On Oct 22, 2011, at 9:19 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> Will Dropouts Save America?
>
> I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the
> college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created
> by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul
> Allen.
>
> And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via
> Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan
> Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the
> college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by
> the degreeless Sean Parker.
>
> American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and
> historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees.
> But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a
> shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t
> traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.
>
Based on your previous posts on computing, I think you would agree that the above is a load of crap? “Job creators”?! Don’t style guides apply to the Op-Ed page?
Anyway, FB and Twitter are fluff that any one of us could code up, albeit, admittedly, in 5 x time as Zuckerberg. The rest of the people are smart managers, not creators of anything. As we discussed in the earlier unrelated thread, the underlying creations come from Alan Turing, von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Dennis Ritchie, Bill Joy, Kirk McKusick (h/t Jordan for reminding me of Kirk), Van Jacobson, Vint Cerf, Metcalfe, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds… not one of whom was a dropout, and almost all of whom have/had advanced degrees.
—ravi
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/opinion/sunday/will-dropouts-save-america.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
>
> --
> "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."
> Richard Hamming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code
>
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