Sane

You know marks do help bring down the price of college?

*cough*scholorship*

I find that a great deal of motivation actually. And I'm surprised not a great deal of people do as well. I have the opportunity to learn AND get a grant for a couple thousand dollars. Hell, why not?

CubeD

OK, now i earn £200 a week doing painting and decorating, (just started) i pay rent i buy my own food, clothes, everything, if i go to college ill be on £30 a week, not enough to live on let alone pay rent and buy clothes and stuff, i mean i live with my sister and she aint gunna buy me all the things i need, she can just afford for her self, so what do i do?

bl00dninja

the mathematics involved in a CS degree are substantial. if you can't do it, you're fucked. unless you do freelance work without a degree, then some good street knowledge (business) should help you do well. but if you're like, "i think algebra is teh sux!!!" hang it up and go work digging ditches or something. seriously how could you fail ALL of your classes? i haven't done one lick of homework for my calc classes and i still carry a high b. wtf dude? a whole lot of very intelligent people have been dismissed as stupid by the education system (albert einsten, thomas edison, etc.), but jesus. go to www.cplusplus.com and if the first few tutorials seem incomprehensible (sorry that word had 6 syllables...try "hard"), then get your ass back over here and shine my shoes.

__________________
i put on my robe and wizard hat...

Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?...Morons.

CubeD

Lmao! I failed all my classes because i just could'nt be botherd to listen ect, my own fault ofcourse

I think id be able understand C++ but I cant learn it just from books and my own knowlodge can I?

CubeD

See i think the thing that confuses me about programming are all the signs and things, eg. CPolygon * ppoly1 = ▭

( n=0 ; n<5 ; n++ )
cout << arg[n] << " ";
if ( b->isitme(a) )
cout << "yes, &a is b";


How you surposed to remember where all the little signs and things go?

Jimbo

That's just part of learning a programming language... and enough popular languages are similar to each other that learning one will cover a large subset from another. You can learn a language from books/tutorials/your own code, but there's a lot more to software than just writing code. And even when writing code, there's more than just knowing the language if you want the product to be very good. And a lot of firewalls, at least at the network layer (as opposed to, say, application firewalls) are done largely in hardware, I believe...

grumpy

If you didn't do well in relevant subjects at school, it is a pretty fair bet you won't do well in learning programming or other aspects of software engineering unless you address the reason you did poorly. In other words, if you failed your subjects because of bad attitude, then you need to develop a better attitude if you want a chance of doing better.

And, yes, one part of learning to program is learning to read the syntax of programming languages. If you want a job as a translator of Asian languages, you need to understand some Asian languages so you can communicate with Asian people. Computer programming languages are the means by which you communicate with the computer: if you want to get a computer to do things, you need to communicate a language the computer can understand. The only difference is that a computer is actually a literal idiot (i.e. as long as you don't confuse it with [say] a syntax error, it does exactly what you tell it, regardless of whether you tell it to do the right thing or not), whereas people (with a common exception of the opposite sex) are more forgiving of the mistakes you make when communicating with them.

Also, be aware that poor grades in school will be a red flag for potential employers. Very few people make the transition from having poor grades in school to being top flight software engineers. So, if you do decide on such a path, you will have to work hard to convince a potential employer to take you on DESPITE your grades. The same goes if you aim to sell your services: you will have to convince potential customers that you are worth paying.

Firewalls are done in both hardware and software. Technically, the hardware firewalls (routers, modems, etc) are FIRMWARE solutions. The hardware is dedicated for the job, but the basic behaviour is programmed as software that is then transferred in a semi-permanent way to the hardware, and becomes FIRMWARE.

Firewalls can also be purely in the software. For example, have a look at the OpenBSD operating system .... the firewall tools in that are software.

CubeD

What you said is correct but surley if i had a degree in programming thats enough? regardless if i have a degree in maths, english ect, ill still know how to programm, anyways im getting way over my head, i havent even written a word yet lol, i mean 6 weeks ago i was crap at photoshop, but practise and following tutorials im now much better, lets hope the same goes for programming..

grumpy

Just having a degree might get you past some recruiting agencies, but you have to remember that few employers actually recruit purely because of a recommendation from a recruiter. And it will probably be the person who wrote the original job description who will vet the recommendations from a recruiter --- and that person probably has some knowledge of what the job involves.

A degree on its own means nothing, and it means even less if the employer (or employer representative) has university qualifications and knows how much a degree really means and how much it doesn't. There are a lot of institutions out there that make it very easy to get a degree for no work. So a learning history that shows contradictions (eg poor grades in school, but high grades in tertiary education) tends to raise a red flag unless the person reading the information KNOWS the marks from a particular institution actually mean something (and there's an explanation of how you got into the degree studies despite your bad grades). Leaving out your older failures also raises a red flag: failure to provide information tends to be a sign of the applicant hiding something. Even if you get to interview, there is a good chance the interviewers will probe and realise what is going on --- at least one member of most interview panels will be from the work area that is looking for people.

That's not saying you can't get past a bad academic record; it just means you have to make the employer see the bad parts of your record as less important than the good parts. Possible, but not necessarily easy.

CubeD

Even if you get to interview, there is a good chance the interviewers will probe and realise what is going on

Good job im a part time grifter lol

Anyways ill just see where life takes me