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Comment AP Computer Science (Score 1) 564

The AP Computer Science AB exam was killed off last year so there's less incentive for linked lists, BigO, binary search trees, to be taught at the high school. Truth is, if there were no AP exam, most Principals would kill off those programs.
More interesting is that the IB dossier views CS so important that it is one of the six pillars of the IB diploma. Funny how the rest of the planet view CS more important than the USA (AP).
I recently had a former high principal ask me if anyone programmed computers anymore?

Comment Use Moodle instead of Blackboard or Desire2Learn (Score 3, Informative) 149

When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.

Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.

Comment Re:The babe from Firefly? (Score 1) 834

Never did watch this Terminator series. To be honest I'm getting bored of the whole series model. The idea these days seems to be to start off as many subplots as possible and then take care never to resolve anything so that there's always room for another season. Then you string it out for as long as you can until you get cancelled. If you're lucky you get a really rushed ending in two episodes that clumsily attempts to tie up the storyline. Quite often not though.

Yep, agree with you there. I'd lump Alias and Lost (hmm pattern?) in the same category. But some people love 54435433 different subplots in their movie. Personally, I like how 24 does it, they solve one up, and then start a new one in the next episode.

Comment Re:Don't worry, AT&T (Score 2, Interesting) 237

I left Verizon for T-Mobile because of it - when Verizon finally released its first Bluetooth phone, it disabled basic sync between a person's phone and his/her computer. I really wonder how many non-techie Verizon are blissfully unaware of some great features their Bluetooth phones would be capable of if only Verizon didn't disable them?

Sprint does the same thing with all of their phones. You can take pictures and play MP3's, but you have (or they want you) to use their expensive web service to download music. If you want to actually print a picture that you took with your camera, you have to send the photo to Sprint's site (for a fee) and then go to the web and print it there. Like an earlier poster said, Verizon, Time Warner, Cox, Sprint do not want to be dumb data pipes. They want to control the content as well.

Comment Wow, got me into C64 Basic (Score 1) 82

This was the first game that I found in an old book of programs I checked out from the library. I typed the entire thing into my Commodore 64 and then proceeded to colorize the game with all of the weird color commands that you put into the PRINT statements.

I remember being so proud at 14 years old for typing it all in.

Thanks for the fond memories.

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