[ale] Off topic

[geary]

> 
> > It's been more than a couple years since I've been in college, so I'd
> > like to ask anyone with recent or current college experience - what the
> > hell are they teaching for C.S. degrees these days? Is it computer
> > science or computer applications?
> 
> Depends on your alma mater. Southern Tech (now Southern Polytechnic) has always
> taken a more hands on practical approach to the field. More emphasis on
> skills that are used in the business world rather than theory. 
> 
> > I just got into a discussion with someone last night who has recently
> > gotten a C.S. degree, but had no idea what I was talking about when I
> > was asking for a "full path" to a program. This was on a unix system and
> > on an operating system this person SUPPORTS!
> 
> I believe this trend has two causes: 1) CS departments are becoming more
> diversified and not being a UNIX only shop like it used to be. I would be
> annoyed with any university that didn't make its students familiar with both
> UNIX and the Win95/WinNT families. To put one above the other is to do them a
> disservice as scientists. 
> 
> > Assembler and C and algorithms as fundamental building blocks? Have they
> > been replaced with Windows 101 and Word Fundamentals? This is scary to
> > me.
> 
> Even here at Ga Tech (which has steadily been rising up the charts towards 
> being a top ten university in CS), we are seeing this trend. It seems to be the
> fault of the faculty that are designing the curriculum. The low level assembly
> and hardware courses are no longer taught in the CS curriculum. The Computer
> ENgineering department which is part of the Electricla Engineering dept is
> responsible for that. We also no longer offer hands-on networking labs. 


   GaTech does offer 'hands-on' networking labs.  It's just that most
people in the networking track don't choose to take it.  CS 4381 which
I'm taking this qtr definitely has hands-on networking labs...  And 
why shouldn't EE or CmpE teach hardware?  I agree that CS should still 
require it but to say 'it used to be CS and now it's not' is deceiving 
cuz most of the old school CS profs have EE degrees so they were 
trained in EE and, appropriately, some of them taught EE to CS mjrs...
    -geary

-- 
|====================================================================|
|   Carl Geary Scherer, Jr.    Senior CS |      geary at bigfoot.com    |
|   http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gt0354e |                           |
|====================================================================|