It has been discovered that a punch in the face drives away techies who have nothing better to do with their time than create technology that causes pain and controls people.
"The future has already arrived. It is just not evenly distributed." --William Gibson
Yes, we will have lunch machines like on Star Trek and we will have mainframes on our keychains.
And when my child get's the flu I will have to take him to the emergency room because I have no health care.
And I will make 8 dollars an hour programming Wal Mart's parking garage.
And we will eat nano-tech grown foodstuffs which will cause all sorts of health problems that won't be studied for decades because the company that makes it will buy congress.
You know, if any of you reading this were transported back in time to any other century, and had the opportunity to meet with the most progressive thinkers of that age, and the most powerful & influential people of that age, and you described to them what technologies we have at our disposal in the year 2005, they would say to you: "Why are you not living in a Utopia? Why do you have hunger? Why do you have water-borne disease? Why do you have wars?"
Engineering students are rewarded when they are able to play to a system that assesses everything that is quantifiable. Those things that are not quantifiable (such as the ability to effectively solve problems with teams or design new solutions to problems) are not graded and therefore students can't afford to spend time honing those skills.
Wow! That is exactly what I experienced in my ee series. The prof had us type in our answers to quizzes on a web form, and if the answer was off by 2 decimal points, then it was counted wrong. No partial credit, no analysis of how the problem was solved, nothing. It was absolutely rediculous, and most of the students learned nothing. Well, we did learn to solve one type of problem one specific way with one applicable equation.
I am so tired of the phrase "hold your hand" when discussing the process of teaching and learning. It is a cop-out. You know, there IS such a thing as a good teacher. What is wrong with doing your best to make sure your students are learning? What the hell do they pay tuition for, anyway?
Please explain to me how a Prof. can be proud that half their class failed. What is there to be proud of? The only thing this tells me is that the teacher is incompetent. Why is it too much to ask that students get in the 80's and 90's on tests instead of 40's and 50's? What does this do to their sense of confidence in their professional competence, when they graduate knowing that in any other context they would have failed? Confidence in one's abilities is very important when one is making tough decisions and working on complex problems. And I do not mean fake confidence. I mean the confidence that comes from having a thorough foundation in your field, and the ability to reason and solve problems in that field. All of this can be taught, and it does not mean "holding their hands."
My experience in the engineering school was horrible. I transferred to a lesser-known school after getting a 4.0 in my freshman liberal arts classes (including math) at a major university. I finished with a 3.1 GPA in Computer Engineering, and that included two years of a foreign language.
I had the same experience with incompetence as this guy. The profs just could not teach, or just didn't care about the students. It seems as if "teaching" was number 34 on their daily list of Things To Do. Basically, the people who did best were those who: cheated; had relatives or friends who graduated a few years earlier and saved their tests; lived at home; or knew the material beforehand. There were a handful of good teachers at the school, and they made a HUGE difference, and nobody ever accused them of "holding hands." They TAUGHT.
Many students enter college young and unsure of themselves. They don't realize there is a real possibility that they are getting ripped off in their education. I am sure as the average age of the student body population gets older, their will be more voices such as this guy's about the incompetence and the inefficiencies of the engineering schools.
Textbooks are chock full of errors - I once spent three hours on a section of transistor theory, only to find out in my (5-minute max.) office hour that the text was wrong. When one is taking 15 credit hours, one does not have time to waste on this bullshit. We pay good money for tuition, and we deserve competent teachers and quality textbooks.
If I go into surgery, I want my surgeon to have had an education where he was taught the material, used textbooks of high quality, had confidence in his abilities, and had professors who cared about their student's learning the material. Everything that a typical engineering school does not have, from what I have been reading throughout the years and have experienced myself.
To the people who constantly use the refrain "they shouldn't hold your hand through school," I say this: then don't go to school. Go to Amazon, buy the textbooks, and learn it yourself. What? It's too hard? Oh, you want someone to hold your hand?
If this had happened at the US Department of Homeland Security, they would have raised the alert level to Orange and we would be told to be on the lookout for slightly overweight middle-aged men with glasses, wearing dockers, using a cellphone. Anyone seen using a cellphone in a dark corner or putting a cellphone in an inside pocket (trying to conceal it!) will be immediately taken in for questioning.
Henceforth, all cellphone usage will require a licence at the county courthouse, and people must submit valid reasons for having one, and give their fingerprints and DNA for registration.
In the future, class distinction will be made apparent by which technologies you have for personal use - digital or analog.
Since digital is so, so cheap, and getting cheaper, the lower socio-economic classes will have an abundance of digital technologies in their lives - digital music, digital movies, DVRs, digital books, etc., and news of the world from broadband content-providers/distributers.
The upper classes will have a plethora of analog technologies - turntables, video-tape, audio-tape, books, and access to better quality news sources.
Analog, at the high-end, is more robust, more stable, and more humanistic. Digital is easily corruptable, unstable, and very artificial.
But this is mostly about money and quality. Wal-Mart will be able to sell you the Encyclopaedia Britannica on digital media for about 5 bucks, but a book on American Literature, not pre-approved by Lynne Cheney, will cost in the hundreds.
It is also about access and freedom. The poorer classes will have to use digital media for most of their transactions - paying bills, getting news, getting an education. The richer class will be able to use other media - written texts, private tutors - which will allow them to remain less "plugged in" to the information systems.
You can see it already in the employment sector. To apply for a job at Target, for instance, one must use an online system, answer inane, insulting questions of a personal nature, and submit to a drug test. To apply for an executive-level position, one meets personally with their peers, submits to no drug tests, and absolutely does not have to answer inane, insulting personal questions to an online database.
The future is digital - for the masses. The elite will use digital for their own ends, while the lower classes will have to adapt their lives to a digital world.
Just reading the testimonials from former students using this technology is horrifying. What are we becoming?
Before I chose my major of Comp. Eng., I had to take a speech class as part of my liberal arts requirement. Later, in engineering school, I saw seniors who couldn't even present their right answer in front of the class.
I guess this is just one more technology to let the Prof do anything but teach, and to make the students just sit and absorb, sit and absorb.
Now we have a nation of university grads who don't know how to present, defend, or discuss their ideas in front of a group. True future captains of industry. True leaders in the complex, competitive, corporate world of tomorrow.
Why would someone pick up Wired magazine, other than to read the ads to find out what is currently available?
In the early-to-mid 90's, it was fun and exciting to resurrect Marshall McLuhan, interview mathematics professors who dabble in mind-altering substances, and proclaim the Internet will empower us all and bring death to tyranny and make Nation States irrelevant. Democracy will flourish, and we will all be free and all-knowing!
Then we had Monica Lewinsky, the election of 2000, and Enron.
In my opinion, the PC is one of the biggest marketing scams ever perpetrated in the United States.
Think about it - in the 1970's, PCs were for hobbyists. That is, people who actually CARED how they worked.
In the 1980's, Apple marketed this cool box with a keyboard and a screen, and everybody thought they could do their budget and write letters on it just as powerfully as corporate HQs did a few years back. It was a good typewriter, but doing an average household budget is much easier with pencil and paper. Always has been, always will be.
So what people had was a $1,000 typewriter sitting on their desk. You remember, don't you?
So the kids came in and started playing with it, and playing games and programming games, since high schools started to have a few Basic-enabled machines lying around.
Flash forward to the late 80's and early 90's: Gaming was getting to be big business. Adults had to have a PC mostly for status. Except for the kids who were getting older and making better games and writing more sophisticated programs.
Then the Internet came in, and BAM!, everybody HAD to get online. I mean, if you were 23 and not a millionaire you were an IDIOT! You had to have a PC just to be part of the New Way! What are you, a luddite loser??
Flash forward to the late 90's and early 00's. E-mail, websurfing for shopping, porn, and maybe the odd recipe or medieval reference to look up. That is what people use their computers for.
(I relegate gamers to the hobbyists of the 70's. This issue needn't concern them, because they do care how the machine works.)
This is the average household. This is the world that no engineer at Intel or Microsoft ever sees. Because in reality their job is mostly for corporate, academic, and government customers. And these customers have extensive technical support coming right in with the machines and software. It is the marketing department that made the average home want the newest and greatest PC, which is most likely sitting in their den, used only for e-mail, shopping online, porn, and the odd recipe or medieval reference.
Nobody has ever made a PC for the average user at home. How long did it take the computer manufacturers to change the color of the plastic chassis? Twenty years? And look how proud they were of themselves!
Nobody I know needs or wants to read 600 pages on how to use Microsoft Word!!
These machines are built, designed, and made for engineers and enterprise-level organizations. To save money, and avoid making machines for average people, they just told the marketing department to make people all giddy about MHz and RAM and Cache.
If you are not a gamer, and you are not running an enterprise-level organization, then there is no PC for you. It is a colossal waste of money and time and energy. But one has to have e-mail, and one has to have internet access in today's world. And in order to do that, one must buy a machine that uses 65,000 running processes just to check their damn e-mail!!!!!!!!
And for all you fat-ass know-it-alls telling people to be personally responsible for their computer virus protection: Screw You! Do you buy a car and then check the ignition timing in your garage every 30 days? Why not, don't you take personal responsibility for your life?
Slashdot Mirror
It has been discovered that a punch in the face drives away techies who have nothing better to do with their time than create technology that causes pain and controls people.
"The future has already arrived. It is just not evenly distributed."
--William Gibson
Yes, we will have lunch machines like on Star Trek and we will have mainframes on our keychains.
And when my child get's the flu I will have to take him to the emergency room because I have no health care.
And I will make 8 dollars an hour programming Wal Mart's parking garage.
And we will eat nano-tech grown foodstuffs which will cause all sorts of health problems that won't be studied for decades because the company that makes it will buy congress.
You know, if any of you reading this were transported back in time to any other century, and had the opportunity to meet with the most progressive thinkers of that age, and the most powerful & influential people of that age, and you described to them what technologies we have at our disposal in the year 2005, they would say to you: "Why are you not living in a Utopia? Why do you have hunger? Why do you have water-borne disease? Why do you have wars?"
The answer: Because we don't care.
Utopia begins in the human heart. Not in the fab.
Engineering students are rewarded when they are able to play to a system that assesses everything that is quantifiable. Those things that are not quantifiable (such as the ability to effectively solve problems with teams or design new solutions to problems) are not graded and therefore students can't afford to spend time honing those skills.
Wow! That is exactly what I experienced in my ee series. The prof had us type in our answers to quizzes on a web form, and if the answer was off by 2 decimal points, then it was counted wrong. No partial credit, no analysis of how the problem was solved, nothing. It was absolutely rediculous, and most of the students learned nothing. Well, we did learn to solve one type of problem one specific way with one applicable equation.
I am so tired of the phrase "hold your hand" when discussing the process of teaching and learning. It is a cop-out. You know, there IS such a thing as a good teacher.
What is wrong with doing your best to make sure your students are learning? What the hell do they pay tuition for, anyway?
Please explain to me how a Prof. can be proud that half their class failed. What is there to be proud of? The only thing this tells me is that the teacher is incompetent. Why is it too much to ask that students get in the 80's and 90's on tests instead of 40's and 50's? What does this do to their sense of confidence in their professional competence, when they graduate knowing that in any other context they would have failed? Confidence in one's abilities is very important when one is making tough decisions and working on complex problems. And I do not mean fake confidence. I mean the confidence that comes from having a thorough foundation in your field, and the ability to reason and solve problems in that field. All of this can be taught, and it does not mean "holding their hands."
My experience in the engineering school was horrible. I transferred to a lesser-known school after getting a 4.0 in my freshman liberal arts classes (including math) at a major university. I finished with a 3.1 GPA in Computer Engineering, and that included two years of a foreign language.
I had the same experience with incompetence as this guy. The profs just could not teach, or just didn't care about the students. It seems as if "teaching" was number 34 on their daily list of Things To Do. Basically, the people who did best were those who: cheated; had relatives or friends who graduated a few years earlier and saved their tests; lived at home; or knew the material beforehand. There were a handful of good teachers at the school, and they made a HUGE difference, and nobody ever accused them of "holding hands." They TAUGHT.
Many students enter college young and unsure of themselves. They don't realize there is a real possibility that they are getting ripped off in their education. I am sure as the average age of the student body population gets older, their will be more voices such as this guy's about the incompetence and the inefficiencies of the engineering schools.
Textbooks are chock full of errors - I once spent three hours on a section of transistor theory, only to find out in my (5-minute max.) office hour that the text was wrong. When one is taking 15 credit hours, one does not have time to waste on this bullshit. We pay good money for tuition, and we deserve competent teachers and quality textbooks.
If I go into surgery, I want my surgeon to have had an education where he was taught the material, used textbooks of high quality, had confidence in his abilities, and had professors who cared about their student's learning the material. Everything that a typical engineering school does not have, from what I have been reading throughout the years and have experienced myself.
To the people who constantly use the refrain "they shouldn't hold your hand through school," I say this: then don't go to school. Go to Amazon, buy the textbooks, and learn it yourself. What? It's too hard? Oh, you want someone to hold your hand?
Oh, and start bombing Venezuela.
If this had happened at the US Department of Homeland Security, they would have raised the alert level to Orange and we would be told to be on the lookout for slightly overweight middle-aged men with glasses, wearing dockers, using a cellphone.
Anyone seen using a cellphone in a dark corner or putting a cellphone in an inside pocket (trying to conceal it!) will be immediately taken in for questioning.
Henceforth, all cellphone usage will require a licence at the county courthouse, and people must submit valid reasons for having one, and give their fingerprints and DNA for registration.
In the future, class distinction will be made apparent by which technologies you have for personal use - digital or analog.
Since digital is so, so cheap, and getting cheaper, the lower socio-economic classes will have an abundance of digital technologies in their lives - digital music, digital movies, DVRs, digital books, etc., and news of the world from broadband content-providers/distributers.
The upper classes will have a plethora of analog technologies - turntables, video-tape, audio-tape, books, and access to better quality news sources.
Analog, at the high-end, is more robust, more stable, and more humanistic. Digital is easily corruptable, unstable, and very artificial.
But this is mostly about money and quality. Wal-Mart will be able to sell you the Encyclopaedia Britannica on digital media for about 5 bucks, but a book on American Literature, not pre-approved by Lynne Cheney, will cost in the hundreds.
It is also about access and freedom. The poorer classes will have to use digital media for most of their transactions - paying bills, getting news, getting an education. The richer class will be able to use other media - written texts, private tutors - which will allow them to remain less "plugged in" to the information systems.
You can see it already in the employment sector. To apply for a job at Target, for instance, one must use an online system, answer inane, insulting questions of a personal nature, and submit to a drug test. To apply for an executive-level position, one meets personally with their peers, submits to no drug tests, and absolutely does not have to answer inane, insulting personal questions to an online database.
The future is digital - for the masses. The elite will use digital for their own ends, while the lower classes will have to adapt their lives to a digital world.
Just reading the testimonials from former students using this technology is horrifying.
What are we becoming?
Before I chose my major of Comp. Eng., I had to take a speech class as part of my liberal arts requirement. Later, in engineering school, I saw seniors who couldn't even present their right answer in front of the class. I guess this is just one more technology to let the Prof do anything but teach, and to make the students just sit and absorb, sit and absorb.
Now we have a nation of university grads who don't know how to present, defend, or discuss their ideas in front of a group. True future captains of industry. True leaders in the complex, competitive, corporate world of tomorrow.
Sad, sad, sad.
Why would someone pick up Wired magazine, other than to read the ads to find out what is currently available?
In the early-to-mid 90's, it was fun and exciting to resurrect Marshall McLuhan, interview mathematics professors who dabble in mind-altering substances, and proclaim the Internet will empower us all and bring death to tyranny and make Nation States irrelevant. Democracy will flourish, and we will all be free and all-knowing!
Then we had Monica Lewinsky, the election of 2000, and Enron.
yay. internet.
Check your credit report lately?
In my opinion, the PC is one of the biggest marketing scams ever perpetrated in the United States.
Think about it - in the 1970's, PCs were for hobbyists. That is, people who actually CARED how they worked.
In the 1980's, Apple marketed this cool box with a keyboard and a screen, and everybody thought they could do their budget and write letters on it just as powerfully as corporate HQs did a few years back. It was a good typewriter, but doing an average household budget is much easier with pencil and paper. Always has been, always will be.
So what people had was a $1,000 typewriter sitting on their desk. You remember, don't you? So the kids came in and started playing with it, and playing games and programming games, since high schools started to have a few Basic-enabled machines lying around.
Flash forward to the late 80's and early 90's: Gaming was getting to be big business. Adults had to have a PC mostly for status. Except for the kids who were getting older and making better games and writing more sophisticated programs. Then the Internet came in, and BAM!, everybody HAD to get online. I mean, if you were 23 and not a millionaire you were an IDIOT! You had to have a PC just to be part of the New Way! What are you, a luddite loser??
Flash forward to the late 90's and early 00's. E-mail, websurfing for shopping, porn, and maybe the odd recipe or medieval reference to look up. That is what people use their computers for.
(I relegate gamers to the hobbyists of the 70's. This issue needn't concern them, because they do care how the machine works.)
This is the average household. This is the world that no engineer at Intel or Microsoft ever sees. Because in reality their job is mostly for corporate, academic, and government customers. And these customers have extensive technical support coming right in with the machines and software. It is the marketing department that made the average home want the newest and greatest PC, which is most likely sitting in their den, used only for e-mail, shopping online, porn, and the odd recipe or medieval reference.
Nobody has ever made a PC for the average user at home. How long did it take the computer manufacturers to change the color of the plastic chassis? Twenty years? And look how proud they were of themselves!
Nobody I know needs or wants to read 600 pages on how to use Microsoft Word!! These machines are built, designed, and made for engineers and enterprise-level organizations. To save money, and avoid making machines for average people, they just told the marketing department to make people all giddy about MHz and RAM and Cache.
If you are not a gamer, and you are not running an enterprise-level organization, then there is no PC for you. It is a colossal waste of money and time and energy. But one has to have e-mail, and one has to have internet access in today's world. And in order to do that, one must buy a machine that uses 65,000 running processes just to check their damn e-mail!!!!!!!!
And for all you fat-ass know-it-alls telling people to be personally responsible for their computer virus protection: Screw You! Do you buy a car and then check the ignition timing in your garage every 30 days? Why not, don't you take personal responsibility for your life?
Jackass (es)