Most schools don't have an unlimited budget, as it seems yours does.
In addition to personalizing the assignments as mentioned above, classes can sometimes be challenged. "Completed" by a single written exam.
I've only ever seen this happen in exceptional cases. 99% of the time, there just isn't time to do any kind of personalization for students. Formal education is a production factory where you are measured by quantity.
Because the book is only part of the education. Additional material and insights can be provided by lectures.
Lecturers are only supposed to talk about course material. Additional material means the course was badly designed to begin with.
Questions from students. Remember the university is a hub of peers who are bright, talented and curious just like you. You will learn a lot from each other, you will learn a lot collaborating on each other's personal projects. You are generally not going to find a cluster of people like that in other settings.
Because it's so very helpful for the others when the indian exchange students keep interrupting the class with stupid questions like: "how do I get pointer?" or "how do you compare a string with a number?" Other students are as clueless as you are, why would it help to have them around?
Why did you not do as the professors I referred to earlier? Why did you not offer the students more of a challenge?
Because time is limited.
I don't know where you went to school, but I'm willing to bet that kind of environment is not what most students globally see.
That's what makes it so hard to generalize about things such as formal education, it may be great in some places, and absolute shite in others. The relative value of it may depend on other factors in your life as well.
The problem is that developers and users alike say they don't need all the functionality in the most advanced sound systems, and then turn around and want to do stuff that requires that very same advanced functionality. Like mixing, individual settings on different programs, and still retaining a relatively low latency for DJing, phone calls etc.
The whole pulseaudio fiasco has been developed because of this brainfailure, people don't understand that what they really need is Jack or something like it.
Pulseaudio adds nothing, and complicates everything, you might as well just use Alsa if all you need is very primitive mixing. For all other tasks, Jack is the way to go, and as an added bonus it encourages sound developers to make programs interoperable by forcing better software design.
The point I was trying to make is that formal education may be nice if you have the extra time and money to spend, but may not be the right choice for everyone. As I said, there are other factors to consider. The self-guided route does not lead to a lesser result as you put it, it leads to a 'different' result, with different advantages. The advantages of which, are not always readily understood by your typical academic types.
Formal education is usually designed for zero pre-knowledge and slow learners. Most teachers expect you to sit through years of not learning anything, for that rare insight. Since it's extremely difficult to skip over courses (or do it any other way) in the bureaucracy that is modern education.
Just because you're educating yourself, doesn't mean you can't get the full advantage of a formal education, it just depends on how you do it. Why sit in a classroom all day long listening to a lecture, when you can read the book it's based on, at your own pace in one 1/50 of that time. The time saved can be spent on getting broader knowledge in other related and unrelated areas and experimentation.
I used to work as a teacher in classical programming, and it was pretty clear that a few people would've been better off educating themselves, whereas others, needed guidance at every turn. Obviously, the whole curriculum was engineered for the latter.
Formal education may be the perfect choice for one subject, and a bad choice for learning another. It depends how much pre-knowledge you have, how much time and resources you are willing to spend, and how fast you need to reach productivity. Of course, if you take the economics out of it, then everything is a good idea;)
This is what Sweden had, until they started outsourcing the whole lot to private entities. Now nothing works, and everyone is paying for it, along with additional health insurance. They did the same to the pension system, schools, public transport etc.
The simple fact is that free public healthcare cannot exist alongside private healthcare. There is no incentive for politicians (and the most influential) to keep the system functioning if they can just pay whatever necessary to get good healthcare, and undermine the public healthcare for profit.
There is a middle ground though, if only research and cutting edge medicine were allowed to be private, and only for a *very* limited time, you'd get the best of both worlds, public and private healthcare.
Learning on your own **and** learning as part of a formal degree program is probably the best. Most purely self taught tend to have gaps in their knowledge.
These so called gaps in knowledge, are mostly a reflection of the formal training you've received. Everyone has gaps in knowledge, it's just that formal education uses checklists in the form of curriculums. It's actually quite damaging, since it fosters people who go around telling others what they NEED to know, while oblivious to their own shortcomings that weren't part of their training. We could talk about the lack of social, life and work experience which comes as a result of spending most of your young adulthood behind a schoolbench. The complete lack of thinking outside the box is promoted by all facets of formal education systems, shaping a mindset which can only follow recipes. Formal training on your resume may actually weigh against you, since it may imply lack of creativity or independent thought.
We've known these issues since hackers became headline stuff in the 80s. Some people have the ability to develop extraordinary skills without formal training, and yet, most people can't no matter how much training they get. Probably because they are missing out on something which can't be bought with formal training.
Logically, learning by doing should be the most accurate way of learning, and, it works very well for areas where "doing" isn't associated with high cost. It doesn't miss any major details, and doesn't say "this is not part of this course". You have to solve all issues; technical, social, economical and political until you succeed with your endeavour.
All training costs time and money, why not pick the one with least associated cost?
Why would anyone want to use Java anyway? It was all promises, and now we know they were lies. There are better alternatives like perl, python and ruby.
It was especially praised by developers. Maemo still has more real apps than all other phones combined.
No, farting apps and advertisement don't qualify.
The usability however, was slightly lacking on n900, which isn't strange for a first edition dev-phone, although it's no worse than android or iphone. It's merely just as bad.
Stable ABI is a complete red herring. How are you going to make a 386, PPC or Arm ABI compatible?
Even if it was technically possible, ABI stability would be very bad for Linux since it would encourage more binary blobs which make stability and compatibility into a complete nightmare a la windows.
This isn't 1999. You should be using a distro which automatically rebuilds and keeps your dynamic referential integrity.
The posix API has been stable for almost 3 decades, which means software still runs the same without changing a single line of code. Compare that to windows versions that have a long history of breaking APIs due to overwhelming amounts of bad security decisions made in design.
This classification is itself an extremely biased way of looking at it.
Communism, is a system which avoids the need for a financial system.
It's the difference between the altruistic and egotistical type of designs when talking about systems altogether.
Capitalism has probably killed more people than communism, but they are both equally abhorrent and extreme ideologies. I don't even understand proponents of capitalism, since it's the normal state of affairs if policy making is left unchecked to the elite.
Democracy is not even a system at all, it's just the belief in the people in making decisions rather than the bourgeoise, the method is unspecified, therefore impossible to satisfy. According to Aristotle, elections are an oligarchic, not democratic practice.
Why did they connect Ethernet via USB? Lame and unprofessional, when there presumably exist much cheaper SPI or parallel solutions with better performance.
It's not like IO-ports are running low on this kind of thing.
Money entitles you to be douche, where have we heard that before? Anyway, I'm sure that's what they're counting on, frivolous buyers who only pay for packaging. They'll never notice that it's an empty shell.
Ads waste our attention, and many of them contain psychological "viruses" that are engineered to attack our minds. The payload being a ridiculous 2% increase in the chance of buying something we don't want.
Marketers can't even know for sure if their marketing works, the only sure thing about it is that it's annoying.
A product worth buying doesn't need advertisement.
I was starting to wonder what the hieroglyphs were all about;)
Seriously though, the eshop is filled to the brim with shitty angry-bird-esque, puzzle, tap-button or other simplistic & shitty games. I can't think of a single good one except for the emulated ones, which are released one by one by our great lord Nintendo as if they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
No thanks, I'll stick to real emulators, where I already have all those games and thousands more.
Nintendo is shooting itself in the foot with this tablescraps type of strategy.
I've owned a 3DS since day one.. and what the console sorely needs is some good games, not Excellent, just good would be enough. I play many DS games which are not that bad, but just about all 3DS games are shallow boring rehashes of old games, which don't work as well as the originals. Not to talk about the web shopping thingy, which is filled with horrendous buggy crap, it's 10x worse than randomly downloading some linux game with apt-get, no, they've got fake screenshots, and fake reviews. Making you buy the game before noticing you've been ripped off. I wouldn't play most of these games even if I was paid to do it.
At least NSMB2 sounds like it's could be playable, I believe people may be content with that.
We're not talking about arbitrary person here, what's been said, is that a good developer will most likely write good code in C. Whereas they may be encouraged to write bad code in C++ due to all the bells & whistles.
Please, STL is a pile of shit, don't recommend it to anyone, ever. Boost is even worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Most schools don't have an unlimited budget, as it seems yours does.
In addition to personalizing the assignments as mentioned above, classes can sometimes be challenged. "Completed" by a single written exam.
I've only ever seen this happen in exceptional cases. 99% of the time, there just isn't time to do any kind of personalization for students.
Formal education is a production factory where you are measured by quantity.
Because the book is only part of the education. Additional material and insights can be provided by lectures.
Lecturers are only supposed to talk about course material. Additional material means the course was badly designed to begin with.
Questions from students. Remember the university is a hub of peers who are bright, talented and curious just like you. You will learn a lot from each other, you will learn a lot collaborating on each other's personal projects. You are generally not going to find a cluster of people like that in other settings.
Because it's so very helpful for the others when the indian exchange students keep interrupting the class with stupid questions like:
"how do I get pointer?" or "how do you compare a string with a number?"
Other students are as clueless as you are, why would it help to have them around?
Why did you not do as the professors I referred to earlier? Why did you not offer the students more of a challenge?
Because time is limited.
I don't know where you went to school, but I'm willing to bet that kind of environment is not what most students globally see.
That's what makes it so hard to generalize about things such as formal education, it may be great in some places, and absolute shite in others. The relative value of it may depend on other factors in your life as well.
The problem is that developers and users alike say they don't need all the functionality in the most advanced sound systems, and then turn around and want to do stuff that requires that very same advanced functionality.
Like mixing, individual settings on different programs, and still retaining a relatively low latency for DJing, phone calls etc.
The whole pulseaudio fiasco has been developed because of this brainfailure, people don't understand that what they really need is Jack or something like it.
Pulseaudio adds nothing, and complicates everything, you might as well just use Alsa if all you need is very primitive mixing.
For all other tasks, Jack is the way to go, and as an added bonus it encourages sound developers to make programs interoperable by forcing better software design.
I'm not aware of any real developers who own an ipad, maybe once it gets a qwerty keyboard?
The point I was trying to make is that formal education may be nice if you have the extra time and money to spend, but may not be the right choice for everyone. As I said, there are other factors to consider.
The self-guided route does not lead to a lesser result as you put it, it leads to a 'different' result, with different advantages.
The advantages of which, are not always readily understood by your typical academic types.
Formal education is usually designed for zero pre-knowledge and slow learners. Most teachers expect you to sit through years of not learning anything, for that rare insight. Since it's extremely difficult to skip over courses (or do it any other way) in the bureaucracy that is modern education.
Just because you're educating yourself, doesn't mean you can't get the full advantage of a formal education, it just depends on how you do it.
Why sit in a classroom all day long listening to a lecture, when you can read the book it's based on, at your own pace in one 1/50 of that time.
The time saved can be spent on getting broader knowledge in other related and unrelated areas and experimentation.
I used to work as a teacher in classical programming, and it was pretty clear that a few people would've been better off educating themselves, whereas others, needed guidance at every turn. Obviously, the whole curriculum was engineered for the latter.
Formal education may be the perfect choice for one subject, and a bad choice for learning another. ;)
It depends how much pre-knowledge you have, how much time and resources you are willing to spend, and how fast you need to reach productivity. Of course, if you take the economics out of it, then everything is a good idea
This is what Sweden had, until they started outsourcing the whole lot to private entities. Now nothing works, and everyone is paying for it, along with additional health insurance.
They did the same to the pension system, schools, public transport etc.
The simple fact is that free public healthcare cannot exist alongside private healthcare.
There is no incentive for politicians (and the most influential) to keep the system functioning if they can just pay whatever necessary to get good healthcare, and undermine the public healthcare for profit.
There is a middle ground though, if only research and cutting edge medicine were allowed to be private, and only for a *very* limited time, you'd get the best of both worlds, public and private healthcare.
Learning on your own **and** learning as part of a formal degree program is probably the best. Most purely self taught tend to have gaps in their knowledge.
These so called gaps in knowledge, are mostly a reflection of the formal training you've received.
Everyone has gaps in knowledge, it's just that formal education uses checklists in the form of curriculums.
It's actually quite damaging, since it fosters people who go around telling others what they NEED to know, while oblivious to their own shortcomings that weren't part of their training.
We could talk about the lack of social, life and work experience which comes as a result of spending most of your young adulthood behind a schoolbench.
The complete lack of thinking outside the box is promoted by all facets of formal education systems, shaping a mindset which can only follow recipes.
Formal training on your resume may actually weigh against you, since it may imply lack of creativity or independent thought.
We've known these issues since hackers became headline stuff in the 80s.
Some people have the ability to develop extraordinary skills without formal training, and yet, most people can't no matter how much training they get.
Probably because they are missing out on something which can't be bought with formal training.
Logically, learning by doing should be the most accurate way of learning, and, it works very well for areas where "doing" isn't associated with high cost.
It doesn't miss any major details, and doesn't say "this is not part of this course". You have to solve all issues; technical, social, economical and political until you succeed with your endeavour.
All training costs time and money, why not pick the one with least associated cost?
Yeah, ever since the apple logo lost the rainbow colours, they've become totally un-gay :(
I'd pick Einstein over Java any day.
Why would anyone want to use Java anyway?
It was all promises, and now we know they were lies.
There are better alternatives like perl, python and ruby.
Very interesting project, but what a weird language you've written it in :P
Is it meant to be just a proof-of-concept?
It was especially praised by developers.
Maemo still has more real apps than all other phones combined.
No, farting apps and advertisement don't qualify.
The usability however, was slightly lacking on n900, which isn't strange for a first edition dev-phone, although it's no worse than android or iphone. It's merely just as bad.
Stable ABI is a complete red herring.
How are you going to make a 386, PPC or Arm ABI compatible?
Even if it was technically possible, ABI stability would be very bad for Linux since it would encourage more binary blobs which make stability and compatibility into a complete nightmare a la windows.
This isn't 1999. You should be using a distro which automatically rebuilds and keeps your dynamic referential integrity.
The posix API has been stable for almost 3 decades, which means software still runs the same without changing a single line of code. Compare that to windows versions that have a long history of breaking APIs due to overwhelming amounts of bad security decisions made in design.
This classification is itself an extremely biased way of looking at it.
Communism, is a system which avoids the need for a financial system.
It's the difference between the altruistic and egotistical type of designs when talking about systems altogether.
Capitalism has probably killed more people than communism, but they are both equally abhorrent and extreme ideologies.
I don't even understand proponents of capitalism, since it's the normal state of affairs if policy making is left unchecked to the elite.
Democracy is not even a system at all, it's just the belief in the people in making decisions rather than the bourgeoise, the method is unspecified, therefore impossible to satisfy.
According to Aristotle, elections are an oligarchic, not democratic practice.
Why did they connect Ethernet via USB?
Lame and unprofessional, when there presumably exist much cheaper SPI or parallel solutions with better performance.
It's not like IO-ports are running low on this kind of thing.
Money entitles you to be douche, where have we heard that before?
Anyway, I'm sure that's what they're counting on, frivolous buyers who only pay for packaging. They'll never notice that it's an empty shell.
Blacklists only suck when accounts aren't associated with any cost. ;)
Whitelists only suck if you think everyone should be treated equally.
I don't think it was that optimistic, how were they supposed to know that computing development would virtually come to a halt for 20 yrs?
I salute you, more people should do it your way.
Ads waste our attention, and many of them contain psychological "viruses" that are engineered to attack our minds.
The payload being a ridiculous 2% increase in the chance of buying something we don't want.
Marketers can't even know for sure if their marketing works, the only sure thing about it is that it's annoying.
A product worth buying doesn't need advertisement.
I was starting to wonder what the hieroglyphs were all about ;)
Seriously though, the eshop is filled to the brim with shitty angry-bird-esque, puzzle, tap-button or other simplistic & shitty games.
I can't think of a single good one except for the emulated ones, which are released one by one by our great lord Nintendo as if they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
No thanks, I'll stick to real emulators, where I already have all those games and thousands more.
Nintendo is shooting itself in the foot with this tablescraps type of strategy.
Can you recommend a good game on eshop?
I've owned a 3DS since day one.. and what the console sorely needs is some good games, not Excellent, just good would be enough. I play many DS games which are not that bad, but just about all 3DS games are shallow boring rehashes of old games, which don't work as well as the originals.
Not to talk about the web shopping thingy, which is filled with horrendous buggy crap, it's 10x worse than randomly downloading some linux game with apt-get, no, they've got fake screenshots, and fake reviews. Making you buy the game before noticing you've been ripped off.
I wouldn't play most of these games even if I was paid to do it.
At least NSMB2 sounds like it's could be playable, I believe people may be content with that.
Nintendo Seal of Quality means jack nowadays.
e-books are much cheaper from piratebay, maybe they should both be worried ;)
Is google selling books now or what?
It's not like anyone goes to amazon to search for pr0n or whatever.
Who still buys books?
What do you expect from children getting their new toy and borrowing mum/dads credit card?
They're the ones with time on their hands and the ones to quickly get fed up with their toys and move on.
We're not talking about arbitrary person here, what's been said, is that a good developer will most likely write good code in C.
Whereas they may be encouraged to write bad code in C++ due to all the bells & whistles.
Please, STL is a pile of shit, don't recommend it to anyone, ever.
Boost is even worse.
Because of the 4 node limit