I've openly shared my opinion that C++ is a terrible first programming language. In the book "Go To" Lohr wrote that "C++ is a language for serious programmers" and he quotes Bjarne Stroustrup saying: "I [with C++] want to give good programmers an advantage instead of protecting mediocre programmers from making all kinds of stupid mistakes."

The phrase "mediocre programmers" implies the user of C++ has some experience with programming. A student who has never written a computer program is not even a mediocre programmer.

[23 August 2010, top]

@nanofoo tweet# 1900 and @mathbabbler tweet# 800 were both tweeted on 22 July 02010 and both of them were about July 22nd being a Pi Approximation Day.

DD/MM/YYYY is a popular international date format (should be YYYYY, but today's world is not ready for 5-digit years). 22 July 2010 is 22/7/2010. If we ignore the 2010 and treat the 22/7 as an arithmetic expression, 22 divided-by 7 approximates the mathematical constant Pi because 22/7 rounded to the nearest hundredth equals Pi rounded to the nearest hundredth. (i.e. 3.14).

Speaking of Pi... Prior to 02005 I didn't give a foo about Pi, but in 02005 I started helping others learn about math so I had to become a fan of Pi.

[22 July 2010, top]

   "And Google's stock price has dropped sharply and 
    shows no signs of recovering."

In a nutshell, with respect to doing business in China, it's complicated.

BusinessInsider.com::Boy, Did Google Blow It In China

[09 July 2010, top]

Sutor.com::Saying it out loud: IBM is moving to Firefox as its default browser

[02 July 2010, top]

Google-OpenSource.Blogspot.com::Introducing the Google Command Line Tool

[19 June 2010, top]

   Moore's Law turns 45. "April 19, 1965: How Do You Like It? 
   Moore, Moore, Moore" Wired.com http://bit.ly/aVhJG1

Wikipedia.org: "Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years."

I liked the following from Nature.com: "A prediction made by engineer Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would increase exponentially with time."

Wired.com::April 19, 1965: How Do You Like It? Moore, Moore, Moore

[19 April 2010, top]

[24 March 2010, top]

   "A new semiconductor factory at world scale built from 
    scratch is about $4.5 billion --  in the United States. 
    If I build that factory in almost any other country in 
    the world, where they have significant incentive programs, 
    I could save $1 billion."

With respect to EDU in the United States...

   "As a citizen, I hate it. As a global employer, I have the 
    luxury of hiring the best engineers anywhere on earth. If 
    I can't get them out of M.I.T., I'll get them out of 
    Tsing Hua." -- Paul Otellini via Thomas Friedman

Otellini is concerned about the "rate of change in innovation capacity" in the United States.

With respect to Obama, Otellini says he is "very good at listening to Silicon Valley, but not so good at responding."

NYTimes.com::A Word From the Wise by Thomas Friedman

[04 March 2010, top]

   "Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten signed a proclamation Monday calling 
    for Topeka to be known for the month of March as 'Google, Kansas 
    -- the capital city of fiber optics.'" 

A few years ago, while roadtripping in Washington, I came across Googleville located at 8276 Hwy-14.

[03 March 2010, top]

   "Go offers 'a new programming paradigm' that makes it easier 
    to solve a wide variety of programming problems by simplifying 
    many types of parallel processing."

Rob Pike, a commander at Google, is working on Go.

   "The level of interest from the community has been higher 
   than we expected and is very encouraging," Pike said.

PCWorld.IDG.com.au::Google Go captures developers' imaginations

[02 March 2010, top]

   "Palaeography is not simply an arcane auxiliary science," says 
    Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, chair of medieval studies at 
    Harvard University. "It is as basic to the training and 
    practice of­historians as mastery of Dos or Unix might 
    be to a computer scientist." - from the Guardian

It's been years since I've seen a DOS prompt, but I see a BASH (Bourne Again SHell) prompt daily.

Blog.LongNow.org::No More New Old Knowlege

[24 February 2010, top]

In a nutshell, computing is being used to better "understand wildfire behavior and predicting its spread."

   "Even on supercomputers, you're really limited," Cunningham said. 
   "To have your smallest scale at 1 meter and your biggest scale at 
    let's say 10, or 100, kilometers you just can't do it based on 
    the computational power available." -- Phil Cunnigham is a 
    "former Florida State University associate professor of 
     meteorology who has just moved to LANL (Los Alamos National
     Laboratory [home the Roadrunner supercomputer]).

Miller-McCune.com::Smokey Bear Now Studies Computer Science

[09 February 2010, top]

   Subject: Thanks for a great 28 years
      Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010
      From: Scott McNealy

IBTimes.com::McNealy bids goodbye to Sun (Full Text)

[27 January 2010, top]

   Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the 
   International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet 
   from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s
   12:13 AM Jan 22, 2010 

[23 January 2010, top]

   "There are 300 trillion trillion trillion possible IPv6 addresses." 
    -- Rod Beckstrom, CEO of Icann (world internet regulator)

[extra] Question posted to Ask.Slashdot.org: Do IT pros abuse their power?

I would say in general the answer is "no", but "abuse" level is probably a function of respect given.

[20 January 2010, top]

   More Tweets Than People?  http://u.nu/4mbm4

Did Bill Gates start using Twitter?

   @BillGates "Hello World." Hard at work on my foundation letter - 
   publishing on 1/25.  about 5 hours ago from web Retweeted by 
   SteveCase and 100+ others 

[20 January 2010, top]

   "Offers to buy Facebook common stock have surged to $32 
    per share on SecondMarket, a marketplace for the buying 
    and selling of private company stock. That offer values 
    Facebook at roughly $14 billion."

[side-bar] How did Barron's define "surge"? [source: Blogs.Barrons.com: $25 per share December 2009; Microsoft stake worth $15 billion in 2007]

And I found the following headline from Bits.Blogs.NYTImes.com interesting.

   CrowdFlower Raises $5 Million to Boost Crowdsourcing

I found the headline interesting because I need to learn the difference between "crowdsourcing" and "flashmobs." My initial guess is that flashmobs are form of crowdsourcing.

The following was copied from the Wikipedia.

   "Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and a 
    short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally 
    performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to 
    a group of people or community, through an 'open call' to a 
    large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions."

[20 January 2010, top]

   GOP Twitters its way to victory in Massachusetts Senate race 
   http://tinyurl.com/ybzsskk

I'm getting ready for day one of the spring 2010 CS1 class. And again I am going to be making sure the CS1 students learn about Twitter and the power of POT (Plain Old Text).

[20 January 2010, top]

   "A consortium of European researchers, coordinated by the 
    Computer Vision Centre (CVC) of Universitat Autonoma de 
    Barcelona (UAB), has developed HERMES, a cognitive computational 
    system consisting of video cameras and software able to recognise 
    and predict human behaviour, as well as describe it in natural 
    language. The applications of the Hermes project are numerous 
    and can be used in the fields of intelligent surveillance, 
    protection of accidents, marketing, psychology, etc."

Something to ponder... robots w/computer vision.

UAB.es::New computer vision system for the analysis of human behaviour

[16 January 2010, top]

   "A piece of software on the affected cards, programmed 
    by our suppliers, is defective, and cannot correctly 
    recognize this year's number, 2010," the German DSGV 
    banking association said on Tuesday.

DW-World.de::Millions of German bank cards hit by software bug

[16 January 2010, top]

JasonBaker.com::Myths about code comments

[02 January 2010, top]

Computing Bits Archives: 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003-02-01

[01 January 2010, top]