The University of Washington has popular introductory CS / programming courses. The teachers wrote the textbook and the classes have really good handouts and slides. They use an "objects later" approach instead of "objects early" like a lot of universities. All their materials are up and others can use them. The web sites are here (CS 142) and here (CS 143). The book is called Building Java Programs.
The reason I mention it is because there has been a perception among women and minorities that computer science is dominated by white males who do not welcome them. This perception (whether justified or not) dissuades some people from trying out CS to see whether it is right for them, which is a shame.
My comment was meant to say that, though more work should still be done, this field has become much more diverse and inviting to all types of people, regardless of demographic or background. The important thing is that anyone who has aptitude and interest will also get a fair opportunity to succeed in the field.
Computer science is a wonderful field. If you like algorithms, solving challenging problems, or crunching interesting data, you can find it in this field. You don't have to sit in a cubicle all day, you do get to work with other people, and yes, you can work on real problems that matter in the real world. And, believe it or not, diversity in CS is on the rise; it isn't a white boys' club any more.
I teach introductory CS at the University of Washington. In our course we scan through the IMDB top 250 movies, examine historical popularity of babies' names, search for codons and amino acids in DNA sequences, parse maps and topological data, compute weather stats, analyze Myers-Briggs personality testing data, and solve other exciting problems.
Best of all, there are still a ton of great jobs waiting for graduates with computer science degrees at exciting companies. UW's students routinely end up at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nintendo, and other great places. CS jobs pay great salaries compared to most other fields! Most of the grads I keep in touch with are living very well at a young age.
Go check out UW's computer science videos on YouTube, which talk about what this field is, and follow several women in our department as they go through a day in their lives at work after graduating:
I'm sorry, but haven't we already seen this in several different incarnations before? Microsoft's "Active Desktop" in Win98. Konfabulator. Apple's Dashboard.
What is this obsession with "widgets", "applets", and "gadgets"? They inevitably end up doing the exact same boring things: weather, sports scores, stocks, dictionary, and maybe a little game. Great. The world of computing has changed forever.
These things are often bloated little programs because they have to run in JavaScript or some other awful language. They never have consistent UIs, so users can't learn many patterns from using one that they can apply to another. Also, it looks like Google doesn't retain any quality control over who can submit "gadgets", so I'm sure it's bound to be abused by people who want to make malware.
This is a prime example of a "me, too" project, and I fail to see how Google's done it any better than the predecessors. At least with Gmail and Google Maps they innovated those applications compared to what came before. And how does this make Google any money whatsoever? Will they put ads in the gadgets? Why should any stockholder be pleased that Google developers are wasting their time on "gadgets"?
My girlfriend and I live in the same apartment complex as this Jason jerk in Kirkland, WA (a suburb of Seattle). He posted his address on a web site before taking it down. The only problem is that he didn't publish which apartment number he was in. There are only 4 apartments in our unit; he's in one of the upstairs pair.
So now I'm worried that some of these furious men will come after him and will instead throw their rocks through my windows, or worse. I feel like my well-being has been potentially endangered by this guy. What should I do? Part of me feels like shouting his address (WITH apartment number) from the Internet rooftops. Part of me wants to post a sign on our door that says "sociopath A-hole Jason upstairs, not here." Maybe I should even alert the police. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but I wonder whether the ruling will matter. I expect the government to overrule the judge and continue doing as it pleases.
What justice do we have, if the justice department is ignored?
So a hostile anonymous coward can no longer create an entry. Fine. But isn't the real mischief to be made by modifying a pre-existing entry anyway? The article itself talks about a blogging "pioneer" who deleted references to early bloggers from a Wikipedia story. He could still have done that despite this change.
Google isn't declaring "war" on Microsoft. That isn't their way. I know several people who work at Google, and they just don't talk about "killing" companies the way Microsoft employees do. It truly is a different work culture there. If someone does use "the K word" at an all-hands meeting or something, the bosses are quick to say that they don't want the employees to think about things that way.
Google can be a resoundingly successful company even if Microsoft is alive and well, and they're fine with that. The only thing Google needs from Microsoft is for them not to put up artificial barriers to accessing Google's services, such as modifying IE in ways that hamper Google. So I'm sure Google would love to see everyone using a non-MS browser such as Firefox.
I really think Google's strategy is (or should be) to lift the key services and applications from the OS up into well-made web services. Word processing is a huge one for most of us. I'm still anxiously hoping that a calendar and scheduler (Outlook-type program) comes along soon to integrate with Gmail. Once Google fills those needs, assuming they do it well, I'll really enjoy having consistent services that I can use from anywhere, on any platform.
From what little knowledge I had of Linspire, it seemed their goal was to intentionally rip off the look and feel of other popular software. They had an "LTunes" media player whose GUI looked just like iTunes, for example. I actually think this isn't such a bad idea. Making a Linux that looks and feels familiar will appeal to some people.
But I don't know much about Linspire under the hood. What sort of package management do they use? Which desktop environment? Does it do a lot of essential tasks "out of the box" like playing MP3s, DVDs, etc? How does it handle automatic software updates?
Can anyone who actually uses Linspire comment on what are the nice features it has that should cause somebody to consider using it, over other distros like Fedora, Suse, and so on?
Call me a troll or flamebaiter, but can we just pronounce the PSP dead and move on? It's too expensive. It has way too few tolerable games. I was at Fry's the other day and all they really have for it are little crappy proprietary movies you're supposed to watch on a 2" screen, and cannot be watched on any other device. Ridiculous!
Why don't the fanboys who gobbled up this overpriced paperweight just concede that it's failing? The only neat thing to do with a PSP appears to be hacking it to make it into a console that actually *WAS* good, such as making it emulate a NES or SNES. But Sony of course disables that with each new firmware upgrade.
As an interesting aside, fooling these scammers by responding to their emails is a fun passtime for quite a few who call themselves baiters.
I myself have quite a bit of experience at leading these folks on. Yes, I'm quite the master baiter... but I figure they deserve it because they keep jerking me around. They're such wankers!
Is it too early for me to reserve...
on
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· Score: 1
But the proposal appears to grant the FBI more power to seek information from banks, hospitals, libraries, and so on through "administrative subpoenas" without prior judicial oversight. The subpoenas are only supposed to be used for terrorism or clandestine intelligence cases.
I'm one step ahead of them. I chose Citibank, so my information has already been leaked!
I say this as a person who desperately wants to ditch MS Office:
OpenOffice isn't quite good enough yet.
The look and feel of the program is a bit too rough. For example, they inexplicably have a huge "Styles" pane on by default that covers 1/4 of the document.
Also, the compatibility is not what it should be. I create Word docs in oowriter, but then when I open them in real Word, the page breaks are all wrong! What used to fit on one page wraps to a second, or vice versa. It's quite frustrating when I prepare a lot of Word docs for printing by others, when I know that essentially all the others are using real Word. I have to reboot and examine the document to make sure of what it really looks like.
Ditto for ooimpress, the PowerPoint clone. It is hard to use it for lots of small reasons; death by a thousand cuts. It isn't easy to pull up a Slide Sorter view and move the slides around, cut and paste them, select ones from one file and put them in another file, and so on. When I create a new slide, it ignores my Master Slide template and the dimensions of the text areas come out all wrong. It also again doesn't look the same as a real PowerPoint file, and when I view the same slides in real PowerPoint, the text falls off the edge or bottom of the slide. Argh!
I realize the challenge OOo is up against, and I applaud their efforts. But OOo is no Office killer, not yet. More work needs to be done.
I'm a developer, and I'm comfortable with my salary and benefits. I don't want attention or clout or respect. I'm happy to be relatively anonymous, come in and work hard, and leave quietly at the end of the day.
Even though I (and most geeks) would not use it, the one-button mouse shipping standard on every Mac is a VERY good thing. Reason: It *forces* application developers to design a decent UI that isn't reliant on endless right-click menu commands. I think this is very important. I hope Apple keeps the one-button mouse forever. Anything that forces good UI decisions is a win to me.
If P2P is so valuable, then everyone who uses it to steal movies and music should realize that they're abusing something important. Those of us who use BitTorrent to get Linux distros and legal content don't really appreciate the fact that 30% of the entire Internet's traffic is from the transfer of pirated BitTorrent files, especially if that potentially leads to anti-P2P legislation.
It tries to be many things and doesn't excel at any of them. People want mobile devices that do things well foremost, and do many things second.
Let this be a lesson to the "convergence"-crazy companies who are putting blurry cameras, pitiful games, tiny amounts of MP3 storage, and other features into cell phones that don't even make calls well. Give me a GameBoy Advance and a solid cell phone in separate casing any day.
Slashdot Mirror
The University of Washington has popular introductory CS / programming courses. The teachers wrote the textbook and the classes have really good handouts and slides. They use an "objects later" approach instead of "objects early" like a lot of universities. All their materials are up and others can use them. The web sites are here (CS 142) and here (CS 143). The book is called Building Java Programs.
One of their instructors also teaches a web programming course that was really popular.
I'd also check out the "How to Think Like A Computer Scientist" series.
> What does that have to do with anything?
The reason I mention it is because there has been a perception among women and minorities that computer science is dominated by white males who do not welcome them. This perception (whether justified or not) dissuades some people from trying out CS to see whether it is right for them, which is a shame.
My comment was meant to say that, though more work should still be done, this field has become much more diverse and inviting to all types of people, regardless of demographic or background. The important thing is that anyone who has aptitude and interest will also get a fair opportunity to succeed in the field.
I teach introductory CS at the University of Washington. In our course we scan through the IMDB top 250 movies, examine historical popularity of babies' names, search for codons and amino acids in DNA sequences, parse maps and topological data, compute weather stats, analyze Myers-Briggs personality testing data, and solve other exciting problems.
Best of all, there are still a ton of great jobs waiting for graduates with computer science degrees at exciting companies. UW's students routinely end up at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nintendo, and other great places. CS jobs pay great salaries compared to most other fields! Most of the grads I keep in touch with are living very well at a young age.
Go check out UW's computer science videos on YouTube, which talk about what this field is, and follow several women in our department as they go through a day in their lives at work after graduating:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=UWCSE
I'm sorry, but haven't we already seen this in several different incarnations before? Microsoft's "Active Desktop" in Win98. Konfabulator. Apple's Dashboard.
What is this obsession with "widgets", "applets", and "gadgets"? They inevitably end up doing the exact same boring things: weather, sports scores, stocks, dictionary, and maybe a little game. Great. The world of computing has changed forever.
These things are often bloated little programs because they have to run in JavaScript or some other awful language. They never have consistent UIs, so users can't learn many patterns from using one that they can apply to another. Also, it looks like Google doesn't retain any quality control over who can submit "gadgets", so I'm sure it's bound to be abused by people who want to make malware.
This is a prime example of a "me, too" project, and I fail to see how Google's done it any better than the predecessors. At least with Gmail and Google Maps they innovated those applications compared to what came before. And how does this make Google any money whatsoever? Will they put ads in the gadgets? Why should any stockholder be pleased that Google developers are wasting their time on "gadgets"?
Thumbs down, Google. I am not impressed.
My girlfriend and I live in the same apartment complex as this Jason jerk in Kirkland, WA (a suburb of Seattle). He posted his address on a web site before taking it down. The only problem is that he didn't publish which apartment number he was in. There are only 4 apartments in our unit; he's in one of the upstairs pair.
So now I'm worried that some of these furious men will come after him and will instead throw their rocks through my windows, or worse. I feel like my well-being has been potentially endangered by this guy. What should I do? Part of me feels like shouting his address (WITH apartment number) from the Internet rooftops. Part of me wants to post a sign on our door that says "sociopath A-hole Jason upstairs, not here." Maybe I should even alert the police. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but I wonder whether the ruling will matter. I expect the government to overrule the judge and continue doing as it pleases.
What justice do we have, if the justice department is ignored?
... since all of my most important files from my PC just disappeared.
So a hostile anonymous coward can no longer create an entry. Fine. But isn't the real mischief to be made by modifying a pre-existing entry anyway? The article itself talks about a blogging "pioneer" who deleted references to early bloggers from a Wikipedia story. He could still have done that despite this change.
Hey baby, want to join the 238,857-mile-high club?
At least you'd have privacy for the moment of climax. In space, no one can hear you scream...
Haven't these people seen Star Trek? Kirk did it with every green woman in space, and that crew turned out fine...
Google isn't declaring "war" on Microsoft. That isn't their way. I know several people who work at Google, and they just don't talk about "killing" companies the way Microsoft employees do. It truly is a different work culture there. If someone does use "the K word" at an all-hands meeting or something, the bosses are quick to say that they don't want the employees to think about things that way.
Google can be a resoundingly successful company even if Microsoft is alive and well, and they're fine with that. The only thing Google needs from Microsoft is for them not to put up artificial barriers to accessing Google's services, such as modifying IE in ways that hamper Google. So I'm sure Google would love to see everyone using a non-MS browser such as Firefox.
I really think Google's strategy is (or should be) to lift the key services and applications from the OS up into well-made web services. Word processing is a huge one for most of us. I'm still anxiously hoping that a calendar and scheduler (Outlook-type program) comes along soon to integrate with Gmail. Once Google fills those needs, assuming they do it well, I'll really enjoy having consistent services that I can use from anywhere, on any platform.
From what little knowledge I had of Linspire, it seemed their goal was to intentionally rip off the look and feel of other popular software. They had an "LTunes" media player whose GUI looked just like iTunes, for example. I actually think this isn't such a bad idea. Making a Linux that looks and feels familiar will appeal to some people.
But I don't know much about Linspire under the hood. What sort of package management do they use? Which desktop environment? Does it do a lot of essential tasks "out of the box" like playing MP3s, DVDs, etc? How does it handle automatic software updates?
Can anyone who actually uses Linspire comment on what are the nice features it has that should cause somebody to consider using it, over other distros like Fedora, Suse, and so on?
Call me a troll or flamebaiter, but can we just pronounce the PSP dead and move on? It's too expensive. It has way too few tolerable games. I was at Fry's the other day and all they really have for it are little crappy proprietary movies you're supposed to watch on a 2" screen, and cannot be watched on any other device. Ridiculous!
Why don't the fanboys who gobbled up this overpriced paperweight just concede that it's failing? The only neat thing to do with a PSP appears to be hacking it to make it into a console that actually *WAS* good, such as making it emulate a NES or SNES. But Sony of course disables that with each new firmware upgrade.
I myself have quite a bit of experience at leading these folks on. Yes, I'm quite the master baiter... but I figure they deserve it because they keep jerking me around. They're such wankers!
ssh.dont.tel ?
or perhaps...
dont.ask.dont.tel ?
I'm one step ahead of them. I chose Citibank, so my information has already been leaked!
I say this as a person who desperately wants to ditch MS Office:
OpenOffice isn't quite good enough yet.
The look and feel of the program is a bit too rough. For example, they inexplicably have a huge "Styles" pane on by default that covers 1/4 of the document.
Also, the compatibility is not what it should be. I create Word docs in oowriter, but then when I open them in real Word, the page breaks are all wrong! What used to fit on one page wraps to a second, or vice versa. It's quite frustrating when I prepare a lot of Word docs for printing by others, when I know that essentially all the others are using real Word. I have to reboot and examine the document to make sure of what it really looks like.
Ditto for ooimpress, the PowerPoint clone. It is hard to use it for lots of small reasons; death by a thousand cuts. It isn't easy to pull up a Slide Sorter view and move the slides around, cut and paste them, select ones from one file and put them in another file, and so on. When I create a new slide, it ignores my Master Slide template and the dimensions of the text areas come out all wrong. It also again doesn't look the same as a real PowerPoint file, and when I view the same slides in real PowerPoint, the text falls off the edge or bottom of the slide. Argh!
I realize the challenge OOo is up against, and I applaud their efforts. But OOo is no Office killer, not yet. More work needs to be done.
They can put me in all the shadows they want.
I'm a developer, and I'm comfortable with my salary and benefits. I don't want attention or clout or respect. I'm happy to be relatively anonymous, come in and work hard, and leave quietly at the end of the day.
- Their front web page is less cluttered than my dorm room.
- Their products aren't full of annoyingly intrusive ads.
- Their search results are as good as Google's.
- They offer anything truly unique on the Web.
- They make me feel like I'm using a useful tool, rather than like I'm part of some kind of e-commerce experiment.
Even though I (and most geeks) would not use it, the one-button mouse shipping standard on every Mac is a VERY good thing. Reason: It *forces* application developers to design a decent UI that isn't reliant on endless right-click menu commands. I think this is very important. I hope Apple keeps the one-button mouse forever. Anything that forces good UI decisions is a win to me.
Once you become a grand master at chess, does it help or hurt your chances with women when you tell them?
If P2P is so valuable, then everyone who uses it to steal movies and music should realize that they're abusing something important. Those of us who use BitTorrent to get Linux distros and legal content don't really appreciate the fact that 30% of the entire Internet's traffic is from the transfer of pirated BitTorrent files, especially if that potentially leads to anti-P2P legislation.
Let this be a lesson to the "convergence"-crazy companies who are putting blurry cameras, pitiful games, tiny amounts of MP3 storage, and other features into cell phones that don't even make calls well. Give me a GameBoy Advance and a solid cell phone in separate casing any day.