employee. That's how it works in other industries.
I think there's an easy middle ground to shoot for here. And note that industry are the ones providing the jobs, not the school, so they should intrinsically be in the driver seat more than the school should.
In the upper level compsci courses i took the languages were treated as a tool, not a subject. We were given a 1 day primer and the manuals, but it was a course on "advanced computing topic" not "language". You could have taken it on yourself to learn C++; if you can get a compsci degree you can learn C++. Take a correspondance course, write and release a freeware program. Done.
I'm surprised it took you until the interviews to catch this out. This should have come up earlier -- surely the career counselors would have caught it, or the work experience programs and internship placement stuff, or even just talking with other students and graduates and profs.
My university had a couple C++ electives I could take, including one by correspondence. Usually worth 1 credit. Or you could take C++ separately from university. I took a C++ windows programming course that looked at MFC and COM and the windows event model from an academic point of view. You didn't need them to graduate but everyone was encouraged to take them as they were "relevant" in the job market. The profs were all well aware of C++ in the world, and just thought it was a terrible teaching language for most subjects.
I'll be the first to admit wish I would known more about what was going to be coming my way after graduation, but I don't think that should let them off the hook. I paid them to educate me so I could get a job. Suppose I go buy a car from car dealership, but they don't put any oil in the engine (after all, they are selling you a car, not oil). You would call the person naive about cars if they ignored the engine light and tried to drive it as is, but that fact doesn't change that the dealership is dropping the ball. And having them "suggest" that you take additional/supplemental courses to prepare you for the job market is just an admission that their curriculum is sub-par. This again comes down to expectations. They don't better prepare you for post-graduation in their curriculum because they don't have to, and thus it detracts from the very point of higher education existing in the first place. My prediction is that if/when someone is able to change this system so that schools held to a better standard of preparation, the overall higher education quality will suddenly much more valued in society, and that person will go down as the genius who revolutionized the outdated western higher educational system.
Work pays you because you understand calculus. You pay school to develop that understanding. School and Work are not the same.
You miss my point - school could do a better job preparing you for work.
Because my boss expects me to already understand what I'm doing. The entire reason you go to school is because you don't know, and you want to learn.
There's often times when I don't understand what I'm doing when I receive an assignment and I have to go teach myself something new to get it done.
You are expected to make mistakes and learn from them.
At my job? No - I'm expected to learn whatever I need to get it right the first time. At school? I had several courses where the professor told us straight up front he/she thought tests were stupid and out of touch with the real world and told us the majority of our grade would be homeworks and projects. Have to say I think I learned the most out of those courses, and being expected to get it right on the homeworks was not a hard thing at all - it made you take it more seriously than just assuming you would just bump up your grade at the final.
University is not grade school my friend, "homework" is your "in class quiz" and "practice problems"; its just not in class where its a complete waste of the limited time you have with the prof. I don't know about you, but I got 3 hours of class time a week. Depending on the course, I got another few hours of TA or supervised lab time. That class time was for the prof to explain the material, and answer questions. It would have been idiotic to use that time do practice problems on our own.
Well I had both in-class ones and ones where you submitted electronically before class. It made sure the students read the material before class and the lecture (which focused on the tougher parts of the material) wasn't wasted on the easy stuff. Seemed to work pretty well from my standpoint.
Why? In the real world your boss expects you to do Y, and assumes you already know the prerequisite A,B,C. School is where you learn your A,B,Cs.
Yes, and they can do a better job with teaching you about Y as well.
University a isn't trade school.
And this is precisely the problem. It should be, in part. And if the professors don't want/can't do it, then find better ones that will.
I didn't get a degree in computer science so that I could learn how to deploy Active Directory, how to properly configure Apache for security, or program against a given library/API that's popular "in industry", or learn R. You graduate with a degree in comp sci and you should know how computers work, how compilers work, how networks work, how programming languages work, what prodecural, functional, and object oriented are, you'll know about recursion, you'll know about concurrency and resource locking, semaphores and critical sections, atomic transactions, you'll know about AI, or SQL, you'll know how algorithms work, how stacks works, how fundamental data structures work, how to compute performance characteristics, etc. I use a lot of this knowledge all the time, and even the stuff I don't use I'm aware of and can recognize its applicability when it comes up. So when I get asked whether an R program used on inputs of n=3 or 4 runs in 5 minutes to an hour how big can they go... and I have the tools to analyze it and say its O(21^n) and you can get up to be about 6 on a PC, maybe 9 or 10 on a cloud platform for some $$$. (real example by the way from a couple weeks ago). The algorithm was about as good as it could be, so we analyzed the problem itself and came up with a new way of defining the solution space, that could be evaluated and searched in O(n^3) and give us the results we needed. And new we can go to n=20 and beyond on a laptop. That's what I went to university for.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't say the Wii U aimed for the poor people crowd. It's original price point was way above what the original Wii was, even though it was still lower than it's competitors. My opinion was that the reason the Wii was a hit, and the Wii U wasn't was simply the price point. The hidden competitor here is the cheap gaming PC.
Disney owns ABCNews?
There they go. Any reiteration of this idea now is just underhandedly trying to push their politics on other people.
...it's the having to "charge my watch" that makes me not buy one. Until they somehow fix that, smartwatches will always be more inconvenient that convenient.
Granted I like firefox over any MS browser... but come on now. That letter has just as much business intent for Mozilla as the the default browser switch does for MS.
Where are these jobs? Silicon Valley? A small town in the Midwest?
...wouldn't it be "You can blame your pointy-haired boss's boss on the Peter Principle"?
I think the root cause in a lot of this comes from the fact that the govt. funding and solicitation of college students for colleges/universities as their income streams heavily shapes the "ivory tower" mentalities found there, which hardly maps at all to how money is made outside of there. What you are taught in the ivory tower is what works well inside the ivory tower.
That argument assumes a level playing field when negotiating terms for employment to be valid, which does not exist for that level of employees. You could justify just about any type corporate practice using that argument.
Coding a prototype of something that's rapidly changing in huge ways should be done differently than production code that's worked on by lots of different developers. One will not be optimal for the other.
...wait a minute...
Another +1 for Redmine. Very simple to use and manage without pushing any manifestos down your throat.
Give your estimate, but also give the variance on that estimate. If it's low, they will ask why. This will lead into the technical barriers and uncertainty discussions, which is really what the business types and PMs need to do and don't do enough of.
Ouch.
This is actually also prevalent in academia. You get profs. who write Ph.D. qualifying exam questions that narrowly focuses on whatever sub-area they specialize in and just expect that everyone should be fluent in it, but in fact most of the other profs in the department couldn't answer them correctly.
Really it is a culture who have been mining in a pit for so long that they reason that getting to China is the easiest way out. They might be right.
I've heard this before, but the problem is that those items that are referred and somewhat spun in a positive light are cherry-picked. In particular, they don't talk about the "items" of how this all gets paid for (more taxes, more deficit, taken out of medicare, etc...) and the general downstream ramifications of the law. Sure, there is partisanship going on, but it's not what this study suggests.
...to be met, like being able to be completely interchangeable with other members on your team, and having prior art to reasonably predict every aspect of effort. If that's not the case (say, in an R&D project where certain people are specialists in certain areas), this method does more harm than good. My best suggestion for using which method is to let the nature of the project choose the method, rather than the other way around.
..several years ago, without the C++ experience. I was applying for a good 5+ months. I was fortunate to get hooked up with a research institute associated with the university for a year doing more grunt-workshy stuff while I finished up my dissertation. It gave me some experience in image processing, which IMO is one of the most in-demand fields to get into if you want to stick with industry research. That was that on top of the Ph.D that got me my current position.
...but it also puts more and more pressure on principal investigators to color their conclusions in the direction of whatever is currently trendy in the eyes of the grant reviewers in that field in order to get future grants. It's not good.
You can only sue for actual harm that was caused. This would imply they would have to convince a jury that people took that campaign seriously.
But the NSA would be free to mention that fact and thus explain away their denial. But, they didn't.
I wouldn't draw too much from anything fiscally-related that comes out of California.
It could, but the question is should it.
Your complaint about C++ is like a CGA not knowing how to use Simply Accounting. You got a degree in computing science. Not C++ programming. Yes, C++ programming is useful, and yes, you might have wanted to take a course in that, but its not related to the degree.
And who's defining what a CS degree this way? My point is that if we re-define that to include more on-the-job elements, the overall value of the education will go up. Any time you have an organization (not just higher education) be the primary evaluator of itself, over time you will get policies and groupthink are more and more out of touch with reality.
True, but industry wants the other extreme, and nothing will satisfy them. Bottom line is if they want an employee who can do X. They can train that employee. That's how it works in other industries.
I think there's an easy middle ground to shoot for here. And note that industry are the ones providing the jobs, not the school, so they should intrinsically be in the driver seat more than the school should.
In the upper level compsci courses i took the languages were treated as a tool, not a subject. We were given a 1 day primer and the manuals, but it was a course on "advanced computing topic" not "language". You could have taken it on yourself to learn C++; if you can get a compsci degree you can learn C++. Take a correspondance course, write and release a freeware program. Done.
I'm surprised it took you until the interviews to catch this out. This should have come up earlier -- surely the career counselors would have caught it, or the work experience programs and internship placement stuff, or even just talking with other students and graduates and profs.
My university had a couple C++ electives I could take, including one by correspondence. Usually worth 1 credit. Or you could take C++ separately from university. I took a C++ windows programming course that looked at MFC and COM and the windows event model from an academic point of view. You didn't need them to graduate but everyone was encouraged to take them as they were "relevant" in the job market. The profs were all well aware of C++ in the world, and just thought it was a terrible teaching language for most subjects.
I'll be the first to admit wish I would known more about what was going to be coming my way after graduation, but I don't think that should let them off the hook. I paid them to educate me so I could get a job. Suppose I go buy a car from car dealership, but they don't put any oil in the engine (after all, they are selling you a car, not oil). You would call the person naive about cars if they ignored the engine light and tried to drive it as is, but that fact doesn't change that the dealership is dropping the ball. And having them "suggest" that you take additional/supplemental courses to prepare you for the job market is just an admission that their curriculum is sub-par. This again comes down to expectations. They don't better prepare you for post-graduation in their curriculum because they don't have to, and thus it detracts from the very point of higher education existing in the first place. My prediction is that if/when someone is able to change this system so that schools held to a better standard of preparation, the overall higher education quality will suddenly much more valued in society, and that person will go down as the genius who revolutionized the outdated western higher educational system.
Work pays you because you understand calculus. You pay school to develop that understanding. School and Work are not the same.
You miss my point - school could do a better job preparing you for work.
Because my boss expects me to already understand what I'm doing. The entire reason you go to school is because you don't know, and you want to learn.
There's often times when I don't understand what I'm doing when I receive an assignment and I have to go teach myself something new to get it done.
You are expected to make mistakes and learn from them.
At my job? No - I'm expected to learn whatever I need to get it right the first time. At school? I had several courses where the professor told us straight up front he/she thought tests were stupid and out of touch with the real world and told us the majority of our grade would be homeworks and projects. Have to say I think I learned the most out of those courses, and being expected to get it right on the homeworks was not a hard thing at all - it made you take it more seriously than just assuming you would just bump up your grade at the final.
University is not grade school my friend, "homework" is your "in class quiz" and "practice problems"; its just not in class where its a complete waste of the limited time you have with the prof. I don't know about you, but I got 3 hours of class time a week. Depending on the course, I got another few hours of TA or supervised lab time. That class time was for the prof to explain the material, and answer questions. It would have been idiotic to use that time do practice problems on our own.
Well I had both in-class ones and ones where you submitted electronically before class. It made sure the students read the material before class and the lecture (which focused on the tougher parts of the material) wasn't wasted on the easy stuff. Seemed to work pretty well from my standpoint.
Why? In the real world your boss expects you to do Y, and assumes you already know the prerequisite A,B,C. School is where you learn your A,B,Cs.
Yes, and they can do a better job with teaching you about Y as well.
University a isn't trade school.
And this is precisely the problem. It should be, in part. And if the professors don't want/can't do it, then find better ones that will.
I didn't get a degree in computer science so that I could learn how to deploy Active Directory, how to properly configure Apache for security, or program against a given library/API that's popular "in industry", or learn R. You graduate with a degree in comp sci and you should know how computers work, how compilers work, how networks work, how programming languages work, what prodecural, functional, and object oriented are, you'll know about recursion, you'll know about concurrency and resource locking, semaphores and critical sections, atomic transactions, you'll know about AI, or SQL, you'll know how algorithms work, how stacks works, how fundamental data structures work, how to compute performance characteristics, etc. I use a lot of this knowledge all the time, and even the stuff I don't use I'm aware of and can recognize its applicability when it comes up. So when I get asked whether an R program used on inputs of n=3 or 4 runs in 5 minutes to an hour how big can they go... and I have the tools to analyze it and say its O(21^n) and you can get up to be about 6 on a PC, maybe 9 or 10 on a cloud platform for some $$$. (real example by the way from a couple weeks ago). The algorithm was about as good as it could be, so we analyzed the problem itself and came up with a new way of defining the solution space, that could be evaluated and searched in O(n^3) and give us the results we needed. And new we can go to n=20 and beyond on a laptop. That's what I went to university for.
The stuff industry wants, best practices for