Yup, these quotes always rear their heads when an education debate sparks on slashdot. I fully concede to the fact that not everyone learns the same way. Nietzsche, Wilde, and Einstein are very unique individuals who required a different path to satisfy their curiosity and learning. Other people excel in structured formal education.
There are people who fail out of college, but are then successful anyway, and then they come complain that the formal education system is a failure because it didn't work for them.
There are others who graduated with honors from college, and lambaste those who failed out because they "didn't try hard enough" or "they just couldn't cut it."
Both parties are wrong. Formal education doesn't work for everyone, that doesn't make it inherently evil. Not all universities are extremely formal. I, for one, went to a university that catered to different kinds of students.
In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.
I feel like comments such as this are what programmers who didn't go to college say to feel better about their decision.
Why assume that just because someone spent four years in college, that they had to be spoon fed coding knowledge? Many of my classmates were tinkerers well before college.
Higher education provides many advantages, many of which are intangibles, that help one rise above a simple "tinkerer" to someone who wants a career in a field.
Remember when games used to come with feelies? Things like cloth maps, gold coins modeled after ones in game, miniature figures, etc? This is kind of the same thing. Buy the game from a certain retailer and you get a "digital feely." Most of the time, these things are insignificant in the game, and are usually available for free after the game's first patch.
Now, the $7 add-on DLC on launch day is just greed. All they did was remove content so they can charge more for it. Bioware got EA'ed, and that's just really sad.
You do know that you don't have to log into twitter/facebook/google wave/IM every time you're on the computer, right? If you're feeling social, log in. If you just want to surf or play a game, log off. Not that hard, bro. I hear this argument against social networking all the time, and it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Personally, twitter and facebook have been very useful beyond saying "whats up dude?" I've discovered new restaurants, met up with old friends that I've lost touch with, etc.
Facebook had to do some damage control once the national media decided to make a story about it. There was a CNN story yesterday morning warning Facebook users about what the new terms of service meant and what it means to any content they put up on their profiles. I tried searching on youtube but couldn't find a video, unfortunately.
I see your devil's advocate tags, but I need to comment regardless.
The philosophy of this country is that you should be able to make a better life for yourself than your parents. If you work hard enough, you'll be able to live a comfortable life. I see entire families struggling to put a simple meal on the table because they only pull in 20K a year. With the cost of housing, food, college for your children, and occasional entertainment (all work and no play makes a very unproductive and unhappy citizen), I'd like to see all of this come in at under 20k a year. This isn't even taking into account any savings for retirement, etc. You do realize that companies don't offer pensions anymore, right? Unless you want to live in a cardboard box when you're 65, you gotta factor that into your 20K too.
If all these companies continue to hire H1-B workers at a cut rate, the American workers who usually purchase products and services that said company produce won't be able to afford it anymore. Hiring foreign workers pay off in short term savings, but putting the American worker out of work is not investing wisely in your company's future, IMNSHO.
Also, how long do you think these H1-B workers are going to stand working for that measly 20k? They have to live somewhere, and 20k is not a living wage in this country.
The problem with "true capitalism" is that decisions are made in terms of personal gain, and not necessarily what benefits society as a whole. Greed will ultimately cause a true capitalistic society to fail, there needs to be compromise and regulation. I'm in favor of large tax hikes for companies who choose to hire more H1-B than American workers, the extra money will help pay for our unemployment checks.....
Gore might not have ignored the memos that read "Bin Laden determined to attack US" like Bush did...
Perhaps Gore would have been tougher with the Saudi government in giving up information regarding the actual terrorists involved because he doens't have any business ties or close personal friends with anyone in the Saudi royal family...
You could get the 4870 for under $200 after rebate if you shop around. I just purchased this card for around $170 and it screams. Plays Crysis at high settings with 4x AA at a consistant 35-40 avg fps, with a lot of areas getting up into the 50's. I think this is definately the best bang vs buck card out there right now.
Perhaps the tests exist because "IT" or the "computer industry" is such a blanket term covering fields as diverse as web development, data center security, networking/hardware, programmer, testing specialists, etc.
I know a lot of people in the IT industry that will apply for any job that has "IT" in the description - even if they have little experience in the actual skills the job requires. IE, programmers interviewing to be web developers, and vice versa. The test just ensures that you have the minimum amount of knowledge to fill the position.
Engineers also have to take a test, the PE exam. I believe all engineers have to eventually take and pass this exam in order to advance in their careers. Perhaps the questions is not whether or not we should be having our knowledge tested, perhaps its time to create a standardized test to certify that an IT professional is at a certain level of expertise similar to the PE.
Except that this isn't censorship required by the government (yet, at least). Youtube and google just folded under the pressure. They're a company and can choose what type of content to host and which to ban. If the government started blocking IP addresses from the middle east, that's a totally different story and if that happens we might as well be living in China.
The OP is using C++, which doesn't support finally blocks. I also assumed that in this example cleanup code was only to be run in the event of an error.
It all depends on the application. If response time is important, then threads are the way to go. If ease of programming and portability is important, use fork.
I did a project in a distributed programming class where we wrote two versions of a simple web server in c++ on solaris, one using a "one process per connection" paradigm, and the other using "one thread per connection." The threaded version was obviously much faster. Of course, you could always just create a process pool and eat the initial startup cost in favor of faster response times.
Its all about how you need to use it. Threads are not necessarily better than true multiple processes, and vice versa. They are all tools in the programmer's toolbox, just choose wisely.
I would call Jackson's version of the story a near perfect film adaptation if it weren't for the damn army of the dead at the end. If he would have kept the battle of pelennor fields almost exactly like the book, it would have been so much better.
If you go to a university, and receive a university degree, you will have a well-rounded education. I went to a school with "Technological" in it's name, and I had to take classes in the arts, history, philosophy, and writing as well as my computer science/math courses.
Technological University does not equal trade school. A technological university is merely a school that focuses on technology-related majors.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, these quotes always rear their heads when an education debate sparks on slashdot. I fully concede to the fact that not everyone learns the same way. Nietzsche, Wilde, and Einstein are very unique individuals who required a different path to satisfy their curiosity and learning. Other people excel in structured formal education.
There are people who fail out of college, but are then successful anyway, and then they come complain that the formal education system is a failure because it didn't work for them.
There are others who graduated with honors from college, and lambaste those who failed out because they "didn't try hard enough" or "they just couldn't cut it."
Both parties are wrong. Formal education doesn't work for everyone, that doesn't make it inherently evil. Not all universities are extremely formal. I, for one, went to a university that catered to different kinds of students.
In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.
I feel like comments such as this are what programmers who didn't go to college say to feel better about their decision.
Why assume that just because someone spent four years in college, that they had to be spoon fed coding knowledge? Many of my classmates were tinkerers well before college.
Higher education provides many advantages, many of which are intangibles, that help one rise above a simple "tinkerer" to someone who wants a career in a field.
not any pseudo-intellectual ivory tower nonsense. I think this is the kind of anti-intellectual thinking the article is referring to...
Remember when games used to come with feelies? Things like cloth maps, gold coins modeled after ones in game, miniature figures, etc? This is kind of the same thing. Buy the game from a certain retailer and you get a "digital feely." Most of the time, these things are insignificant in the game, and are usually available for free after the game's first patch. Now, the $7 add-on DLC on launch day is just greed. All they did was remove content so they can charge more for it. Bioware got EA'ed, and that's just really sad.
You do know that you don't have to log into twitter/facebook/google wave/IM every time you're on the computer, right? If you're feeling social, log in. If you just want to surf or play a game, log off. Not that hard, bro. I hear this argument against social networking all the time, and it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Personally, twitter and facebook have been very useful beyond saying "whats up dude?" I've discovered new restaurants, met up with old friends that I've lost touch with, etc.
Facebook had to do some damage control once the national media decided to make a story about it. There was a CNN story yesterday morning warning Facebook users about what the new terms of service meant and what it means to any content they put up on their profiles. I tried searching on youtube but couldn't find a video, unfortunately.
I see your devil's advocate tags, but I need to comment regardless.
The philosophy of this country is that you should be able to make a better life for yourself than your parents. If you work hard enough, you'll be able to live a comfortable life. I see entire families struggling to put a simple meal on the table because they only pull in 20K a year. With the cost of housing, food, college for your children, and occasional entertainment (all work and no play makes a very unproductive and unhappy citizen), I'd like to see all of this come in at under 20k a year. This isn't even taking into account any savings for retirement, etc. You do realize that companies don't offer pensions anymore, right? Unless you want to live in a cardboard box when you're 65, you gotta factor that into your 20K too.
If all these companies continue to hire H1-B workers at a cut rate, the American workers who usually purchase products and services that said company produce won't be able to afford it anymore. Hiring foreign workers pay off in short term savings, but putting the American worker out of work is not investing wisely in your company's future, IMNSHO.
Also, how long do you think these H1-B workers are going to stand working for that measly 20k? They have to live somewhere, and 20k is not a living wage in this country.
The problem with "true capitalism" is that decisions are made in terms of personal gain, and not necessarily what benefits society as a whole. Greed will ultimately cause a true capitalistic society to fail, there needs to be compromise and regulation. I'm in favor of large tax hikes for companies who choose to hire more H1-B than American workers, the extra money will help pay for our unemployment checks.....
I bet you're a blast at parties...
Gore might not have ignored the memos that read "Bin Laden determined to attack US" like Bush did...
Perhaps Gore would have been tougher with the Saudi government in giving up information regarding the actual terrorists involved because he doens't have any business ties or close personal friends with anyone in the Saudi royal family...
You could get the 4870 for under $200 after rebate if you shop around. I just purchased this card for around $170 and it screams. Plays Crysis at high settings with 4x AA at a consistant 35-40 avg fps, with a lot of areas getting up into the 50's. I think this is definately the best bang vs buck card out there right now.
No way, I can't believe they left out my most favorite nastolgic error of all time:
The Row of Bombs
I grew up on the Atari ST, and bombs still warm my heart...
Perhaps the tests exist because "IT" or the "computer industry" is such a blanket term covering fields as diverse as web development, data center security, networking/hardware, programmer, testing specialists, etc.
I know a lot of people in the IT industry that will apply for any job that has "IT" in the description - even if they have little experience in the actual skills the job requires. IE, programmers interviewing to be web developers, and vice versa. The test just ensures that you have the minimum amount of knowledge to fill the position.
Engineers also have to take a test, the PE exam. I believe all engineers have to eventually take and pass this exam in order to advance in their careers. Perhaps the questions is not whether or not we should be having our knowledge tested, perhaps its time to create a standardized test to certify that an IT professional is at a certain level of expertise similar to the PE.
Except that this isn't censorship required by the government (yet, at least). Youtube and google just folded under the pressure. They're a company and can choose what type of content to host and which to ban. If the government started blocking IP addresses from the middle east, that's a totally different story and if that happens we might as well be living in China.
I saw a shirt during superbowl that said "Detroit, it's a nice place you asshole"
Well, if all you saw was southfield then I don't blame you. There's nothing there but offices and subdivisions.
Now you know how us Detroiters feel... no matter how many positive things our area offers, the rest of the country just focuses on the negative.
oh, and go wings!
Just go for the classics...Philip K. Dick, Issac Asimov, etc.
I know it's in the fantasy genre, but A Song of Ice and Fire has been holding my interests for a while.
The OP is using C++, which doesn't support finally blocks. I also assumed that in this example cleanup code was only to be run in the event of an error.
It all depends on the application. If response time is important, then threads are the way to go. If ease of programming and portability is important, use fork.
I did a project in a distributed programming class where we wrote two versions of a simple web server in c++ on solaris, one using a "one process per connection" paradigm, and the other using "one thread per connection." The threaded version was obviously much faster. Of course, you could always just create a process pool and eat the initial startup cost in favor of faster response times.
Its all about how you need to use it. Threads are not necessarily better than true multiple processes, and vice versa. They are all tools in the programmer's toolbox, just choose wisely.
Just use OpenMP. Makes optimizing a program for parallel execution very easy.
Try, catch, finally was invented for this reason....
foo()
{
try {
library_thingie
library_thingie
library_thingie
do stuff that can fail horribly
do more stuff
} catch {
exception/error handling
undo_library_thingie
undo_library_thingie
undo_library_thingie
}
}
I would call Jackson's version of the story a near perfect film adaptation if it weren't for the damn army of the dead at the end. If he would have kept the battle of pelennor fields almost exactly like the book, it would have been so much better.
joke
head
If you go to a university, and receive a university degree, you will have a well-rounded education. I went to a school with "Technological" in it's name, and I had to take classes in the arts, history, philosophy, and writing as well as my computer science/math courses.
Technological University does not equal trade school. A technological university is merely a school that focuses on technology-related majors.