shopi - Slashdot User

Harvard Concludes Linux Will Remain Second Best 460

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday September 10, 2006 @09:30AM from the i-said-number-two dept.

watzinaneihm writes "A Harvard Study which uses formal economic modelling to determine "Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position?" came to a (not so?) surprising result. Linux is likely to remain second best as long as Microsoft has a first mover advantage."

Americans Are Scarce in Top Programming Contest 478

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday May 10, 2006 @08:27AM from the many-have-stopped-caring dept.

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Only four of the 48 best computer programmers in the world are Americans, at least according to a computer-programming competition run by TopCoder. Poland had 11 of the final 48, and Russia had 8. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes asks whether this is more evidence of a sad decline in American education and competitiveness: 'Surprisingly, the Eastern Europeans don't seem to think so. Poland's Krzysztof Duleba, 22, explained that in countries like his own, there are so few economic opportunities for students that competitions like these are their one chance to participate in the global economy. Some of the Eastern Europeans even seemed slightly embarrassed by their over-representation, saying it isn't evidence of any superior schooling or talent so much as an indicator of how much they have to prove.'"

Comment grafeq or dpgraph (Score 1) 605

by shopi on Monday December 13, 2004 @09:05PM (#11077777) Attached to: Open Source Math Software For Education?

these are not open source, but I found them invaluable in helping visualize equations in an intuitive manner. For 2d use GrafEq, and for 3d DPgraph. They are both amazingly intuitive tools, and complement each other rather nicely. You should check if the college has licenses for the last one.

Another useful tool maybe Maple, again, if the college has the proper license. The lastest version has a number of "tutors" geared toward the first years of college (meaning calc I-III, and lin. alg.). There is a step by step symbolic integrator, for instance.

Anyway, my advice would be using tools that help creativity and visualization, not tools that do their work for them. And like other people have said, if they know a language like python or c++, they might be motivated to use it as a "playground" to explore ideas. This is very cool.

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