31 Dec
2001
31 Dec
'01
5:05 a.m.
On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Dave McGuire wrote:
Ahh, those "engineers" who don't know
which end of a soldering iron
gets hot.
A fond memory from around 1991, while working for a small defense
contractor in NJ, talking with a 2nd-year "summer slave" on loan from
MIT (of all places!). I'd assigned him to write some data reduction
code in FORTRAN for a remote sensing project, and later wound up
having to do it myself: . . .
Me: "No. You're fired."
I catch a lot of flack at the college for teaching real-world programming,
instead of UCBerkeley academic style. (such as teaching students to NOT
use scanf() for keyboard input (According to Ritchie, it was NEVER
intended for keyboard)).
There is a classic old story about Edison.
He had a college intern one summer. He handed the intern an empty
lightbulb and asked him to find out what the volume was. The intern
proceeded to calculate an equation for the shape, and integrate that
around the rotational axis. After a few hours, Edison took the bulb away
from him, filled it with water from the sink, and
poured that into a
graduated beaker.
OB_CC: That makes the old Apple ad exceptionally out of line. Apple's ad
said that if Edison were to have had an Apple, he could have simulated
everything, instead of actually having to try things out in his
workshop. Would he?
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com