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Maybe it's Bill's fault
Wed Jun 30 11:00:34 2004 Maybe it's Bill's fault
Posted by Tony Lawrence
Referencing:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa008&articleID=0005930F-3978-10AE-B97883414B7FFE9F&pageNumber=1&catID=4
In the above referenced interview at Scientific American, Bill Gates answers a question about whether enough people are pursuing computer science courses in college. He says they certainly should be, but:
And yet the number of people going in has gone down, and it's hard to measure whether we are getting the best and brightest. There is this huge disparity. We're getting the best and brightest in China and India, and the numbers are just going up there. Does that mean that this country will have to let those people come here, or does it mean the good work in the future won't be done here? So we really need a rededication to what's made the U.S. such a leader.
Microsoft's domination grows in the U.S., interest in C.S. falls. Linux and open source grow in China, interest in C.S. is strong. Coincidence? Seriously, I think not. Proprietary code is hard to get excited about, and certainly is a little difficult to have as the basis for course work. I'm sure there are other factors, but there's very little in a Windows machine that is going to get anyone fired up and excited about computers. That isn't the case with Linux and other open source offerings: there you have something you can really get charged up about. Leaving all technical and other arguments aside, Windows is pretty boring - it's a frozen TV dinner, and Linux is tossing steaks on the barbecue.
So maybe it is at least partly Bill's fault that American kids aren't as interested in computer science as their Asian counterparts.
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Well there is a general apathy in people's attitude today. Especially towards computers, and MS is certainly a big part of it. But it's something inherent in most feilds.
But linux did get me hooked into understanding computers.
With Windows I had no idea how anything worked. It was a locked box and only people at MS had the key.
However, compared to everybody else I knew I was a computer genius. I could fdisk, format, and install a entire operating system!
At the time I was taking networking classes and heard about linux on the internet. I wanted to learn how to be a "hacker", cause it was cool and punkish. I was told by various websites that Linux was a hacker OS and it had 10X the networking capabilities that Windows has. (I have no desire to going around "hacking" websites or anything like that, never did, never will.)
So I tried to install "Zipslack" by downloading the individual files and making them work. Failed utterly, of course.
So I got Redhat 7.0 installed it. I bought it with a book figuring that if I can't get on the internet then the book can help me fix whatever is broken or get it going. (only had a winmodem.)
Remembering from my Win98 experiace, I had to get the memory usage down to the smallest size possible. Little memory usage = fast in my mind. Minimalist window manager, ok. Shut off a bunch of stuff. Found out what top was, and learned that I was eating up 80megs out of my 96! I was shocked.
Shut down X, looked at it, I was using 85megs now! WTF? Command line is suppose to be fast and need little memory, but it was using more then twice as much as it took just to get Win98 running.
So I got on the internet and looked up and down finding was to make Linux run as small as possible. Recompiled the kernel, removed all modules made it as small as possible, fought it, tried to kill proccess, they came back. So I looked online again and found a website taking about Linux's memory management. Then it hit me with this phrase "Unused memory is wasted memory".
Found out that you want as much stuff in memory as possible because when you open and close apps you would just have to re-read everything over and over again from the disk. Disk is slow, RAM is fast, so keep extra info in memory then it speeds things up a bit.
Complete oppisite of everything that I ever experianced in Windows. I was hooked and it turned out more and more of the things that I learned from using Windows was completely polar opisite of what makes a good computer OS.
If it wasn't for Linux I would of never understood that most of what I knew was wrong or misleading. It turned out that I knew only a fraction of the amount that I thought I knew.
Now I know that there is such a vast amount to learn and I am fasinated by every aspect of computing. Some people go around and they obsess about sports, watch way to much television. Me? I sit and listen to music and spend my time learning. Spend time hanging out with my freinds and all that, but while they sit and stare at commercials all day long I break out my laptop and play around with it.
I just wish now that I had learned about Linux, Unix, and free software and started using it much much earlier then I did.
--Drag.
"And yet the number of people going in has gone down, and it's hard to measure whether we are getting
the best and brightest."
If I were a young college student today, I would not consider the computer industry as a good place to work. The "best and brightest" may well be interested in a career in computers but may also perceive the business to be an odious one populated by anal-retentives like Gates and Darl McBride, as well as businesses where concern about profits greatly overshadows concern about quality. (Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell, are you listening?)
Also, why would anyone be willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars in a computer "science" education, only to discover upon graduation that all the good paying jobs have been shipped overseas? I can't see how we expect students to make such a commitment when the best we can offer them for post-graduation employment is manning the help desk at Circuit City.
But, as Tony said, it's a good possibility that many would-be computer students are simply turned off by the cookie-cutter Windows mentality and the Microsoft meglomania. I am.
--BigDumbDinosaur
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