I recently bought a Kindle and read it on the bus pretty much everyday. You bring up some really good justifications of why it doesn't make sense for you to get one. What I think is funny is that your reasons for not getting one are the reason that pushed me into getting one. For the most part, the library doesn't work for me. It's out of the way, a pain to work into my schedule for returning books, and I end up getting late fines before I know it (don't get me started on the library I lived near that wasn't open on weekends and didn't have an after hours drop-bin). The $1 bin at Half Price Books isn't my style as far as things I'd like to read, so that doesn't work well for me either.
What did convince me to buy the Kindle was the fact that I could carry a bunch of books with me at the same time. Considering I'm going on vacation soon, this was a huge draw. I did some research into the books that are available and found that pop fiction type stuff is way too expensive (so much so that if that's all you read, then I don't suggest getting a Kindle), but those are the types of books I don't like reading, so I was fine. It ended up that a lot of the tech books I owned were available on there. I did some basic math and figured out that the discounted Kindle version of these tech books would have covered the cost of the Kindle. I also looked into what formats were supported by the Kindle and found that plain text can be transferred over to the Kindle. So I now go to Project Gutenberg and grab a bunch of the classics that are no longer under copyright for free.
Free classics, cheaper tech books, on a device I can bring with me anywhere without much hassle? That's what did it. Since getting the Kindle, I'm pretty happy with it, but it definitely has its flaws. The buttons on the sides make it awkward to hold at times. The keyboard was designed as if you were only using it one way (with both thumbs at the same time), which aggravates me most of the time. But I do think that the screen makes up for it and the convenience is great. We're thinking about getting a second one, because after I bought it I found out that you can hook up 5 Kindles to your account and they all get the books that have been purchased. But I'll need some time before taking that step...even that might not be enough to justify the extra price...
As for your other statement...
If you need to get in touch with your kid, there is an established procedure for that: Contact the office. It may take a few minutes longer, but it won't end up disturbing the entire class while your kid figures out that it is his phone, digs it out of the bag, and starts chatting in the middle of a test or lecture.
Back when I was in high school, I had 3-4 things per week that took place once school was over. Some took place at the school while others were anywhere from a 5 minute walk to a 45 minute drive. Some where on-going through out the entire school year and some where just a few weeks. But all of them took place when the school office was closed. This "established procedure" just isn't an option.
"investment in the physical infrastructure necessary to provide high-speed Internet will slow down, the U.S. will fall even further behind the rest of the world [in broadband deployment], and our rural and low-income populations will wait even longer to enter the digital age."
So the big tele companies are being the good guys here for wanting to gouge various internet sites, screw the users, and roll out to the "poor, rural areas" only to have more customers they can gouge and control?
I want to add that I think the number one reason to drop VB6 all together is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it. What does that mean? Who knows. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if Microsoft starts breaking VB6 apps with future OS releases (or updates for that matter). And what about third-party.dll's? Who's to stop them from giving up all together? Well I think they already have...
We have some apps running that were written in VB6 and as soon as people upgraded to XP all the reports in the program broke. I looked into the problem and from what I can tell, Crystal Reports refuses to release a.dll for XP machines. Where do we go from here? Rewrite the program? Rewrite the portion of the program that is breaking? Force users to stick to older operating systems? The amount of time this wasted is good enough reason for me to drop VB6 and use something else.
Excel 2007 now supports over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet.
WTF? If I've got anyone in IT putting 1,000,000 rows in a spreadsheet, I'm seriously considering demoting them. If you're going to have a million rows, get a database.
This is what I've been waiting for. I write programs that deal with scientific data and this issue has come up again and again for pretty much everyone that uses our data. I try my best to force things to use databases, but sometimes it just doesn't work with the way the current environment is built...and when that happens, the current limits of Excel make the job completely suck. This reason alone is the reason that I'm excited for the next version to come out.
They should learn to program as close to the raw as possible. notepad, command line, debugging through prints.
They should learn software development separately, with an IDE, with integrated debugging and complex build systems. Learning to program, and learning to be a good software developer are two separate things.
This makes complete sense, but I'd also like to add that learning and IDE can be a good idea. This past spring I did interviews for interns. The project I'm leading will be written with C# using Visual Studio. Since I how I jumped to C# development from a Java with Eclipse background, I figured I would gear the internship towards students that had either C# or Java experience. I did interviews and came across one applicant that had some good training in Java and some basic experience with data structures and databases (a major bonus for the project). Unfortunately the absolute deal breaker was the applicant had no idea what an IDE was. Eventually it came to the surface that the applicant's four semesters of Java programming was all done with Notepad on Windows and then compiled on the command line. There's no way I have time to teach the major differences between Java and C# and also teach how to use something as complicated as Visual Studio in 10 weeks.
So while the student is getting a stronger foundation in programming, I'm completely shocked that they are not getting introduced to something that can be incredibly useful in the work world. I tend to think it would be a different situation if it was on Linux and used vi, but Notepad on Windows? When you have something like Eclipse that you can use for free? I see that not even mentioning IDEs in classes or that there are other options out there is a disservice to students that want to get a job after they graduate.
I vote for starting off with a *really* simple IDE or just a text editor of some sort. After that has been covered for a few semesters, jump to an IDE, especially if there are great alternatives out there that are free.
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I recently bought a Kindle and read it on the bus pretty much everyday. You bring up some really good justifications of why it doesn't make sense for you to get one. What I think is funny is that your reasons for not getting one are the reason that pushed me into getting one. For the most part, the library doesn't work for me. It's out of the way, a pain to work into my schedule for returning books, and I end up getting late fines before I know it (don't get me started on the library I lived near that wasn't open on weekends and didn't have an after hours drop-bin). The $1 bin at Half Price Books isn't my style as far as things I'd like to read, so that doesn't work well for me either.
What did convince me to buy the Kindle was the fact that I could carry a bunch of books with me at the same time. Considering I'm going on vacation soon, this was a huge draw. I did some research into the books that are available and found that pop fiction type stuff is way too expensive (so much so that if that's all you read, then I don't suggest getting a Kindle), but those are the types of books I don't like reading, so I was fine. It ended up that a lot of the tech books I owned were available on there. I did some basic math and figured out that the discounted Kindle version of these tech books would have covered the cost of the Kindle. I also looked into what formats were supported by the Kindle and found that plain text can be transferred over to the Kindle. So I now go to Project Gutenberg and grab a bunch of the classics that are no longer under copyright for free.
Free classics, cheaper tech books, on a device I can bring with me anywhere without much hassle? That's what did it. Since getting the Kindle, I'm pretty happy with it, but it definitely has its flaws. The buttons on the sides make it awkward to hold at times. The keyboard was designed as if you were only using it one way (with both thumbs at the same time), which aggravates me most of the time. But I do think that the screen makes up for it and the convenience is great. We're thinking about getting a second one, because after I bought it I found out that you can hook up 5 Kindles to your account and they all get the books that have been purchased. But I'll need some time before taking that step...even that might not be enough to justify the extra price...
As for your other statement... If you need to get in touch with your kid, there is an established procedure for that: Contact the office. It may take a few minutes longer, but it won't end up disturbing the entire class while your kid figures out that it is his phone, digs it out of the bag, and starts chatting in the middle of a test or lecture.
Back when I was in high school, I had 3-4 things per week that took place once school was over. Some took place at the school while others were anywhere from a 5 minute walk to a 45 minute drive. Some where on-going through out the entire school year and some where just a few weeks. But all of them took place when the school office was closed. This "established procedure" just isn't an option.
"investment in the physical infrastructure necessary to provide high-speed Internet will slow down, the U.S. will fall even further behind the rest of the world [in broadband deployment], and our rural and low-income populations will wait even longer to enter the digital age."
So the big tele companies are being the good guys here for wanting to gouge various internet sites, screw the users, and roll out to the "poor, rural areas" only to have more customers they can gouge and control?
Really good comments.
I want to add that I think the number one reason to drop VB6 all together is that Microsoft has stopped supporting it. What does that mean? Who knows. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if Microsoft starts breaking VB6 apps with future OS releases (or updates for that matter). And what about third-party .dll's? Who's to stop them from giving up all together? Well I think they already have...
We have some apps running that were written in VB6 and as soon as people upgraded to XP all the reports in the program broke. I looked into the problem and from what I can tell, Crystal Reports refuses to release a .dll for XP machines. Where do we go from here? Rewrite the program? Rewrite the portion of the program that is breaking? Force users to stick to older operating systems? The amount of time this wasted is good enough reason for me to drop VB6 and use something else.
Excel 2007 now supports over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet.
WTF? If I've got anyone in IT putting 1,000,000 rows in a spreadsheet, I'm seriously considering demoting them. If you're going to have a million rows, get a database.
This is what I've been waiting for. I write programs that deal with scientific data and this issue has come up again and again for pretty much everyone that uses our data. I try my best to force things to use databases, but sometimes it just doesn't work with the way the current environment is built...and when that happens, the current limits of Excel make the job completely suck. This reason alone is the reason that I'm excited for the next version to come out.
They should learn to program as close to the raw as possible. notepad, command line, debugging through prints. They should learn software development separately, with an IDE, with integrated debugging and complex build systems. Learning to program, and learning to be a good software developer are two separate things.
This makes complete sense, but I'd also like to add that learning and IDE can be a good idea. This past spring I did interviews for interns. The project I'm leading will be written with C# using Visual Studio. Since I how I jumped to C# development from a Java with Eclipse background, I figured I would gear the internship towards students that had either C# or Java experience. I did interviews and came across one applicant that had some good training in Java and some basic experience with data structures and databases (a major bonus for the project). Unfortunately the absolute deal breaker was the applicant had no idea what an IDE was. Eventually it came to the surface that the applicant's four semesters of Java programming was all done with Notepad on Windows and then compiled on the command line. There's no way I have time to teach the major differences between Java and C# and also teach how to use something as complicated as Visual Studio in 10 weeks.
So while the student is getting a stronger foundation in programming, I'm completely shocked that they are not getting introduced to something that can be incredibly useful in the work world. I tend to think it would be a different situation if it was on Linux and used vi, but Notepad on Windows? When you have something like Eclipse that you can use for free? I see that not even mentioning IDEs in classes or that there are other options out there is a disservice to students that want to get a job after they graduate.
I vote for starting off with a *really* simple IDE or just a text editor of some sort. After that has been covered for a few semesters, jump to an IDE, especially if there are great alternatives out there that are free.