Web-based, built around CVS, very easy to use and get used to. It's not JUST version control, but you buy what you need. You can also view docs on the web, from particular applications (Adobe Acrobat® ,
Artemis® Views® ,
Computer Associates COOL: Teamwork® ,
Computer Associates ERwin(TM) ,
Foresight Systems Foresight(TM),
Microsoft Excel ,
Microsoft PowerPoint ,
Microsoft Word ,
Microsoft® Project ,
Microsoft® Visio® ,
Popkin System Architect(TM) ,
Primavera Project Planner® ,
PTC Pro/ENGINEER® ,
Rational® ClearCase® ,
Rational® ClearQuest(TM) ,
Rational® Rose® ,
Scitor Project Scheduler 7(TM) ,
Telelogic DOORS® ,
Telelogic Tau UML(TM) ).
I'm also a TA, and that pays about $8 an hour (not starting wage), for 10-12 hours/week. So my unpaid time is really between 50-60 hours. No health insurance, no real vacations during the semester (duh, homework) or during the "breaks" (on financial aid --> summer earnings required for tuition... and financial aid figured out how much CS students make, too).
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can work shorter weeks and be "appreciated" like the rest of you:)
CS = dotcom whore. You'll probably go into IT or be a code monkey
Yeah. Because Cormen, Knuth, Sipser, Rivest, van Dam, etc. are such IT whores and code monkeys.
The robustness of the degree depends not so much on the field but on the degree program at the school in question. You can go to any number of schools and get a degree that prepares you to be very good at IT, software engineering, etc. That does not completely describe the field of "computer science", however; it describes some of the applications of computer science. A scientist is a rather different creature by necessity.
Why not wait to decide until you get to school, take a class or two in each of the departments, talk to the profs, undergrads, and (possibly) gradstudents, and find out which one tickles your fancy the most when you have a much better idea of what it would be like?
The first year or two of college is notorious for change-and-growth. Very often people graduate with a degree in a field they were barely considering as pre-frosh.
If you haven't decided yet what college you will be attending, pick a school that has both departments. Often a well-rounded CS major will need an Engin class or two, anyway, and the same goes for CE. You'll be better off giving yourself a chance at both departments.
That generalizes to "pick a school with PLENTY of good departments, in case you want to go even farther afield."
HTH:)
Curran
(originally Biochem, now CS, thanks to the chemistry dept's intro-CS-course requirement:)
hang on to your hats, folks... heavy concept coming through... run commercials on the web, too!
honestly. where is the brainiac executive who said "we'll lose all our advertising revenue if we broadcast over the web"? and more important, how could the rest have believed him?
I dislike ads on the web as much as you do, but I'd be ok with wading through a few to get to coverage of the sports I'm interested in. Nobody's forcing me to retain it any more than a TV commercial.
yeah, games like that (simple AI, minimax decision-making) are good for students who have the basics of a functional or OO language down. You don't even need a GUI for half of them (checkers, C4, tetris, minesweeper come to mind).
I wholly endorse the group-project model... working on a team to do something besides drug-trafficking-in-south-america social studies reports in high school would have been nice.:) i like to think that you learn a different kind of teamwork when coding, too, what with speccing out the interfaces between components. It teaches design-it-right-first pretty quickly.
My high school had a few computer courses: keyboarding, spreadsheets, and something to do with VB, i think. this was only a few years ago... and they also had students for LAN administrators. It was a bit of a shock getting to college and discovering how intensely prepared some other people in the CS dept. were.
So, yeah... learn the basic data structures and algorithms, but do it in a fun way. Eliza is a pretty easy and fun program, and students can make it as "smart" as they wish, without changing the underlying structure of the program too much (and thereby making it take longer to grade).
coming from someone NOT entrenched in unix culture (at least not firmly), perl is not as hard as you make it out to be. In fact, i learned it on an NT box at work one summer... BEFORE i learned C++.
Nothing wrong with teaching students to write good, relatively clean Perl code before they get corrupted by the macho-ism of obfuscation.
One of the intro cs courses at Brown University tried teaching OCaml last year (fall 99), and we TA's are trying to prevent that from happening again... We were forced into using OCaml because a system upgrade removed MLWorks (dev envt for Standard ML) from our bag o' tools. Where the two languages intersect, things were fine... but when the Object in OCaml came up in class, the students had a hell of a time. To program a simple game like Mancala or checkers both functionally and OO, they were forced to dance around mutation by instantiating new instances of objects (with obscenely long argument lists) and assigning them to self. And as an intro to OO and Java (the second-semester material), OCaml really didn't help very much.
IMHO OCaml tries to be too many things to too many people. I'd never program anything larger than "Eliza" in it by choice, and the terrific parts of the language (strong type definition, pattern matching) are all present in SML.
I certainly couldn't sustain the kind of lifestyle I'm used to. Besides the personal growth angle, would a 4 year degree help me much at this point?
I think you hit the nail on the head right there -- the personal growth nail anyway. Taking a four year "sabbatical" from work and having to deal with a student income for 4 years can help you find out just where your priorities are... Take courses just because they're interesting, not because you need them to boost your resume, since you've already got one you're happy with. (a freedom too many students don't allow themselves, or can't afford to)
I guess what it would come down to for me, if I had this choice, is "why wait?" What will the next ten years be like, if I wait? What if I don't wait that long? (What if I die in 5?)
Would you rather have the benefits of going back to school 14 years from now, or 4?
Slashdot Mirror
mesasys.com
Web-based, built around CVS, very easy to use and get used to. It's not JUST version control, but you buy what you need. You can also view docs on the web, from particular applications (Adobe Acrobat® , Artemis® Views® , Computer Associates COOL: Teamwork® , Computer Associates ERwin(TM) , Foresight Systems Foresight(TM), Microsoft Excel , Microsoft PowerPoint , Microsoft Word , Microsoft® Project , Microsoft® Visio® , Popkin System Architect(TM) , Primavera Project Planner® , PTC Pro/ENGINEER® , Rational® ClearCase® , Rational® ClearQuest(TM) , Rational® Rose® , Scitor Project Scheduler 7(TM) , Telelogic DOORS® , Telelogic Tau UML(TM) ).
tell them Curran sent you :)
I'm also a TA, and that pays about $8 an hour (not starting wage), for 10-12 hours/week. So my unpaid time is really between 50-60 hours. No health insurance, no real vacations during the semester (duh, homework) or during the "breaks" (on financial aid --> summer earnings required for tuition... and financial aid figured out how much CS students make, too).
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can work shorter weeks and be "appreciated" like the rest of you :)
Yeah. Because Cormen, Knuth, Sipser, Rivest, van Dam, etc. are such IT whores and code monkeys.
The robustness of the degree depends not so much on the field but on the degree program at the school in question. You can go to any number of schools and get a degree that prepares you to be very good at IT, software engineering, etc. That does not completely describe the field of "computer science", however; it describes some of the applications of computer science. A scientist is a rather different creature by necessity.
crap. forgot about those pesky line breaks :)
Why not wait to decide until you get to school, take a class or two in each of the departments, talk to the profs, undergrads, and (possibly) gradstudents, and find out which one tickles your fancy the most when you have a much better idea of what it would be like? The first year or two of college is notorious for change-and-growth. Very often people graduate with a degree in a field they were barely considering as pre-frosh. If you haven't decided yet what college you will be attending, pick a school that has both departments. Often a well-rounded CS major will need an Engin class or two, anyway, and the same goes for CE. You'll be better off giving yourself a chance at both departments. That generalizes to "pick a school with PLENTY of good departments, in case you want to go even farther afield." HTH :)
Curran
(originally Biochem, now CS, thanks to the chemistry dept's intro-CS-course requirement :)
honestly. where is the brainiac executive who said "we'll lose all our advertising revenue if we broadcast over the web"? and more important, how could the rest have believed him?
I dislike ads on the web as much as you do, but I'd be ok with wading through a few to get to coverage of the sports I'm interested in. Nobody's forcing me to retain it any more than a TV commercial.
I wholly endorse the group-project model... working on a team to do something besides drug-trafficking-in-south-america social studies reports in high school would have been nice. :) i like to think that you learn a different kind of teamwork when coding, too, what with speccing out the interfaces between components. It teaches design-it-right-first pretty quickly.
My high school had a few computer courses: keyboarding, spreadsheets, and something to do with VB, i think. this was only a few years ago... and they also had students for LAN administrators. It was a bit of a shock getting to college and discovering how intensely prepared some other people in the CS dept. were.
So, yeah... learn the basic data structures and algorithms, but do it in a fun way. Eliza is a pretty easy and fun program, and students can make it as "smart" as they wish, without changing the underlying structure of the program too much (and thereby making it take longer to grade).
Good luck!
Nothing wrong with teaching students to write good, relatively clean Perl code before they get corrupted by the macho-ism of obfuscation.
Korinthe (who wishes "machisma" were a word)
and how soon does the floorboard become flexible and wearable?
We were forced into using OCaml because a system upgrade removed MLWorks (dev envt for Standard ML) from our bag o' tools. Where the two languages intersect, things were fine... but when the Object in OCaml came up in class, the students had a hell of a time. To program a simple game like Mancala or checkers both functionally and OO, they were forced to dance around mutation by instantiating new instances of objects (with obscenely long argument lists) and assigning them to self. And as an intro to OO and Java (the second-semester material), OCaml really didn't help very much.
IMHO OCaml tries to be too many things to too many people. I'd never program anything larger than "Eliza" in it by choice, and the terrific parts of the language (strong type definition, pattern matching) are all present in SML.
I think you hit the nail on the head right there -- the personal growth nail anyway. Taking a four year "sabbatical" from work and having to deal with a student income for 4 years can help you find out just where your priorities are... Take courses just because they're interesting, not because you need them to boost your resume, since you've already got one you're happy with. (a freedom too many students don't allow themselves, or can't afford to)
I guess what it would come down to for me, if I had this choice, is "why wait?" What will the next ten years be like, if I wait? What if I don't wait that long? (What if I die in 5?)
Would you rather have the benefits of going back to school 14 years from now, or 4?
At any rate, good luck in whatever you do :)