Allairion
Est. 1971

Allairion's purpose: To help your company discern which of its employees, increasingly displaced by automation, would flourish if retrained as coders, and to provide that group with a sound foundation for crafting good software.

Our view of Security: While commercial pressures press coders to "make it work" rather than "craft it well" -- and there's a great deal of poorly written software we all depend on -- the global disaster (estimated at $10,000,000,000) caused by the June 2017 cyber-attack on Maersk (estimated damage $300,000,000) was due to the ubiquity of the software infected, allowing the malware to spread everywhere.
   It seems prudent in future for any sizable company to develop its own private Operating System and BIOS chip.  A company doing so can neither spread a virus nor catch one from outside.  (While all code is vulnerable, isolating an attack to a single enterprise drastically reduces the rewards of succeeding.)
   This may seem expensive but it is likely less so than the $300,000,000 (estimated) loss suffered by Maersk, and many others.

Our instructor:  Barry Wittman, formerly a consultant to government and industry, has designed and taught University Computer Science foundation courses to students ranging from late High School, through University undergraduates, to High School teachers and College faculty already possessing Doctoral degrees and, at the state's request, evaluated such curricula at all public colleges in NJ.

Our courses: Allairion teaches the following courses, on your site: you need to provide a suitable lecture space, hardware and software support (which includes one technical "lab assistant", each of whom knows a computer language you want to use, for every 5 other attendees), the instruction fee (per course), a daily expense allowance ($1000), plus transportation costs.

 

Courses

ID#DAYSTITLEPurposeFEE
ACE01So you want to be a coder...to help you discern:
  • whether you might like coding as a profession;
  • how well you can do it.
    		• none
    Detail View
    MorningCounting and algorithms.
    Sets. (elements. Order. Uniqueness)
    a tiny language for algorithms
    a single familiar data type.
    AfternoonImplementing algorithms
    exercises
    Radix notation.
     
    ACE14 Program Architectureto learn to create well-structured maintainable software $14,000
    Overview
  • Characteristics of well-crafted programs
  • Divide and Conquer
  • Protecting clients from themselves
  • Axiomatic programing
    •  
    ACE25 Data Architectureto learn about various data structures' strengths and weaknesses,
    primarily for searching and sorting.    		$15,000
    Overview
  • Importance of search
  • Costs of sorting
  • Simple sorting methods
  • Arrays and trees
  • Hash tables
    •  
    ACE35 Hardware ArchitectureTo learn about the logical structure of computing machines $15,000
    Overview
  • Memory hierarchy management
  • CPU: CISC/RISC; BIOS
  • The fetch/execute cycle
  • Minimal instruction set
  • Loaders, Assemblers
    •  
    ACE45 Operating System ArchitectureTo learn about OS structure$15,000
    Overview
  • What is an OS, minimal kernel
  • System definition and management
  • Time sharing; virtual machines
  • I/O and buffering
  • Interrupts and other services management