No, in fact, music from yesterday *isn't* available for purchase these days, even from Amazon.
As one example, I still can't buy Isao Tomita's "Bolero" album on CD. You can get "Bolero" itself as a single track of a collection (who would want 10 different versions of the same song, just to get the one you wanted?!?), but you don't get "The Mother Goose Suite", "Daphnis and Chloe: Suite No. 2", or "Pavan for a Dead Princess".
As another, I can't get a "Baltimora" album, except as used vinyl (if then); the only thing available on CD is one song, "Tarzan Boy" (good tune, but ruined by the "Listerine" commercial), and it's only available on "Beverly Hills Ninja" or in some *LAME* 80's dance collection (two exceptions: a cover band, and an "Italo" Italian dance CD sold in the U.S.: a *LAME* non-80's dance collection).
Frankly, I'm amaze that "Buffalo Springfield" or Harry Nilsson is available (incredibly hard to find, though).
That's what Bill Clinton charged the Phillipine coal producers in capmaign donations to lock up the single largest reserve of clean coal in the United States into a national park in Southern Utah, right before he shepparded legislation through congress requiring coal-fired power plants use cleaner coal.
Something like this would make an excellent test case.
If IP is to be treated as real property, a the MPAA, RIAA, and SPA, etc., all want, then I can establish a Prescriptive Lien through Adverse Use, now can't I? It's a fundamental Common Law principle.
Because I parked my car in front of your house for years, and you didn't stop me, I now have a *right* to park my car in front of your house.
Because I used your VM algorithm in my software for years, and you didn't stop mem I now have a *right* to use your VM algorithm in my software.
Bob: "What's that big ``#if 0'' block?"
Tom: "Oh, that's package XXX, which makes my code a derivative work which grandfathers it under the prescriptive lien package XXX has for use of patent QRS. Pretty cool, huh?"
A slight correction on the national aerospace plane project...
The engine was a liear aerospike, which the design had being fueled by a Hydrogen slurry tank. The tank was not buildable with current material science, after a number of tries. *THAT*, NOT September 11th, was why it was cancelled (yes, I know they could have used a different fuel tank technology; they didn't).
Personally, I think some non-Berne signatory country should build a DC-X with a linear aerospike, and screw the U.S. patents.
The (unfortunately) winning contractors design called for a runway, which meant building additional hardware, if you ever wanted to go any place interesting. A DC-X ("Delta Clipper") could have, with 3 launced for orbital refueuling on the way in any out, put us back on the moon very quickly (and once in orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar system). You're not going to the moon in something that lands like an airpane, ever... no runways, gas stations, or air to hold the wings up.
The claims about this being the heaviest lift rocket "since the Saturn V" are exaggerated. The Saturn V had over 12 times the payload capacity of the top end Atlas 5 (which hasn't actually flown, yet).
Comparatively, the top end Russian heavy lifter is very nearly the equal of the Saturn V (the Saturn V could lift 2% more weight, assuming we could even build one again).
Here are various payload capacities for all the Atlas 5 series, and a number of other currently in service rockets, as well as the Saturn V, in US pounds:
__8,752 Atlas 5 501 _11,618 Atlas 5 511 _13,117 Atlas 5 411 _13,856 Atlas 5 521 _15,057 Atlas 5 421 _15,873 Atlas 5 531 _16,843 Atlas 5 431 _17,593 Atlas 5 541 _19,114 Atlas 5 551 _28,950 Delta IV _39,600 Ariane V _45,320 Proton K _47,800 Titan IV _63,500 Space Shuttle 231,000 Energia SL17 236,000 Saturn V
Looks like if you're planning a 1969-style trip to the moon, you better learn Russian... it also explains just what it is the Russians bring to the ISS that the U.S. could not provide on their own (since the U.S. would have a difficult time even building anything close these days).
Sorry: I don't have numbers on the Chinese or Japanese launch vehicles.
So I guess the decision mandates that you can write the code, but are not fit to run it?
I find it absolutely amazing that IMS/ISC are rated so poorly, primarily on supposedly technical grounds.
Does anyone else find it unbelievable that the people currently running one of the TLD servers for the.com domain would be unable to duplicate this performance for.org domain?
I find criteria 7 to be stupid; it basicallymeans that "technical" preference should be given to plans from companies that sell add-on mail and web hosting, etc., commercial services.
Criteria 8 is also pretty stupid; the answer to the question is "these are the people defining the protocol changes to which the successful applicant will need to adapt".
They lost out on #9, as well, even though, according to Gartner, "One of the few proposals that discusses non- technical components of the transition such as staffing, facilities, technical support and community activities."; basically the complain boils down to "they are not a going for-profit registry concern".
Verisign still manages registration through *email*, for God's sake! Who the heck are they to cast stones?!?
If you're not willing to be careful, then at least be honest.
Not everyone has what it takes to be a software engineer, or even just a programmer, any more than everyone has what it takes to be an architect, CEO, fashion model, an Olympic swimmer, Pope, or president of the United States.
People are different, and some are seriously lacking in the departments necessary -- though (to be politically correct), perhaps they are gifted in other areas, like the ability to interact easily in social situations.
No matter how you slice it, there are a lot of people who have entered the CS field recently, and not because of any native ability, but because of some misguided notion that the Internet bubble never burst.
These people would have been OK to work with, as long as they were never given really demanding assignments, or could be a junior member of a team led by someone with more natural ability. But not any more: the rewards necessary to make them tolerable to their coworkers just aren't there any more (money will make you put up with a lot, and it's amazing how uncivilized people get without its lubrication).
Look no futher than the last "flamewar" on a volunteer project mailing list to see what I mean: the flames are how the people would act normally in a work situation, if they weren't being paid to be polite.
Be very careful answering this. The people who pass and obtain their degrees are the same people you will end up relying upon doing their jobs, correctly and well, in the future.
If you would not want to work with this person based on the help you are required to give them, it's likely that they are just there for their "union card", and you would be doing yourself and any potential future coworkers a service if you convinced them that the real money was in some other field.
For those whining about no regulation... just how the heck would having to pay $200 million to get a spectrum licence help out people providing free wireless access? How are you going to recoup license fees, if you don't charge for service? I guess everyone should charge for service? I can't wait to set up my "toll sidewalk" outside your building, if there should be no such thing as free public access to resources...
I can see how it would help the people who want a barrier to entry against free competition in an area where they'd like to charge money... well "boo hoo". The air waves belong to the public, and the free service was there first, and all your paid customers can get service from the free service anyway. So Go Away, Please.
The way I see it escalating is this: the free service doesn't move and the paid service doesn't move and both services suck, so they both lose users, only the paid service loses money because of that, and the free service doesn't. Upshot: If you are the paid service, and you don't want to lose money... move. Case closed.
I vote for a box to make cell phones ring as you enter an establishment, so that whoever is at the door can hand out a clue.
In movie theaters, you could put up a "have you turned off the ringer on your cell phone?" slide, and then make the things ring. Do this 4 or 5 times before the previews, etc., start.
Another alternative is to actually put a *cell* in the theater, and give it a $50 call termination/origination fee. 8-).
"I don't see much point in [making Internet2 IPv6-only]".
The main problem is that if people can use IPv4, there is no incentive for them to change over to IPv6. What this really means is that there's no incentive for Microsoft to include it be default in their desktop OS's. IPSec is languishing because Microsoft has not included it until very recently. Even so, the IPv4 IPSec they've included does not include cryptogrpahy, it only include authentication and non-repudiation.
That's great if you want evidence to accuse someone of a crime, but without the third part of the IPSec specification being implemented, it doesn't provide privacy... for things like credit card numbers.
"Applications should be able to speak IPv4 and v6 natively with little trouble."
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Not only is it easier to implement IPv4-only code ("just do what you've always done, instead of learning a new way to carefully code"), and impossible to test non-IPv4 operations without a lot of effort, given the non-deployment of IPv6, doing otherwise damages your code portability to platforms which have not implemented IPv6 interfaces and transport agnostic resolver and other code. As long as this is true, and there's no overriding incentive for IPv6, IPv6 will not be widely deployed.
Personally, I fully expect my analog television to have signals to receive for the next decade, rather than the 2004 date that's been pushed back to 2006, when analog broadcasts were scheduled to cease.
I also fully expect to have incredible difficulty getting a static IP, as long as the IPv4 address space is the primary address space.
While apparently dissimilar, there is a common cause for both of these issues: there is a good reason that the phrase "backward compatability" has the word "backward" in it.
"Since IPv6 is still an experimental protocol[...]"
Wrong. RFC 240 is standards track, and has been since December of 1998. All Cisco equipment has had IPv6 capable software loads available since June 24th, 2000.
What would make me happiest is if they would turn off IPv4 on the damn thing, and force everyone to use IPv6, or not be able to connect.
It will truly suck to have all this shiny new equipment deployed and talking to its peers at incredible speed... without a shiny new address space to go with it.
With all this non-resalable equipment and media, has anyone done an environmental impact study in terms of waste disposal, when your computer and/or it's current OS load and the CDROMs it came on can no longer be donated to the local orphanage?
We're already having problems with monitors and computers (it costs to throw a monitor away where I live, unless you take it to the dumpster at 3AM), with most printed circuit board finding their way to heavily contaminating the countryside during cheap-labor disassembly after shipping to Asia.
"Just wait, fellow code monkeys.... India and China are the rising stars...."
China will not be a threat until they go from an ideogrammatic to an alphabetic language representation, perfect written/voice input, or figure out how to build a keyboard with 32,000 keys (same for Japan, which has kana, but doesn't use it for digital documents).
Not to mention that problem solving ability tends to self-select against people in repressive societies, since problems-solvers don't tend to be incredibly particular about *which* problems they solve, or necessarily agree with their governments about *what* constitutes a problem.
India is more of a threat to U.S. supremacy in information technology, but until they get their act together on state interference with etherpreneurial ventures (e.g. 3 weeks for a business license in the most heavily regulated locations in the U.S. vs. 3 months or more in India), it's much more likely that they'll simply come to the U.S. and start their business here (1/3 of all businesses in Silicon Valley are started by non-US born people). At which point, it's still U.S. supremacy, even if it's a non-U.S. citizen doing the coding.
And it's not like people like me are sitting by and not saying anything when people try to dumb-down universities in North America (for example;^))...
"It's Electrical & Computer Engineering. That may make a difference."
It only makes a difference as to the subcommittee doing the accreditation. The accreditation is a strange thing, but most of it arises out of the wishes of professional societies, and most of them are international. In this case, an E&CE program falls under the blanket of the ACM (and IEEE).
The professional societies have a vested interest in keeping ceritifcations in their professions from becoming nothing more than the moral equivalent of "union cards" -- "You got a card, you work; you don't got a card, you don't work. You don't like it, you talk to the shop steward".
"I went through this program, and I remember those courses. They used to be taught in C++."
Back before the rules changes in the mid 1980's, there were tons of language courses, as opposed to "CS concept using " courses (I took all of them that were available at my University, actually, including "COBOL" and "Business FORTRAN": this is not about me being a snob about my education vs. someone else's education).
The ACM and IEEE ended up all pissed off that the colleges were turning CS classes into vocational education programs, and insisted that the "Science" part of "Computer Science" get the major emphasis. Most of these classes stage largely -- or even completely -- the same, just under new names. After a while, the courses evolved away from teching languages. Just as the people who had changed the rules intended.
Their point (and I agree with it) is that there is a difference between a programmer and a software engineer: a programmer turns people's algorithms into machine instructions, whereas a software engineer solves problems using a computer as a tool. The mindsets required for these different approaches are miles apart.
Is C# a valid language to know? Probably it will be something nice to have on your resume in about 3 years, after the economic recovery gets going, now that VC purse strings are starting to open up again and new businesses are starting to be created again. Just like Java was the thing to have on your resume, before all the J2EE and other Java based Internet startups folded in the.com crash. Not a lot of high paying work for Java programmers these days: the skills were intended to make the people modular and replaceable -- and they are. Without an artificial shortage to drive wages up, the pay is lower than for other skill sets.
But that's not my point.
My point is, and always has been, that if you intend to go on to a graduate degree (and most students would be smart to want this, now that there are no longer high-5 and low-6 figure salaries available to people without degrees or experience, just to get *any* warm body plugged into a cubicle), then you need to consider accreditation, and the ability to enroll directly into graduate programs at name universities, without having to take a semester or more of "make up classes".
You can say it's snobbish, the way that credits transfer between the University of California and California State University systems (for example).
OK. You've said it. So what? Does that get your degree from one accepted at the other's graduate programs without "make up classes"? No, it doesn't.
By acting in a way that U.S. Universities are not permitted to act and retain accreditation, U of Waterloo is going to hurt their graduate's ability to get into U.S. University graduate degree programs, without adding a semester or more of "being gratuitously different on purpose" tax.
You may not think this is fair, but that doesn't make me an asshole for pointing out that those are the facts, or that that's the risk they are running when they do what they are doing, and require a specific language class for entry into their programs.
A University can not require a specific computer language and remain accredited. Those are the rules.
Requiring C# (or *any other computer language course*) will endanger a University's accreditation.
A Computer Science program is supposed to teach Computer Science. If you want to learn a computer language out of that context, you might as well go to a trade school or enroll in a vocational ng if it's a training program.
By requiring a course in a particular computer language, the U of Waterloo is damaging itself.
I don't give a flying XXXX *whose* computer language it is, or if the thing is public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
No, in fact, music from yesterday *isn't* available for purchase these days, even from Amazon.
As one example, I still can't buy Isao Tomita's "Bolero" album on CD. You can get "Bolero" itself as a single track of a collection (who would want 10 different versions of the same song, just to get the one you wanted?!?), but you don't get "The Mother Goose Suite", "Daphnis and Chloe: Suite No. 2", or "Pavan for a Dead Princess".
As another, I can't get a "Baltimora" album, except as used vinyl (if then); the only thing available on CD is one song, "Tarzan Boy" (good tune, but ruined by the "Listerine" commercial), and it's only available on "Beverly Hills Ninja" or in some *LAME* 80's dance collection (two exceptions: a cover band, and an "Italo" Italian dance CD sold in the U.S.: a *LAME* non-80's dance collection).
Frankly, I'm amaze that "Buffalo Springfield" or Harry Nilsson is available (incredibly hard to find, though).
-- Terry
Tthe going rate is about $10,000,000 per park.
That's what Bill Clinton charged the Phillipine coal producers in capmaign donations to lock up the single largest reserve of clean coal in the United States into a national park in Southern Utah, right before he shepparded legislation through congress requiring coal-fired power plants use cleaner coal.
-- Terry
Something like this would make an excellent test case.
If IP is to be treated as real property, a the MPAA, RIAA, and SPA, etc., all want, then I can establish a Prescriptive Lien through Adverse Use, now can't I? It's a fundamental Common Law principle.
Because I parked my car in front of your house for years, and you didn't stop me, I now have a *right* to park my car in front of your house.
Because I used your VM algorithm in my software for years, and you didn't stop mem I now have a *right* to use your VM algorithm in my software.
Bob: "What's that big ``#if 0'' block?"
Tom: "Oh, that's package XXX, which makes my code a derivative work which grandfathers it under the prescriptive lien package XXX has for use of patent QRS. Pretty cool, huh?"
-- Terry
I read all of the other comments, even the trolls.
I don't see anyone else pointing out that the draft expired the dat this story was posted.
What gives?!?
-- Terry
"
... ]
Protected EAP Protocol (PEAP)
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all
provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026.
[
Expiration Date
This memo is filed as , and
expires August 22, 2002.
"
-- Terry
A slight correction on the national aerospace plane project...
The engine was a liear aerospike, which the design had being fueled by a Hydrogen slurry tank. The tank was not buildable with current material science, after a number of tries. *THAT*, NOT September 11th, was why it was cancelled (yes, I know they could have used a different fuel tank technology; they didn't).
Personally, I think some non-Berne signatory country should build a DC-X with a linear aerospike, and screw the U.S. patents.
The (unfortunately) winning contractors design called for a runway, which meant building additional hardware, if you ever wanted to go any place interesting. A DC-X ("Delta Clipper") could have, with 3 launced for orbital refueuling on the
way in any out, put us back on the moon very quickly (and once in orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar system). You're not going to the moon in something that lands like an airpane, ever... no runways, gas stations, or air to hold the wings up.
-- Terry
The claims about this being the heaviest lift rocket "since the Saturn V" are exaggerated. The Saturn V had over 12 times the payload capacity of the top end Atlas 5 (which hasn't actually flown, yet).
Comparatively, the top end Russian heavy lifter is very nearly the equal of the Saturn V (the Saturn V could lift 2% more weight, assuming we could even build one again).
Here are various payload capacities for all the Atlas 5 series, and a number of other currently in service rockets, as well as the Saturn V, in US pounds:
__8,752 Atlas 5 501
_11,618 Atlas 5 511
_13,117 Atlas 5 411
_13,856 Atlas 5 521
_15,057 Atlas 5 421
_15,873 Atlas 5 531
_16,843 Atlas 5 431
_17,593 Atlas 5 541
_19,114 Atlas 5 551
_28,950 Delta IV
_39,600 Ariane V
_45,320 Proton K
_47,800 Titan IV
_63,500 Space Shuttle
231,000 Energia SL17
236,000 Saturn V
Looks like if you're planning a 1969-style trip to the moon, you better learn Russian... it also explains just what it is the Russians bring to the ISS that the U.S. could not provide on their own (since the U.S. would have a difficult time even building anything close these days).
Sorry: I don't have numbers on the Chinese or Japanese launch vehicles.
-- Terry
Had to be said.
Read the Walt Whitman poem.
-- Terry
So I guess the decision mandates that you can write the code, but are not fit to run it?
.com domain would be unable to duplicate this performance for .org domain?
I find it absolutely amazing that IMS/ISC are rated so poorly, primarily on supposedly technical grounds.
Does anyone else find it unbelievable that the people currently running one of the TLD servers for the
I find criteria 7 to be stupid; it basicallymeans that "technical" preference should be given to plans from companies that sell add-on mail and web hosting, etc., commercial services.
Criteria 8 is also pretty stupid; the answer to the question is "these are the people defining the protocol changes to which the successful applicant will need to adapt".
They lost out on #9, as well, even though, according to Gartner, "One of the few proposals that discusses non- technical components of the transition such as staffing, facilities, technical support and community activities."; basically the complain boils down to "they are not a going for-profit registry concern".
Verisign still manages registration through *email*, for God's sake! Who the heck are they to cast stones?!?
-- Terry
"Of course, I would only call it a "success" if 2 cloned mammoths were able to successfully mate."
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the mammoths would agree with you...
-- Terry
Your point is damaged by the incorrectness of your cites.
"Wealth of Nations" is by Adam Smith, not someone whose last name is "Adam".
"The Prince" is by Niccolo Machiavelli, not someone whose last name is "Machievello".
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's book is entitled "The Brothers Karamazov", not "The Brothers Karamazoo".
-- Terry
Is this like "pollution credits"? For every extinct species we bring back, do we get to take one out for free?
-- Terry
If you're not willing to be careful, then at least be honest.
Not everyone has what it takes to be a software engineer, or even just a programmer, any more than everyone has what it takes to be an architect, CEO, fashion model, an Olympic swimmer, Pope, or president of the United States.
People are different, and some are seriously lacking in the departments necessary -- though (to be politically correct), perhaps they are gifted in other areas, like the ability to interact easily in social situations.
No matter how you slice it, there are a lot of people who have entered the CS field recently, and not because of any native ability, but because of some misguided notion that the Internet bubble never burst.
These people would have been OK to work with, as long as they were never given really demanding assignments, or could be a junior member of a team led by someone with more natural ability. But not any more: the rewards necessary to make them tolerable to their coworkers just aren't there any more (money will make you put up with a lot, and it's amazing how uncivilized people get without its lubrication).
Look no futher than the last "flamewar" on a volunteer project mailing list to see what I mean: the flames are how the people would act normally in a work situation, if they weren't being paid to be polite.
-- Terry
Be very careful answering this. The people who pass and obtain their degrees are the same people you will end up relying upon doing their jobs, correctly and well, in the future.
If you would not want to work with this person based on the help you are required to give them, it's likely that they are just there for their "union card", and you would be doing yourself and any potential future coworkers a service if you convinced them that the real money was in some other field.
-- Terry
For those whining about no regulation... just how the heck would having to pay $200 million to get a spectrum licence help out people providing free wireless access? How are you going to recoup license fees, if you don't charge for service? I guess everyone should charge for service? I can't wait to set up my "toll sidewalk" outside your building, if there should be no such thing as free public access to resources...
I can see how it would help the people who want a barrier to entry against free competition in an area where they'd like to charge money... well "boo hoo". The air waves belong to the public, and the free service was there first, and all your paid customers can get service from the free service anyway. So Go Away, Please.
The way I see it escalating is this: the free service doesn't move and the paid service doesn't move and both services suck, so they both lose users, only the paid service loses money because of that, and the free service doesn't. Upshot: If you are the paid service, and you don't want to lose money... move. Case closed.
-- Terry
I vote for a box to make cell phones ring as you enter an establishment, so that whoever is at the door can hand out a clue.
In movie theaters, you could put up a "have you turned off the ringer on your cell phone?" slide, and then make the things ring. Do this 4 or 5 times before the previews, etc., start.
Another alternative is to actually put a *cell* in the theater, and give it a $50 call termination/origination fee. 8-).
-- Terry
The relative performance of AMD and Intel equipment is highly software dependent.
Actually, the AMD only outperforms the Intel if you run software.
}B^)
-- Terry
"I don't see much point in [making Internet2 IPv6-only]".
The main problem is that if people can use IPv4, there is no incentive for them to change over to IPv6. What this really means is that there's no incentive for Microsoft to include it be default in their desktop OS's. IPSec is languishing because Microsoft has not included it until very recently. Even so, the IPv4 IPSec they've included does not include cryptogrpahy, it only include authentication and non-repudiation.
That's great if you want evidence to accuse someone of a crime, but without the third part of the IPSec specification being implemented, it doesn't provide privacy... for things like credit card numbers.
"Applications should be able to speak IPv4 and v6 natively with little trouble."
And if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Not only is it easier to implement IPv4-only code ("just do what you've always done, instead of learning a new way to carefully code"), and impossible to test non-IPv4 operations without a lot of effort, given the non-deployment of IPv6, doing otherwise damages your code portability to platforms which have not implemented IPv6 interfaces and transport agnostic resolver and other code. As long as this is true, and there's no overriding incentive for IPv6, IPv6 will not be widely deployed.
Personally, I fully expect my analog television to have signals to receive for the next decade, rather than the 2004 date that's been pushed back to 2006, when analog broadcasts were scheduled to cease.
I also fully expect to have incredible difficulty getting a static IP, as long as the IPv4 address space is the primary address space.
While apparently dissimilar, there is a common cause for both of these issues: there is a good reason that the phrase "backward compatability" has the word "backward" in it.
"Since IPv6 is still an experimental protocol[...]"
Wrong. RFC 240 is standards track, and has been since December of 1998. All Cisco equipment has had IPv6 capable software loads available since June 24th, 2000.
What good is Internet 2 going to
-- Terry
What would make me happiest is if they would turn off IPv4 on the damn thing, and force everyone to use IPv6, or not be able to connect.
It will truly suck to have all this shiny new equipment deployed and talking to its peers at incredible speed... without a shiny new address space to go with it.
-- Terry
Rather than complaining, there are a number of things you can actually do about RIAA.
The number one thing you can do is to get them legally disbanded (discorporated).
The Government Giveth... The Government Can Damn Well Taketh Away.
The Recording Industry Association of America is a California Corporation, corporate number C1858372.
Contact CAlifornia Secretary of State Bill Jones, and request that their incorporation as a legal entity be terminated. Contact information follows...
Mail or in person:
California Secretary of State
1500 11th Street
Sacramento, California 95814
Public Contact Phone Numbers:
General Information - (916) 653-6814
Corporations Unit & Branch Offices - (916) 657-5448
Executive Office - (916) 653-7244
Legislative & Constituent Services - (916) 653-6774
Political Reform Division - (916) 653-6224
Email:
ConstituentAffairs@ss.ca.gov
PS: For good measure:
- Governor Gray Davis
- State Capitol Building
- Sacramento, CA 95814
- Phone: 916-445-2841
- Fax: 916-445-4633
- governor@governor.ca.gov
-- Terry
With all this non-resalable equipment and media, has anyone done an environmental impact study in terms of waste disposal, when your computer and/or it's current OS load and the CDROMs it came on can no longer be donated to the local orphanage?
We're already having problems with monitors and computers (it costs to throw a monitor away where I live, unless you take it to the dumpster at 3AM), with most printed circuit board finding their way to heavily contaminating the countryside during cheap-labor disassembly after shipping to Asia.
-- Terry
"Just wait, fellow code monkeys.... India and China are the rising stars...."
;^))...
China will not be a threat until they go from an ideogrammatic to an alphabetic language representation, perfect written/voice input, or figure out how to build a keyboard with 32,000 keys (same for Japan, which has kana, but doesn't use it for digital documents).
Not to mention that problem solving ability tends to self-select against people in repressive societies, since problems-solvers don't tend to be incredibly particular about *which* problems they solve, or necessarily agree with their governments about *what* constitutes a problem.
India is more of a threat to U.S. supremacy in information technology, but until they get their act together on state interference with etherpreneurial ventures (e.g. 3 weeks for a business license in the most heavily regulated locations in the U.S. vs. 3 months or more in India), it's much more likely that they'll simply come to the U.S. and start their business here (1/3 of all businesses in Silicon Valley are started by non-US born people). At which point, it's still U.S. supremacy, even if it's a non-U.S. citizen doing the coding.
And it's not like people like me are sitting by and not saying anything when people try to dumb-down universities in North America (for example
-- Terry
"It's Electrical & Computer Engineering. That may make a difference."
.com crash. Not a lot of high paying work for Java programmers these days: the skills were intended to make the people modular and replaceable -- and they are. Without an artificial shortage to drive wages up, the pay is lower than for other skill sets.
It only makes a difference as to the subcommittee doing the accreditation. The accreditation is a strange thing, but most of it arises out of the wishes of professional societies, and most of them are international. In this case, an E&CE program falls under the blanket of the ACM (and IEEE).
The professional societies have a vested interest in keeping ceritifcations in their professions from becoming nothing more than the moral equivalent of "union cards" -- "You got a card, you work; you don't got a card, you don't work. You don't like it, you talk to the shop steward".
"I went through this program, and I remember those courses. They used to be taught in C++."
Back before the rules changes in the mid 1980's, there were tons of language courses, as opposed to "CS concept using " courses (I took all of them that were available at my University, actually, including "COBOL" and "Business FORTRAN": this is not about me being a snob about my education vs. someone else's education).
The ACM and IEEE ended up all pissed off that the colleges were turning CS classes into vocational education programs, and insisted that the "Science" part of "Computer Science" get the major emphasis. Most of these classes stage largely -- or even completely -- the same, just under new names. After a while, the courses evolved away from teching languages. Just as the people who had changed the rules intended.
Their point (and I agree with it) is that there is a difference between a programmer and a software engineer: a programmer turns people's algorithms into machine instructions, whereas a software engineer solves problems using a computer as a tool. The mindsets required for these different approaches are miles apart.
Is C# a valid language to know? Probably it will be something nice to have on your resume in about 3 years, after the economic recovery gets going, now that VC purse strings are starting to open up again and new businesses are starting to be created again. Just like Java was the thing to have on your resume, before all the J2EE and other Java based Internet startups folded in the
But that's not my point.
My point is, and always has been, that if you intend to go on to a graduate degree (and most students would be smart to want this, now that there are no longer high-5 and low-6 figure salaries available to people without degrees or experience, just to get *any* warm body plugged into a cubicle), then you need to consider accreditation, and the ability to enroll directly into graduate programs at name universities, without having to take a semester or more of "make up classes".
You can say it's snobbish, the way that credits transfer between the University of California and California State University systems (for example).
OK. You've said it. So what? Does that get your degree from one accepted at the other's graduate programs without "make up classes"? No, it doesn't.
By acting in a way that U.S. Universities are not permitted to act and retain accreditation, U of Waterloo is going to hurt their graduate's ability to get into U.S. University graduate degree programs, without adding a semester or more of "being gratuitously different on purpose" tax.
You may not think this is fair, but that doesn't make me an asshole for pointing out that those are the facts, or that that's the risk they are running when they do what they are doing, and require a specific language class for entry into their programs.
-- Terry
"Yes they are. IN THE FUCKING USA!!!!"
Read the links.
The ACM is an international organization.
We are not talking about U.S. accreditation in particular, we are talking about accreditation in general.
And people outside the U.S. wonder why the U.S. is kicking everyone else's rears in software as a percentage of GNP... sheesh.
-- Terry
A University can not require a specific computer language and remain accredited. Those are the rules.
Requiring C# (or *any other computer language course*) will endanger a University's accreditation.
A Computer Science program is supposed to teach Computer Science. If you want to learn a computer language out of that context, you might as well go to a trade school or enroll in a vocational ng if it's a training program.
By requiring a course in a particular computer language, the U of Waterloo is damaging itself.
I don't give a flying XXXX *whose* computer language it is, or if the thing is public domain.
-- Terry