Aside from the question of priorities, there is also the problem that gene therapy is still wildly dangerous and so trials are reserved for people suffering from lethal conditions. I assume you wouldn't be willing to trade your color blindness for a case of leukemia, wheras if you have severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome it might be worth the risk.
Wouldn't this sort of thing almost be a sort of cosmetic surgery in the end though?
Let me give you a couple of examples of what it is already doing. I have a dear friend with an inoperable brain tumor. It turns out this particular form of tumor has genetic markers that are strongly correlated with its response to chemotherapy. After a biopsy of the tumor they can run genetic tests and give you a much clearer picture of whether chemotherapy is likely to be effective or not. As you doubtless know, chemotherapy is no picnic, so it is a hard, hard decision figuring out whether you should undertake a treatment that may extend your life 5 years, or simply screw up the the last three months you have. Tools like this genetic analysis help a bit.
On the absolute cutting edge of genetic therapy, doctors in France treated several children who had no immune system (bubble boy disease in popular parlance) due to a genetic defect. They were able use viruses to transfer a correctly functioning copy of the broken gene into the children's bone marrow. All of the children developed fully functioning immune systems. Unfortunately three of the children developed leukemia and one died. Certainly here is an example of the unforeseen consequences you are worried about, but what do you do in the face of a lethal disease like this?
Do these sound like cosmetic surgery?
I think it's great if we can avoid the problems, but I foresee it being used (at least in the beginning) by only the people who can afford to have it done.
How is this different from any form of medical care now in existence? Across the world, even in countries with socialized medicine, the wealthy can get better health care then the poor. If you are going to wait to develop medical treatments until this inequity can be solved, you are going to wait a very long time.
And, it's sad that people DON'T volunteer more time and energy to help those in need. We seem to be moving into a time where people are becoming more selfish even though they have more than they need.
But again I ask, what is your moral standing to make this criticism? How much of your time and treasure have you given? You could cancel your cell phone this very week, send the money to Doctor's Without Borders, and they might save several lives with the supplies that it buys. Are you going to do it? I don't mean to pick specifically on you here. I have a cell phone, and unfortunately I am not going to cancel it and give the proceeds to a worthy cause. I'm just trying to make the point the people are sometimes too quick to demand charity and sacrifice in others while not offering it themselves.
If it isn't one thing, it's another - so my cynical, pessimistic side says - WHAT'S THE POINT?
As Oscar Wilde said "A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
My mother was born in 1925. By the time she was 18 she'd had tuberculosis and lost four or five schoolmates to infectious diseases like scarlet fever. I on the other hand, have had nothing worse then the mumps, and didn't loose any friends to infectious disease until I was well into my thirties. Modern civil sanitation and medicine haven't made anyone immortal, but they have greatly reduced the odds of dying tragically young. Do you really not see the value in this?
Perhaps I look like I'm playing devil's advocate or something, but that really wasn't my intention. As it is, I really do wonder, though - won't all this just go to the people who can afford it? And aren't they the ones who can already afford the costs of getting cured already?
Medical research costs lots of money. There are only a few ways of raising that money: voluntary taxes, (think March of Dimes and the Polio vaccine), involuntary taxes (think National Institutes of Health), and investment by capitalists who hope eventually to get more money back from a project then they put into it (think paying customers). Now I supose you could argue that the human suffering involved cries out for people to volunteer their time and fortunes, but then I have to ask, what are you doing along these lines? If you aren't giving away your time and treasure to cure disease why would you feel others are obliged to?
The more ways we come up with to avoid getting sick, the more mutations occur at that level.
Mutations are not sent to punish us for our hubris, they are random chemical changes.
In other words, by getting rid of "such-and-such" disease, we could be setting ourselves up for something worse. We don't have the knowledge or the willpower to make the correct decisions - the dollar will make them for us. And I am afraid.
What on earth are you talking about? Which diseaes do you think are worse then typhus, plague, polio, and smallpox? Yes, there are bacteria that are developing resistance to antibiotics, but these bugs are not becoming "worse", we're just being pushed back to where we stood with them 80 years ago.
The best cons work take advantage of people who believe they are already cheating someone or doing something illegal/unethical.
Con artists sometimes justify themselves with statements like that, but I think it's self-deception. An awful lot of cons prey on elderly folks who may be in the early stages of dementia. For example "The Bank Examiner" is a common confidence game that preys on people's desire to be helpful and law abiding. The con approaches an elderly person and represents themselves as a "bank examiner" who needs their help in catching a dishonest employee. They get the mark to make a series of withdrawals in order to gather evidence on the dishonest employee, handing over the cash to the "examiner" to be re-deposited later. After the mark's account is emptied, the "examiner" and the cash disappear. No desire to cheat or defraud here, just naive or impaired folks trying to be honest and helpful.
I'm going to put some noses out of joint here, but education in the USA sucks, and it doesn't really get better until you've got all the way through a PhD programme.
For contrary views see the survey of higher education in the current Economist and this story in the Guardian.
I have often heard the complaint that 'kids these days' aren't getting the same quality of education that was offered of yore. I tutor high school students in math and chemistry and I work as a programmer in a laboratory full of grad students. My experience is that the good students are getting at least as good an education as I received 25-30 years ago. However, this may be obscured by the huge numbers of students who are going on to college (see Sturgeon's Law). Personally, I am pleased to see so many people getting a shot at higher education, even if many of them don't get all the benefit they could from it.
You've reduced what was a dialectic discussion into a silly ass argument.
Let's take it back to a dialectic then. I've recited the experiences that lead me to value formal education. Why don't you describe your experience in self-directed learning?
Sorry to hear you don't have such a high opinion about your parents.
There seems to have been a miscommunication. I'm very fond of my parents and had a lot of respect for them. They were both very intelligent and well-read which was why I wanted to correct your assumption that I would be surprised at how smart common plebeians (your term) could be.
And how the hell would you know what this auto mechanic knew about black holes
(Shrug) I've known several mechanics and I've know several physics profs. It wouldn't surprise me at all to meet a mechanic who's read many of the popular books on relativity. It's just my observation that mechanics who know understand the state of the art of in relativity theory are every bit as rare as theoretical physics professors who are certified master mechanics. That is to say, very rare indeed. If you want to put forward your friend as a counter-example I'd love to hear about him.
Please dont go any further into this with me, or you are going find out how really nasty I can get.
Human contrariness being what it is, telling someone "Shut up or I shall taunt you again." is just about guaranteed to raise a response. If you were to simply respond with "This has gotten boring. Let's drop it." I would be happy to leave you the last word.
You'd be surprised how smart a lot of the ordinary plebeians are.
My father was a logger and my mother a secretary. I grew up in a small ranching and logging town. Please don't presume to inform me on the virtues of "ordinary plebeians".
For example, my first knowledge of black holes was from an auto mechanic who never finished high school.
I know several college professors who do their own car maintenance. I might ask them for some basic advice on car maintenance, but if I want my car's engine rebuilt I'll take it to a real mechanic. Similarly, it's terrific that the mechanic could introduce you to black holes, but if you really want to learn the gritty mathematical and observational details of black holes you'd probably be better off consulting an astronomer at a university.
Second, why if the tuition is being paid at UW, should someone have to go chase after a proff or teacher to have them do their job, which is to teach
I think you've missed my point about the enormous state universities having to be all things to all people. You think the professor's primary job is to teach. The professor thinks their primary job is to do research, and they can probably produce the tenure standards to justify that opinion. To be sure, they will acknowledge they have teaching duties: lecturing, limited office hours, and testing. They will not include what they would dissmissively call "baby-sitting" (things like actively begging the students to attend office hours or seeking out and trying to motivate intelligent but lazy students).
This contrasts with the small liberal arts colleges where the faculty and the students will both agree that teaching is the primary job of the faculty. The embarassing truth of the matter is that even very bright students usually benefit from some "baby-sitting". I remember my sophomore humanities class professor repeatedly snagging me in the cafeteria to urge me to keep up with the reading and to participate more in the discussions. The tradeoff is that you have to pay a small fortune for the student/teacher ratio that allows this kind of mentoring.
When I was speaking of Universities, I meant US universities. Perhaps your experience had to do with Europe or somewhere else. Or maybe you were lucky, and just found the exception that proves the rule in the US.
I started off at Reed College, which is an terrific, small, expensive, liberal arts school. I ended up at the University of Washington which is a typical Enormous State University. When I was 47 I went back to UW and got a Master's. My experience was that small colleges like Reed hand you a terrific education on a silver platter. The faculty and staff do their darndest to give you a good, liberal arts education, even if you are callow, clueless, and lazy like I was. I think you can get just as good an education at a big school like the UW, but you have to be mature and self-motivated. Many of the faculty and staff are busy with other matters, so they are perfectly happy letting you sleepwalk through your four years, checking off the requirements. None-the-less, the opportunities are there if you have the strength of will and foresight to go grab them.
I do recognize a couple of problems. Giant state universities must be all things to all people: credentialing factory, vocational school, liberal arts school, research factory, private nightclub, and pro-football farm team. On top of this, people seem to select colleges for all sorts or random and ill-considered reasons (lord knows I did), and then complain when they feel their needs aren't being met. I think this is why you see so many threads like this one, where CS program are simultaneously criticized for being too theoretical and too vocational. There are thousands of schools in the US. If the one you are attending isn't meeting your needs, you should try shopping carefully for a different school.
And I would disagree with you about learning on your own. If you really need a guide, I am sure their are curriculum outlines on the internet. But really all you have to do is go to a library
I certainly don't want to dismiss independent learning. Most of us are going to spend a lot more time out of school then in, so being able to learn material on our own is vital. But think of it this way: if I study the great books on my own I'm going to have to read them, think about them, and draw my conclusions about their meaning and import. If I study the great books at a college or university, I'm going to do all those things too, but in addition I'm going to have to to defend my conclusions to the teacher and my fellow students. Having to defend your idea in front of honest critics really helps to peel away your misconceptions, and helps you recognize when you have had a genuinely good idea.
If you really want to learn, you'll do it on your own a lot better.
For most folks this is rarely true. Yes, a bad teacher can be a waste of time, but the answer to that is not to insist that you can learn it all your own, but to go find some good teachers. They are out there.
There are two problems with relying entirely on self-education. First, since you are starting from a position of ignorance, it is pretty hard for you to pick out what material is truly important, and what is not. This results in people gearing up on the buzz word de jour, only to find it obsolete in a year or two. It can be very helpful to have direction from someone who has seen the fads come and go and therefore has some clue as to what you will still be using in 10 years.
The second problem with self-education is that most of us (myself included) have an amazing capacity for self-deception. It is all to easy to sit down with a couple of O'Reily books, work through some of the examples, and convince ourselves that we have mastered a subject. Meeting with a skilled critic on a regular basis is a terrfic way to learn how to identify your own BS.
Universities are just a waste of time.
Your's may have been. Mine certainly was not. There was some purely technical material that I could have learned on my own (and in fact I was mostly left to do so) but I learned to write more clearly, and think more clearly, and I got much better at identifying when I really understood something, and when I did not.
They are already way ahead of you. Check out http://www.thomsonisi.com/, an index of most of the the major peer reviewed journals (or at least those that provide english abstracts). You can use it as a keyword index, but the real kicker is being able to find every paper that cited a given paper. It sure beats flipping through its predecessor, the old Science Citation Index.
To get access to it you'll have to have an account at an academic library though.
Meanwhile, it spent no time or virtually no time on some of the most important problems in the field of software development: interface design, usability, and software testing methodologies. Furthermore, the curriculum and assignments were geared in a manner that steered students away from experimentation with important tools like data persistence, logging, or security frameworks. In other words, code reuse was often restricted to simplistic data structures.
Why didn't you go to a program in software engineering? There aren't as many of them as CS programs, but they do exist and it sounds like they would have suited your interests better.
However I am more concernd (a reason that I am an ex-CS major too) that the university doesnt offer a single course in PERL, Python, Ruby, PHP, or any of the currently popular languages except Java, and some C as a side benefit from some classes. Don't give me BS about the basic concepts being all the preperation you need from any language. What you really need is practice programmming in new languages, followed by more practice. Theory is nice, but if your networking classes never teach you how to code arround a socket you still can't write a network application.
I strongly disagree. I don't see any single computer language as warranting a full course in a four your college after the first year. After the first year you should be able to pick up the basics of any language in a couple of weeks. Heck, I learned the basics of FORTRAN IV in four weeks in my freshman physics lab. Languages are easier to learn then theory, so you want to spend the classroom time on the hard stuff, and leave the relatively easy stuff for students to learn on their own.
I appreciate that you want to go beyond the basics, and you are absolutely right that you've got to write a lot of code to master a language, but I submit that no classroom based course with canned exercises will get you there. To really master a language you'll need to use it for multiple projects over an extended period of time. That's what summer jobs, hobby projects, internships and capstone programs are for.
The courses in trade schools and community colleges are a different matter. They have a different audience with very narrow and well defined vocational goals.
The Universities found that such a program was difficult for many students, so instead of maintaining a culture of excellence, they started offering "industry requested" courses. Pretty soon all the rigor was gone and it was 4 years of learning visual basic and java from within Windows based IDE's without gaining any real insight into how computers work or the nature of algorithmic design, data structure or any other consideration.
Do you have some specific schools in mind? I'm familiar with several large state universities (UWash, UO, PDX for example) and none of them are as weak as you describe. What you describe sounds more like a trade school or a community college, and that sort of vocational training seems appropriate in those settings.
From what I hear (I don't work in the field, but some of my family and friends do), it isn't really necessary that you have any kind of computer related degree to work in a computer-related feild. My brother works on a big linux cluster and says his office mate has a degree in like pastoral ministry or something. My cousin's degree is in Spanish. Now my 3 brothers who work in the field have Electrical Engineering or CIS degrees, but that's 2 out of 5.
Is my experience that uncommon?
No. I think it is very common.
I think what confuses people is that there are a huge range of computer related fields with wildly varying requirements, but everyone seems to want to lump them in a single category. The most numerous computer jobs involve system administration, the care and feeding of databases, and moving data back and forth from the databases to some sort of front end, usually for some sort of business. For these jobs a CS degree is usually overkill, and an experienced coder with no degree will often run rings around a freshly minted CS degree holder (though the CS major will usually be fine once they have some experience).
There are other computer jobs where the background in CS is more relevant. You'll still find a lot of non-CS folks working on packaged software, but a knowledge of CS fundamentals is more important. Then there are folks who are designing new languages, new operating systems, new encryption algorithms, etc. Folks without CS (or EE or Math) degrees in these jobs are rare and getting rarer. There aren't as many of these jobs, but they can be a lot of fun if you like that sort of thing.
jesus. i am glad the people who build bridges, dams, etc... don't have your attitude.
The people who build dams, bridges, etc., don't simply tell the construction crew to be be careful. They know that mistakes will be made, so they create protocols to minimize the likelihood of mistakes, and to maximize the likelihood of finding the mistakes that are made. For example, an in-law who works in avionics tells me that in any cable run that carries multiple cables, the cables are required to have physically incompatible connectors. They could just tell the manufacturing crew to be careful, but they know from long experience that if two cables can be confused, they will be, so they do their best to make it physically impossible to do so.
Personally, I work down a suite of tools to help ensure reliability:
1. Use a language and run-time that enforces bounds checking and managed memory. This is not always practial because of performance issues.
2. If I can't do that, use libraries that hide the complexity of managing memory (smart pointers, smart arrays, and the like). This is not entirely reliable because it depends on the discipline of the programmer.
3. If I can't do that, I use tools like valgrind in conjunctgion with unit testing, so that l can find memory errors after the fact. This can't be completely trusted because it depends on the completeness of the test suite.
Your argument assumes that buffer overflows are a natural and unavoidable aspect of C programming. I can show you plenty of examples of C modules without buffer overflows. Writing a complex system without buffer overflows is only a matter of using these modules together with a carefully constructed interface.
Can you walk across a freeway at rush hour without getting hit by a car? Sure, but I wouldn't want to make a practice of it. Admonishing developers to be careful is not engineering. Even careful, skilled developers (and my understanding is that the authors of zlib are careful and skilled) live in the real world which means they have to work around phone calls, meetings, flu, fire alarms, and earthquakes, making lapses in concentration inevitable.
Unfortunately we are seeing more and more security breaks because the percentage of careless programmers out there has been steadily rising.
This is certainly not my experience. Certainly by 1988 and the Morris Internet worm the UNIX and VAX infrastructure was riddled with buffer overflow bugs. Can you provide some examples of major software projects that have not suffered from buffer-overflow issues?
Those with the "Hey, all warnings but no errors--Ship It!" mentality give the software writing skill a bad name.
The warnings remark is a straw-man. Ignoring compiler warnings is foolish, but a program can be 100% syntactically correct and still be full of buffer overflows and other problems.
Perhaps, but they were applying to a programming position, and I would expect a Doctor of Computer Science to, I dunno, be able to actually solve a problem. If he wants to be a researcher, then let him apply to be a researcher.
This is case where one size does not fit all. There are plenty of C.S. Ph.D's who are competing for workaday programming jobs just like the rest of us, and it makes perfect sense to ask them to demonstrate their code writing skills in an interview.
However, there are also quite a few Ph.D.'s who are hired in industry solely for their "higher order" C.S. skills. They get asked to solve problems like: "Can you design a new language that combines the best features of C++ and Java?", "Can you write a gene finding algorithm that gets a 99% ROC score?", "Can you design a speech recognition system that is better then anything currently on the market?", "Can you find a routing algorithm for our nationwide fleet of delivery vehicles that cuts 10% from our fuel budget?". Solutions to these problems are worth a lot of money, and if you are looking for one of these folks, you'd be wasting their time (and yours) to ask them to solve the Kanji backspace problem in C, since it has nothing to do with the task you want them to carry out.
Which category Sorkin fell into is not entirely clear from the article, but given his patent and publication record, and the fact that Microsoft called him, it doesn't seem likely that they wanted him simply as a clever coder.
I took a four-year degree from a reputable American school and thought it largely a waste of time.
I went to the same school Jobs dropped out of and (despite my best efforts) I received a terrific education. The ability to be self-educating should be the goal of any university education, but the danger in depending entirely on self-education is that self-deception is all too easy. There is nothing like confronting a pack of skilled critics every day for four years to help you learn how to detect your own BS. If a person lacks the self-discipline to take charge of their own education at university with the libraries, laboratories, and lecturers spread before them like a buffet, are they any more likely to find that discipline out in the working world?
After seeing your posting I did find several links saying that in 1982 DRI successfully sued Microsoft and IBM for copyright infringement. They allege that Gary Kildall was able pop up a DRI copyright notice with a few keystrokes on an IBM PC in front of a judge. Apparently Microsoft and IBM settled, but a gag order was part of the settlement. See for example here. None of the links I found seemed definitive, but then they wouldn't if there was a gag order in place.
On the other hand Tim Patterson is suing an author for defamation for claiming that QDOS was a "rip-off" of CPM.
Can anybody point me to solid information on the DRI suit?
Actually, it was. You see, after Bill's parents (IBM board members) got him his chance, he had only one problem. He DIDN'T HAVE THE OPERATING SYSTEM HE TOLD IBM HE HAD. Got it? He lied.
It is so annoying when people screw up telling a perfectly good urban legend. Neither Mary Gates nor Bill Gates Jr. was ever on the board of IBM. Mary Gates was on the board of United Way. The legend was that there were some IBM executives also on the board of United Way at the time. Supposedly when the time came for the IBM top execs to review the secret IBM PC project there was some concern about giving contract to deliver the operating system to such a young and small company. The legend holds that an IBM exec who had worked with Mary Gates at United Way spoke up and said something like "Oh yes, Mary Gates's son, a fine boy!", and the concerns vanished. To my knowledge no one has ever confirmed that this actually happened. If they have I welcome correction.
As for your allegation that Microsoft swindled IBM: What do you think, IBM came by and asked to see the OS and Bill told them "Oops! I left it at home, let's sign the contract and I'll bring it in tommorrow."? IBM came to Microsoft hoping to buy languages and an OS, but Gates told them that Microsoft didn't do OS's and sent them on to Gary Kildall at DRI. DRI and IBM couldn't reach an agreement and IBM went back to Microsoft and asked them if they could quickly develop an OS. Since Microsoft had sent IBM on to DRI they knew full well that MS didn't have an OS in its pocket. See http://www.fireinthevalley.com/ for a fairly reliable history of microcomputer development.
No matter how slimy somebody is, so long as they are successful they have people who defend them as if using lies, undue influence, and deception
No matter how slimy somebody is you shouldn't use lies to attack them. To paraphrase Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Why should I make up stuff? Life is awful enough as it is."
I've heard people even question that accomplishment... as Bill Gates got much of the ideas behind the MS Basic interpreter (it was not a compiler) from some of the CS courses he took before he dropped out of college, including one class where the primary project was to write a BASIC interpreter.
Gates's and Allen's real technical acheivement was not the BASIC interpreter (though that was the product), it was writing a 8080 emulator that was good enought that machine code developed on it actually ran correctly on the MITS Altair.
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Aside from the question of priorities, there is also the problem that gene therapy is still wildly dangerous and so trials are reserved for people suffering from lethal conditions. I assume you wouldn't be willing to trade your color blindness for a case of leukemia, wheras if you have severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome it might be worth the risk.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what it is already doing. I have a dear friend with an inoperable brain tumor. It turns out this particular form of tumor has genetic markers that are strongly correlated with its response to chemotherapy. After a biopsy of the tumor they can run genetic tests and give you a much clearer picture of whether chemotherapy is likely to be effective or not. As you doubtless know, chemotherapy is no picnic, so it is a hard, hard decision figuring out whether you should undertake a treatment that may extend your life 5 years, or simply screw up the the last three months you have. Tools like this genetic analysis help a bit.
On the absolute cutting edge of genetic therapy, doctors in France treated several children who had no immune system (bubble boy disease in popular parlance) due to a genetic defect. They were able use viruses to transfer a correctly functioning copy of the broken gene into the children's bone marrow. All of the children developed fully functioning immune systems. Unfortunately three of the children developed leukemia and one died. Certainly here is an example of the unforeseen consequences you are worried about, but what do you do in the face of a lethal disease like this?
Do these sound like cosmetic surgery?
How is this different from any form of medical care now in existence? Across the world, even in countries with socialized medicine, the wealthy can get better health care then the poor. If you are going to wait to develop medical treatments until this inequity can be solved, you are going to wait a very long time.
But again I ask, what is your moral standing to make this criticism? How much of your time and treasure have you given? You could cancel your cell phone this very week, send the money to Doctor's Without Borders, and they might save several lives with the supplies that it buys. Are you going to do it? I don't mean to pick specifically on you here. I have a cell phone, and unfortunately I am not going to cancel it and give the proceeds to a worthy cause. I'm just trying to make the point the people are sometimes too quick to demand charity and sacrifice in others while not offering it themselves.
As Oscar Wilde said "A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
My mother was born in 1925. By the time she was 18 she'd had tuberculosis and lost four or five schoolmates to infectious diseases like scarlet fever. I on the other hand, have had nothing worse then the mumps, and didn't loose any friends to infectious disease until I was well into my thirties. Modern civil sanitation and medicine haven't made anyone immortal, but they have greatly reduced the odds of dying tragically young. Do you really not see the value in this?
Medical research costs lots of money. There are only a few ways of raising that money: voluntary taxes, (think March of Dimes and the Polio vaccine), involuntary taxes (think National Institutes of Health), and investment by capitalists who hope eventually to get more money back from a project then they put into it (think paying customers). Now I supose you could argue that the human suffering involved cries out for people to volunteer their time and fortunes, but then I have to ask, what are you doing along these lines? If you aren't giving away your time and treasure to cure disease why would you feel others are obliged to?
Mutations are not sent to punish us for our hubris, they are random chemical changes.
What on earth are you talking about? Which diseaes do you think are worse then typhus, plague, polio, and smallpox? Yes, there are bacteria that are developing resistance to antibiotics, but these bugs are not becoming "worse", we're just being pushed back to where we stood with them 80 years ago.
Con artists sometimes justify themselves with statements like that, but I think it's self-deception. An awful lot of cons prey on elderly folks who may be in the early stages of dementia. For example "The Bank Examiner" is a common confidence game that preys on people's desire to be helpful and law abiding. The con approaches an elderly person and represents themselves as a "bank examiner" who needs their help in catching a dishonest employee. They get the mark to make a series of withdrawals in order to gather evidence on the dishonest employee, handing over the cash to the "examiner" to be re-deposited later. After the mark's account is emptied, the "examiner" and the cash disappear. No desire to cheat or defraud here, just naive or impaired folks trying to be honest and helpful.
For contrary views see the survey of higher education in the current Economist and this story in the Guardian.
I have often heard the complaint that 'kids these days' aren't getting the same quality of education that was offered of yore. I tutor high school students in math and chemistry and I work as a programmer in a laboratory full of grad students. My experience is that the good students are getting at least as good an education as I received 25-30 years ago. However, this may be obscured by the huge numbers of students who are going on to college (see Sturgeon's Law). Personally, I am pleased to see so many people getting a shot at higher education, even if many of them don't get all the benefit they could from it.
Let's take it back to a dialectic then. I've recited the experiences that lead me to value formal education. Why don't you describe your experience in self-directed learning?
There seems to have been a miscommunication. I'm very fond of my parents and had a lot of respect for them. They were both very intelligent and well-read which was why I wanted to correct your assumption that I would be surprised at how smart common plebeians (your term) could be.
(Shrug) I've known several mechanics and I've know several physics profs. It wouldn't surprise me at all to meet a mechanic who's read many of the popular books on relativity. It's just my observation that mechanics who know understand the state of the art of in relativity theory are every bit as rare as theoretical physics professors who are certified master mechanics. That is to say, very rare indeed. If you want to put forward your friend as a counter-example I'd love to hear about him.
Human contrariness being what it is, telling someone "Shut up or I shall taunt you again." is just about guaranteed to raise a response. If you were to simply respond with "This has gotten boring. Let's drop it." I would be happy to leave you the last word.
I know several college professors who do their own car maintenance. I might ask them for some basic advice on car maintenance, but if I want my car's engine rebuilt I'll take it to a real mechanic. Similarly, it's terrific that the mechanic could introduce you to black holes, but if you really want to learn the gritty mathematical and observational details of black holes you'd probably be better off consulting an astronomer at a university.
I think you've missed my point about the enormous state universities having to be all things to all people. You think the professor's primary job is to teach. The professor thinks their primary job is to do research, and they can probably produce the tenure standards to justify that opinion. To be sure, they will acknowledge they have teaching duties: lecturing, limited office hours, and testing. They will not include what they would dissmissively call "baby-sitting" (things like actively begging the students to attend office hours or seeking out and trying to motivate intelligent but lazy students).
This contrasts with the small liberal arts colleges where the faculty and the students will both agree that teaching is the primary job of the faculty. The embarassing truth of the matter is that even very bright students usually benefit from some "baby-sitting". I remember my sophomore humanities class professor repeatedly snagging me in the cafeteria to urge me to keep up with the reading and to participate more in the discussions. The tradeoff is that you have to pay a small fortune for the student/teacher ratio that allows this kind of mentoring.
I started off at Reed College, which is an terrific, small, expensive, liberal arts school. I ended up at the University of Washington which is a typical Enormous State University. When I was 47 I went back to UW and got a Master's. My experience was that small colleges like Reed hand you a terrific education on a silver platter. The faculty and staff do their darndest to give you a good, liberal arts education, even if you are callow, clueless, and lazy like I was. I think you can get just as good an education at a big school like the UW, but you have to be mature and self-motivated. Many of the faculty and staff are busy with other matters, so they are perfectly happy letting you sleepwalk through your four years, checking off the requirements. None-the-less, the opportunities are there if you have the strength of will and foresight to go grab them.
I do recognize a couple of problems. Giant state universities must be all things to all people: credentialing factory, vocational school, liberal arts school, research factory, private nightclub, and pro-football farm team. On top of this, people seem to select colleges for all sorts or random and ill-considered reasons (lord knows I did), and then complain when they feel their needs aren't being met. I think this is why you see so many threads like this one, where CS program are simultaneously criticized for being too theoretical and too vocational. There are thousands of schools in the US. If the one you are attending isn't meeting your needs, you should try shopping carefully for a different school.
I certainly don't want to dismiss independent learning. Most of us are going to spend a lot more time out of school then in, so being able to learn material on our own is vital. But think of it this way: if I study the great books on my own I'm going to have to read them, think about them, and draw my conclusions about their meaning and import. If I study the great books at a college or university, I'm going to do all those things too, but in addition I'm going to have to to defend my conclusions to the teacher and my fellow students. Having to defend your idea in front of honest critics really helps to peel away your misconceptions, and helps you recognize when you have had a genuinely good idea.
For most folks this is rarely true. Yes, a bad teacher can be a waste of time, but the answer to that is not to insist that you can learn it all your own, but to go find some good teachers. They are out there.
There are two problems with relying entirely on self-education. First, since you are starting from a position of ignorance, it is pretty hard for you to pick out what material is truly important, and what is not. This results in people gearing up on the buzz word de jour, only to find it obsolete in a year or two. It can be very helpful to have direction from someone who has seen the fads come and go and therefore has some clue as to what you will still be using in 10 years.
The second problem with self-education is that most of us (myself included) have an amazing capacity for self-deception. It is all to easy to sit down with a couple of O'Reily books, work through some of the examples, and convince ourselves that we have mastered a subject. Meeting with a skilled critic on a regular basis is a terrfic way to learn how to identify your own BS.
Your's may have been. Mine certainly was not. There was some purely technical material that I could have learned on my own (and in fact I was mostly left to do so) but I learned to write more clearly, and think more clearly, and I got much better at identifying when I really understood something, and when I did not.
So in your view everyone in the military is on welfare?
The public health staff treating tuberculosis in the indigent too?
Proof by assertion? Not even an anecdote?
They are already way ahead of you. Check out http://www.thomsonisi.com/, an index of most of the the major peer reviewed journals (or at least those that provide english abstracts). You can use it as a keyword index, but the real kicker is being able to find every paper that cited a given paper. It sure beats flipping through its predecessor, the old Science Citation Index.
To get access to it you'll have to have an account at an academic library though.
Why didn't you go to a program in software engineering? There aren't as many of them as CS programs, but they do exist and it sounds like they would have suited your interests better.
I strongly disagree. I don't see any single computer language as warranting a full course in a four your college after the first year. After the first year you should be able to pick up the basics of any language in a couple of weeks. Heck, I learned the basics of FORTRAN IV in four weeks in my freshman physics lab. Languages are easier to learn then theory, so you want to spend the classroom time on the hard stuff, and leave the relatively easy stuff for students to learn on their own.
I appreciate that you want to go beyond the basics, and you are absolutely right that you've got to write a lot of code to master a language, but I submit that no classroom based course with canned exercises will get you there. To really master a language you'll need to use it for multiple projects over an extended period of time. That's what summer jobs, hobby projects, internships and capstone programs are for.
The courses in trade schools and community colleges are a different matter. They have a different audience with very narrow and well defined vocational goals.
Do you have some specific schools in mind? I'm familiar with several large state universities (UWash, UO, PDX for example) and none of them are as weak as you describe. What you describe sounds more like a trade school or a community college, and that sort of vocational training seems appropriate in those settings.
No. I think it is very common.
I think what confuses people is that there are a huge range of computer related fields with wildly varying requirements, but everyone seems to want to lump them in a single category. The most numerous computer jobs involve system administration, the care and feeding of databases, and moving data back and forth from the databases to some sort of front end, usually for some sort of business. For these jobs a CS degree is usually overkill, and an experienced coder with no degree will often run rings around a freshly minted CS degree holder (though the CS major will usually be fine once they have some experience).
There are other computer jobs where the background in CS is more relevant. You'll still find a lot of non-CS folks working on packaged software, but a knowledge of CS fundamentals is more important. Then there are folks who are designing new languages, new operating systems, new encryption algorithms, etc. Folks without CS (or EE or Math) degrees in these jobs are rare and getting rarer. There aren't as many of these jobs, but they can be a lot of fun if you like that sort of thing.
Personally, I work down a suite of tools to help ensure reliability:
1. Use a language and run-time that enforces bounds checking and managed memory. This is not always practial because of performance issues.
2. If I can't do that, use libraries that hide the complexity of managing memory (smart pointers, smart arrays, and the like). This is not entirely reliable because it depends on the discipline of the programmer.
3. If I can't do that, I use tools like valgrind in conjunctgion with unit testing, so that l can find memory errors after the fact. This can't be completely trusted because it depends on the completeness of the test suite.
4. Code carefully and cross my fingers.
This is certainly not my experience. Certainly by 1988 and the Morris Internet worm the UNIX and VAX infrastructure was riddled with buffer overflow bugs. Can you provide some examples of major software projects that have not suffered from buffer-overflow issues?
The warnings remark is a straw-man. Ignoring compiler warnings is foolish, but a program can be 100% syntactically correct and still be full of buffer overflows and other problems.
This is case where one size does not fit all. There are plenty of C.S. Ph.D's who are competing for workaday programming jobs just like the rest of us, and it makes perfect sense to ask them to demonstrate their code writing skills in an interview.
However, there are also quite a few Ph.D.'s who are hired in industry solely for their "higher order" C.S. skills. They get asked to solve problems like: "Can you design a new language that combines the best features of C++ and Java?", "Can you write a gene finding algorithm that gets a 99% ROC score?", "Can you design a speech recognition system that is better then anything currently on the market?", "Can you find a routing algorithm for our nationwide fleet of delivery vehicles that cuts 10% from our fuel budget?". Solutions to these problems are worth a lot of money, and if you are looking for one of these folks, you'd be wasting their time (and yours) to ask them to solve the Kanji backspace problem in C, since it has nothing to do with the task you want them to carry out.
Which category Sorkin fell into is not entirely clear from the article, but given his patent and publication record, and the fact that Microsoft called him, it doesn't seem likely that they wanted him simply as a clever coder.
I went to the same school Jobs dropped out of and (despite my best efforts) I received a terrific education. The ability to be self-educating should be the goal of any university education, but the danger in depending entirely on self-education is that self-deception is all too easy. There is nothing like confronting a pack of skilled critics every day for four years to help you learn how to detect your own BS. If a person lacks the self-discipline to take charge of their own education at university with the libraries, laboratories, and lecturers spread before them like a buffet, are they any more likely to find that discipline out in the working world?
After seeing your posting I did find several links saying that in 1982 DRI successfully sued Microsoft and IBM for copyright infringement. They allege that Gary Kildall was able pop up a DRI copyright notice with a few keystrokes on an IBM PC in front of a judge. Apparently Microsoft and IBM settled, but a gag order was part of the settlement. See for example here. None of the links I found seemed definitive, but then they wouldn't if there was a gag order in place.
On the other hand Tim Patterson is suing an author for defamation for claiming that QDOS was a "rip-off" of CPM.
Can anybody point me to solid information on the DRI suit?
It is so annoying when people screw up telling a perfectly good urban legend. Neither Mary Gates nor Bill Gates Jr. was ever on the board of IBM. Mary Gates was on the board of United Way. The legend was that there were some IBM executives also on the board of United Way at the time. Supposedly when the time came for the IBM top execs to review the secret IBM PC project there was some concern about giving contract to deliver the operating system to such a young and small company. The legend holds that an IBM exec who had worked with Mary Gates at United Way spoke up and said something like "Oh yes, Mary Gates's son, a fine boy!", and the concerns vanished. To my knowledge no one has ever confirmed that this actually happened. If they have I welcome correction.
As for your allegation that Microsoft swindled IBM: What do you think, IBM came by and asked to see the OS and Bill told them "Oops! I left it at home, let's sign the contract and I'll bring it in tommorrow."? IBM came to Microsoft hoping to buy languages and an OS, but Gates told them that Microsoft didn't do OS's and sent them on to Gary Kildall at DRI. DRI and IBM couldn't reach an agreement and IBM went back to Microsoft and asked them if they could quickly develop an OS. Since Microsoft had sent IBM on to DRI they knew full well that MS didn't have an OS in its pocket. See http://www.fireinthevalley.com/ for a fairly reliable history of microcomputer development.
No matter how slimy somebody is you shouldn't use lies to attack them. To paraphrase Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Why should I make up stuff? Life is awful enough as it is."
Gates's and Allen's real technical acheivement was not the BASIC interpreter (though that was the product), it was writing a 8080 emulator that was good enought that machine code developed on it actually ran correctly on the MITS Altair.