Archive for August 20th, 2002
Mulroney says leaders must take good care of caucus. MONTREAL — Prime ministers need never face caucus revolts if they treat their MPs with respect, Brian Mulroney says.The former Tory prime minister said yesterday that the key to his own two election victories — and those of Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien — was the contribution of the back bench, a group he said he took great care to regularly pat on the back.
Witmer won’t shut schools despite auditors’ advice. — Ontario Education Minister Elizabeth Witmer says she has no intention of closing schools in Toronto, Hamilton or Ottawa or slashing programs in order to balance school-board budgets this year.
Dieppe lessons apply in Iraq, McCallum warns. DIEPPE, FRANCE and TORONTO — Canada has learned the lessons of past military catastrophes and is ”very unlikely” to join any quick, U.S.-led action against Iraq, Defence Minister John McCallum says.
UW engineers question Microsoft sponsorship deal. I send money to the old alma mater every year. Yesterday I got a letter in the mail inviting me to participate in Waterloo’s $260MM “Building a talent trust” funding campaign. The University is trying to raise an enormous amount of money right now, and it’s a little dismaying to see students questioning a major donation in this fashion. Personally, I am delighted to see my former employer contributing their dollars to Waterloo.
I think the students raising this issue have missed on one fundamental fact. Programming languages are somewhat fungible. The University knows this. Comp Sci students learn a B.Math degree, with a heavy emphasis on the mathematical basis for computing, rather than any particular technology. It really doesn’t matter if two first year courses are taught in C# (which is apparently easy, and excellent) because the learning will be applicable to Java, C++, etc later in their careers. The language is merely a tool for expressing an algorithm. For beginning programmers, an easy-to-use tool is an advantage, which is why Waterloo was using Pascal as a teaching language when I went there in the early 80’s.
