Unfortunately I am not in a position to move or I would send you a resume. I live near Austin, Texas which is also one of the top rated cities. I have two kids in college. I own my home out right. And my wife has a good job and is close enough to retiring with a real pension that it just isn't reasonable for me to move even though I haven't been able to find a job around here.
Where are these jobs? Where is this huge demand for experienced people?
I can't find these jobs anywhere I look. They aren't in the want ads. They aren't on the web sites. And the few people I know who are still making a living are holding on with their finger tips, sweating blood over whether they will have a job this afternoon.
This is just part of a PR campaign to increase the H1B visa cap.
I used to be a software developer. I helped build 4 start up companies. I was laid off in 2001 and have not been able to find a development job since.
Because I have an MS degree and 30+ years experience mostly in computer graphics I was able to get a part time job teaching at the local community college. This semester the students are just like last semester and the semester before that. Less than one third are young people just out of high school, the rest are adults over 40, who have BS, MS, or even Ph.Ds in computer science, math, and electrical engineering. They have all been laid off and have all been unable to find engineering jobs for 2 to 5 years.
The older people are trying to retrain in anyway they can so they can get back to doing engineering work. They are surviving by working at fast food joints, delivering pizzas, and doing secretarial work. Most have depleted their savings.
The drop out rate among the younger people is very high. The main lesson they are learning in my class is that engineers and scientists are disposable workers who wind up on the streets at age 40, or 50 if they are lucky.
Gates wants more young people to feed to the meat grinder? Let me tell you, America's young people are not stupid. If you want more young people to work for you, you have to show them that they will have jobs when they are older. You have to employee the thousands and thousands of unemployed and under employed scientists and engineers we already have in the US.
There is no shortages of technical talent in the US. There is a huge shortage of technical jobs in the US. The very existence of the H1B visa system is proof that the US government is owned by big business.
I would jump at a job like those you describe. Almost all my experience has been in small start up companies. I have worked at 5 start up companies. I have actively been looking for companies like that. I have been turned down for those jobs and the reasons are usually that 1) I am over qualified, i.e. they assume I will leave at the drop of a hat and 2) I am over 50.
The second one can be a killer for small companies. First off, they usually believe that you have to very young to be any good at programming and they look at what I would do to their health care costs and they lose all interest.
I have a masters in CS, 30+ years programming experience, lots of business knowledge. You name it, I pretty much have it. I was laid off on my 49th birthday. That was 5 years ago. I can not buy a paid programming job. The only serious contact I have had in the last 3 years was with a company in India that was desperate for experienced people. Moving to Bangalore is not an option for me right now. The contract market has dried up.
I work on open source projects. I do some writing. I took the courses and passed the tests so that I can teach in the public schools. I haven't been able to find a job there yet. There are a lot of people like me chasing too few teaching jobs. I do teach part time at the local community college. But, very few people in the US are interested in learning programming right now. I have only had 6 students in the last 3 semesters. I teach and code when I can. I was thinking about going to law school. But I do not have the money and I would have to move which is not an option right now.
So, all I can say is good luck with that.
Stonewolf
Re:Get your financial house in order!
on
Resolutions for 2007?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
YES!
I was laid off five years ago on my 49th birthday and haven't been able to find a tech job since. My income dropped from over a $100K/year to under $20k (some years under $10k). After we were married (almost 30 years ago now) my wife and I started putting 10% of our gross income into various forms of savings. As we got raises we took part of the raise and put the rest in savings. When I was laid off we were putting nearly 30% of our combined gross into a mixture of pre and post tax savings. Over the last 30 years we have both had extended periods of unemployment and sometimes we did have to stop saving just to cover our locked in expenses. But... we own our cars, own our house, and are able to maintain a comfortable life style while I retrain and start a new career. What little debt we have is due to a decision to keep investments in place so long as the return on those investments is greater than the interest on our debt.
Save, save, save... you never know when you will need the money.
Stonewolf
P.S.
No matter what you may believe, you *can* live on 10% less than you currently make.
Intel got into the lead and as a result had the most money to spend on research and development, not to mention being able to build ever more capable chip foundries. The R&D budgets for competitive architectures were measured in millions while the R&D budgets for x86 was (and is) measured in billions. Better yet, the billions are being spent by more than one company which guarantees multiple points of view being applied to each new problem. The effect of budgets like that ripples out and has many effects the give the x86 an advantage. There is now an entire culture around the x86.
Having now reached the 64 bit stage there is little chance that the x86 will go away any time soon.
Writing a game like pong would be a semester goal. A goal they may not reach, but that is OK. If y'all don't get there by the end of the semester, shoot for the next semester.
One other thing I would change, do not teach C, teach C++. I do not consider either of those languages good for teaching beginners, but you know C and so it is the best language for you to teach. So, why did I just say C++? Well, C is mostly a subset of C++. The basic language is the same whether you call it C or C++. But, C++ gives you access to a much richer set of tools and is a better language for developing complex programs. Just call what you are teach C++ and use a C++ compiler and learn C++ as you go along.
A text book that I have used for complete beginners is "Beginning C++ Game Programming" by Michael Dawson. For advanced student I've been using "C++ Primer Plus" Fifth Edition by Stephen Prata. Neither book is perfect, but I haven't found anything better.
And, I am certified to teach computer science in high school. And, I am a programmer with over 30 years of experience. I can probably help you quite a bit. You should be able to contact me through slashdot, if not post a reply and we'll figure out how to communicate.
First off, you are still a very early stage beginner. That means that anything you do will require you to learn *more* than the students learn. I would try very hard to make your classes into more of a guided discussion and collaboration that a traditional lecture course. Get the students to research the areas they are having problems with and teach the class the solutions. Discuss, discuss, discuss.
Second, reach out to the tech community in your town and find experienced people who can help you.
Third, take on projects. DO NOT start out by teaching them and if and a for loop. Pick a project and let the students drive the teaching as you lead them through the problem of figuring out how to do the project. I would suggest a simple game or simulation, something the students are interested in. OTOH, there is a serious problem with expectation management. Cloning pong, asteroids, or tetris is a reasonable goal. Cloning WoW is not.:-)
Pick the right tools. It is important that you pick tools that all the students can have access to. That includes PCs and development tools. Design the course around free tools that will run on cheap PCs. It all depends on what they students have access to. But, you can teach programming on $40 PCs running Ubuntu with completely free tools, or you can teach it on $3000 PCs loaded up with $5000 worth of software. The amount of programming they learn will be the same.
I was going to post some advice, but I read a bunch of the comments that have been posted and many are great and cover every thing I was going to say....
So, why am I posting? I am asking you to post the name of your school so that people who want to learn programming can run away from there as fast as possible.
I was in a meeting last Friday with a group of CS instructors and a group of game developers working out a game programming curriculum. One of the things the inudstry people kept bringing up is that recent CS graduates do no know how to program and they have no knowledge of computer architecture. One producer who is actively recruiting said that most new CS graduates could not answer the question "what is a byte?" I kid you not.
I know what CS professors say when challenged on this subject. They will tell you they are teaching computer *Science* not computer *programming*. All I can say is that if you are in a computer science school and want to be a programmer you might want to switch to a software engineering school. Or, you could finish the CS degree and take some programming courses at a trade school or junior college.
I upgraded two systems from dapper to edgy. One is a fairly generic desktop and it worked perfectly. I'm using it to write this message. The other is an old laptop. It is now totally borked. It boots, but can't start the X server. Trying to log in is interesting as it seems to lose random keystrokes. I spent several hours trying to get it working, no joy. So, I'm going to have to down load the CD image and try to reload from scratch.
The article is based on data on men in the Boston area. Boston is one town in the northwest US. It is an old industrial town and Boston harbor has a reputation as being horribly polluted. It is not a representative sample of the entire US.
I've been to Boston on business more times than I can remember. There are a lot of things to love about the Boston/Cambridge area. Not to mention that I have 10th and 11th great grandfathers buried just out side Boston. But speaking as someone who grew up in the western US and live in Texas by choice, Boston is one of the most foreign places I visit. I gave up trying to dress correctly for Boston. You have to be a native to understand the rules. (How many shades of black are there?) And, well what can I say, never ever ask for salsa or for a Hawaiian style pizza in Boston.
Boston is its own unique reality and is not representative of the rest of the US.
You are making a hypothesis with a cause and effect assumption. Culture and technology emerge together.
Culture drives the development of technology. Technology drives the development of culture. Neither is a cause or an effect. Both are a cause and an effect. To get a better idea of what I am talking about do a couple of things. Read a few books on Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the Dao to give yourself an idea of a non-western point of view. Try to imagine a world view that does not include original sin. Or, if you grew up with an eastern world view, read the bible and some Calvinist literature and try to imagine your life believing in original sin. Then take the time to study the way automobiles developed in the US, England, Germany, and France. And ask your self some questions, could post revolution France have ever developed or had a market for the Rolls Royce? Why was the drive-in so important for so long and where did they go?
If I were doing a similar study I would probably look at the cultural communication taking place between the west and Japan in the form of vide games.
I'm sorry, I covered your entire objection with the phrase "... and some interface logic..." which would of course have to either include or interface to ATD and DTA converters. Such converters can be either on chip or off chip. It is up to companies such as Intel and AMD to decide where they want to put them. As you point out, there are already a lot of CPUs that include these devices. Intel has recently demonstrated mixing lasers with silicon, I think they can manage some analog converters.
You seem to think there is a strong distinction between DSPs and general purpose CPUs. That just isn't so. The difference is more in marketing and pricing than anything else. Though DSPs do tend to leave out a lot of memory hardware.
Your question "Why isn't a GP CPU being used for the modem or GPU?" does deserve an answer. The answer is that they are used at the low end. In fact, in low end PCs and all the first several generations of PCs all graphics was done by the CPU in the box. They did not have any sort of graphics coprocessor. Believe me, I wrote a 3D graphics library for the 486/VGA using modex and there was no GPU. Graphic coprodessors moved into the PC from the high end graphics world. At first they were horribly expensive, but over time the price came down. Oddly enough, one of the firsts graphics hardware products I worked on was a graphics coprocessor for the PC that used a motorola 68000 to do the rendering.:-)
Currently the price (not the cost, they are two very different things) make it cheaper to use special purpose processors to run graphics cards. But, just as it did with high end graphcs 20 years ago that is changing. Now the special purpose hardware is being pushed out to the shaders and the GPU is looking more and more like a GP CPU. Twenty years ago I worked on graphics hardware that accepted a stream of graphics commands. It used a DSP to send the commands to other DSPs that generated span lists that were then passed on to pixel processors (shaders) that rendered the spans into the frame buffer.
Intel is promising to give us 80 DSP like cores on a chip. They can be logically connected to form a stream processor with the same logical structure as the hardware I worked on 20 years ago and it would out perform it.
Oh yeah, the modem question? Look up the definition of WinModem and why it caused the Linux such grief.
God! I would eat a ton of shit to be allowed to work on a project like that. I'd eat even more to get paid to do it.
You are so focused on a few details that you are missing the whole point of what Intel is doing.
Stonewolf
P.S.
BTW, DSPs never ever work on analog signals. The D is DSP stands for DIGITAL. Analog to digital converters are used to convert the analog signal to the digital domain where it is processed and then passed to a digital to analog converter to recreate the analog signal. For graphics you only need the digital to analog part of the system.
Look at the total system cost of a having a separate NIC versus the cost of not having one. When the number of cores available is large enough the cost of using one to replace a NIC is much less that the cost of a NIC. It works out the save for all devices that aren't part of the CPU. When specific devices get replaced by a core on the CPU depends on the cost per core and the cost of the external device.
This has already happened to modems and to graphics on low end PCs. It is simple economics and it is driven by the costs to the companies that build motherboards and PCs. Not so much by the user. If a PC manufacturer can gain a $2 per unit cost reduction by doing what I describe they will do it in a heart beat. It is simple economics.
Thank you for posting the link to your message on the subject. You and I are thinking alike. It is nice to know there are other people out there who can see the obvious.
A couple of things to mention here. Many years ago I read an Intel road map for the x86 processors. It was more than 10 years ago, less than 20 I think. In it they said they would have massively multicore processors coming along around now. They may have forgotten that and reinvented the goal along the way, companies do that. But, they really have been predicting this for a very long time.
The other thing is that with that many cores and all the SIMD and graphics instructions that are built into current processors it looks to me like the obvious reason to have 80 cores is to get rid of graphics coprocessors. You do no need a GPU and a bunch of shaders if you can throw 60 processors at the job. You do need a really good bus, but hey, not much of a problem compared to getting 80 cores working on one chip.
With that kind of computer power you can throw a core at any thing you currently use a special chip for. You can get rid of sound cards, network cards, graphics cards... all you need is lots of cores, lots of RAM, a fast interconnect, and some interface logic. Everything else is just a waste of silicon.
History has shown that general purpose processing always wins in the end.
I was talking to some folks about this just last Saturday. They didn't beleive me. I don't expect y'all to believe me either.:-) The counter example everyone came up with was, "well, if that is true why would AMD buy ATI?" The answer to that is simple, they want their patent portfolio and their name. In the short term it even makes sense to put a GPU and some shaders on a chip along with a few cores. At the point you can put 16 or so cores on a chip you won't have much use for a GPU.
You are focusing on the wrong problem. It isn't football versus academics. As other have pointed out they are in different budgets. In the south if you don't have football you might not even have a school. I live in a property rich school district (Round Rock ISD in central Texas). They just spent 26 million dollars out of a 16 million dollar budget to build a new football temple. OTOH, they do have some technology courses and even an Information Technology Academy magnet school. They also happen to have thousands (tens of thousands) of high tech people living in the district.
But here is the problem. Where do you get teachers qualified to teach this subject? The starting salary for a teacher with a degree in computer science is the same as the starting salary for a teacher with a degree in underwater basket weaving, about 35,000 per year. The bonus for having a graduate degree is only a few hundred dollars per year. No work other than teaching in a public school is counted as experience so not matter what you have done you start at the bottom. You have to pay for a fair amount of schooling on top of your degree(s) to get a teaching certificate. You even have to pay to work for them for your first semester, its called student teaching.
I know all this because I have been going through it. I have a masteres in CS and 30+ year exerience in "technology". I'm 99% done with the course work needed to get a teaching certificate and have passed the (joke of a) test to be certified to teach computer science in Texas. Now that I am at the point where I can apply for teaching jobs I am finding out that schools do not want people who are experts in any subject. There aren't enough students who want these classes to justify having a full time CS teacher. A highly qualified CS or math teachers must also be highly qualified in several other areas and be willing to teach English, or shop, or be a sports coach, if they hope to get a teaching job.
The result is that people who are qualified to teach these subjects do not want to be teachers and even people who are qualified and want to teach have trouble getting jobs.
That leads to a real Catch-22. Few students want the classes, few teachers are available, therefore no classes are taught. If there were hundreds of parents (students don't really count) demanding these classes then the school would try to find a way to teach them. But, even if they want to teach them, it doesn't mean they can.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I currently teach at the college level. It is much easier to teach college than to teach in a public school.But, the problems are still there. There are very few students who what to learn hard subject like CS or IT right now.
There is no disagreement here. The current situation in the world economy is not sustainable. The current US balance of trade is not sustainable.
What I was trying to say is that the current situation is a transition caused by dramatic changes in technology and trade policy. I was talking in generalities.
If you want to get specific, the current trade situation between the US and China is astonishing. I do not understand what the Chinese are doing. They are selling the US a huge amount of goods. But, at the same time they are holding their currency at an artificially high value and buying huge amounts of US government debt. In effect, China, and also Japan, are financing our wars and our obscene balance of trade. I do not understand why they are doing that. They are not stupid, they have a reason for doing it.
When you look at the rest of the US trade balance you see the largest part of it is spent on oil. This actually makes sense if you take the long view and assume that the world will continue to use hydrocarbons for fuels and industrial feed stocks. Oil costs less to extract and its extraction does less environmental damage than any other source of hydrocarbons. OTOH, the US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than just about anybody else. It is estimated that we have enough coal and oil shale to power our society with it for 500 to 1000 years (estimates from the '70s, probably shorter time now). It makes sense to buy cheap oil now and sell expensive coal later. The US also has large supplies of uranium and thorium and we have potential sources of geothermal power that are large enough to power the world. Just look at what is sitting under Yellowstone or the magma upwelling about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
What is going on now is not sustainable. OTOH, in the long run it does set the US up as one of the worlds major suppliers of hydrocarbons and energy. You have to take a long view and assume that when things get bad enough people will do what is needed to correct the problems. The situation in the US is going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. We have a huge older generation who are... not rational is the best way to say it. They are old, they vote, and they are dying off. Things will change as voiting power moves from the old rural population to the younger urban population.
The way things are going in China I have to wonder how long it is until there is a revolution that completely disrupts their economy. The other major concern is the current terror war. I do not believe that the world understands how the US feels about that right now. I believe the terrorists really to not understand what they are dealing with. They have missed the lesson of flight 93. They clearly have not read any US history.
There is only one Earth. That means there is only one economy. Much of the economic strife in the world today is the result of the slow and horribly uneven break down of the natural and artifical barriers that make it look like there are local and foreign economies. Natural barriers boil down to distance and the proportional cost of transportation. Artificial barriers include such things as tariffs and even the concept of the nation state itself.
We all need to take step back and look at the forest and not the individual trees. The world economy must be self sufficient and self sustaining. No one region must achieve that result by itself.
Stonewolf
P.S.
This point of view comes from a fellow whose last full time job was moved to India along with the rest of the company when the decided that the US wasn't a viable market for their products. I and many many others have been hurt by all these changes. But, they have to happen.
The only way to stop being old is to die. So... are you suggesting that all the old folks should just kill them selves? If so, and I do not want to put words in your mouth, at what age should we all kill our selves?
The article links to a site that specifically says they are interested in young people. In other words, no matter what else they say they are not interested in old people. Why is no one upset about the agism displayed by that company? In the US that kind of add is illegal. To bad this kind of discrimination seems to be legal and tolerated in Canada.
These days in IT "old" is the "N" word you can say out loud in public and no body cares. No matter how well you do on the test, don't show up with gray hair.
ACC I need 3 to 5 students to be able to teach the class. Contact Bob McGoldrick rmcgoldr@austincc.edu
if you want to sign up. Officially, the class has been canceled, but I know Bob will open it if he gets a lot of interest.
Does not have to mean working for EA or any of the other major players. I teach a game programming class and I think the #1 misconception that students have is that to be in the industry they must get a job with a major player. To be in the industry you need to write a game and sell it. Then you *are* the industry. The only way you will have the freedom to develop the games you want to develop is to do it on your own. Look at the number of recent/. articles about major game designers going indie! Why are the doing it? Because they can! And, they can now have more creative freedom and keep a bigger percentage of the money.
The game industry is growing at a huge rate. There is enough growth every year to support a new major studio or hundreds of small ones. Create games and try to sell them. If nothing else it will give you the skills and experience that the majors are looking for. Being hired is nice, but selling your game studio is a lot nicer.
The comments in the article about the shortage of programmers fit right in to news I got yesterday. I teach game programming and graphics at the local community college. I teach the hard core programming class. To try to save the students sanity I use the SDL library, but each student is required to design and code a complete (small) video game during the semester.
This semester my class was canceled for lack of interest. For the first time ever no one signed up for the class. I checked the enrollment in the other classes in the game development curricula and what I see is that the game design classes are full, the game industry classes and production classes are well attended, the game art classes are packed, but the technical classes are empty or nearly empty.
The fact is that it is a lot more fun to do art or design games than it is to code them, and with the number of free, or cheap, game engines out there the need for programmers is reduced. But, if this trend continues it will create a real opportunity for programmers.
Anyway.... if any one in the Austin, Texas area is looking for a hardcore game programming class, let me know, I really like teaching the class. I might still be able to save it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately I am not in a position to move or I would send you a resume. I live near Austin, Texas which is also one of the top rated cities. I have two kids in college. I own my home out right. And my wife has a good job and is close enough to retiring with a real pension that it just isn't reasonable for me to move even though I haven't been able to find a job around here.
Stonewolf
Where are these jobs? Where is this huge demand for experienced people?
I can't find these jobs anywhere I look. They aren't in the want ads. They aren't on the web sites. And the few people I know who are still making a living are holding on with their finger tips, sweating blood over whether they will have a job this afternoon.
This is just part of a PR campaign to increase the H1B visa cap.
Stonewolf
I used to be a software developer. I helped build 4 start up companies. I was laid off in 2001 and have not been able to find a development job since.
Because I have an MS degree and 30+ years experience mostly in computer graphics I was able to get a part time job teaching at the local community college. This semester the students are just like last semester and the semester before that. Less than one third are young people just out of high school, the rest are adults over 40, who have BS, MS, or even Ph.Ds in computer science, math, and electrical engineering. They have all been laid off and have all been unable to find engineering jobs for 2 to 5 years.
The older people are trying to retrain in anyway they can so they can get back to doing engineering work. They are surviving by working at fast food joints, delivering pizzas, and doing secretarial work. Most have depleted their savings.
The drop out rate among the younger people is very high. The main lesson they are learning in my class is that engineers and scientists are disposable workers who wind up on the streets at age 40, or 50 if they are lucky.
Gates wants more young people to feed to the meat grinder? Let me tell you, America's young people are not stupid. If you want more young people to work for you, you have to show them that they will have jobs when they are older. You have to employee the thousands and thousands of unemployed and under employed scientists and engineers we already have in the US.
There is no shortages of technical talent in the US. There is a huge shortage of technical jobs in the US. The very existence of the H1B visa system is proof that the US government is owned by big business.
Hey, Thanks for the info.
I would jump at a job like those you describe. Almost all my experience has been in small start up companies. I have worked at 5 start up companies. I have actively been looking for companies like that. I have been turned down for those jobs and the reasons are usually that 1) I am over qualified, i.e. they assume I will leave at the drop of a hat and 2) I am over 50.
The second one can be a killer for small companies. First off, they usually believe that you have to very young to be any good at programming and they look at what I would do to their health care costs and they lose all interest.
Stonewolf
I have a masters in CS, 30+ years programming experience, lots of business knowledge. You name it, I pretty much have it. I was laid off on my 49th birthday. That was 5 years ago. I can not buy a paid programming job. The only serious contact I have had in the last 3 years was with a company in India that was desperate for experienced people. Moving to Bangalore is not an option for me right now. The contract market has dried up.
I work on open source projects. I do some writing. I took the courses and passed the tests so that I can teach in the public schools. I haven't been able to find a job there yet. There are a lot of people like me chasing too few teaching jobs. I do teach part time at the local community college. But, very few people in the US are interested in learning programming right now. I have only had 6 students in the last 3 semesters. I teach and code when I can. I was thinking about going to law school. But I do not have the money and I would have to move which is not an option right now.
So, all I can say is good luck with that.
Stonewolf
YES!
I was laid off five years ago on my 49th birthday and haven't been able to find a tech job since. My income dropped from over a $100K/year to under $20k (some years under $10k). After we were married (almost 30 years ago now) my wife and I started putting 10% of our gross income into various forms of savings. As we got raises we took part of the raise and put the rest in savings. When I was laid off we were putting nearly 30% of our combined gross into a mixture of pre and post tax savings. Over the last 30 years we have both had extended periods of unemployment and sometimes we did have to stop saving just to cover our locked in expenses. But... we own our cars, own our house, and are able to maintain a comfortable life style while I retrain and start a new career. What little debt we have is due to a decision to keep investments in place so long as the return on those investments is greater than the interest on our debt.
Save, save, save... you never know when you will need the money.
Stonewolf
P.S.
No matter what you may believe, you *can* live on 10% less than you currently make.
Intel got into the lead and as a result had the most money to spend on research and development, not to mention being able to build ever more capable chip foundries. The R&D budgets for competitive architectures were measured in millions while the R&D budgets for x86 was (and is) measured in billions. Better yet, the billions are being spent by more than one company which guarantees multiple points of view being applied to each new problem. The effect of budgets like that ripples out and has many effects the give the x86 an advantage. There is now an entire culture around the x86.
Having now reached the 64 bit stage there is little chance that the x86 will go away any time soon.
Stonewolf
Writing a game like pong would be a semester goal. A goal they may not reach, but that is OK. If y'all don't get there by the end of the semester, shoot for the next semester.
One other thing I would change, do not teach C, teach C++. I do not consider either of those languages good for teaching beginners, but you know C and so it is the best language for you to teach. So, why did I just say C++? Well, C is mostly a subset of C++. The basic language is the same whether you call it C or C++. But, C++ gives you access to a much richer set of tools and is a better language for developing complex programs. Just call what you are teach C++ and use a C++ compiler and learn C++ as you go along.
A text book that I have used for complete beginners is "Beginning C++ Game Programming" by Michael Dawson. For advanced student I've been using "C++ Primer Plus" Fifth Edition by Stephen Prata. Neither book is perfect, but I haven't found anything better.
Stay in touch,
Stonewolf
And, I am certified to teach computer science in high school. And, I am a programmer with over 30 years of experience. I can probably help you quite a bit. You should be able to contact me through slashdot, if not post a reply and we'll figure out how to communicate.
:-)
First off, you are still a very early stage beginner. That means that anything you do will require you to learn *more* than the students learn. I would try very hard to make your classes into more of a guided discussion and collaboration that a traditional lecture course. Get the students to research the areas they are having problems with and teach the class the solutions. Discuss, discuss, discuss.
Second, reach out to the tech community in your town and find experienced people who can help you.
Third, take on projects. DO NOT start out by teaching them and if and a for loop. Pick a project and let the students drive the teaching as you lead them through the problem of figuring out how to do the project. I would suggest a simple game or simulation, something the students are interested in. OTOH, there is a serious problem with expectation management. Cloning pong, asteroids, or tetris is a reasonable goal. Cloning WoW is not.
Pick the right tools. It is important that you pick tools that all the students can have access to. That includes PCs and development tools. Design the course around free tools that will run on cheap PCs. It all depends on what they students have access to. But, you can teach programming on $40 PCs running Ubuntu with completely free tools, or you can teach it on $3000 PCs loaded up with $5000 worth of software. The amount of programming they learn will be the same.
Stonewolf
I was going to post some advice, but I read a bunch of the comments that have been posted and many are great and cover every thing I was going to say....
So, why am I posting? I am asking you to post the name of your school so that people who want to learn programming can run away from there as fast as possible.
I was in a meeting last Friday with a group of CS instructors and a group of game developers working out a game programming curriculum. One of the things the inudstry people kept bringing up is that recent CS graduates do no know how to program and they have no knowledge of computer architecture. One producer who is actively recruiting said that most new CS graduates could not answer the question "what is a byte?" I kid you not.
I know what CS professors say when challenged on this subject. They will tell you they are teaching computer *Science* not computer *programming*. All I can say is that if you are in a computer science school and want to be a programmer you might want to switch to a software engineering school. Or, you could finish the CS degree and take some programming courses at a trade school or junior college.
Stonewolf
I upgraded two systems from dapper to edgy. One is a fairly generic desktop and it worked perfectly. I'm using it to write this message. The other is an old laptop. It is now totally borked. It boots, but can't start the X server. Trying to log in is interesting as it seems to lose random keystrokes. I spent several hours trying to get it working, no joy. So, I'm going to have to down load the CD image and try to reload from scratch.
Stonewolf
The article is based on data on men in the Boston area. Boston is one town in the northwest US. It is an old industrial town and Boston harbor has a reputation as being horribly polluted. It is not a representative sample of the entire US.
I've been to Boston on business more times than I can remember. There are a lot of things to love about the Boston/Cambridge area. Not to mention that I have 10th and 11th great grandfathers buried just out side Boston. But speaking as someone who grew up in the western US and live in Texas by choice, Boston is one of the most foreign places I visit. I gave up trying to dress correctly for Boston. You have to be a native to understand the rules. (How many shades of black are there?) And, well what can I say, never ever ask for salsa or for a Hawaiian style pizza in Boston.
Boston is its own unique reality and is not representative of the rest of the US.
Stonewolf
You are making a hypothesis with a cause and effect assumption. Culture and technology emerge together.
Culture drives the development of technology. Technology drives the development of culture. Neither is a cause or an effect. Both are a cause and an effect. To get a better idea of what I am talking about do a couple of things. Read a few books on Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the Dao to give yourself an idea of a non-western point of view. Try to imagine a world view that does not include original sin. Or, if you grew up with an eastern world view, read the bible and some Calvinist literature and try to imagine your life believing in original sin. Then take the time to study the way automobiles developed in the US, England, Germany, and France. And ask your self some questions, could post revolution France have ever developed or had a market for the Rolls Royce? Why was the drive-in so important for so long and where did they go?
If I were doing a similar study I would probably look at the cultural communication taking place between the west and Japan in the form of vide games.
Stonewolf
I'm sorry, I covered your entire objection with the phrase "... and some interface logic..." which would of course have to either include or interface to ATD and DTA converters. Such converters can be either on chip or off chip. It is up to companies such as Intel and AMD to decide where they want to put them. As you point out, there are already a lot of CPUs that include these devices. Intel has recently demonstrated mixing lasers with silicon, I think they can manage some analog converters.
:-)
You seem to think there is a strong distinction between DSPs and general purpose CPUs. That just isn't so. The difference is more in marketing and pricing than anything else. Though DSPs do tend to leave out a lot of memory hardware.
Your question "Why isn't a GP CPU being used for the modem or GPU?" does deserve an answer. The answer is that they are used at the low end. In fact, in low end PCs and all the first several generations of PCs all graphics was done by the CPU in the box. They did not have any sort of graphics coprocessor. Believe me, I wrote a 3D graphics library for the 486/VGA using modex and there was no GPU. Graphic coprodessors moved into the PC from the high end graphics world. At first they were horribly expensive, but over time the price came down. Oddly enough, one of the firsts graphics hardware products I worked on was a graphics coprocessor for the PC that used a motorola 68000 to do the rendering.
Currently the price (not the cost, they are two very different things) make it cheaper to use special purpose processors to run graphics cards. But, just as it did with high end graphcs 20 years ago that is changing. Now the special purpose hardware is being pushed out to the shaders and the GPU is looking more and more like a GP CPU. Twenty years ago I worked on graphics hardware that accepted a stream of graphics commands. It used a DSP to send the commands to other DSPs that generated span lists that were then passed on to pixel processors (shaders) that rendered the spans into the frame buffer.
Intel is promising to give us 80 DSP like cores on a chip. They can be logically connected to form a stream processor with the same logical structure as the hardware I worked on 20 years ago and it would out perform it.
Oh yeah, the modem question? Look up the definition of WinModem and why it caused the Linux such grief.
God! I would eat a ton of shit to be allowed to work on a project like that. I'd eat even more to get paid to do it.
You are so focused on a few details that you are missing the whole point of what Intel is doing.
Stonewolf
P.S.
BTW, DSPs never ever work on analog signals. The D is DSP stands for DIGITAL. Analog to digital converters are used to convert the analog signal to the digital domain where it is processed and then passed to a digital to analog converter to recreate the analog signal. For graphics you only need the digital to analog part of the system.
Look at the total system cost of a having a separate NIC versus the cost of not having one. When the number of cores available is large enough the cost of using one to replace a NIC is much less that the cost of a NIC. It works out the save for all devices that aren't part of the CPU. When specific devices get replaced by a core on the CPU depends on the cost per core and the cost of the external device.
This has already happened to modems and to graphics on low end PCs. It is simple economics and it is driven by the costs to the companies that build motherboards and PCs. Not so much by the user. If a PC manufacturer can gain a $2 per unit cost reduction by doing what I describe they will do it in a heart beat. It is simple economics.
Stonewolf.
Thank you for posting the link to your message on the subject. You and I are thinking alike. It is nice to know there are other people out there who can see the obvious.
Thank you for your post.
Stonewolf
A couple of things to mention here. Many years ago I read an Intel road map for the x86 processors. It was more than 10 years ago, less than 20 I think. In it they said they would have massively multicore processors coming along around now. They may have forgotten that and reinvented the goal along the way, companies do that. But, they really have been predicting this for a very long time.
:-) The counter example everyone came up with was, "well, if that is true why would AMD buy ATI?" The answer to that is simple, they want their patent portfolio and their name. In the short term it even makes sense to put a GPU and some shaders on a chip along with a few cores. At the point you can put 16 or so cores on a chip you won't have much use for a GPU.
The other thing is that with that many cores and all the SIMD and graphics instructions that are built into current processors it looks to me like the obvious reason to have 80 cores is to get rid of graphics coprocessors. You do no need a GPU and a bunch of shaders if you can throw 60 processors at the job. You do need a really good bus, but hey, not much of a problem compared to getting 80 cores working on one chip.
With that kind of computer power you can throw a core at any thing you currently use a special chip for. You can get rid of sound cards, network cards, graphics cards... all you need is lots of cores, lots of RAM, a fast interconnect, and some interface logic. Everything else is just a waste of silicon.
History has shown that general purpose processing always wins in the end.
I was talking to some folks about this just last Saturday. They didn't beleive me. I don't expect y'all to believe me either.
Stonewolf
You are focusing on the wrong problem. It isn't football versus academics. As other have pointed out they are in different budgets. In the south if you don't have football you might not even have a school. I live in a property rich school district (Round Rock ISD in central Texas). They just spent 26 million dollars out of a 16 million dollar budget to build a new football temple. OTOH, they do have some technology courses and even an Information Technology Academy magnet school. They also happen to have thousands (tens of thousands) of high tech people living in the district.
But here is the problem. Where do you get teachers qualified to teach this subject? The starting salary for a teacher with a degree in computer science is the same as the starting salary for a teacher with a degree in underwater basket weaving, about 35,000 per year. The bonus for having a graduate degree is only a few hundred dollars per year. No work other than teaching in a public school is counted as experience so not matter what you have done you start at the bottom. You have to pay for a fair amount of schooling on top of your degree(s) to get a teaching certificate. You even have to pay to work for them for your first semester, its called student teaching.
I know all this because I have been going through it. I have a masteres in CS and 30+ year exerience in "technology". I'm 99% done with the course work needed to get a teaching certificate and have passed the (joke of a) test to be certified to teach computer science in Texas. Now that I am at the point where I can apply for teaching jobs I am finding out that schools do not want people who are experts in any subject. There aren't enough students who want these classes to justify having a full time CS teacher. A highly qualified CS or math teachers must also be highly qualified in several other areas and be willing to teach English, or shop, or be a sports coach, if they hope to get a teaching job.
The result is that people who are qualified to teach these subjects do not want to be teachers and even people who are qualified and want to teach have trouble getting jobs.
That leads to a real Catch-22. Few students want the classes, few teachers are available, therefore no classes are taught. If there were hundreds of parents (students don't really count) demanding these classes then the school would try to find a way to teach them. But, even if they want to teach them, it doesn't mean they can.
Stonewolf
P.S.
I currently teach at the college level. It is much easier to teach college than to teach in a public school.But, the problems are still there. There are very few students who what to learn hard subject like CS or IT right now.
There is no disagreement here. The current situation in the world economy is not sustainable. The current US balance of trade is not sustainable.
What I was trying to say is that the current situation is a transition caused by dramatic changes in technology and trade policy. I was talking in generalities.
If you want to get specific, the current trade situation between the US and China is astonishing. I do not understand what the Chinese are doing. They are selling the US a huge amount of goods. But, at the same time they are holding their currency at an artificially high value and buying huge amounts of US government debt. In effect, China, and also Japan, are financing our wars and our obscene balance of trade. I do not understand why they are doing that. They are not stupid, they have a reason for doing it.
When you look at the rest of the US trade balance you see the largest part of it is spent on oil. This actually makes sense if you take the long view and assume that the world will continue to use hydrocarbons for fuels and industrial feed stocks. Oil costs less to extract and its extraction does less environmental damage than any other source of hydrocarbons. OTOH, the US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than just about anybody else. It is estimated that we have enough coal and oil shale to power our society with it for 500 to 1000 years (estimates from the '70s, probably shorter time now). It makes sense to buy cheap oil now and sell expensive coal later. The US also has large supplies of uranium and thorium and we have potential sources of geothermal power that are large enough to power the world. Just look at what is sitting under Yellowstone or the magma upwelling about 50 miles west of Salt Lake City.
What is going on now is not sustainable. OTOH, in the long run it does set the US up as one of the worlds major suppliers of hydrocarbons and energy. You have to take a long view and assume that when things get bad enough people will do what is needed to correct the problems. The situation in the US is going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. We have a huge older generation who are... not rational is the best way to say it. They are old, they vote, and they are dying off. Things will change as voiting power moves from the old rural population to the younger urban population.
The way things are going in China I have to wonder how long it is until there is a revolution that completely disrupts their economy. The other major concern is the current terror war. I do not believe that the world understands how the US feels about that right now. I believe the terrorists really to not understand what they are dealing with. They have missed the lesson of flight 93. They clearly have not read any US history.
There is only one Earth. That means there is only one economy. Much of the economic strife in the world today is the result of the slow and horribly uneven break down of the natural and artifical barriers that make it look like there are local and foreign economies. Natural barriers boil down to distance and the proportional cost of transportation. Artificial barriers include such things as tariffs and even the concept of the nation state itself.
We all need to take step back and look at the forest and not the individual trees. The world economy must be self sufficient and self sustaining. No one region must achieve that result by itself.
Stonewolf
P.S.
This point of view comes from a fellow whose last full time job was moved to India along with the rest of the company when the decided that the US wasn't a viable market for their products. I and many many others have been hurt by all these changes. But, they have to happen.
The only way to stop being old is to die. So... are you suggesting that all the old folks should just kill them selves? If so, and I do not want to put words in your mouth, at what age should we all kill our selves?
The article links to a site that specifically says they are interested in young people. In other words, no matter what else they say they are not interested in old people. Why is no one upset about the agism displayed by that company? In the US that kind of add is illegal. To bad this kind of discrimination seems to be legal and tolerated in Canada.
These days in IT "old" is the "N" word you can say out loud in public and no body cares. No matter how well you do on the test, don't show up with gray hair.
Stonewolf
ACC I need 3 to 5 students to be able to teach the class. Contact Bob McGoldrick rmcgoldr@austincc.edu
if you want to sign up. Officially, the class has been canceled, but I know Bob will open it if he gets a lot of interest.
Stonewolf
Does not have to mean working for EA or any of the other major players. I teach a game programming class and I think the #1 misconception that students have is that to be in the industry they must get a job with a major player. To be in the industry you need to write a game and sell it. Then you *are* the industry. The only way you will have the freedom to develop the games you want to develop is to do it on your own. Look at the number of recent /. articles about major game designers going indie! Why are the doing it? Because they can! And, they can now have more creative freedom and keep a bigger percentage of the money.
The game industry is growing at a huge rate. There is enough growth every year to support a new major studio or hundreds of small ones. Create games and try to sell them. If nothing else it will give you the skills and experience that the majors are looking for. Being hired is nice, but selling your game studio is a lot nicer.
Stonewolf
The comments in the article about the shortage of programmers fit right in to news I got yesterday. I teach game programming and graphics at the local community college. I teach the hard core programming class. To try to save the students sanity I use the SDL library, but each student is required to design and code a complete (small) video game during the semester.
This semester my class was canceled for lack of interest. For the first time ever no one signed up for the class. I checked the enrollment in the other classes in the game development curricula and what I see is that the game design classes are full, the game industry classes and production classes are well attended, the game art classes are packed, but the technical classes are empty or nearly empty.
The fact is that it is a lot more fun to do art or design games than it is to code them, and with the number of free, or cheap, game engines out there the need for programmers is reduced. But, if this trend continues it will create a real opportunity for programmers.
Anyway.... if any one in the Austin, Texas area is looking for a hardcore game programming class, let me know, I really like teaching the class. I might still be able to save it.
Stonewolf