ArsDigita U. Cuts On-Campus Admissions 39
Cambridge writes: "ArsDigita University, which has been previously featured here, has lost its funding for the 2001-2002 year, and so won't be accepting applications. While it is all perfectly reasonable to expect that the good and great causes rising out of the Internet Boom will suffer the same fate as the many bad causes in the Internet Bust, I find it rather sad nonetheless." Note that the course materials will remain online, though -- so while it's still a sad turn that they can't accept applicants for the on-campus program for now, there is a silver lining.
Re:ArsDigita is also laying off 20% of staff (Score:1)
The ArsDigita Corporation which is the ArsDigita Foundation's major sponsor also had layoffs of their own this past week (previously mentioned).
I actually go to this school, dammit and... (Score:1)
What PhilG and other have not mentioned is what has happened to ArsDigita, the company that catalyzed its fall with all the others. ArsD, under Phil's direction was a small company where the coders ran the show. They had ~25 employees and charged more for their work but apparently would do more better faster than the drones. This was ostensibly because Phil was a taskmaster and he didn't hire dolts or MBAs. Sounds like heaven. It is totally possible that had the company stayed that small it woud have survived this crunch. But. Just like Steve Jobs and Sculley, PhilG asked the MBA VC bastards in and they took the place over. He went for funding to expand and prep for an IPO 200+ million $US. Then the NASDAQ went down and the VCs hired more MBAs and these MBAs hired more... and so on. They gave PhilG a big shove and now they are firing many others. I hope that they don't think that I am ungrateful for saying so, but if highly payed management was really worth the trouble and the paycheck I would expect to see some big, insightful plays other than canning a lot of people, cutting my school's funding and proceeding on.
I hope this is a lesson to everyone. Exponential growth, free lunch stock options and VC in general is almost never preferable to honest client based growth and good solid work. These MBAs marching into our offices are not on our side. They are trying to force techies and their work into a 'commodity'-shaped mold, which it (and we) will not fit into and still be innovative and smart. These guys are not on our side. I wish I could graduate from ArsD and work for PhilG at his old school shop, but alas.
Some comments on distance learning ... (Score:1)
Also you need a fair amount of mathematical background (compsci is discrete maths for sakes) and you can't teach someone to be a professional racing driver if they don't have a clue in the first place of how to drive.
LL
Re:After the Shakedown (Score:1)
Re:every engineering school churns out drones... (Score:1)
Smallish engineering groups were the norm in the 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s. I was there and lived it, running my own company I might add.
This norm existed outside of IBM and other large companies. That exception still lives today, of course, in Microsoft, Oracle and other well-known companies.
What has changed is that our small groups can be distributed worldwide due to cheap connectivity, and we can work cheaply within our homes due to the fact that you can buy what once would've been considered a supercomputer for the cost of two nights in Amsterdam (well, considering that I like nice hotels rather than hostels).
The lowering of the economic barrier has made open source much more viable, not vice-versa. But for good folks, the need to work in large groups or to be a drone has never been a reality.
Perhaps you hang out with the wrong crowd, Philip.
Re:get a fucking life (Score:1)
Though I must say that would be an exceptionally charitable view of the post that triggered your response...
Re:good example (Score:1)
This helped Unix as well, BTW. The world learned about Unix on PDP-11s and it was distributed on RK05 disks, not the 'net, with source available for universities or non-profits (like my group) for $200. Of course, Unix wasn't discovered by all that many folks until the VAX came out, but the popularity of DEC minicomputers within the university environment had quite a bit to do with its popularity. Along with the availability of the source, even if AT&T's lawyers were a bit intimidating (we asked one favor of them in 1975 and never bothered again after reading their response).
Of course the fact that the PDP-11 was the first minicomputer with an instruction set designed to make compilers for it simple didn't hurt at all, either.
Now ... there wasn't much money to be made by starting a small third-party software company in those days (when I was a teenager one of my software products owned 10% of the PDP-8 market, closer to 50% of those not humping bits on the factory floor, but at the time only 3,000 PDP-8s had been built). At the time it was pretty clear that one could do better financially by working for a major manufacturer's software engineering department. But opportunities to do what you wanted were there for those willing to take the risk and the fact that the rewards were modest.
There were no VCs running around minicomputer land offering to dump $35M in your lap, that's certainly a change. Then again, I didn't have to worry about them kicking me out of my own company, did I?
Beyond this quibbling over details I largely agree with you. The open source model is great for development, but the financial implications are less clear. Certainly making a living selling $30 boxes ala RedHat is a more viable business model in a world with millions of cheap computers. Equally certainly it would've been madness back in the days when the number of potential buyers was in the hundreds or low thousands.
One of the interesting developments in today's open source world is that people who never meet can build a project and deliver software. That was nearly impossible back in the days of my youth. The OpenACS project numbers about 20 volunteers as of today. Ben and I have met a few times. Ben's met with Dan Wickstrom. None of the others have ever met face-to-face or talked on the phone.
Cheap connectivity and cheap cycles are what make this possible.
Another example is the PostgreSQL group, which never met face-to-face until the money people behind Great Bridge brought them together about a fifteen months ago.
So the world has certainly changed over the years. In 1975 I couldn't bring my laptop to a place that serves decent coffee and hang out, get wired, and work with Oracle. In Portland I could find decent coffee back in those days, but dragging along my VAX 11/780 was unthinkable.
In Boston all I could find was Dunking Donuts back then...today cheap laptops,good coffee, and rotaries with stop signs or traffic lights combine to make Boston a tolerable and reasonably safe town to visit!
After the Shakedown (Score:1)
Once the internet shakes off its unstable bits, regains its composure, and starts over, I think that some of the powerful sites like ArsDigita will thrive once again.
Some will change, some will stay the same, but when the garbage falls away, only the sites with real content, real creativity, and real usefulness with thrive, and I honestly think that ArsDigita is one of these.
Re:ArsDigita is also laying off 20% of staff (Score:1)
Yep. The Pittsburgh office just got cut (taking friends of mine with it). This doubtless means that the CMU edition of Software Engineering for Web Applications is going to go too.
It sounds like they're becoming just another totally corporate Web house. One hears that the entire code base is going to Java, not because of its technical superiority (servlets are immature compared to most other server-side dev technologies) but because it's easy to sell Java to big enterprise businesses.
With Greenspun isolated by the Board of Directors I think a lot of the soul of the company is gone.
Re:every engineering school churns out drones... (Score:1)
Does anyone know if and where ArsDigita is accepting monetary or other type of donations?
Re:I'm a little confused.. (Score:1)
Re:I'm a little confused.. (Score:1)
Simple Reason... (Score:1)
ArsDigita was just another fucked company e-consulting that overpaid their developers and overcharged their clients just like Organic [organic.com] and Razorfish [razorfish.com]. The primary difference being that at least most of the people at ArsDigita could code.
Anyway ArsDigita University was never really an "Online University that will rival MIT" but instead was part incubator and part training ground for new ArsDigita employees which was obvious from the heavy focus on web programming . Serious CS degree programs do not focues primarily on web scripting and accessing databases. This must have been soon obvious to their funders who rightfully pulled the plug.
guess? (Score:1)
Re:why ... ? (Score:1)
Google (Score:1)
Re:The Mills Post-Bac CS Program (Score:2)
One snag. Most of us are male, and Mills College is for women only (at least, it was when I lived in Oakland, nearby where Mills is located).
Re:I'm a little confused.. (Score:2)
I think you are too cynical. (Score:2)
However, they also realized that many such people would be cubicle fodder. The end goal was to try and raise the general level of CS related skills across all companies so companies all over would be able to move one step beyond the primitive churn of haphazard design that we see today.
Wouldn't it be great if all your co-workers knew what a hashtable or linked list was, and in what cases you might want to use them? Even very small basic steps like that would really help everyone, both designers and coders. The benefit of that would extend outside of companies by providing more people who might be working on OSS stuff during spare time, but with an elevated level of skill. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that there are going to be cubicile fodder farms anyway, so why not try and make one that produces a halfway decent product.
A tangent could be people from other professions (like lawyers) who used knowledge gleaned from Ars Digita courses in other areas of our lives.
I could be wrong, but that's the impression I get after reading through a lot of Greenspun's material on Photo.net.
every engineering school churns out drones... (Score:2)
What keeps me excited about teaching computer science is the fact that someone with a good CS background is in a great position to touch a lot of human lives. That wasn't true 20 years ago when computers were only in the back rooms of big companies. If someone with a first-rate CS education instead chooses to become a drone, that is sad but we don't live in Roman times (where a parent could kill his adult child if he didn't like the way he or she turned out; not sure if teachers were accorded the same privilege).
(Oh yes, and please don't sell Oracle employees short. They've got enough PhD computer scientists in their core RDBMS server programming team to equip a medium-size university. That said, I wouldn't want work in their huge bay-side office towers (no dogs allowed))
good example (Score:2)
"What were a programmer's options, then, [in the 1980s] if in fact craftsmanship proved to be an unsatisfying career goal? The only escape from the strictures of closed-source and secrecy was the university. A programmer could join a computer science research lab at a university where, very likely, he or she would be permitted to teach others via publication, source code release, and face-to-face instruction of students. However, by going into a university, where the required team of 50 would never be assembled to deliver a software product to market, the programmer was giving up the opportunity to work at the state of the art as well as innovate and teach."]
Bell Labs, where Unix was developed, is in many ways analogous to a university research lab. Engineers there have to give up on the idea of getting applications into the hands of end-users, though of course occasionally it has happened.
If you read http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/professionalism carefully you'll see that the article does not posit large engineering groups either today or any time in the past. It says that the closed-source packaged software business strategy ends up requiring large groups of people for physical packaging, traditional marketing, and fulfillment to retailers.
I'll give you a personal example. I developed a computer-aided engineering system back in the 1980s with one other programmer. This automated the design of large steel structures. We built it on a Symbolics Lisp Machine and therefore our productivity as programmers was extremely high. It took us about a year to get the thing working properly on a test problem of doing one person-year of engineering for an air-cooled heat exchanger (like a car radiator but the size of a house with about 20,000 parts). It probably took another two years before the 100th end-user was looking at his or her design taking shape on the screen. And we needed several full-time business people to convince people to buy the software and a Lisp Machine to run it (more Symbolics machines were sold to run this app than for any other purpose; then it got converted to run on Suns).
Contrast that with adding a feature to photo.net. If I were to write a new service on photo.net, it would take less than one hour to reach the 100-user mark (photo.net attracts more than 30,000 visitors per day across all services on the site).
At least for me, the world has changed a lot since I started programming (1976).
what's good about ADU (Score:2)
we are now tools-neutral (Score:2)
This is sort of the same progression as has been followed by ACS. When we started packaging up our apps we said "Wouldn't it be nice to have three versions, one for Oracle/AOLserver, one with a Microsoft Active Server Pages presentation layer, and one with a JSP presentation layer". But we were only five part-time programmers. So we never got around to doing the other versions and figured someone else might. Early in the summer of 2000, when I was still at aD, I twisted Jin's arm into leading a small team to do a 100% Java version. And that opened up all kinds of possibilities for new and different execution environments (Tomcat, built-into-Oracle, etc., etc.).
But guess what? Nobody cares. You might think C sucks but you still run your spreadsheet. When I give talks to people in big organizations they often are most impressed by WimpyPoint (see http://www.arsdigita.com/wp/ [arsdigita.com]). They've never seen anything like it before and think it is amazing that you can view, at a glance, the most recent work of a whole bunch of people in one orgazation. Having seen it, they ask how to get it. But nobody has ever asked what computer languages were used to build it.
Raise money by encouraging campus inventors (Score:2)
Also put donations into the pool.
Re:every engineering school churns out drones... (Score:2)
Slashdot would have been theoretically possible without Free software - it could be built on Sun/Oracle/Netscape Enterprise. But those products require money, and money generally requires permission from gatekeepers of some kind, and Slashdot wouldn't be what it is if some investor or faculty committee had the upper hand from the start.
I'd say the flourishing web is a result of three things: Cheap generic hardware (which you cited), Free software, and affordable bandwidth.
Re:we wanted to help other schools (Score:2)
I'm a little confused.. (Score:2)
Thus, how badly will it hurt them to not accept on-campus students, an action that would shut down most schools?
Real Video Lectures here (Score:2)
Where's Philip Greenspun? (Score:2)
Bummer (Score:2)
reworked MIT courses (Score:2)
School of the Future or Drone Mill? (Score:2)
In the promotional paragraph they mention that it is a one year (albeit intense) undergraduate program. In the News section they mention a thanks to Oracle for their donation. These coupled with the fact that they have lost funding during the hightech landslide brings up a question; Is ArsDigita really the scholastic wave of the furture, striving to produce competent and innovative CS mjors who will help us take the great leap into the technology era, or is it just a mill for the big companies to churn out drones for the cubilcle farms?
And just because Stallman gave a lecture there doesn't, in my opnion, prove that they are the former. I am all for educating toward technological tolerance and ease as we will need it in the years to come. I just hope that it will be the need for knowledge and not the need for revenue that wins out.
Re:ArsDigita is also laying off 20% of staff (Score:2)
ArsDigita is also laying off 20% of staff (Score:3)
Re:The Mills Post-Bac CS Program (Score:3)
we wanted to help other schools (Score:3)
The Mills Post-Bac CS Program (Score:4)
Mills College [mills.edu], located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has a longstanding program targetting the same demographic: bright people interested in computer science with a bachelor's degree in another field. After completing their studies, graduates go on to computer science graduate school, industry, or teaching. Like ADU, there is a strong MIT influence. (Half of the CS professors at Mills are MIT graduates.) Visit the web site [mills.edu] or contact me [mailto] for more information. While the official deadline has passed for Fall admission, I may be able to get strong applications considered.
the aim was NOT to be "MIT without overhead" (Score:4)
MIT remains great for what it is (undergrad education for people done with high school; grad education for people done with college) and we never claimed that we would be able to do better than MIT at MIT's chosen mission.
See http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/teaching-sof
get a fucking life (Score:4)