The AP Computer Science AB exam was killed off last year so there's less incentive for linked lists, BigO, binary search trees, to be taught at the high school. Truth is, if there were no AP exam, most Principals would kill off those programs. More interesting is that the IB dossier views CS so important that it is one of the six pillars of the IB diploma. Funny how the rest of the planet view CS more important than the USA (AP). I recently had a former high principal ask me if anyone programmed computers anymore?
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
Never did watch this Terminator series. To be honest I'm getting bored of the whole series model. The idea these days seems to be to start off as many subplots as possible and then take care never to resolve anything so that there's always room for another season. Then you string it out for as long as you can until you get cancelled. If you're lucky you get a really rushed ending in two episodes that clumsily attempts to tie up the storyline. Quite often not though.
Yep, agree with you there. I'd lump Alias and Lost (hmm pattern?) in the same category. But some people love 54435433 different subplots in their movie. Personally, I like how 24 does it, they solve one up, and then start a new one in the next episode.
Yeah, I wondered why the EU was so generous to the Somali pirates after all of the attacks and hostage negotiations. Then I wondered what kind of broadband the warlords get these days? Fiber to the huts?
I left Verizon for T-Mobile because of it - when Verizon finally released its first Bluetooth phone, it disabled basic sync between a person's phone and his/her computer. I really wonder how many non-techie Verizon are blissfully unaware of some great features their Bluetooth phones would be capable of if only Verizon didn't disable them?
Sprint does the same thing with all of their phones. You can take pictures and play MP3's, but you have (or they want you) to use their expensive web service to download music. If you want to actually print a picture that you took with your camera, you have to send the photo to Sprint's site (for a fee) and then go to the web and print it there.
Like an earlier poster said, Verizon, Time Warner, Cox, Sprint do not want to be dumb data pipes. They want to control the content as well.
This was the first game that I found in an old book of programs I checked out from the library. I typed the entire thing into my Commodore 64 and then proceeded to colorize the game with all of the weird color commands that you put into the PRINT statements.
I remember being so proud at 14 years old for typing it all in.
What made you take out LAN play? To me, playing with a bunch of friends in the same room is by far the best multi-player experience. No battle-net can touch it.
I can't think of any reason to leave out pure LAN play other than DRM issues. Thwarting DRM through LAN play is trivial. Simply tell all of your friends to install Hamachi, and kapow.. instant VPN LAN.
I think LAN play without a central server is gone the way of the dodo. I felt the similar shock when games started leaving out modem to modem play. If all you wanted to do was play 1 vs 1, then a direct 56k modem connection produced less latency without going through the internet.
I remember reading a developer blog about C&C:Generals. He said that performance wise, there is no difference between LAN and internet play. Once you press the launch button in the chatroom, all internet traffic is sent between you and your opponents -- the chat/match server has nothing to do with it.
Hmmm, I wonder how many people were angry when Warcaft III didn't support null-modem play? (For you youngsters: That's when you connected the serial ports of two computers together with a little null-modem adapter.... Oh god, now I have to explain what serial ports were.. )
EBay/PayPal holding the money doesn't solve where the buyer gets the item but claims he didn't, or where the seller ships something else.It's still he said, she said. People on both sides will still get ripped off. The only thing different is the extra fees by using PayPal.
As a seller, you do get $2000 of protection if you only accept Paypal and you only ship via UPS tracking using what's called a confirmed Paypal address. Basically you have to prove that you are at that address via a major credit card, or by snail mail.
My only gripe with the confirmed address policy is that eBay doesn't verify that bidders have one before they bid on an item. So when a bidder wins an auction, they often bitch to me that Paypal is refusing payment until they get it "fixed". And of course no one actually reads the item description that warns that my auctions require this.
It's ironic that I would trust pirates over some game developers to not screw up my system.
Isn't that the truth! Gamecopyworld, Demonoid, Nforce, and other sites have such a great software defect reporting system that rivals most of the companies I've worked with. When a new crack comes out, if there's anything screwy with the release.. people immediately jump on the forums and post detailed problems, and the crack is "nuked" and soon after that, a "proper" one is released.
When no one has any incentive to purchase a copy, no copies will be purchased (or very few will be anyway).
This is the ultimate fear any one that creates digital media (literature, songs, movies, software) for a living. It's understandably scary as hell. There will ALWAYS be a demand for these things, someone will always pay for this to be created.
As a software engineer, I do not want the government really involved in enforcing copywrite law. I don't want the police or FBI snooping on bits worrying about what people are downloading or sharing. It just doesn't matter to me. People will always pay for good software at some point. Trust the free market. If you make a great game or app, there will be someone wanting to pay you to keep creating more apps.
I think the main point with Tribes is that no DRM is needed because the game is that good! Another example is the game Combat Mission. (http://www.combatmission.com) None of their games has ever had DRM or copy protection, yet they make a great living because of the crazy fanbase. I know that hundreds of people are drooling months before each release and constantly donating to them to encourage the next release.
Yes, it's scary. But if you look at Cliff's blog responses, a majority of them say that DRM is the #1 (more than price) reason they pirate the game. Because of fear, Cliff will probably dismiss that reason.
Cliff asks, "Is it 10%? is it 95%? I don't know. Are they generally kids, or adults? I don't know. "
IMHO, this is THE million dollar question here, it's more important to find out WHO, than WHY.
I remember when Sierra released a multiplayer game called Tribes. It had absolutely NO copy protection. It installed completely to the hard drive. No cd-key was required to install it. It never performed a CD check. Even though it was multiplayer only, it did no online checks. Even the crudest CD-writing software could make a simple backup. I remember reading a developer blog which mentioned that at peak times, there were about 50% more people playing Tribes online than actual CD's sold. However, the game made a decent profit, and Tribes 2 was given the green light for development.
This would be extremely useful information to justify expensive and time consuming DRM and anti-piracy schemes. I have not seen any studies done to see who pirates games.
If you knew from a valid study that 99% of the people who pirate your games are less than 15 years old and live with parents, you might not spend as much money on incorporating DRM in your product.
This would be an excellent PhD topic for some business graduate.
However, if the study returned data that suggested a majority of your pirates are people in their 30's making over $80,000 a year and owned a Prius, then something to prevent trivial copy/burn might be justified.
Microsoft's success can be pinpointed to one day in time when all of IBM's lawyers were at Gary Kildall's house. Gary was out screwing around in his Cessna that day and Dorothy basically freaked out during the negotiations for DOS. When Digital Research punted the IBM deal, that's when the phenominal $50,000 investment in Tim Patterson's DOS became Microsoft Legend.
I'm not sure that Gates knew that IBM was going to pull parts off the shelf to slam together a PC, and I doubt he knew that clever reverse engineering of the ROM BIOS that Compaq would do would cause the Attack of The PC Clones to occur and the money bags to fall from the sky at Microsoft.
If you ever read any Gates biography, documentaries etc, almost all literature dedicates a large amount to that particular point in time.
Bob Cringley's PBS Triumph of the Nerds spends about 30 minutes of the documentary on this decision.
Stephen Manes' Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America -- dedicates an entire chapter to this event.
Even Noah Wiley's Pirates of Silicon Valley does a silly bullet time effect on this one moment.
My wife has a 16GB iPhone and I have some craptacular LG CU575 flip phone. What will be the price for me if I'm already on the AT&T and just want the iPhone? (I'm betting full price of $500).
Absolutely great idea. It makes sense too. A company should have to basically pay "back taxes" for the benefit of that foreign person to work in the USA. Another way to is to heavily garnish the H1-B visa person's salary.
It doesn't block them, it just makes companies look at hiring locally before they go outside.
Today's high school students are a tough sell when it comes to taking programming electives. They've all grown up with Xboxes, Playstations, Cell Phones, web 2.0. When they find out that it takes a page of complicated code to move a square across the monitor (Looking at you Java!), they leave the class.
Back in the early eighties, there was no World of Warcraft. Atari had just come out. Not everyone had an Apple IIe or Commodore computer. So programming classes were really cool (well, compared to today). It was easy to impress a high school student.
I think that India and China are going through what we did in the eighties. When you are poor as dirt, and a computer is really cool, then there's a larger pool of applicants.
So you are finding less and less people that have any programming background entering today's universities. You won't get many people in science excited about using programming.
Solved by downloading Apple's free BootCamp software and purchasing a Mac Book Pro or Intel based iMac. Now mac users never have to fret about waiting for a PC port to OSX ever again.:)
As someone who is a longtime Windows user and now MAC OS X user out of necessity (I'm an IT Director at a sports publishing company and we are ALL MAC OS X), I wonder why any Mac user in their right mind would buy a Mac only to install Windows on it.
Simple reason to put Windows on a Macbook Pro: Games. I'm tired of having reconnect my monitor to a Windows machine for games and one for my PowerMac. The ONLY reason I keep a Windows machine around is to play games. I don't use it for anything else. OSX does everything else (Office, banking, surfing the net, etc) better.
I also don't want two monitors. I want one machine that can run Windows for gaming, and then OSX for everything else. Apple now has a product that does this well. I'm going to purchase this.
In highschool I have yet to meet a computer teacher that is a trained programmer, other than self taught. Most are business/science teachers that get the job to try to teach kids to program while most kids goof off.
As a current computer science high school teacher, I'd have to agree. Secondary ed computer science endorsements are ridiculously easy to obtain. In most states, you only need about 25 college hours of "computer classes". That could mean anything from a class in "HTML" to a class in "Microsoft Office". In fact, I have never heard of an official computer science exam that teachers have to pass.
I attended an AP Computer Science summer workshop for teachers in 2005. I was appalled at the number of CS teachers who could not write a for loop. Most of the teachers there were business or math teachers who were forced to provide a class in programming.
At one interview I had for a high school, the principal asked me "does anyone program computers anymore?". She was refering to the fact that todays computers do not boot with a copy of QBASIC in ROM. (i.e. Apple IIe, C64, TRS-80)
Another reason that students aren't taking programming courses is that there are so many other computer classes being offered now. And they are easier to pass! Our school offers Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash, Video, Computer Repair (A+ cert), Networking.
Finally, programming just isn't that sexy to your typical high school student. Students see that making a game in Flash (without Actionscript) is so much easier than all of the crap you have to do in Java or C++. Many of the high school CS teachers teach the entire course using System.out.println.
Encourage your local schools to look at adopting software that encourges programming:
mounting a drive over the Internet (do we still capitalize that?) involves much OS overhead as well, and that is very slow. during my brief, free, usage of.Mac and its iDrive I was frustrated more than anything else. perhaps if the OS is modified to strip out some of what it does when you mount a drive they can speed it up, but for now FTP serves me better.
Yeah, I bought the.Mac package this year and I was suprised at how slow it is just to traverse directories. Apple needs to make it's.Mac technology as speedy as a normal FTP site. I don't know why it's that slow. I'm running on 256KB/s upload as well.
Now it's cool to have autosyncronization of bookmarks, addressbooks, and certain folders; but the slowness of.Mac is something they need to work on.
Slashdot Mirror
The AP Computer Science AB exam was killed off last year so there's less incentive for linked lists, BigO, binary search trees, to be taught at the high school. Truth is, if there were no AP exam, most Principals would kill off those programs.
More interesting is that the IB dossier views CS so important that it is one of the six pillars of the IB diploma. Funny how the rest of the planet view CS more important than the USA (AP).
I recently had a former high principal ask me if anyone programmed computers anymore?
Carrier groups are prime targets for short ranged nukes.
When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.
Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.
Never did watch this Terminator series. To be honest I'm getting bored of the whole series model. The idea these days seems to be to start off as many subplots as possible and then take care never to resolve anything so that there's always room for another season. Then you string it out for as long as you can until you get cancelled. If you're lucky you get a really rushed ending in two episodes that clumsily attempts to tie up the storyline. Quite often not though.
Yep, agree with you there. I'd lump Alias and Lost (hmm pattern?) in the same category. But some people love 54435433 different subplots in their movie. Personally, I like how 24 does it, they solve one up, and then start a new one in the next episode.
Yeah, I wondered why the EU was so generous to the Somali pirates after all of the attacks and hostage negotiations. Then I wondered what kind of broadband the warlords get these days? Fiber to the huts?
I left Verizon for T-Mobile because of it - when Verizon finally released its first Bluetooth phone, it disabled basic sync between a person's phone and his/her computer. I really wonder how many non-techie Verizon are blissfully unaware of some great features their Bluetooth phones would be capable of if only Verizon didn't disable them?
Sprint does the same thing with all of their phones. You can take pictures and play MP3's, but you have (or they want you) to use their expensive web service to download music. If you want to actually print a picture that you took with your camera, you have to send the photo to Sprint's site (for a fee) and then go to the web and print it there. Like an earlier poster said, Verizon, Time Warner, Cox, Sprint do not want to be dumb data pipes. They want to control the content as well.
This was the first game that I found in an old book of programs I checked out from the library. I typed the entire thing into my Commodore 64 and then proceeded to colorize the game with all of the weird color commands that you put into the PRINT statements.
I remember being so proud at 14 years old for typing it all in.
Thanks for the fond memories.
What made you take out LAN play? To me, playing with a bunch of friends in the same room is by far the best multi-player experience. No battle-net can touch it.
I can't think of any reason to leave out pure LAN play other than DRM issues. Thwarting DRM through LAN play is trivial. Simply tell all of your friends to install Hamachi, and kapow.. instant VPN LAN.
I think LAN play without a central server is gone the way of the dodo. I felt the similar shock when games started leaving out modem to modem play. If all you wanted to do was play 1 vs 1, then a direct 56k modem connection produced less latency without going through the internet.
I remember reading a developer blog about C&C:Generals. He said that performance wise, there is no difference between LAN and internet play. Once you press the launch button in the chatroom, all internet traffic is sent between you and your opponents -- the chat/match server has nothing to do with it.
Hmmm, I wonder how many people were angry when Warcaft III didn't support null-modem play? (For you youngsters: That's when you connected the serial ports of two computers together with a little null-modem adapter.... Oh god, now I have to explain what serial ports were.. )
EBay/PayPal holding the money doesn't solve where the buyer gets the item but claims he didn't, or where the seller ships something else.It's still he said, she said. People on both sides will still get ripped off. The only thing different is the extra fees by using PayPal.
As a seller, you do get $2000 of protection if you only accept Paypal and you only ship via UPS tracking using what's called a confirmed Paypal address. Basically you have to prove that you are at that address via a major credit card, or by snail mail.
My only gripe with the confirmed address policy is that eBay doesn't verify that bidders have one before they bid on an item. So when a bidder wins an auction, they often bitch to me that Paypal is refusing payment until they get it "fixed". And of course no one actually reads the item description that warns that my auctions require this.
When Adblock is released for chrome, I will use it. It's funny how a 3rd party extension has become the killer app for browsing.
Isn't that the truth! Gamecopyworld, Demonoid, Nforce, and other sites have such a great software defect reporting system that rivals most of the companies I've worked with. When a new crack comes out, if there's anything screwy with the release.. people immediately jump on the forums and post detailed problems, and the crack is "nuked" and soon after that, a "proper" one is released.
This is the ultimate fear any one that creates digital media (literature, songs, movies, software) for a living. It's understandably scary as hell. There will ALWAYS be a demand for these things, someone will always pay for this to be created.
As a software engineer, I do not want the government really involved in enforcing copywrite law. I don't want the police or FBI snooping on bits worrying about what people are downloading or sharing. It just doesn't matter to me. People will always pay for good software at some point. Trust the free market. If you make a great game or app, there will be someone wanting to pay you to keep creating more apps.
I think the main point with Tribes is that no DRM is needed because the game is that good! Another example is the game Combat Mission. (http://www.combatmission.com) None of their games has ever had DRM or copy protection, yet they make a great living because of the crazy fanbase. I know that hundreds of people are drooling months before each release and constantly donating to them to encourage the next release.
Yes, it's scary. But if you look at Cliff's blog responses, a majority of them say that DRM is the #1 (more than price) reason they pirate the game. Because of fear, Cliff will probably dismiss that reason.
IMHO, this is THE million dollar question here, it's more important to find out WHO, than WHY.
I remember when Sierra released a multiplayer game called Tribes. It had absolutely NO copy protection. It installed completely to the hard drive. No cd-key was required to install it. It never performed a CD check. Even though it was multiplayer only, it did no online checks. Even the crudest CD-writing software could make a simple backup. I remember reading a developer blog which mentioned that at peak times, there were about 50% more people playing Tribes online than actual CD's sold. However, the game made a decent profit, and Tribes 2 was given the green light for development.
This would be extremely useful information to justify expensive and time consuming DRM and anti-piracy schemes. I have not seen any studies done to see who pirates games.
If you knew from a valid study that 99% of the people who pirate your games are less than 15 years old and live with parents, you might not spend as much money on incorporating DRM in your product.
This would be an excellent PhD topic for some business graduate.
However, if the study returned data that suggested a majority of your pirates are people in their 30's making over $80,000 a year and owned a Prius, then something to prevent trivial copy/burn might be justified.
Sorry, I keep seeing:
Large Hard-on Collider Goes Live September
It's really sad that my sense of humor has not progressed since junior high school. *sigh*
Microsoft's success can be pinpointed to one day in time when all of IBM's lawyers were at Gary Kildall's house. Gary was out screwing around in his Cessna that day and Dorothy basically freaked out during the negotiations for DOS. When Digital Research punted the IBM deal, that's when the phenominal $50,000 investment in Tim Patterson's DOS became Microsoft Legend.
I'm not sure that Gates knew that IBM was going to pull parts off the shelf to slam together a PC, and I doubt he knew that clever reverse engineering of the ROM BIOS that Compaq would do would cause the Attack of The PC Clones to occur and the money bags to fall from the sky at Microsoft.
If you ever read any Gates biography, documentaries etc, almost all literature dedicates a large amount to that particular point in time.
Bob Cringley's PBS Triumph of the Nerds spends about 30 minutes of the documentary on this decision.
Stephen Manes' Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry--and Made Himself the Richest Man in America -- dedicates an entire chapter to this event.
Even Noah Wiley's Pirates of Silicon Valley does a silly bullet time effect on this one moment.
Just curious..
My wife has a 16GB iPhone and I have some craptacular LG CU575 flip phone. What will be the price for me if I'm already on the AT&T and just want the iPhone? (I'm betting full price of $500).
*sigh*
Absolutely great idea. It makes sense too. A company should have to basically pay "back taxes" for the benefit of that foreign person to work in the USA. Another way to is to heavily garnish the H1-B visa person's salary.
It doesn't block them, it just makes companies look at hiring locally before they go outside.
Today's high school students are a tough sell when it comes to taking programming electives. They've all grown up with Xboxes, Playstations, Cell Phones, web 2.0. When they find out that it takes a page of complicated code to move a square across the monitor (Looking at you Java!), they leave the class.
Back in the early eighties, there was no World of Warcraft. Atari had just come out. Not everyone had an Apple IIe or Commodore computer. So programming classes were really cool (well, compared to today). It was easy to impress a high school student.
I think that India and China are going through what we did in the eighties. When you are poor as dirt, and a computer is really cool, then there's a larger pool of applicants.
So you are finding less and less people that have any programming background entering today's universities. You won't get many people in science excited about using programming.
I'd figure the major high point would be Bill Gates buying Tim Patterson's 86-DOS for $50,000 and selling it to IBM and the clones for bazillions.
Should we accept region coding now for all software? Is this good for the consumer?
It just encourages people to pirate the software. No more steam!
the Maxtor OneTouch II and with the bundled Dantz Restrospect software, it works great.
Just note: The Dantz software that's bundled will not work with Windows 2003 Server
Solved by downloading Apple's free BootCamp software and purchasing a Mac Book Pro or Intel based iMac. Now mac users never have to fret about waiting for a PC port to OSX ever again. :)
Simple reason to put Windows on a Macbook Pro: Games. I'm tired of having reconnect my monitor to a Windows machine for games and one for my PowerMac. The ONLY reason I keep a Windows machine around is to play games. I don't use it for anything else. OSX does everything else (Office, banking, surfing the net, etc) better.
I also don't want two monitors. I want one machine that can run Windows for gaming, and then OSX for everything else. Apple now has a product that does this well. I'm going to purchase this.
As a current computer science high school teacher, I'd have to agree. Secondary ed computer science endorsements are ridiculously easy to obtain. In most states, you only need about 25 college hours of "computer classes". That could mean anything from a class in "HTML" to a class in "Microsoft Office". In fact, I have never heard of an official computer science exam that teachers have to pass.
I attended an AP Computer Science summer workshop for teachers in 2005. I was appalled at the number of CS teachers who could not write a for loop. Most of the teachers there were business or math teachers who were forced to provide a class in programming.
At one interview I had for a high school, the principal asked me "does anyone program computers anymore?". She was refering to the fact that todays computers do not boot with a copy of QBASIC in ROM. (i.e. Apple IIe, C64, TRS-80)
Another reason that students aren't taking programming courses is that there are so many other computer classes being offered now. And they are easier to pass! Our school offers Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash, Video, Computer Repair (A+ cert), Networking.
Finally, programming just isn't that sexy to your typical high school student. Students see that making a game in Flash (without Actionscript) is so much easier than all of the crap you have to do in Java or C++. Many of the high school CS teachers teach the entire course using System.out.println.
Encourage your local schools to look at adopting software that encourges programming:
Yeah, I bought the .Mac package this year and I was suprised at how slow it is just to traverse directories. Apple needs to make it's .Mac technology as speedy as a normal FTP site. I don't know why it's that slow. I'm running on 256KB/s upload as well.
Now it's cool to have autosyncronization of bookmarks, addressbooks, and certain folders; but the slowness of .Mac is something they need to work on.