Daniel Lemire's blog

MYTH: NDAs are a Good Idea

, 1 min read

Thanks to Downes, I found this beautiful post on why asking for a NDA is like screaming that you are clueless. This comes back to the unnecessary lack of openess I complain about. For every guy willing to implement an idea, you have a thousand ideas out there if not more. Ideas are simply not that…

Programming and college CS education

, 3 min read

Moving things up on the skill ladder, going to higher level skills and discarding lower level skills where “higher” means “more abstract”, doesn’t necessarily lead to a better education, but to a worse one. You should not discard lower level skills, you should value them: they are our…

Being open or not, that is the question

, 1 min read

Harold reminds us that sharing knowledge is not part of everyone’s culture: One interesting observation I made this week is that not everyone is as open to sharing their thoughts and opinions in a public way as my fellow bloggers are. Coming from a community of practice that shares ideas and…

High demand for storage

, 1 min read

In What was Sun thinking? (CNET News.com), Charles Cooper tells us that storage is now in high demand: What with some of the confusing–make that idiotic–federal regulations governing corporate behavior that have appeared the last couple years, there’s a near bottomless demand for big storage…

fixacm.sty

, 1 min read

fixacm.sty

Expert Opinion: College expectations

, 2 min read

Expert Opinion has a thoughtful analysis of modern day university students: They pay money, they want the tools and certification to get jobs, and they resent being subjected to “irrelevant crap”. I don’t know how to respond to this. Certainly, I feel that this is not the best mode of…

fixacm.sty

, 1 min read

Jeff Erickson makes available a fixed ACM proceedings template. If you’ve had trouble with the default ACM template, like me, this might save you some headaches.

Joe´s OpenSolution Page

, 1 min read

Abdel sent me a link to Joe’s OpenSolution Page. It is a page with some of the best open source software for your business project. I learned about two open source ETL software!

LaTeX Tips & Tricks

, 1 min read

By accident, I found the LaTeX Tips & Tricks page again. I think they changed the URL and it wasn’t easy to find in Google.

eLearning is all about searching and connecting

, 1 min read

Harold talks about the new business of learning. As a university professor, I’m in the “learning business”. Harold makes it clear that if all I do is provide content to my students, then I compete against Google and I will lose: I have already talked about Google as the best learning…

Trump University

, 1 min read

Will writes about the new Trump University which, as the name suggests, was funded by Donal Trump. He has 4 professors and all appear credible at first glance. Prices are reasonable (it seems): $300 a course. There are no degrees offered and the number of courses is currently limited (I see 3…

The Geomblog: Do we really need more students in CS ?

, 2 min read

Suresh jumps into the Do we really need more students in CS ? debate. He concludes: On the one hand, you can make a degree program produce graduates that are more employable, but you veer dangerously close to the ‘vocational training’ edge of the cliff, or you make a degree program more…

Do we really want more students interested in CS?

, 1 min read

Expert Opinion talks about whether the current drop in enrollment is a tragedy or not From an employee’s perspective, fewer people seeking jobs is a good thing. And, frankly, while having lots of graduate students to shovel code may help some university research, I’m not convinced that most of…