The perfect IT Education? (IT/Nerd Alert)

[brianl703]

I know a guy who has an electrical engineering degree. He had to call an electrician to correct a miswired outlet in his house.

[MarkL]

Computer programming and problem solving. This course should be based on html, html help, java script, and SQL.

No. A course such as that should avoid language-specific instruction. In all reality, what language you use would depend on what you seek to accomplish. A course such as this should introduce would-be, or existing, programmers to programming methodologies that work, rather than teaching a specific langauge... just my opinion, of course...

I can't agree with you more. When I was in the CS program at SUNY @ Stony Brook, Computer Science 101 was a very serious "wash out" class. It started with over 500 students in the lecture, and by the end of the semester, there were fewer than 100 still in it. In that class, you never even touched a computer (VT-52 terminals on a VAX 750) until the last two weeks of class, and then just to use the "turtle" robot simulation software. The entire class was logic and problem solving, and that's something that's really missing from a lot of programs. Forget the coding, and go with simple problem solving.

Mark

[brianl703]

Were you asking if he was joking about a requirement to understand basic electronics? If so:

What if the culprit is the power supply? Wouldn't it be nice to know that your technician has the knowledge required to check the power supply with a multimeter to discover that the +12V feed is missing and that's why all of the hard drives won't spin up?

Or, in the case of the microwave oven (which, by the way, I would not let anyone who didn't understand basic electronics touch--1500V at 500 milliamps will hurt someone BAD), wouldn't it be nice to know that the technician has the knowledge required to check if the fuse has blown?

[MarkL]

The convention is that if the high-order bit is turned on, it represents a negative number.

I was wondering about that too... "Twos Complement." That keeps you from having both a +0 and a -0.

Mark

[MarkL]

I know a guy who has an electrical engineering degree. He had to call an electrician to correct a miswired outlet in his house.

I realize that this is a broad stroke, and my apologies to any "good" Freeper EEs out there...

My philosophy is simple... If you see an Electrical Engineer with a screwdriver in his or her hand, RUN!!!! I've had to fix so many problems caused by EEs trying to "improve" the performance of their computers, either through SW or HW mods, that it's kept me busy for years. More importantly, I was nearly electocuted by an EE who put together some office cubicles, and when he did the outlet wiring, he wired a hot ground. Blew up 3 systems and a switch. And I wound up dazed on the floor.

Mark

[bobwoodard]

Seems more than a little scattershot; you're trying to cover too many disciplines.

User support and cost-benefit analysis??? I'm not sure the guy who's into supporting remote users is the same guy who knows how to design a spreadsheet for IT labor costs and benefits.

I'd rather have a person who is great at a limited number of skills, versus someone who can list off 2 pages of proficiency.

[bobwoodard]

Forget the coding, and go with simple problem solving.

Exactly right. I could almost care less what you program in; if you can't _tell_ me how you're going to solve the problem, we've both got a problem. After the solution is determined, then I'm willing to be impressed by beautiful code.

[BushCountry]

BUMP

[BushCountry]

IT Industry *ping*

Designing a perfect IT Course.

[BushCountry]

Bump to see if anyone else is interested in responding. };O)

[dfwgator]

If you really want to get ahead of the curve, learn Ruby.

[BushCountry]

For the people who don't know what Ruby is (from their website):

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.

Oh, I need to mention, it's totally free, which means not only free of charge, but also freedom to use, copy, modify, and distribute it.

[SlickWillard]

According to this page at MSDN, the following two code snippets should have essentially identical functionality [i.e. upon completion of loading, each should call the "Hello World!" alert box]:

image.htm

<html>
<script>
function helloWorld()
{
  alert("Hello World!");
}
</script>

<body>
<center>

<img
onload="helloWorld()"
src="http://www.drudgereport.com/logo9.gif">

</center>
</body>
</html>

embed.htm

<html>
<script>
function helloWorld()
{
  alert("Hello World!");
}
</script>

<body>

<embed
onload="helloWorld()"
autostart="true"
hidden="true"
src="http://okonsar.fcpages.com/LMO-Records/LMO-Records_EN/Audio/Offer/08FugaCan.mp3">

</body>
</html>

image.htm works exactly as it should, but I can't for the life of me get embed.htm to work. I've narrowed it down to two possibilities:

1) There's something in the Internet Explorer security settings that prevents scripts from running in association with the <EMBED> tag, or

2) MSDN is claiming some functionality for Internet Explorer that just doesn't exist.

Any thoughts?

[Chad Fairbanks]

Hmmm... do you have a MIME type set up that will process MP3 Files when embedded in html files? The reason I ask is, it works for me, and so that was the first thing I thought of...

[Chad Fairbanks]

And if you REALLY want to be on the cutting edge, you should try The Shakespearean Programming Language as an interesting diversion...

[PFKEY]

I would make a mandatory course on "The Work Ethic".

[MarkL]

Sorry, I don't code anymore... Haven't since about 1989. I've thrown together a few simple web pages (coded in vi!) for a friend or two, but I'm more into network architecture and server HW and OS.

Mark

[SlickWillard]

The music part of the <EMBED> tag works just fine. It's the onload() DHTML event-thingy that won't work in conjunction with <EMBED>.

The code is copied more or less verbatim from the MSDN reference for onload() [which states explicity that it applies to <EMBED>], and it works just fine with the <IMG> tag.

What I'm trying to do is write some code that will preload a sound file before playing it in Internet Explorer. [If you don't preload, you get a herky-jerky playback of your file.] The web is littered with patchwork hacks that try to overcome this limitation in Internet Explorer. In theory, it should be pretty straightforward in Netscape, with the Sound object, and its load() method, but IE doesn't support the Sound object.