We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!
I never went to university but I did understand (the gist of) everything you talked about in your post. I'm a self-taught programmer, since about 1982. I learned everything pretty much the hard way.
On the other hand, I recently took a couple "computer science" classes at my local community college, just to add some easy (but impressive-looking) A's to my transcript. I understood everything that the instructors were talking about there, too. I just often didn't understand how they were saying it. I'd think, "Well, that almost made sense... but maybe they should have explained it this way..." When my fellow students asked questions, I could tell they weren't getting it, either. The instructors' answer was for them to go back, study the book, and spend more time in the lab. In other words, they were supposed to just learn it all the hard way, like I did, but do it in one semester instead of spread over several years of elementary through high school. And I tell you, it was reflected in their grades. Many did poorly. The ones who got A's were the ones that could successfully complete the exercises in a textbook (with help from the computer lab tutors where necessary). And that was that. On to the next class.
(Oh, and just to give you an idea... if I'm remembering right, CS101A was a C++ class, but it never once mentioned object orientation and had students write all the exercises C-style. And as for sophistication, I don't think it actually got as far as introducing the concept of an array, let alone anything like a struct.)
Now, you might be thinking, "well, that's community college for you." But I live in the Bay Area, where community colleges are actually pretty high quality where serious classes are concerned. Many local campuses have special arrangements where they essentially act as feeder schools for immigrants and other people who lack U.S. high school transcripts but who want to get into Berkeley and Stanford. A large number of Berkeley students go this route. I had a friend who took higher math classes at my community college and later had to re-take a few at a Cal State campus, because her original classes didn't transfer, and she couldn't believe how much easier the State versions of the classes were.
What I'm suggesting here is that computer education departments do not seem to be held to the same high standards as math, chemistry, or physics departments. The classes definitely seem to be treated like "workplace skills" classes, rather than a serious discipline and a path to higher education. Perhaps the problem is simply that last year's crappy, poorly-educated MIS graduates are the ones teaching today's undergrads? Whatever it is, having met the students and seen their frustration trying to learn CS concepts in a traditional class setting, I am not surprised that they make for poor hires once they graduate.
Re:You knew nothing of the sort
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
You knew nothing of the sort. We were told time and time again that there was a plan, it was all plotted out, and it would all come together and questions would be answered. We were lied to.
I believe the appropriate term here is "credulous."
Nobody who actually watched the show should have had the impression there were any "answers" forthcoming at all.
The GPL squarely puts the Freedom with the end-user.
Well, and perhaps more poignantly, the GPL makes no distinction between the "end user" and the "developer." That is, the so-called end user might just as easily be a developer as well. In the Free Software world, there is no "priesthood" that develops software and no flock of users-as-supplicants. Everybody is just a person using a computer, and everyone has equal right to do with the software as they see fit -- just so long as they agree not to deny that right to anybody else.
Jeez, a Palm m100? Those came out around the time I'd given up on Palm. You're apparently pretty young, though, so you're forgiven.
Still, even TFA seems pretty lacking in genuine geek cred. Lots of gushing about vapor patents filed in 2001, "long before Palm made phones." Well you know what? In 2001 I had one of these, and if you didn't mind carrying around a brick it wasn't a bad device at all. It was just a Palm III PDA melded to a phone, so you got the benefits of the address book and calendar. This was long before mobile data, but there was a mobile browser available for Palms, and I was able to use that when I coupled the phone with a Ricochet modem.
Childs worked on his own definition of authorized as that was never given to him either. Did he fail to give the passwords to the person he felt was authorized? I thought the Mayor got the passwords in the end, so how did he not deliver them to an authorized person?
This just sounds like the usual geek interpretation of legal matters that you see on Slashdot all the time. You now the type of thing: "The law says 'you shall not do this.' But if I let my brother do half of it and I do the other half, neither of us did the whole thing, so obviously we're both scot free!" It just doesn't work that way. Wherever a question of law is present, it's decided by either a judge or a jury, and in both cases the standard usually boils down to how a reasonable person would interpret the law. Everyone's heard these kinds of terms before: "acting in good faith," "reasonable expectation," etc. In my opinion Child just simply wasn't acting like a reasonable person. He fails the sniff test.
What I want to know now is why did the trial take so long? And why did it have to go into technical detail?
Just speculation, but:
A.) The prosecution may have felt it necessary to introduce the technical detail to establish the complexity of the systems involved to support the "denial of service" charge;
B.) The defense may have introduced the technical detail to establish the complexity of the systems involved to support the assertion that only Childs was competent to manage them.
However, as you point out, the fact of his felony conviction, may have the same effect.
Or the fact that his last major reference -- not some mere company, but a high-level city government agency -- will say he was terminated for cause.
Or the fact that his name has been floating around the press for months as a possible computer criminal -- including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the KCBS Evening News.
But the Tesco/Levi's case didn't hinge on copyright, if I understand it, but on trademark law and trade regulations. Tesco was free to buy Levi's from Italy or Spain, for example, but was importing them from countries outside the EU, which is forbidden without the consent of the manufacturer.
What I don't understand is that the fact that Levi's were available at a much cheaper price in Eastern Europe sounds like classic dumping on Levi's part, which should mean Tesco can bring a complaint to the European Commission -- but perhaps that's not an effective process in practice?
Speaking as another member of the computing press, I totally agree. I got an icky feeling as soon as I saw the story posted, and the background behind it. Gizmodo very clearly crossed a line. It also annoys me that this is one more story to point to when people want to put down journalists. The ones who fly straight and act professionally and responsibly inevitably get tarred with the same brush as the ones who don't.
I think it's safe to say they didn't have any exotic computer technology. Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ^.^
No? It's well known that the Soviets developed computers based on ternary logic (rather than binary) -- that seems pretty exotic to me. I thought it was equally well understood that it was more expedient to switch to clones of Western technology, so that's what happened.
But since when are hot girls who wear tight pants and kick ass considered "strong, capable, confident female characters"?
You know who plays a strong, capable, confident female character? Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect. Compared to that, Whedon's females are just adolescent wank material.
I watched Serenity and thought it was a bunch of total fanboy garbage that would barely play as a comic book, and that reaction led me to skip the whole series.
Children aren't mentally prepared to tackle the deeper issues that earned these books the title "classic."
I see your point, and I too hated many of the books I was made to read in school. But if you don't twist kids' arms just a little bit, how will they even realize that this mental hurdle even exists for them to leap? That is, how will they ever understand that a book like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe can be both an exciting, imaginative fairy tale and a work of Christian symbolism? How will they ever understand that some books that don't feature any magic lions, vampires, gunfights, or space ships can have far more real and compelling value to their lives? You think they're just going to come home work one day, turn off the TV, and say to themselves, "You know, I never read Moby-Dick"? Not if they've never even been told that Moby-Dick is a good book, they won't.
I think the real problem, quite frankly, is bad teaching. Personally, I cannot fathom what a bunch of school-age boys wouldn't like about Lord of the Flies. It's an awesome story. But if you have a teacher that's constantly pounding the podium going, "allegory, allegory, allegory... what does it symbolize? What is the meaning of the conch?"... then you won't get anything out of it. It's kind of like screening a TV show and constantly interrupting the dialogue to make comments and ask questions. Viewers will never be able to be immersed in the fiction. For students to really get anything out of books, teachers need to do it a little more like they do in college -- they should have you read whole huge sections of the books, or even the whole book, and then start the discussion. That way you can enjoy the book first, then look at it in a whole new light. But good luck getting a class full of high school students to read books without constant prodding.
You know, it can be even simpler. Just because a book is regarded as great literature doesn't mean that it actually is that.
Yes, I suppose that can be the case, but it's unlikely. A great many of our greatest writers didn't come to be regarded as "great literature" until after they were dead. If it's all just a popularity contest, why would that be the case?
Great writers are often judged by other writers, who recognize their skill in comparison to their own. For example, I'd count Hemingway as an author whose style is so deceptively simple that many readers won't realize how difficult it is to achieve -- until they try it themselves.
There is also the problem of books that contain daring or innovative ideas, or that employ innovative narrative structures, or that contain unique characters, but which were written a century ago or earlier. The innovations will no longer be readily apparent to people who have seen them imitated hundreds of times over in popular fiction that has been published since. The reader needs to be aware enough of the historical context, both of the story and its authorship, to fully appreciate why it was hailed as "great."
And then, finally, there is the problem that many readers simply lack the sophistication to appreciate great works. Nobody likes being called stupid, so they tend to reject this idea, but the fact is that we're all born ignorant and we only gain intellectual sophistication through long and rigorous practice. Books I read and absolutely could not appreciate when I was 12 years old seem like works of genius to me now. Some people -- especially those who don't read very much -- won't gain that level of appreciation until they're in their 20s, 30s, or maybe never. That's life.
Someone who reads a book and just says, "I don't get it. That was stupid," probably didn't get very much out of the book. They should probably go back, pick a different book, and try again. Then maybe, after they read a few more books, they can go back and try the first book again and maybe this time they'll gain a different appreciation for it. Some books -- a great many books -- really are pretty bad, or at best mediocre. But books that have managed to stay in print in dozens of editions, in every language in the world, for hundreds of years probably don't rank among them.
I had to read Madame Bovary as a college student...
Then you are truly lucky. When I took college English classes (recently, since I never went to college after HS), we were exposed to a little bit of classical writing, in the form of Shakespeare ("Hamlet," naturally, because nobody's ever been exposed to that one before) and a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (yuck). As for novels, though, I don't recall being assigned anything that didn't fall under the categories of fiction about immigrants of non-European ethnic origins, fiction about the gay and/or lesbian experience, and graphic novels. All very innovative and non-traditional, to be sure, but nothing written before 1997 and nothing that could approach the vast backlog of classics available. In short, it seems English departments have been assigned the parallel role of "empathy and diversity training," which has since become more central to the curriculum than teaching kids about the English language. (I also found it curious that the instructors put almost no marks on students' papers, merely grades; they insisted that it was not their job to teach you how to write, but that you were supposed to learn from your mistakes and "work harder.")
You may be on to something, because I'm a very bad story teller. But i have to ask, what is the value in stories that aren't true? Aren't they just as likely to mislead as inform?
Here's a mind-blower for you: A great many of the very best stories are told from the perspective of something called an "unreliable narrator" -- that is, even within the context of a fictional (not true) narrative, what the narrator is telling you might not actually be true, or his or her interpretation of the events may be wrong. So I'll throw your own question back at you: Why would anyone want to read that?
Personally, I don't think you have Asperger's, I just think you're being deliberately pigheaded.
The way I remember it, they actually destroyed the sonic screwdriver at some point in the original series, precisely because it lent itself to such lazy writing.
They screened it twice at WonderCon here in San Francisco yesterday......but the lines to get into the screening were too long. They seemed to wrap around the building. I went home and downloaded it instead.
The episode also seemed more low-budget than episodes from previous seasons, but that could be because it was the first time I've watched it in FullHD.
No, my reaction also was that the effects in this one were a bit naff. I thought that of the very first episode, too, though. Remember Mickey wrestling with the Dumpster? And the Nestene Consciousness wasn't very impressive. I figure they're just saving their budget for the best bits to come.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a coop student now in her 3rd year at the University of Waterloo (my university... a supposed top engineering university in Canada)... calls me up to solve a problem. I help her out... I tell her to step through some code... she says what? Apparently she has never ran a debugger before. Hooooowwwwwww!!!!
I never went to university but I did understand (the gist of) everything you talked about in your post. I'm a self-taught programmer, since about 1982. I learned everything pretty much the hard way.
On the other hand, I recently took a couple "computer science" classes at my local community college, just to add some easy (but impressive-looking) A's to my transcript. I understood everything that the instructors were talking about there, too. I just often didn't understand how they were saying it. I'd think, "Well, that almost made sense... but maybe they should have explained it this way..." When my fellow students asked questions, I could tell they weren't getting it, either. The instructors' answer was for them to go back, study the book, and spend more time in the lab. In other words, they were supposed to just learn it all the hard way, like I did, but do it in one semester instead of spread over several years of elementary through high school. And I tell you, it was reflected in their grades. Many did poorly. The ones who got A's were the ones that could successfully complete the exercises in a textbook (with help from the computer lab tutors where necessary). And that was that. On to the next class.
(Oh, and just to give you an idea... if I'm remembering right, CS101A was a C++ class, but it never once mentioned object orientation and had students write all the exercises C-style. And as for sophistication, I don't think it actually got as far as introducing the concept of an array, let alone anything like a struct.)
Now, you might be thinking, "well, that's community college for you." But I live in the Bay Area, where community colleges are actually pretty high quality where serious classes are concerned. Many local campuses have special arrangements where they essentially act as feeder schools for immigrants and other people who lack U.S. high school transcripts but who want to get into Berkeley and Stanford. A large number of Berkeley students go this route. I had a friend who took higher math classes at my community college and later had to re-take a few at a Cal State campus, because her original classes didn't transfer, and she couldn't believe how much easier the State versions of the classes were.
What I'm suggesting here is that computer education departments do not seem to be held to the same high standards as math, chemistry, or physics departments. The classes definitely seem to be treated like "workplace skills" classes, rather than a serious discipline and a path to higher education. Perhaps the problem is simply that last year's crappy, poorly-educated MIS graduates are the ones teaching today's undergrads? Whatever it is, having met the students and seen their frustration trying to learn CS concepts in a traditional class setting, I am not surprised that they make for poor hires once they graduate.
You knew nothing of the sort. We were told time and time again that there was a plan, it was all plotted out, and it would all come together and questions would be answered. We were lied to.
I believe the appropriate term here is "credulous."
Nobody who actually watched the show should have had the impression there were any "answers" forthcoming at all.
The GPL squarely puts the Freedom with the end-user.
Well, and perhaps more poignantly, the GPL makes no distinction between the "end user" and the "developer." That is, the so-called end user might just as easily be a developer as well. In the Free Software world, there is no "priesthood" that develops software and no flock of users-as-supplicants. Everybody is just a person using a computer, and everyone has equal right to do with the software as they see fit -- just so long as they agree not to deny that right to anybody else.
Jon Katz? Is that you?
Jeez, a Palm m100? Those came out around the time I'd given up on Palm. You're apparently pretty young, though, so you're forgiven.
Still, even TFA seems pretty lacking in genuine geek cred. Lots of gushing about vapor patents filed in 2001, "long before Palm made phones." Well you know what? In 2001 I had one of these, and if you didn't mind carrying around a brick it wasn't a bad device at all. It was just a Palm III PDA melded to a phone, so you got the benefits of the address book and calendar. This was long before mobile data, but there was a mobile browser available for Palms, and I was able to use that when I coupled the phone with a Ricochet modem.
Beat that, anyone?
Childs worked on his own definition of authorized as that was never given to him either. Did he fail to give the passwords to the person he felt was authorized? I thought the Mayor got the passwords in the end, so how did he not deliver them to an authorized person?
This just sounds like the usual geek interpretation of legal matters that you see on Slashdot all the time. You now the type of thing: "The law says 'you shall not do this.' But if I let my brother do half of it and I do the other half, neither of us did the whole thing, so obviously we're both scot free!" It just doesn't work that way. Wherever a question of law is present, it's decided by either a judge or a jury, and in both cases the standard usually boils down to how a reasonable person would interpret the law. Everyone's heard these kinds of terms before: "acting in good faith," "reasonable expectation," etc. In my opinion Child just simply wasn't acting like a reasonable person. He fails the sniff test.
What I want to know now is why did the trial take so long? And why did it have to go into technical detail?
Just speculation, but:
A.) The prosecution may have felt it necessary to introduce the technical detail to establish the complexity of the systems involved to support the "denial of service" charge;
B.) The defense may have introduced the technical detail to establish the complexity of the systems involved to support the assertion that only Childs was competent to manage them.
However, as you point out, the fact of his felony conviction, may have the same effect.
Or the fact that his last major reference -- not some mere company, but a high-level city government agency -- will say he was terminated for cause.
Or the fact that his name has been floating around the press for months as a possible computer criminal -- including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the KCBS Evening News.
But the Tesco/Levi's case didn't hinge on copyright, if I understand it, but on trademark law and trade regulations. Tesco was free to buy Levi's from Italy or Spain, for example, but was importing them from countries outside the EU, which is forbidden without the consent of the manufacturer.
What I don't understand is that the fact that Levi's were available at a much cheaper price in Eastern Europe sounds like classic dumping on Levi's part, which should mean Tesco can bring a complaint to the European Commission -- but perhaps that's not an effective process in practice?
Oh come now, this is just more "get off my lawn" sour grapes. Every new generation that comes along thinks SNL stopped being funny about a decade ago.
Speaking as another member of the computing press, I totally agree. I got an icky feeling as soon as I saw the story posted, and the background behind it. Gizmodo very clearly crossed a line. It also annoys me that this is one more story to point to when people want to put down journalists. The ones who fly straight and act professionally and responsibly inevitably get tarred with the same brush as the ones who don't.
I think it's safe to say they didn't have any exotic computer technology. Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ^.^
No? It's well known that the Soviets developed computers based on ternary logic (rather than binary) -- that seems pretty exotic to me. I thought it was equally well understood that it was more expedient to switch to clones of Western technology, so that's what happened.
So the settlement doesn't make Comcast pay out enough money, so everybody should opt out, so Comcast gets to pay nothing?
Hate to steal the Kiwis' thunder, but that joke's way older than several years ago.
But since when are hot girls who wear tight pants and kick ass considered "strong, capable, confident female characters"?
You know who plays a strong, capable, confident female character? Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect. Compared to that, Whedon's females are just adolescent wank material.
I watched Serenity and thought it was a bunch of total fanboy garbage that would barely play as a comic book, and that reaction led me to skip the whole series.
Did I do it wrong?
Either that, or time itself is an illusion...
Children aren't mentally prepared to tackle the deeper issues that earned these books the title "classic."
I see your point, and I too hated many of the books I was made to read in school. But if you don't twist kids' arms just a little bit, how will they even realize that this mental hurdle even exists for them to leap? That is, how will they ever understand that a book like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe can be both an exciting, imaginative fairy tale and a work of Christian symbolism? How will they ever understand that some books that don't feature any magic lions, vampires, gunfights, or space ships can have far more real and compelling value to their lives? You think they're just going to come home work one day, turn off the TV, and say to themselves, "You know, I never read Moby-Dick"? Not if they've never even been told that Moby-Dick is a good book, they won't.
I think the real problem, quite frankly, is bad teaching. Personally, I cannot fathom what a bunch of school-age boys wouldn't like about Lord of the Flies. It's an awesome story. But if you have a teacher that's constantly pounding the podium going, "allegory, allegory, allegory... what does it symbolize? What is the meaning of the conch?" ... then you won't get anything out of it. It's kind of like screening a TV show and constantly interrupting the dialogue to make comments and ask questions. Viewers will never be able to be immersed in the fiction. For students to really get anything out of books, teachers need to do it a little more like they do in college -- they should have you read whole huge sections of the books, or even the whole book, and then start the discussion. That way you can enjoy the book first, then look at it in a whole new light. But good luck getting a class full of high school students to read books without constant prodding.
You know, it can be even simpler. Just because a book is regarded as great literature doesn't mean that it actually is that.
Yes, I suppose that can be the case, but it's unlikely. A great many of our greatest writers didn't come to be regarded as "great literature" until after they were dead. If it's all just a popularity contest, why would that be the case?
Great writers are often judged by other writers, who recognize their skill in comparison to their own. For example, I'd count Hemingway as an author whose style is so deceptively simple that many readers won't realize how difficult it is to achieve -- until they try it themselves.
There is also the problem of books that contain daring or innovative ideas, or that employ innovative narrative structures, or that contain unique characters, but which were written a century ago or earlier. The innovations will no longer be readily apparent to people who have seen them imitated hundreds of times over in popular fiction that has been published since. The reader needs to be aware enough of the historical context, both of the story and its authorship, to fully appreciate why it was hailed as "great."
And then, finally, there is the problem that many readers simply lack the sophistication to appreciate great works. Nobody likes being called stupid, so they tend to reject this idea, but the fact is that we're all born ignorant and we only gain intellectual sophistication through long and rigorous practice. Books I read and absolutely could not appreciate when I was 12 years old seem like works of genius to me now. Some people -- especially those who don't read very much -- won't gain that level of appreciation until they're in their 20s, 30s, or maybe never. That's life.
Someone who reads a book and just says, "I don't get it. That was stupid," probably didn't get very much out of the book. They should probably go back, pick a different book, and try again. Then maybe, after they read a few more books, they can go back and try the first book again and maybe this time they'll gain a different appreciation for it. Some books -- a great many books -- really are pretty bad, or at best mediocre. But books that have managed to stay in print in dozens of editions, in every language in the world, for hundreds of years probably don't rank among them.
I had to read Madame Bovary as a college student...
Then you are truly lucky. When I took college English classes (recently, since I never went to college after HS), we were exposed to a little bit of classical writing, in the form of Shakespeare ("Hamlet," naturally, because nobody's ever been exposed to that one before) and a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (yuck). As for novels, though, I don't recall being assigned anything that didn't fall under the categories of fiction about immigrants of non-European ethnic origins, fiction about the gay and/or lesbian experience, and graphic novels. All very innovative and non-traditional, to be sure, but nothing written before 1997 and nothing that could approach the vast backlog of classics available. In short, it seems English departments have been assigned the parallel role of "empathy and diversity training," which has since become more central to the curriculum than teaching kids about the English language. (I also found it curious that the instructors put almost no marks on students' papers, merely grades; they insisted that it was not their job to teach you how to write, but that you were supposed to learn from your mistakes and "work harder.")
You may be on to something, because I'm a very bad story teller. But i have to ask, what is the value in stories that aren't true? Aren't they just as likely to mislead as inform?
Here's a mind-blower for you: A great many of the very best stories are told from the perspective of something called an "unreliable narrator" -- that is, even within the context of a fictional (not true) narrative, what the narrator is telling you might not actually be true, or his or her interpretation of the events may be wrong. So I'll throw your own question back at you: Why would anyone want to read that?
Personally, I don't think you have Asperger's, I just think you're being deliberately pigheaded.
The way I remember it, they actually destroyed the sonic screwdriver at some point in the original series, precisely because it lent itself to such lazy writing.
They screened it twice at WonderCon here in San Francisco yesterday... ...but the lines to get into the screening were too long. They seemed to wrap around the building. I went home and downloaded it instead.
Plus the sonic screwdriver is no longer blue? Huh? Lore, people, lore?
Lore? The sonic screwdriver only had a light on it for the new series. It wasn't any color at all in the originals.
The episode also seemed more low-budget than episodes from previous seasons, but that could be because it was the first time I've watched it in FullHD.
No, my reaction also was that the effects in this one were a bit naff. I thought that of the very first episode, too, though. Remember Mickey wrestling with the Dumpster? And the Nestene Consciousness wasn't very impressive. I figure they're just saving their budget for the best bits to come.