sorfane - Slashdot User

Comment I study this course (Score 1) 663

by sorfane on Friday May 14, 2010 @02:57AM (#32204484) Attached to: Exam Board Deletes C and PHP From CompSci A-Levels

I'm currently studying this piece-of-shit course, and to be honest it comes as no surprise. The spec is brand new, my year is the first to actually use it. The resources are poor, the content meaningless, and the exams are stupidly easy, but with ridiculous mark schemes which seem to be answering different questions to what was actually in the paper. This is all down to the Chief Examiner, someone who my tutor has spent the last year fighting. She has no experience in "real-world" CompSci, she has just taught IT at schools for however many years. This means that the course just seems to be bolted together, a confusing, and outdated, mix of IT and CompSci. One minute youre learning about the differences between Floppies and Zip Drives, the next you're learning how to traverse trees with her own overprice proprietary software. Maybe I just hate this course too much, having endured a year and a half of it, but it seems that it simply could not get much worse.

Comment Still censored (Score 1) 300

by sorfane on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @01:29PM (#30752936) Attached to: Google.cn Has Already Lifted Censorship

Appears to still be cesored. http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&oq=tiananmen&ei=ZQFOS5iEIZDQM9e07PkM&sa=X&oi=pinyin&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CA0QBSgA&q=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%97%A8&spell=1

Still displays "According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.".

Submission + - Are Information Technology's Glory Days Over?

Submitted by

Hugh Pickens

on Saturday August 08, 2009 @11:31PM

Hugh Pickens writes: "The NY Times reports that computer science students with the entrepreneurial spirit may want to look for a different major because if Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, is right, IT is a mature industry that will grow no faster than the larger economy, its glory days long past, having ended in 2000. Addressing Stanford students in February as a guest of the engineering school, Siebel called attention to 20 sweet years, from 1980 to 2000, when, he said, worldwide IT spending grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 17 percent. "All you had to do was show up and not goof it up," Siebel says. "All ships were rising." Since 2000, however, that rate has averaged only 3 percent, Siebel says. Siebel's explanation for the sharp decline is that "the promise of the post-industrial society has been realized." Three successive inventions — the mini-computer, the PC, and then the Internet — were essentially "total market takeover" products, each wiping out the market for the product before it. No new technological advances, Siebel believes, will impel IT customers to replace the computer technology they now have: "I would suggest to you that most of what's going on today is not very exciting." In Siebel's view, far larger opportunities are to be found in businesses that address needs in food, water, health care and energy. Though Silicon Valley was "where the action was" when he finished graduate school, he says, "if I were graduating today, I would get on a boat and I would get off in Shanghai.""

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