The Point of Higher Education

Sorry about not posting last night, but it was a rough day and ended up preferring to hit the sack. Not much news yesterday anyway other than the iPhone release, so I figured that it could wait a day. Then today, Internet was out so it's fortunate that I even managed to get thru this post. Anyway, Jeff Atwood make a great point, as always, about the point of college. The stuff you learn in college often isn't directly applicable to your career. Isn't that screwed up? This does not apply to all majors, but quite a few of them, nonetheless. I started to suspect this when I discovered how much more employers value experience over academics. Basically, you're in school to learn how to learn. Often, you discover that you don't need a teacher to learn the material and start skipping said class, and that's a sign that you've gotten pretty good at learning on your own (assuming you do well on the tests, that is). In CS, I cannot emphasize enough how important that skill is. A zeal for learning is required. I meet guys at Amazon in their early 40s who started out in Ada and now they're working in Java, two completely different languages with vastly different concepts backing them. I think a CS degree still gives you a lot of valuable knowledge, but you don't remember all of it. The fact that you learned it means that you can learn it again at another time if you need it, and that you have a vague idea of it, and that's what's really important. Plus, some of this material is still evolving. Anyway, I just think this is valid in many majors, so I thought I'd steal Jeff's idea and talk about it a bit.

The iPhone came out yesterday, and the bigger cities had the more hardcore campers. If you want coverage of that, it's everywhere. I don't feel like propagating it. Instead, I'd rather plug Gizmodo's video of their first attempt at sending a text. It looks tricky, but not as bad as some people seem to think. My brother got one, and says it's cool, but it only seems to ring once and doesn't keep an alert about missed calls.

Sorry, but that's not all the iPhone news. LifeHacker has the top iPhone 3rd party web applications. I must say, I'm impressed what people have done without even an SDK.

There are also rumors that Apple will announce a 3G iPhone in Europe to work with Vodafone and T-Mobile. I can see them working with other carriers, but I cannot see them making it 3G there and not here. It would definitely cause a massive uproar and backlash stateside, and they seem to always favor Americans with their technology than foreigners, so I don't see how the iPhone would be different. Obviously, Jobs denies this rumor in an interview with USA Today, but instead hints that they are working on getting the iPhone compatible with corporate e-mail systems. That is quite important (Amazon isn't letting us use it with our e-mail; not secure enough), and I can't imagine many big companies being compatible with it, so that'll cost them a lot of users since these are the high-end customers to target.

One-liner: ever wonder where else the famed Contra code works? 1UP did a great round-up of their discoveries. Definitely worth a read in case you have any of those games.

Christian Bale tells us that, for The Dark Knight, they're definitely trying to ground their depiction of the Joker in reality while recognizing that he is a cartoon character. I think the Joker is more complex than he gets credit for, so I look forward to Heath Ledger proving himself here.

We have our first father/son shot from Indiana Jones 4, but you can't see a whole lot in it. So instead, I opted to show you guys the poster from Rush Hour 3, which is very reminiscent of the second installment's poster. Oh well, it's Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan back together again, so it had better be fun. I don't care if it's far-fetched, it just better be entertaining.



My Internet is dying, so no meme tonight. I should be back tomorrow night though if I don't get too tied up at my cousin's place. Let's hope that my Internet is back in full force as well!