Poll: Stupidest thing a Computer Science teacher has said in class.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

It's been more than a few years since I got out of school, but here's the dumbest thing I heard:

Our teacher wouldn't listen to the students at all. It was a database class. He described it at "We're going to work on how to use a database, not how to build one. So we're not talking about classes and pointers and stuff. We're talking about SQL and data normalization"

So we went through the class which turned out to be a class on how to use M$ Access.

At the end of the class I asked this question: "If we were to find ourself at a job where we needed to write our own database could you give me some pointers on where I could learn how to write a database?"

His Answer: "I told you, we're not using pointers here. We're only learning how to communicate with a database!"

One of the other students had to pipe up with "You're not even listening to his question. He didn't ask about C pointers, he asked if you could tell him where to go to learn how to write a database."

The teacher still couldn't answer my question.

I'll wait to hear your comments before I tell you more. But there's been plenty of times where I've just had to shake my head and think WTF!?

[X_console]

Mine said "Netscape is an operating system"

[lazy_cod3R]

Mine was a classic.
It was an SQL database data modeling class also.

I said : what do you mean by there is a correlation between them, i dont get what you mean by correlation.

He Said: Sh!t im not sure either but thats what it says on the answer sheet !


basiclly i looked at him and thought, dam what a monkey !, he's tutoring and doesnt know jack ! :)

[sans-hubris]

I don't have any direct experience with this teacher, but supposedly, while teaching a MIPS assembly class, she wrote on the chalk board, "RISK."

Anyway, it seems I have a lot to be thankful for.

My favorite teacher, who's from Australia, when I took his class, had these signs he would pass out to us with predetermined answers and he would ask us various questions and we would hold up the answer. Kinda stupid, but one time, once we were done, he tells us to, "pass those doobies up here" (with Aussie accent of course.) My friend had told him that "doobies" probably doesn't mean what he think it means, not here at least. I dunno, it was pretty funny at the time. The class had a good laugh.

Oh, you wanted stuff regarding CS? Sorry, don't really have anything except for the riscy misspelling.

[ 17 September 2001: Message edited by: Muad Dib --formerly ndogg ]

[element-x]

ok...this happened today

my instructor/professor was talking about Computer Ethics, branched off to pirated software, then to Linux and how it had NO licencing agreements, and how you could DOWNLOAD "C", then turns to me and says "You can download C, right." (not in an answer, but more of a statement.) My reply was "sure, whatever you say" and I went back to happily finishing my crossword.

I don't know, but I can't for the life of me, see why in hell I'm paying the amount of money that I am, to get taught by less than stellar professors/instructors. For gods sake, you'd think there would be some sort of requirements before they can actually teach a course!

[ 17 September 2001: Message edited by: JAdrock ]

[Dru Lee Parsec]

I don't know, but I can't for the life of me, see why in hell I'm paying the amount of money that I am, to get taught by less than stellar professors/instructors.

I had a reputation at school for being, shall we say, non-politically correct with teachers. One of my teachers was just being a complete idiot one day. I was in the front row and I had to do this: "I stopped him and said "Oh my gosh! Wait just a minute!" I pulled out my calculator and punched in a few numbers. WHen the teacher asked "what is it? Why do you want me to wait?" I answered:

"I just had to calculate it. Do you have any idea what I'm paying per hour to listen to your uninformed idiotic rant? It's amazing! I can't believe that I'm paying for this"

That didn't win me any points but since I've was a 4.0 student (Hell, I could have taught most of those classes better than any of the teachers).

OK, how about this: If you utterly failed on your test and projects you would get a "C". I worked my *** off and I got A's and I deserved the A's. But teachers were passing students that had no clue about anything having to do with writing code. When I graduated there were people graduating right next to me with a degree in Computer Science who could not write a Hello World program in C.

Now, years later I'm making a pretty good living (well, now that I'm no longer in the dot-com downward spiral I'm making good money again) and I havn't seen any of them at any company I've worked for. So I guess skills still account for something.

[Gnu/Vince]

"It is normal that Windows 2000 takes 5 to 10 minutes to boot: it's a server operating system"

I just pointed out that my server at home (running Debian and it had ran FreeBSD) took no more than 1 minute to boot. He got mad :)


Cool thing I heard:

"VB sucks and most Programmist-Analer (yes he said that) don't like it very much" This was said by my VBA teacher :D

[X_console]

I know a computer prof who doesn't even know how to FTP, or what FTP is. I feel sorry for the students.

[Niminator]

"MOD and integer division have a lower precedence than plus or minus."

No wonder the other professors make him teach vb.

[minus18]

Mine said "Linux is up to version 8.0 now."

I pointed out that you should talk about kernal numbers which shut him up and I became the class Linux guru :D

[EscapeCharacter]

"linux is an operating system like windows..."
this came from the same teacher that taught our vb class.
i started busting up

[ 18 September 2001: Message edited by: EscapeCharacter ]

[sans-hubris]

My teacher had us do the following when we submit our programs until I told him that we should do otherwise (keep in mind he used to use Solaris):

$ tar -czvf pgm1.tz pgm1
$ compress pgm1.tz

I told him that the compress step was redundant. He's open enough to acknowledge when he's wrong.

He also spelled implementation wrong: implemtation.

Ok, so those are pretty petty, but I haven't really come across anything worth mentioning beyond that. I think I'm getting my money's worth here.

However, one stupid thing the CS department does do is have us buy these excessively expensive books and we hardly ever use them. I guess that would apply to other colleges too, huh? Of course, I keep all my CS and math books.

[Qubit]

I don't have any experiences with stupid CS teachers (since I don't have that many CS courses), but what strikes me is how these people who are among the world's authorities on a particular field fail to do the most trivial things with their computer. Eg: my theoretical mechanics professor had written a fairly big simulation in Maple, not something you do every day, and yet it took him some 15 minutes to get into Maple, turn on the projector and download his files. No kidding!

One of my friends took a class in formal logics where the professor managed to project on screen his password (in front of 200 ppl.)

[RTFM]

Some random quips:

<prof> "HTML is not a programming language because it does not compute."

<me> I thought the reason it isn't a programming lanuage is just because its a markup language?

-------------------------

"Now as we look at the innards of this thing, we see here the power supply. *points at the harddrive, which is on the other side of the computer* The power supply gives power to things like the mouse, keyboard, and lights on the front for us."

--------------------------

The reason I like VisualBasic more than I do Java or J++ here, the reason is because Java doesn't have any kind pointers, and thats why I like VisualBasic so much.

--------------------------

From a student in the java class, commenting on how people on the hijacked 747's used cell phones to call. Mind you, he is black and uses heavy slang/ebonics.

Now, see, wid java here, all dees peep could call home, and say to zeyz wife and kids, I wuv you, ya know? Cuz like, like, you know, like, wizout java, dem dere zellphones, they no work wizout zey Java.

--------------------

And yes, yes, Visual C++ works well as an operating system, and is much much more powerful then assembly. Assembly really is very limited in what it can do, because its so low level. But Visual C++ is not low level, and thus it can work well with any kind of hardware, and all other operating systems.

-----------------

I'm sure I could think of some more. But thats enough for now.

[nanode]

If you think those CS classes were ridiculous, try attending some upper division management courses. dr00l =P~~

I will say that stupid college courses did prepare me for the real world. There are idiots everywhere. They may be your customers, employers and even co-workers.

Stupid people are everywhere and to be successful in this world, that needs to be understood.

[f'lar]

My GUI professor (the class is taught for windows, only) didn't know how to set windows to "Show window contents while dragging."

Other than he and one other (who I thankfully don't have to take) most of my professors are pretty competent. There was a funny incident with my networking professor last semester:

"In summary, with CSMA/CD, you detect when there has been a collision and shout it to the entire network: AAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!".
I guess you had to be there.

[Dru Lee Parsec]

And yes, yes, Visual C++ works well as an operating system, and is much much more powerful then assembly. Assembly really is very limited in what it can do, because its so low level. But Visual C++ is not low level, and thus it can work well with any kind of hardware, and all other operating systems

Now THAT is stupid enough to actually be dangerous. "Visual C++ works well as an operating system" ?? Well, then show me how to dual boot Linux and Visual C++.

Assembly really is very limited in what it can do

Dude! With Assembler you can make your friggin' hard drive spin backwards! Are you telling me that's not powerfull?

Since you have access to absolutly any of the hardware with Assembler then it's teh most powerful language. It's just a pain to write things like GUI's and web servers in assembler. That's why we have high level languages.

Geez! Did this guy drool on his tie during class?

[david]

Originally posted by Dru Lee Parsec:
<STRONG>Dude! With Assembler you can make your friggin' hard drive spin backwards! Are you telling me that's not powerfull?

Since you have access to absolutly any of the hardware with Assembler then it's teh most powerful language. It's just a pain to write things like GUI's and web servers in assembler. That's why we have high level languages.

Geez! Did this guy drool on his tie during class?</STRONG>


:eek:

/me goes to learn assembler so I can spin my hard drive backwards and be 1337

[Gnu/Vince]

Originally posted by david:
<STRONG>
:eek:

/me goes to learn assembler so I can spin my hard drive backwards and be 1337</STRONG>

That's what ALL geek rappers do.

[Nameless]

Hey,
I was more offended than anything by this 'stupid' advice my grade 11 advanced programming teacher told me a couple of weeks ago. After complaining about the speed of the new "Windows 98fe Light" that they put on the computers and comparing it to Linux he told me:

"You are wasting your time with linux - no one can understand it, there is nothing it can do that windows cant and it is just a passing phase".

When I heard this I was blown away. I argued with him for a few minutes until he realized that he didn't stand a chance at which point he just left the classroom. He was stupid to argue with me about linux.

[TacKat]

...no one can understand it...

I think what he meant to say was, "I can't understand it and since I'm the smartest person ever..."

[RTFM]

Originally posted by Gnu/Vince:
<STRONG>That's what ALL geek rappers do.</STRONG>

Lol.

:D

[slacker_x]

I've figured it out. Schools know that they can't hire competent Comp Sci profs, so they just hire teachers with thick accents so you can't even understand the stupid **** they are saying.

[PimpHolic]

i wish i had programming courses at my high school. currently im learning how the use a word processor..but hey, if its on a computer, ill take it

[bdg1983]

I'm lucky. All my profs vary from competent to guru... However, my UNIX prof today, who I thought was a guru, spoiled that image. One of the things we have to do for that class is a Debian install; today, he was looking over my shoulder while I was partitioning a harddrive, and saw that hdc1 (for some reason, the harddrive on this machine was hdc :confused: ) was 300 megs. He realised this was my / partition, but he told me that 300 megs was too small and I should make it at least a gig. :rolleyes: Secondly, I asked if we had to stay with potato, or if we could upgrade to woody or sid... he said he had tried to upgrade to testing, but was unsuccessful, and that he'd like to see it if I did, because it must have a nice, new KDE desktop environment... Oh well, I guess he's just not entirely a unix d00d... he's a really good teacher, tho, I have him for various programming classes, and he covers those quite well.

[Danger Fan]

Originally posted by slacker_x:
<STRONG>I've figured it out. Schools know that they can't hire competent Comp Sci profs, so they just hire teachers with thick accents so you can't even understand the stupid **** they are saying.</STRONG>

the TA who taught my ASM class for one week was a hell of a lot smarter about the stuff than the professor was.

but then again, my c++ professor said she knew nothing about ASM, but she's known for her DB work.

why did they have her teach the class?? :confused:

[nanode]

You high school students are lucky to have any sort of programming classes available. If you're reading this forum, you're already smart. Just nod your head and smile knowing what you know =)

[Dru Lee Parsec]

I got a million of 'em:

In college in a Pascal class the instructor wanted us to take a stream of input data from a file and if it was formatted in one way we should translate it using translation A, if it was formatted a different way we would translate it using translation B. Essentially there were headers in the input stream that would say "Translate the next N characters this way or that way".

I wrote a method that determined which translation method would be used and then wrote 2 methods, one for each translation.

The teacher said "That's not what I asked for. I wanted one method that did both translations."

I said "But this way is clean and easy to understand. Each method does only one thing"

He said "But that's not what the assignment is. If you turn that in I can't give you full credit for it even if it works".

So I went back and re-wrote it. As I was doing it (this was in the computer lab) he came over and tried to be a fatherly, helpful teacher and said "How's it going. Is everything coming along OK" .

To which I responded "Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out how to write sloppy code".

That was probably meaner than I should have been. :(

[TheBouleOfFools]

My C++/Java teacher believes that double and apstring are the answers to everything.
Me: "I'm having a few problems here and I don't think that..."

Him: "Just use double."
"But don't wont..."
"Just use double, and replace all of those with apstring."

:rolleyes:

[MrNewbie]

Unfortunatly I have no programming classes at all in high school, except a little VB. Once we had to write a programming in it, in which I included a lot of error checking which I was told to remove because it was "unneccesary".

[Dru Lee Parsec]

How about "Why are you writing setters and getters for every attribute in your class? If you're just getting the attribute or setting the attribute then all your doing is making your class bigger and writing extra code"

Of course, the answer is because if, in the future, I need to do some data validation when setting the value or if I need to return an error code when getting the value then I can do it in the setter or getter and the public API to my class doesn't change. Therefore, none of my other code that accesses this class changes.

You know, just basic OOP stuff. Thank GOD that was my last class. If I had to deal with these idiots any more I'd start buying weapons.

Oh here's one: In an Operating systems class the teacher starts out the first day by explaining that one of the things the OS is responsible for is directing input and output to things like disk drive. [get ready] For example, it could be a hard drive or even a floppy drive [here it comes] "Let me just pass this around the room so you can all see one [No, I can't believe he's going to do this] This is a floppy disk. It can hold about 1.4 megs of data." :rolleyes:

The idiot passes a floppy disk around the room AS IF WE'VE NEVER SEEN ONE!! We're F*#$ing 4th year Computer Science majors OR people working on their master's degree in CS and this guy thinks we're going to be thrilled by a floppy disk!? :eek:

Incredible, Just incredible. Once I graduated I swore that I would never give another dime to any school ever again. Oh well, it's been several years since I've had to worry about that.

[TacKat]

I remember my third grade computer teacher passing around floppy disks...

[f'lar]

Hehheh: on the first day, my operating systems teacher passed around a real VACUUM TUBE! That was pretty cool.

[Raskii]

Originally posted by f'lar:
<STRONG>"In summary, with CSMA/CD, you detect when there has been a collision and shout it to the entire network: AAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!".
I guess you had to be there.</STRONG>

I like how my instructor describes the difference between CSMA/CD and CSMA/CA.

Prof: "Let's say you're crossing the street...

CSMA/CA is where you stick your head out and look left, then look right, to check for any oncoming traffic before crossing.

CSMA/CD is where you get your little brother Billy and have HIM run out into the street. If he gets creamed, then you wait a little while before you cross the street yourself."

Needless to say, I like his classes :D

[optech]

teacher: So, in theory, that is how an IC works.

me: can you tell us how the IC works on a physical level? i mean, sure, you put a current to those two pins, and the answer is a boolean AND operation, but how does that actually WORK?

teacher: that's not part of the course conduct.

me: but i wanna know.

teacher: well research it in your own time.

me: *stand up, walk to computer, research how a logic gate works on a physical level.
*walk to front of class, interupt teacher during lesson, draw up lesson on how logic gates work on a physical level. sit down.

teacher: ummmmm? go to the office.

i was suspended for 3 days for an "educational interuptance" whatever the hell that means...

it's a wonder i dropped out in grade 11 :P

[Silent Bob]

Originally posted by Dru Lee Parsec:
<STRONG>The idiot passes a floppy disk around the room AS IF WE'VE NEVER SEEN ONE!! We're F*#$ing 4th year Computer Science majors OR people working on their master's degree in CS and this guy thinks we're going to be thrilled by a floppy disk!? :eek:</STRONG>

One of my lecturers passed around one of those 2 megabyte 'portable' (you know the ones where the drive heads stay in the machine and you remove the platters in a big plastic cylinder) IBM harddrives with 1976 dated on it. That was way cool to see :)

[Col. Panic]

Originally posted by Lucefiel:
<STRONG>I like how my instructor describes the difference between CSMA/CD and CSMA/CA.

Prof: "Let's say you're crossing the street...

CSMA/CA is where you stick your head out and look left, then look right, to check for any oncoming traffic before crossing.

CSMA/CD is where you get your little brother Billy and have HIM run out into the street. If he gets creamed, then you wait a little while before you cross the street yourself."

Needless to say, I like his classes :D</STRONG>

That made my day! :D

As for my personal experience, Colorado State has a man who is a legend for all the wrong reasons (Mandrel, if you're around, back me up on this). Good Ol' Van Howbert, while he knows his stuff and doesn't say anything particularly wrong, lacks ... how shall I say ... people skills. I've always been under the impression that profs are supposed to foster learning and answer questions, but he thinks differently. The man absolutely berates anyone who asks a question. Numerous people I know have gone to talk to him during his office hours for a simple question and left an hour and a half later.

Myself, I'm a CIS major, which is under the school of business. I had him for C++, which is in the Computer Science dept. First day of class, he asks for a "show of hands of everybody who's CS? Good, now let's see the engineers? Great. Now if you're here from the college of business, that's stupid. They recommended you take C++? Well, they could have recommended you take an art class, too, and it would do you about as much good. This class is geared toward scientists and engineers, and I'm going to teach it as such. I don't think they ought to allow you business majors in here."

Couple years ago, we took pledges on my floor to get one of the guys (not in the class) to go sit in on a class in the back of the room and ask innane questions ("What are those semi-colons for? What's commenting?"). The pot was to double if he got Van to swear at him, tripple if Van left the room, and quadruple if Van removed him by force. Sadly, he chickened out, which was probably a good idea since there was still the possibility of him having to take a class taught by him at that point.

[JCool451]

This was a statement made by the school IS/IT guy.

"Our new system is running windows 2000 and is completely secure. Everyone has individual log in accounts and all 'violators' will be actively hunted down." (Note in daily bulletin)

Turned in a memo, with a 4 page report attached, to him the next day on how crappy his "secure" system was. He said that it was "impossible, that it would not work, and that it could be logged.", eventhough the traffic is encypted. (Not exact qoute) So, I offered to do a demonstration for him. I showed him and my entire 2nd period how to do it. What did he do? Nothing and everyone in the school knew how to bypass all of his "security".

You would think they would do something after I spent 3 hours making a report for him!

[Fryguy8]

I haven't necessarily had my profs say anything stupid yet (although i did get my first year CS teacher to swear at me), but has anybody noticed that CS teachers go SLOW!?

I did java for 2 semesters (freshman year, soph now), and we did a total of 3 weeks of GUI apps. The other 27 weeks of class or so was for loops, while loops, arrays etc. We spent almost 2 months on arrays. It's ridiculous.

NOW I'm in data structures (learning stuff like linked lists, trees, structures like that), and we haven't even started yet!! They refuse to follow the course schedule because supposedly 60-70% of people STILL don't understand the basics, even after going so slow. I'm getting insanely pissed about just sitting there and having him explain that instances of objects are addresses that point to the real object etc.

I wish he'd just go and drop these stupid people. If they can't get the basics then they shouldn't be CS majors...

[JCool451]

You're absolutely right, they should flunk them. Unfortunately most of their CS income comes from these retards.

[sasKuatch]

This is CS related but still...

My 7th grade health teacher was probably the worst teacher I've ever had in my life (and I'm in my 3rd year in college now). Not to say his class wasn't really easy, because it was. Now, remember, it was a health class, but he made us do crossword puzzles. Yes, crossword puzzles. That weren't about health. He would sit with his feet up on his desk and (I'm not sh!^*ng you) picked his nose. When somebody talked, he would yell "Quiet!!!" and slam his fist on the desk. What charisma, he looked a cross between Don Knots and Janet Reno!!:D http://www.stormfront.org/forum/images/smilies/rofl.gif

[cfaun5]

"A mouse isn't an input device; it's a peripheral device"

[Jata]

When I was doing computers for my A-Levels we were 'taught' pascal using Delphi. When we got stuck we would ask the teachers for help as you would. They replied "Use the help files". The trouble was most of them were missing. When somebody asked why they couldn't just tell us they said: "Nobody is going to help you when you get a job in the real world! We're preparing you for that."
Needless to say the department was disbanded not long after. Bit late for me though. In uni now though so I don't care.

[PolteRGeisT]

"Notice how the \t goes OUTSIDE the parentheses"

:rolleyes:

then she wrote this
cout << "---" << \t << endl;

:D hilarious.

[Sepero]

I don't attend any college. I've taught myself nearly 100% of all I know about computers(mostly software configuring and programming), but this is one of the best threads I have read in a long time! It almost makes me want to start attending classes so I can feel like a super-guru. :p

Keep this thread going guys!

P.S.
geek rappers->spin disks backwards->turn tables:p

[Trogdor]

My compy sci teacher claimed that emacs is an editor.











For those of you not old enough to get this, us vi users know that emacs is a operating system. Or maybe a virus.

[Wolface]

while taking trigonometry in CIT university's classes the teacher wrote on the board:

a/b + c/d =


(a*d) + (c*d)
------------------
(b*d)

I stared at the board thinking "what the hell is that?, did I forget algebra?" and the guy says "remember that if u dont know algebra you are doomed"

one situation among many that i cant remember right now.

Im still taking the class and we all (students) agreed not to listen to the teacher because we could "unlearn" something. So now we sit and start studying on our own without paying any attention to him.

[bsh152s]

Heck, I had a teacher that was assigned Computer Architecture. He openly admitted he knew nothing of computer hardware, and said he'd email us the days we would have class. It turns out we went to class 5 times (one was a field trip to another college), had 2 assignments, and no final. I told the department head at the end of the year and he just shook his head.

[Icarus]

Originally posted by Trogdor
My compy sci teacher claimed that emacs is an editor.

For those of you not old enough to get this, us vi users know that emacs is a operating system. Or maybe a virus. That's a good one, let the flames begin :D

I had a "into to operating systems" teacher that had no business teaching the class. His knowledge was "Win98 stopped working, upgrading to WinXP fixed it" :rolleyes:

Then there was the "You need a mouse to use WindowsNT" arguement we got into...
Who's ever not used a mouse with WindowsNT? I have, it's not that difficult.

It was fun during the second half of the semester when it covered Unix...he was so lost he didn't know what to do...I think I was teaching the class from that point since the only thing people were learning was what I taught them, many CS students were scared off from Unix/Linux after that guy was done :(

[jedthehumanoid]

Originally posted by f'lar
Hehheh: on the first day, my operating systems teacher passed around a real VACUUM TUBE! That was pretty cool.

that bastard probably stole it out of my guitar amp!!

see here (http://www.groovetubes.com)

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by mahdi
That's a good one, let the flames begin :D


As the old saying goes, "Emacs is a great operating system - it just lacks a good editor."

Emacs is to editors as VB is to programming: anyone who uses it, I will meet in the parking lot.

[goon12]

Burninating the peasants, burninating the country side, burninating all the THATCH ROOF COTTAGES!!!

Sorry.. Trogdor gets me fired up.

[templest]

try this one on for size... (note, I live in London Ontario and "Turing (WinOOT)" is a sort of local programming language, not too famous, which tell's you something about it.).

(on the first day of class:)
Mrs.#######: "Turing is a really powerful programming language and is much more easier to learn then C++ (which I agree on, but...) and it works a lot better for graphics processing and games and such. (ooops... shu'nna said that)."

Now to tell you why this is such a retarded statement... Turing converts the code from:
put "Hello!"
to whatever it's C++ equivalent is.... bascically, it's an easier programming language that get's translated to C++. And even then... since whenever you run stuff in Turing it's constantly translating... It doesn't just translate it once and leaves it as C++... it translates every time you run something... so therefore.... It's not really that great for games and such.. and not great for anything really since you don't even have direct access to the computer's resources. Making it extreamely limited in what it can do... Ohh! And you cant use networks... so forget about makiing anything like a Chat Program... or a Mod of AIM.
Why in the name of buddah would she make such a retarded statement.. I have no clue... people with this kind of intellect deserve to die... that's why I no longer post in www.sucks500.com , :D :D :D only Linux bashers there. I got one to convert though... so that made me proud (help him out from time to time with problems he has).

[sasKuatch]

Ummm.... access to "computer 'resources" doesn't make a language good. It depends on what you want to do, but it's not every day you need to spin hardrive backwards and move individual bits in memory. Sure, there is a time for that, but it's rare. That's why everything is not written in assembly, or even C for that matter.

I'm sure that Turing language is much slower, but it's not all about speed. Sometimes being able to move up a level of abstraction to rise above the nitty-gritty details is more important.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by sasKuatch
Sometimes being able to move up a level of abstraction to rise above the nitty-gritty details is more important. Like when you're doing [insert any task here] in Lisp.

:D

[sasKuatch]

Exactly!:p :)

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by templest
I live in London Ontario

Ha! I used to live in London Ontario! Is Masonville still a mall, or is it its own suburb now? :p

[Thorkyl]

Here in the past few months while I was off project I went to the community college for an interview as a mySQL instrutor for the first mySQL course they where going to teach. Now keep in mind that I have been on many an interview in the past where they hand you code and ask whats wrong with it or ask what it is doing.

The code he handed me was "Failing to create the table" and wanted to know why.

Here is the code.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_ERROR_HANDLER]
@sMOD varchar(100),
@iENBR int,
@sMSG varchar(1500)
AS
INSERT INTO TBL_ERROR_LOG
(
ERR_MODULE,
ERR_NUMBER,
ERR_DESC,
ERR_USER,
ERR_DT,
ERR_RESOLVED
)
VALUES
(
@sMOD,
@iENBR,
@sMSG,
system_user,
getdate() ,
0
)
GO

My response was
"The code is for SQL server and the word procedure does not make a table."

I didn't get the job...

[lagdawg]

When I was a senior in highschool I took Computer Science 2. The year I took the class was the first year that my school used C++ as the programming language for the class. On the first day of classes the teacher told us - "I have looked through the text book, but I have never programmed in C++. This class will be a learning experience for all of us." All the teacher did was assign projects. We had to teach ourselves the syntax of what to do. Every so often the teacher would ask us to explain how we did something because he didn't know the syntax. What a class, we basically taught ourselves.

Last week at college my Design and Analysis of Algorithms professer made the following comment when talking about prime numbers:

"2 is an odd prime number, because all other prime numbers are odd".

Then I had a C++ programming professor who liked to give group exams. Basically a group of people would meet with him and talk through the concepts we were supposed to learn in class. At the end of the meeting he asked everyone what grade they thought they should get. For some people he agreed and some he disagreed. With one who thought he should have received a higher grade than the professor wanted to give, the professor asked the rest of the students at the meeting whether they thought he deserved the higher grade, and when they agreed he gave the student the higher grade.

[tecknophreak]

Originally posted by lagdawg
"2 is an odd prime number, because all other prime numbers are odd".
[/B]

That's a nice little play on words! Reminds me of the stupid riddle "When is a door not a door?". Now there's "When is a prime odd?" What can I say, I'm a math nerd.

[StarTiger]

I've figured it out. Schools know that they can't hire competent Comp Sci profs, so they just hire teachers with thick accents so you can't even understand the stupid **** they are saying.


THAT IT!!! that explains my engineering prof. and the entire engineering departmant.

[knute]

In high school, I had a pascal class. I would drive the teacher nuts, because I would spend most of my time making it look nice, and very little time on the processing part of the program.

Whenever they would tell me that I needed to start on that part, I would mildly look over at them, and say, "Why? It'll either work or it won't, and if it doesn't I've made a typo." :D

There was once that I started on the processing part about 5 minutes before it was due. That was funny, cause I ended up turning it in right as the bell rang for class to be over, and it was right. :)

---------------------

In a basic programming class in college, our assignment was to create a hangman-esque word guessing game. The computers that we were using had no concept of what multimedia was. The only sound available was beep. :cool:
The teacher had told us that there was only one A that was going to be given.
This was the stage that this is played upon.

So I'm working on my program "Timebomb" and just happen to be working on not only the opening screen, but also the timing of the clock and the "high end" :rolleyes: sound effects.
I run the program, and you hear BEEP!!!! BEEP!!!! BEEP!!!!! in this otherwise completely silent (libraryesque, tombesque) classroom.

Have you ever heard 30 people jump in unison? :D

Or been in the middle of the room as everyone around you suddenly jumps up? Almost like falling in a hole! :cool:

They all looked at me while it was still beeping, basically because I was the only one that didn't jump. I looked up innocently and said, "What? I'm testing my program."

Needless to say it kinda knocked their hopes out for getting an A on that project. :D

----------------

I know that this is completely off topic, but I can't resist telling this one!

I was working as a computer tech for a major computer company. One of my co-workers asked me about creating a batch file that could be used as a joke. Previously I'ld written a batch file to scandisk and defrag the windows computers that we had to use, so I figured ok, I'll do it.

So I wrote this program that showed the commands that we would use to do a quick format on the drive. It displayed these commands for about 5 seconds (just long enough so that what was displayed would register), then it would proceed to list the entire contents of the C: drive, just like deltree would do.
Then when that was completed, it would say, "Your drive is now clean."
"---press any key to continue---"
After you found and pressed the any key :D it would say "Psych! Just kidding."

I named the batch file "Double click me".
After I sent it to the co-worker, he ended up sending it to one of the supervisors, who did exactly as he was instructed by the name of the file. :rolleyes:
We heard, "OH FU@K!"
He started panicking and just freaking out.

When it was over, we heard, "Shawn, I'm gonna kill you!"

:D

[Anomaly]

^ LMAO!!! :D

[jvolm]

I've figured it out. Schools know that they can't hire competent Comp Sci profs, so they just hire teachers with thick accents so you can't even understand the stupid **** they are saying.

I know it's a compsci thread, but I gotta bring in a little chemistry story here. I had an organic chem prof in college from India. His accent was incredibly thick. Anyway, one day during class, he started talking about "hashplas" and how it was so terribly important in all kinds of reactions, it governs this and that...and none of us had a clue what he was talking about. It was a sophmore in-major course, everyone there had at least 15 hours of chemistry, but had no one had a clue what "hashplas" was. All of the people near me looked at each other and shrugged. We were still trying to figure it out when towards the end of the 90 minute class some guy in the back excitedly blurted out "H-plus! He's saying H-plus!" The whole class sighed in unison. The prof just looked confused. From then on, we all referred to H-plus as "hashplas". Even in later classes, we all knew each other from that habit.


(FYI, H-plus is shorthand for a free proton. Free protons govern the pH in a solution, and are therefore quite important in most chemical reactions)

[Whipping Boy]

Originally posted by EscapeCharacter
"linux is an operating system like windows..."
this came from the same teacher that taught our vb class.
i started busting up

[ 18 September 2001: Message edited by: EscapeCharacter ]

I wonder if what he said simply came out wrong. Perhaps he meant to say something along the lines of "Linux, like Windows, is an operating system."

[vrek]

Originally posted by Fryguy8
I haven't necessarily had my profs say anything stupid yet (although i did get my first year CS teacher to swear at me), but has anybody noticed that CS teachers go SLOW!?

I did java for 2 semesters (freshman year, soph now), and we did a total of 3 weeks of GUI apps. The other 27 weeks of class or so was for loops, while loops, arrays etc. We spent almost 2 months on arrays. It's ridiculous.

NOW I'm in data structures (learning stuff like linked lists, trees, structures like that), and we haven't even started yet!! They refuse to follow the course schedule because supposedly 60-70% of people STILL don't understand the basics, even after going so slow. I'm getting insanely pissed about just sitting there and having him explain that instances of objects are addresses that point to the real object etc.

I wish he'd just go and drop these stupid people. If they can't get the basics then they shouldn't be CS majors...

Thats not bad. I am in Pre-calc as a Junior in highschool and 2 weeks ago we were going 1 page a day. Hell we even spent 5 days on a SINGLE homework assignment(only 20 problems). The sad part is most people were still confused.

As for stupid teachers the only thing I can say is that my teacher for physics started off the day deriving 5 formulas from d=t*v which I could of followed but in the beginning he used D for distance then at the about half way through the second equation he changed to x for distance with out telling anyone of this change. It's no wonder that I end up spending most of my time in that class helping other people.

My only other bad teacher was last years chemistry teacher. That teacher was not bad cause of her stupiditty, just because she had NO control over her class. Papers would be thrown across the room, shed yell at people and they would laugh. SHe couldn't do **** for punishment. It was fun but the class was not one for people who wanted to learn stuff.

[Trogdor]

As we are no longer limited to CS teachers, let me tell you about my current bio teacher. I am in grade 10 in an academic high school.

For those of us who know of homestar runner (http://www.homestarrunner.com/) , he talks exactly like Coach Z (http://www.homestarrunner.com/vcr_cz.html) . And goes off in the craziest tangents. For example:

"As you can see in the diagram, all mammals have a post-anal tail in . . . at least one part of their lives. Humans have a tail when they are . . . fetuses. Now that all of you are born, you only have the . . . tail bone. Make sure you never whack your tail bone. That can really hurt. You gotta sit in one of those . . . donut seats. I knew a student who hurt his tail bone after he fell off a stage. Hurt so much, he had it removed. No more donut seat for him."

[ThoughT]

You high school students are lucky to have any sort of programming classes available

Actually I really dont think that. I've taken Gr 10, 11 & 12 computer science at my high school and barely learned a thing from the teacher, most of the programming techniques that I know are from me fooling around with "turing" at home years before i got into highschool, cuz my older bro was taking the same classes and brought the enviroment home one day (:) i just love pirated warez, schools make it so easy)

half the time i would have to explain to the teacher how to use windows, like seriously! the teach didn't know how to operate windows, he once asked me how to "make the internet window go smaller and into the bar down there" lol, and i had to show him the min, max and close buttons.. omg...

right now im taking a computers in business course or something, and i thought i was going to go insane, at the beginning of the year we were taught the basics.. here's a couple titles from handouts I got.. "What is windows?" "what does windows do?" "the desktop" "computer system hardware" (and it shows the COMPUTER, MOUSE, KEYBOARD, MONITOR, PRINTER, wow, i never knew of those part before!, I'm glad i took this course!) my teacher shows us the inside of a computer, a junker 486 you'd think that she would know how it goes together? she was showing us the parts and she picked up the CPU and said "this is the processor, this is what does all the computer's thinking"... (:rolleyes:, omg) ..."it goes here", and she sets it on top of the bios chip and other ROM chips.. like omg it's not like the cpu socket ISN'T white.

but the one thing i hate about this class most is that we're actually supposed to be doing constuctive activities.. its just word processing, and the whole course is a promotion for MyCrowSoft, Corel, Intel, and Dell..

can someone kill me now?

[ThoughT]

actually wait, there was some good in my high school programming class one day..

the normal teach was away, prolly j@cking to some kids or something, so we had a sub, he didn't know a damn thing so our entire class got together and re-did a program.. ..here ill give you a lil background, recently the school board implemented that all computers had a lil program called "progkill" or "search and destroy" to kill programs like messenger, kazza, etc.. and when you put your cursor over it, it would popup with "get back to work" and i dont blame em, those programs are usually infectious when you allow students to install them. (but for some reason it doesn't kill bonzai buddy (sp?)) anyways, we found a way to kill progkill, progkill wasn't usually in the end task menu, but we found that when the progkill first loads its there, so easy enough, then we used trillian (cuz its such a good prog) and altered it's icon with microangelo to look like the progkill icon in the tray, and later we reprogrammed it to say "get back to work" when you put your mouse over it.. lol fun times, the thing is, our sub knew exactly what we were doing,

yup.. I say the most fun had at school is defying it, and causing mutanies!
:D

[JKlebs9225]

Ok, here's a strange story. I had a favorite teacher that taught a intro to computers class. He was a complete linux enthusiast. As a matter of fact, he is the one who got me started on linux, and many other students in the class also. He is an excellent teacher, but his degree is in economics?!?!!? Every time you went to his class, you came out hating windows more. He enlightened us on everything from their shady business tactics to their many security holes. The semester after that, I took a c++ class from a teacher recommended to me by the first one, who was also a linux freak. Since we were forced to use visual studio in the lab, he brought in a laptop and used cygnus windows for all of the examples. I wonder if just community colleges have teachers that know what they're doing. Now I am scared to transfer to the four year after hearing all of these horror stories.

[stoe]

Don't be afraid, just do your research ... sit in on some classes at a school you plan on attending, or go to a school known for engineering/computer science.

The school I currently attend is not a top computer science school, and as a matter of fact has only a small comp sci department with 3 or 4 professors. But all of them know what they are doing.

Don't assume that a school that has a computer science department will also neccessarily have competent professors. Do your homework before you burn all that money.

[knute]

In High School (sophmore year) I took a sociology class.
The sociology teacher was completely clueless about most things regarding interaction with other people.
The class really didn't like him, and he was always brusque when he was asked a question.

One day, he was upset about something that the class had done and asked us, in a very angry manner btw, "Am I stupid or what?!?"
So the class, picking up on his attitued, answered him, "YES!!!" :D

It was funny, because he actually looked surprised that he would get an answer.

True story, btw.

[CaptainPinko]

Originally posted by Trogdor
Ha! I used to live in London Ontario! Is Masonville still a mall, or is it its own suburb now? :p

bah, it's its own friggin mini-Toronto. 'nuff said.

and for Turing... oh the memories!!! i remember grade 10 and people couldn't understand the concept of a conditional (those these are probably the people who don't understand the concept of contingent statements... how do they get dressed in the morning?!?).

A really nice example of my cs teachers was when they wrote a class called ezio and since typing the class names was too long and "made it ugly" they said we should just extend the class so we could jsut tyupe the method names. also we had to capture every exception thrown... but not *DO* anyhthing with it...


and finally VB is my favourite programming by far, and when the line "on error: resume next" is literally a valid instruction i'm not sure why it's not a favourite with C h4XoRz everywhere

[ozdream]

Originally posted by JCool451
This was a statement made by the school IS/IT guy.

"Our new system is running windows 2000 and is completely secure. Everyone has individual log in accounts and all 'violators' will be actively hunted down." (Note in daily bulletin)

Turned in a memo, with a 4 page report attached, to him the next day on how crappy his "secure" system was. He said that it was "impossible, that it would not work, and that it could be logged.", eventhough the traffic is encypted. (Not exact qoute) So, I offered to do a demonstration for him. I showed him and my entire 2nd period how to do it. What did he do? Nothing and everyone in the school knew how to bypass all of his "security".

You would think they would do something after I spent 3 hours making a report for him!

I head the same thing from my daughters Middle School "IT guy" about XP Pro bla bla bla. So when I did a little "Slight of hand and was logged on he said "Well I am just a hacker and I don't count" Ya right :confused:


He also called my daughter a lier about running Linux and XP Pro on a dual boot system at home he said that is impossible and they are different OS's:eek:

Well at least he was right about them being different :p

[Ratboy68]

that if you were a solid programmer you'd always have a pretty well paying job. What joke that turned out to be....

[Boris27]

Originally posted by ozdream
I head the same thing from my daughters Middle School "IT guy" about XP Pro bla bla bla. So when I did a little "Slight of hand and was logged on he said "Well I am just a hacker and I don't count" Ya right :confused:


He also called my daughter a lier about running Linux and XP Pro on a dual boot system at home he said that is impossible and they are different OS's:eek:

Well at least he was right about them being different :p

If I were you I'd had requested a serious conversation with this fellow and politely piss all over him for calling your daughter a liar, when he clearly is wrong. If he then still kept up his big mouth, I'd file a complaint for incompetence against him at the director.... But thats only when he is clearly wrong, but won't admit it...

I hate those people.

[bazoukas]

ohhhh where to start,,,WHEEEERE TO START.


C++ instructor: "linux? Why you want to use that"
Same instructor: "I will ask so the CIS department will drop the UNIX course from the program." Thank God they didnt.

VB instructor a complete drunk: "Nobody uses Linux".


Oddly enough though most of the stuff I learn and still learn about Networking and Programming is from a Windows fanatic teacher. He loves the whole idea of Linux though but he really doesnt have time to learn it. But he changed my mind about windows only users. Not all of them are Nazis and morons.

[anmaxp]

back in my old high school days :)

teacher: so kids, where is the RAM ?
everyone stares cluelessly at the teacher...
techer: kids, its in THE MONITOR...... remember that... (points and touches a monitor.) THE MONITOR KIDS!

(a debate then starts between me and the teacher discussing about the whereabouts of the main memory... lol)

[JCool451]

Meh, what do you expect? It's high school! If you were paying for that stuff, then you might get teachers that know what they're talking about. ;)

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I head the same thing from my daughters Middle School "IT guy" about XP Pro bla bla bla. So when I did a little "Slight of hand and was logged on he said "Well I am just a hacker and I don't count" Ya right


He also called my daughter a lier about running Linux and XP Pro on a dual boot system at home he said that is impossible and they are different OS's

Well at least he was right about them being different

OMG! Not even the IT guy at my school is that stupid and closed minded! He still hasn't fixed the problem I submitted to him, I gave it to him around a month ago!

[canon006]

How about a C++ review full of inaccuracies and somethings that were just plain wrong, the most obvious error- the assertation that if x=7 then x-- = 5, professor confused a number of people with that one.

[bwkaz]

That is kinda weird, though (and it happens in C, too).

If x=7, then (x--) == 7, but x == 6.

http://kadzban.is-a-geek.net/notallthere.gif

;)

[CaptainPinko]

"C is a good programming language."

if by good you mean avoided like the plague unless you are forced into it...



oh, i'm kidding folks seriously...

...not even our teachers are that dumb!

[terribleRobbo]

Originally posted by CaptainPinko
"C is a good programming language."

if by good you mean avoided like the plague unless you are forced into it...

It's not _That_ bad.

Well.

Actually... Hmm... You may have a point.


On an unrelated note, my dad is always telling me to get 'a real operating system'.
He's running Windows 98.

[jlmb]

I heard that one computer science teacher once said:"Don't be afraid to burn cds with virus infected files the laser will kill them". And the students actually had to explain him why that was extremaly idiotic.

[Boris27]

Originally posted by terribleRobbo
On an unrelated note, my dad is always telling me to get 'a real operating system'.
He's running Windows 98.

Laugh in his face. A real operating system... pff... Ask how much BSODs he gets a day.

[hardcore]

Originally posted by jlmb
I heard that one computer science teacher once said:"Don't be afraid to burn cds with virus infected files the laser will kill them". And the students actually had to explain him why that was extremaly idiotic.

Oh good god that teacher needs to be spanked by a branch from the tree of knowledge...

[jvolm]

"640K ought to be enough RAM for anybody."

Wasn't my comp sci prof, but still.....I can't believe that hasn't been posted in the week (?) that this thread has been up....

[CaptainPinko]

Originally posted by jvolm
"640K ought to be enough RAM for anybody."

Wasn't my comp sci prof, but still.....I can't believe that hasn't been posted in the week (?) that this thread has been up....

if we are gonna include that then we might as well post "hey, i don't need to comment." it's sad because one of the most brilliant programmers i know is rendered next to useless by his inability to work in a team...

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by jvolm
...I can't believe that hasn't been posted in the week (?) that this thread has been up.... It's been here for much, much, much longer than a week.

If you go to the first page, you'll see that the first post in this thread was from two years ago (Sep. 17, 2001). It died once, around Sep. 23 of that year, only to be resurrected by JCool451 two years later (Sep. 26, '03).

[jlmb]

Originally posted by bwkaz
It's been here for much, much, much longer than a week.

If you go to the first page, you'll see that the first post in this thread was from two years ago (Sep. 17, 2001). It died once, around Sep. 23 of that year, only to be resurrected by JCool451 two years later (Sep. 26, '03).

Nice history class

[dlausevic]

Taking a stupid intro to computer science course, my 25 year old professor from Princeton explained what a database was, "It is a file with a .mdb extension, and holds information with tables and stuff." Playing dumb, I asked what other extensions existed for databases. He replied that mdb was the only one. I asked, "What about oracle sql or dbase formats? Don't they have extensions as well?" Simply stated, he only knew of m$ suites and knew nothing else. I dropped the class. When he bumped into me on a future date, I told him idiots don't belong in front of a classroom. I had better things to do. Granted, he didn't last too long on the staff. I couldn't imagine why.

[Antrix]

I am shocked, reading some of the things that computer science teachers come out with.

I'm going university next year to study computer science, HOPING to get somebody who can teach me, and actually know their stuff (I'm sure they exist).

Antrix

[CptKrf]

It isn't just CS teachers. Pearls of wisdom can come from people who should know better...

So... As close as I can remember...

Watson of IBM back in the '50s - "I can see a need for maybe a dozen computers worldwide"

Popular Science in the '60s. "Computers will always grow larger due the nature of size/cost benefits. The idea of one small enough for the home is pure science fiction"

Intel management to the CP/M development team in the 70's. "We are shutting down this project because of our determination that software sales and development will never be profitable"

Editor of Byte magazine in the 80's. "It is very unlikely that anyone is ever going to need the power of a 486 for a desktop PC."

B. Gates in the 90's. "Linux is a amateur development for nerds that has no relevance for MS - next question?"


CptKrf

[jvolm]

B. Gates in the 90's. "Linux is a amateur development for nerds ....- next question?"

Well, he was at least half right....<ducks>

[Wolface]

quote:B. Gates in the 90's. "Linux is a amateur development for nerds ....- next question?"



Well, he was at least half right....<ducks>

--------------------

linux looks very professional to me, Microsoft is now publicly aware of the Linux threat and my dad is using it so I really don't think is just for nerds even though is still not user friendly.

[jvolm]

I agree, my comment was only a lame joke, hence the <ducks> at the end.

[Wolface]

Originally posted by jvolm
I agree, my comment was only a lame joke, hence the <ducks> at the end.

your <ducks> reminded me of fallout tactics... haaa good times...

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by CptKrf
B. Gates in the 90's. "Linux is a amateur development for nerds that has no relevance for MS - next question?"

Gates's OS (XP) takes up about 6 gb in default installation. My Linux box takes up, after tossing in games, editors, web browsers, emulation software, KDE /and/ XFCE, etc., etc., ect., in less than 3gb.

[Pafnoutios]

A guy I work with...
When he started about two years ago, his PC (running NT4, I think, maybe 98) was having terrible problems. It kept crashing horribly and he couldn't get any work done. The guy from IT that came to investigate the problem told him it was crashing because he had rearranged the icons in his Start(tm) menu. (i.e. moving all the MS Office programs into an "Office" folder and such.)

[Kaligraphic]

Originally posted by bwkaz
That is kinda weird, though (and it happens in C, too).

If x=7, then (x--) == 7, but x == 6.

http://kadzban.is-a-geek.net/notallthere.gif


Because the postfixes take effect after the line is executed.
if x=7, then (--x) == 6, and x == 6.
because the prefixes take effect before the operation.

------

My "fundamentals of windows" teacher explained that files have "resource forks and data forks".

I had to give a mention that Windows uses FAT and NTFS. FAT, of course, doesn't have forks, and NTFS uses streams, of which there may be more than two. This, of course, completely fails to take into account the sort of filesystem sensible people use, ext3.

Of course, he's a mac and amiga guy at heart.

[sceadu]

My teacher said that Javascript was a programming language. All the kids in the class agreed with her too. I didn't even want to have to go into explaining the difference between scripting and programming and compilers and interpreters and all that, so I just shut up.

[silverblade]

Heh this brings back memories...

We had a lecturer in our college who seemed very dumb. He used to mumble a lot and had a bald head and a beard, and looked a bit daft.

But anyway, one day early on in the course, he said next lesson we'd be taking apart a computer. Oh, goodie!

That lesson arrived, and he had an old computer on the desk which someone else had taken apart for him. Fine. He then held up an I/O card and said "this... is a sound card"

Needless to say, that particular moment in time stuck in everyones memories until this day and everyone still laughs about it.

He always used to carry around a yellow box filled with textbooks. And it turned out his assignments were all practically identical to the small "test yourself" type things included in the textbook for the A-level classes (I was on the BTEC one - this is in the UK, by the way...) so he never made his own questions up!

We were playing a game at Christmas once where we'd pick a letter and he'd ask us a question where the answer began with that letter. Someone picked H, and he asked what word beginning with H described some text on a web page you could click on. Or something like that.

Someone answered "hyperlink!" and he said "no... the correct answer is... hyper-text link."

And on that matter, his son was apparently teaching him HTML, which he was teaching us!

He got on everyones nerves and at one point we even all signed a petition to try to get rid of him, but no... Now he actually is the head of one of the advanced courses!

Eventually, I made a computer game where you had to catch the falling textbooks and avoid questions :D The ending was quite satisfying - his head explodes.

[cozmo]

For everybody criticizing their former teachers I find it odd that not a single person here has picked up on the poor grammar of the thread subject line. "Stupidest" is a word, but very poor use of the english language.

Dumb people say dumb things, and none of us should be surprised. I am the type of person who has to rock the boat and correct someone when they are wrong. I wont profess to be perfect, but I have a pet peive for people in a position of authority who show all the signs of a frontal labotomy. I would be irate if I am paying for a quality education when the teacher is half assing it or doesn't have the expert knowledge to qualify them for their position.

What is worse is you may have to work with some of your peers from those classes. Hopefully they are smart enough to recognize cow poop when they smell it. :mad:

[Trogdor]

That's nothing. I have a desire to kill any who misuse apostrophes.

Trogdor's :) FUN:) Apostrophe Lesson, you Morons:D :D

Use apostrophes ONLY to make posessive, or make a contraction.

Good Examples::cool:
The cat's feet are wet.
The football teams's (or teams') salary is high.
Don't eat paint.

BAD Examples::(
I burned eight CD's.
Dont break my saucer.
I like to eat taco's.

[jvolm]

cozmo-

What exactly is a peive? I love exotic animals, and I would love to have one as a pet. And while I agree that those in authority should have their laboratories completely intact, I also think they should use verb agreement when condemning grammar mistakes.

peeve
lobotomy ("Hole in the lobe (of the brain)")
I would be irate if I am paying (was paying)

Sorry...I'm not normally a spelling/grammar Nazi, but in this context, it was just too tempting. Please, take in the spirit in which it is given, that of levity.

Oh, and any spelling/grammar errors in MY post are because your browser doesn't render what I'm typing correctly.

[trc]

about iostream.h:

"a while ago someone at microsoft wrote this header file so that you can output text in a console using 'cout'."

/me shakes head

[Liquido]

Mine was when we were in Data Structure class. He was explaining about the stack. Then he made an abstraction on the board to explain the process, but he wrote "Puss(y)" as he meant by "Push". But until the class was over, he didn't change it. He even said "puss" during the class. I had no idea if he did it intentionally or not, or what the hell was on his mind. pathetic!

[cozmo]

Okay you got me. I did say I didnt claim to be perfect. It is not like I said something tremendously stupid like this guy:
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." --A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

[sceadu]

The guy FedEx's his net income statement to his professor every year, too. Just out of pure spite. :)

[jephthah]

i think it was about 5 years ago (or so), one of my engineering lecturers stated:

"650 MHz is about the fastest speed processors will ever reach. There are physical limitations to faster clock speeds that just can't be overcome."

[Kaligraphic]

"HTML is a binary code" (emphasis mine)

[MartinB]

Said by an IT manager at the University I'm at, in response to questions regarding his proposed replacement of a reliable Unix server with a new Windows server:

"Well, Windows runs on top of Unix anyway".

----------------------------

This was one I overheard in my old college, which using Pentium 3 667MHz machines with Windows 98, networked together for Internet access, printing and student file storage:

Teacher: "You need to say what hardware you used for your Excel assignment. For example, did you use a dumb terminal or a PC?"
Student: "Ummm.... uhhh... I'm... not sure..."
Teacher: "Well, these computers are on a network, so they don't have their own processing power, so it's a dumb terminal."
Student: "Okay... So I should put that in my evaluation then?"
Teacher: "Yes."

----------------------------

And finally, in a Stage 1 (i.e. Lower than highschool level) HTML class that I was forced into taking during college:

Teacher: "You failed the assignment"
Me: "Why?"
Teacher: "You wrote "This website is maintained by:" instead of "This website maintained by:""
Me: "Well, that's a bit stupid isn't it? The assignment is supposed to test my ability to write HTML, not accurately copy grammatical errors".
Teacher: "The OCR exam boards are heavily secretarial based, so you should be able to show that you can follow instructions accurately"
Me: "But the course is called 'OCR Internet Technology - Stage 1', not 'Following Instructions - Stage 1'"
Teacher: "Well, it's their decision"
Me: "I've probably written better web pages than they ever could. You can't fscking fail me on this."
Teacher: "Well, maybe. I don't care. It's up to them."

After a few minutes of this, I ended leaving the room and never bothered to go back.

----------------------------

Oh yeah, nearly missed this one, an E-mail from one of the IT managers at my University regarding availability of OpenOffice on university machines (Pentium 4's, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Pro etc.):

"We considered Open Office and Star Office, but found that we don't have the resources necessary to install them."

Bunch of lying bastards. :(
This one really pissed me off. I'm screaming revenge now, whilst printing my assignments on my only horribly blurred printer, and burning all my electronic copies to CD to hand in, in .sxw format. Should give 'em a fun time marking my work. ;)

[Pafnoutios]

Originally posted by MartinB

Teacher: "You wrote "This website is maintained by:" instead of "This website maintained by:""

I hate bad grammar.

[cozmo]

Okay, I apologize. I never should have brought up grammar. I should be beaten severely and forced to sit through some of these teacher's courses with my eyelids glued open, and of course one basic grammar course.

In the mean time I found this article today: http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/unix/story/0,10801,86597,00.html

Why is it the more important somebody gets the less of a requirement it is to be competent? :confused:

[JCool451]

Originally posted by bwkaz
It's been here for much, much, much longer than a week.

If you go to the first page, you'll see that the first post in this thread was from two years ago (Sep. 17, 2001). It died once, around Sep. 23 of that year, only to be resurrected by JCool451 two years later (Sep. 26, '03).

You shouldn't give me so much credit. This topic was too good to not start up again. I'm surprised it ever died in the first place.

[EmperorPenguin]

The only two that I've got are an beginner level C++ course where the prof went on about the "reel" number set. If one cannot speak english, one should not be teaching at an english university.

My management IT prof also told the class that Linux is only 3 years old (as of September '03). I was tempted to lend her my copy of Revolution OS.

[EmperorPenguin]

Originally posted by Trogdor
Good Examples::cool:
The cat's feet are wet.
The football teams's (or teams') salary is high.
Don't eat paint.

BAD Examples::(
I burned eight CD's.
Dont break my saucer.
I like to eat taco's.

Technically:

"The football team's salary is high." would be correct, as would "The football teams' salaries were high."

And my understanding is that plural acronyms should also bear an apostrophe, which would make CD's correct, despite the absence of the apostrophe in "compact discs".

Aside from those, I agree with your examples.

Of course, conventions vary by country and change through time, but this is what I learned back in my school days ... somehow they assume we university students should know all this stuff already :D

[bubblenut]

When asking advice on setting up PHP on my box at home my lecturer told me to switch global vars on becuase "leaving it of is just annoying", not to mention one of PHP's biggest security holes.

[mister_math]

Originally posted by MartinB
Said by an IT manager at the University I'm at, in response to questions regarding his proposed replacement of a reliable Unix server with a new Windows server:

"Well, Windows runs on top of Unix anyway".

Technically he's right. Windows does run on top of Unix ... X-Windows! :-)

Originally posted by cozmo
I should be beaten severely and forced to sit through some of these teacher's courses with my eyelids glued open, and of course one basic grammar course.

Man I love Kubrick...

Originally posted by EmperorPenguin
Technically:

"The football team's salary is high." would be correct, as would "The football teams' salaries were high."

Interestingly enough, if a singular noun ends in an 's', it is correct to have "s's"; that is, "The bus's wheel" is gramatically correct.

Just my $0.02.

[andycrofts]

..My BT lecturer reckoned 1 megaherz was about as fast as a processor would run (we were using the (then) new 8080....)

Actually, at the time, I thought he was correct...!

[hyp_spec]

teacher in my school, (i'll never take the class) but i've seen her think the cd tray was a cup holder and that a pop up taking up the whole screen was a system failure, then she didn't know how to turn the power button off NO LIE!

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by dlausevic
Taking a stupid intro to computer science course, my 25 year old professor from Princeton explained what a database was, "It is a file with a .mdb extension, and holds information with tables and stuff." Playing dumb, I asked what other extensions existed for databases. He replied that mdb was the only one. I asked, "What about oracle sql or dbase formats? Don't they have extensions as well?" Simply stated, he only knew of m$ suites and knew nothing else. I dropped the class. When he bumped into me on a future date, I told him idiots don't belong in front of a classroom. I had better things to do. Granted, he didn't last too long on the staff. I couldn't imagine why.
I think you'll find you learn more on your own than in class anyway. You'll probably pick up a lot of facts in class, and if you have no previous coding experience it may be your cane for the first year but after that you should be able to learn on your own.

This isn't really stupid, it's more annoying. My com sci professor (Introduction to Object Oriented Programming) continuously gives g++ human attributes by telling us what syntax it likes and doesn't like. I know he's catering to the non-technical but it's quite annoying still. And he also doesn't refer to these syntax likes specifically as g++ features, but usually as features of the computer. Ex:
"The computer doesn't like it when you write it this way."

But at least we're using g++!



I do have a really good one though. My English teacher, who thinks he should spend time teaching us web development is convinced that css and proper xhtml is the way EVERY website should be structured. I'm unsure of W3C standards, but according to him formatting a page with tables is wrong for xhtml 1.1. He prefers to use CSS, which works fine if you have the time and effort to make it work in opera, gecko(sp?), and IE; and if you want to exclude users with older machines and old browsers. And if you want your page to look strange in browsers that have javascript disabled.
His site doesn't work in Opera on Linux btw. I'd show it, but I'm afraid he'll stumble onto this as he searches for links to his site that he didn't okay. Maybe when I pass the class!
He also forces us to write articles on, and play, Deus Ex. Which I find quite annoying, cause I don't like RPG very well, and I only like FPS (first person shooter) if it's in multiplayer on a local LAN.
I did not go to college to play games. And I don't like getting C's from a guy who can't make web-pages that work in Opera. My writing may be ****, well ok I can't write a paper worth crap.

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by ThoughT
Actually I really dont think that. I've taken Gr 10, 11 & 12 computer science at my high school and barely learned a thing from the teacher, most of the programming techniques that I know are from me fooling around with "turing" at home years before i got into highschool, cuz my older bro was taking the same classes and brought the enviroment home one day (:) i just love pirated warez, schools make it so easy)

half the time i would have to explain to the teacher how to use windows, like seriously! the teach didn't know how to operate windows, he once asked me how to "make the internet window go smaller and into the bar down there" lol, and i had to show him the min, max and close buttons.. omg...

right now im taking a computers in business course or something, and i thought i was going to go insane, at the beginning of the year we were taught the basics.. here's a couple titles from handouts I got.. "What is windows?" "what does windows do?" "the desktop" "computer system hardware" (and it shows the COMPUTER, MOUSE, KEYBOARD, MONITOR, PRINTER, wow, i never knew of those part before!, I'm glad i took this course!) my teacher shows us the inside of a computer, a junker 486 you'd think that she would know how it goes together? she was showing us the parts and she picked up the CPU and said "this is the processor, this is what does all the computer's thinking"... (:rolleyes:, omg) ..."it goes here", and she sets it on top of the bios chip and other ROM chips.. like omg it's not like the cpu socket ISN'T white.

but the one thing i hate about this class most is that we're actually supposed to be doing constuctive activities.. its just word processing, and the whole course is a promotion for MyCrowSoft, Corel, Intel, and Dell..

can someone kill me now?

Well, some of us were blessed in our high school CS courses. My school has two years, the first was VB and the second was c++ (but with a more com sci and less language specific approach). The c++ course taught, as far as I can tell, everything we learn our freshman year in programming. And the teacher was fairly good, he was easy going and pretty bright.
The trouble was we used M$ visual studio on 350MHz PII's with no where near enough RAM. It was a bit slow, but got it done eventually. Since it was all terminal I could still code in linux and hand it in though.
I don't think he knew what linux was though, nor did he likely care. As far as he was concerned com sci got him a pay check, and it was a pain in the butt. But he was funny.

[canon006]

This was just a few hours ago in class. My professor asked me if I was running VC++ on my laptop. That wouldn't be so bad but my laptop is an Apple iBook and was sitting in front of me at the time, open and on with the bright white glowing apple facing him. I thought he might be kidding at first, when I realized he wasn't I replied "Uh, no, I used G++."

My roommate and I found that rather amusing.

[StarTiger]

"LCD displays will come down in price and will completly replace tube monitors and TV in a year to a year and a half."


Stated by my high school physics teacher my junior year. I fraduated in 2000, so this was probably around late 1998.

I'm still waiting for and LCD of any quality to be any direct competiton price wise to a CRT.

[StarTiger]

All these quotes, and no one has said the untimate one:

By an IBM exec who i don't feel like looking up right now:

"Some day the world may actually have five computers."

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
My English teacher, <...> is convinced that css and proper xhtml is the way EVERY website should be structured. I'm unsure of W3C standards, but according to him formatting a page with tables is wrong for xhtml 1.1. He's 100% right.

Sorry.

In XHTML (not HTML 4 Transitional, or something like that), tables (and all markup tags, actually) are meant to be used to describe what their data is, not how to display it.

If you want to specify how something should be displayed, you use CSS. If your users don't have a CSS capable browser, then perhaps you should provide a link. It's not like it's hard to find a browser created after Netscape 4.79...

[madcompnerd]

However, css support is varied between gecko, IE, and opera. I don't know if AOL's support is worth anything, and an AOL user doesn't know what a browser is even less be able to install one.
Web development is not about using the latest standard, it's about using the compatible standard. Right now, transitional is probably the best supported. CSS is not well supported, and it's supported differently between browsers.
But I know he's right about the standards. But when I make a website I want a dillo user to see it. Sometimes I'll even think of lynx, but rarely.

[bwkaz]

Right (well... perhaps -- IE is only different from other browsers because it doesn't even support CSS2, and any other differences are, I'm guessing, bugs in the browsers).

But that's not what he was talking about. Let me quote your original post on the subject:

Originally posted by madcompnerd
but according to him formatting a page with tables is wrong for xhtml 1.1. He is completely correct; that is wrong for XHTML 1.1. The preferred way to format your page for XHTML 1.1 (and incidentally, most other XML doctypes...) is CSS.

[Trogdor]

I am the webmaster of my school's website - OSA Online (http://oldscona.epsb.ca/) - I inherited the mess. Only compliant with IE. Uses tons of javascript. Buggy HTML. It is SUCH a mess.

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by StarTiger
All these quotes, and no one has said the untimate one:

By an IBM exec who i don't feel like looking up right now:

"Some day the world may actually have five computers."

That guy was Watson.

[Darksamurai]

I'm self taught, so I'd have to make fun of myself. :rolleyes:

[Wolface]

like it's so hard to make fun of yourself :D

yesterday I was trying to find what was wrong with my samba server... until I found out I hadn't started the service after booting up

[The Linux Kid]

Originally posted by Darksamurai
I'm self taught, so I'd have to make fun of myself. :rolleyes:

Join the club!! But there are some disadvantages to learning yourself i.e. my first PHP program had more bugs in it than a pre release of windoze xp. If I had a teacher, I could have asked them to lead me through fixing it.....If I had a GOOD teacher that is ;)

[DSwain]

Not really a CS class, but oh well. Heres what one said

"Wireless network won't work with shiny things"

i'm not so sure if she was right or wrong to be honest, but it seems that's a pretty darn false statement to me.

oh i remember another thing...different teacher....

"95% of the time rebooting will fix all your problems"

Win wise he was right (to a degree) but still amusing to hear.

That's all i can remember as of now. I just started high school though, so maybe more to come later.

[BritishNemesis]

I've got a couple more to add... I've had some really great ones during my time taking CS at uni. One of my all time favorites actually happened a couple weeks ago.

I have a boring 4th year class called Ethics and Business Management.... one day the prof came in and was getting ready to start class. Everything he is doing is being projected from his computer onto a screen so the class can follow (I'm sure you guys know the routine)... and it appears he is having problems logging in to our university network. He begins saying that the network is down and that he won't be able to log in or to teach off his powerpoints...

I walk to the front of the class and plug the network cable into his network card.

Same teacher next week... Starts up the computer yet again but this time the projector doesn't turn on. After a while of pressing different buttons he informs the class that the projector is broken and that we'll just have to do something else for the class.

Yet again I walk to the front of the class and plug the power cord into the projector.

Next story....

We had a linux exam in one of my networking classes covering the general aspects of redhat and linux. We spent a couple days studying for this exam, and went over all the main concepts inside and out. We get the exam and there are 10 questions straight off the top that have to do with the shortcut keys in the command line for tabbing forwards 5 characters and backwards... etc.

At the end of the exam 5 guys get up and systematically throw their exams in the teachers face. Needless to say... he got a very poor review and the entire class signed a protest against him. The rest of the exam was BS in the same way... not testing any general concepts just very specific useless shortcut keys, or obscure commands.

I can't stand it when profs exam useless subject matter and completely skip the main core concepts.

[madcompnerd]

I feel for the teacher with the network difficulties. If I were in front of a class and couldn't log onto the network I'd probably never think to check if the physical media were connected or not (why would they not be?!).
The projector professor however is absent minded.

I understand your point on the last one. It does seem like sometimes com s tests especially can become a test to see if you understand nuances and not if you know logic and the basics of the system you're in. I once lost points on a test because I couldn't draw a traditional ampersand (&) I instead used the ones that look like crosses. The bad part is that I even made a comment about it in the code. It was only one point though, not worth contesting.


Did you say UNI? As in University of Northern Iowa?

[Kaligraphic]

The ampersand that looks kind of like "Et" is actually the older form. It comes from the Latin word "et", meaning "and".

[madcompnerd]

No, this one looks like a '+' with a little circle on the left of the vertical.

[Jeff Dyer]

This is an engineering "computer methods" class which 95% of the people don't know squat about programming. The teacher never really said anything stupid, most of the stupidness comes from the teacher assistant.

For example I'm looking at some of the ridiculous things he claimed were "wrong" with my assignments and has taken points off for. I understand there are certain standards he is looking for on the assignments but some of the things are of personal preference and should not be the reason of lost points...

1) indenting three instead of five spaces, everyone I know uses different spaces, some people use two spaces indentation, other uses seven, as far as I'm concened as long as you keep consistant and you can read it fine there is not problem with it, minus 5%.

2) printing out a few new lines so all the data is not as crammed together, minus 5%

3) using for (i=0; i<3; i++) instead of for (i=1; i<=3; i++), minus 5%

4) using a variable name 'p' instead of 'rho', minus 5%

5) and my personal favorite, losing 10% on an assignment for passing it in during the regular lab class first and not hearing directions which were given later on in the class.


I have lots more of these stupid point deductions and in case you didn't figure out I've stopped taking this class seriosuly a while ago.

[hardcore]

The spacing stuff is ricoculous in my book. The p and the rho distinction i can see, especially in a classroom situation. As I'm sure you've learned (the hard way), profs and TA's can be sticklers about grading, especially TA's. I've found that most of my TA's are inadiquate in the subject being taught and follow the grading sheet exactly.

So take this advice: do whatever the magical grading sheet tells you to do.

[MorphiusFaydal]

i had a good CS1 teacher my sophomore year in HS, it was the last year they taught C++, (last year, 02-03).. when i heard they were going to java, i decided i would teach myself some slightly more useful stuff at home..

but still..

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/ <-- Computer Stupidities, a site full of dumb stuff people have said/done with computers...

Chris

[chris_14]

How about this one from a German professor?


The German alphabet approximately consists of 26 letters.


To tell the truth, it has exactly 26 letters :D

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by chris_14
To tell the truth, it has exactly 26 letters :D


Ah ah ah -- plus the schlaussess (god I hope I spelled that right). It looks like a capital beta, and is a somewhat shorthand version of two 'S'es.

[jvolm]

http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/ <-- Computer Stupidities, a site full of dumb stuff people have said/done with computers...

Oh, dear God, thank you. That stuff is hilarious.

[MorphiusFaydal]

Originally posted by Trogdor
Ah ah ah -- plus the schlaussess (god I hope I spelled that right). It looks like a capital beta, and is a somewhat shorthand version of two 'S'es.

actually.. they have removed that letter from the language, and the only place you will find it is in the word 'straBe' (street) i had to use an english 'B' for it, cause i dont know if everyones browser/OS will dispaly an thingummy-bob

i though it was 'estsett'.. but im almost certainly wrong..

Chris

[Crito]

Originally posted by Ratboy68
that if you were a solid programmer you'd always have a pretty well paying job. What joke that turned out to be....

Well, this is probably OT for the thread, but the most astute thing a CS teacher ever said to me happened in high school. He wrote on my report card: "I'd like to have Crito as an employee but I'd hate to be his coworker."

The man's name was Mr. Lindquist and for years I wasn't sure if I had been complimented or insulted. He frequently made mistakes and I frequently corrected him in front of the class. Then I entered into the IT workforce and realized what he meant. Should have taken a class in office politics instead. Hard/good work isn't nearly as important.

[mXskweeb]

I wonder if just community colleges have teachers that know what they're doing. Now I am scared to transfer to the four year after hearing all of these horror stories.
<my_opinion>

Go to a big name university if you want to spend four years engaged in politically correct academic masturbation with a bunch of out of touch professors who have spent the last 20 years hermetically sealed in the university system bubble. If you want hard working instructors who at least *try* to build their teaching approach on a foundation of competance and relevance, go to DeVry or one of the schools that caters to the full-time workforce and try to stick with night classes. Not only will a lot of the instructors be working professionals who spend their days actually working in their industry, but you will be in classes with older people who are already into their careers, are there to learn, and who can be good points of contact for opportunities. I think community colleges rock for the same reasons--but of course you can't usually get a four year degree from them. Note, University of Phoenix may be an exception to the schools for working folk theory as each class is only 5 weeks long so they tend not to go very deep, but I haven't personally attended there. If this thread doesn't illustrate that we're wasting our money on traditional Universities, I don't know what would. So save your money--if you can't find a school that earns your dollars with the quality education you want, at least go to the cheapest lousy school you can and save a little dough. Unless you go to MIT etc., five years into your career no one is going to care where you graduated from.

</my_opinion>

Whoa, that rant came on unexpectedly.

[canon006]

A close friend of mine did a DeVry type thing, school's called Citone. They taught him how to pass the A+ and MCP exams, that's about it. I on the other hand am in my third year at a major university and feel as though I've learned so much, I really feel like I'm being educated and not just taught something. My friend is now sending in applications to various 2 year schools to get a start, eventually he'll transfer to a 4 year school.

I think it's interesting that even though we were supposed to be new at this stuff, we were still able to point out problems with our teachers.

P.S. In low level classes my profs were mostly graduate students doing the teacher thing part time, in higher level classes the profs seem mostly retirees from the industry, or left because they wanted to teach. But that's me, your mileage may vary.

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by mXskweeb
<my_opinion>

Go to a big name university if you want to spend four years engaged in politically correct academic masturbation with a bunch of out of touch professors who have spent the last 20 years hermetically sealed in the university system bubble. If you want hard working instructors who at least *try* to build their teaching approach on a foundation of competance and relevance, go to DeVry or one of the schools that caters to the full-time workforce and try to stick with night classes. Not only will a lot of the instructors be working professionals who spend their days actually working in their industry, but you will be in classes with older people who are already into their careers, are there to learn, and who can be good points of contact for opportunities. I think community colleges rock for the same reasons--but of course you can't usually get a four year degree from them. Note, University of Phoenix may be an exception to the schools for working folk theory as each class is only 5 weeks long so they tend not to go very deep, but I haven't personally attended there. If this thread doesn't illustrate that we're wasting our money on traditional Universities, I don't know what would. So save your money--if you can't find a school that earns your dollars with the quality education you want, at least go to the cheapest lousy school you can and save a little dough. Unless you go to MIT etc., five years into your career no one is going to care where you graduated from.

</my_opinion>

Whoa, that rant came on unexpectedly.

You don't go to a big university to learn a career. You go there to seperate yourself from all the other idiots going there. So you can show on your resume how you stood above the crowd in your university.
You also go to them because they have far better class availibility than a community college can dream of offering. They have greater than BS and BA degrees, masters and PH D's. The professors are not all bumbling idiots, many of them are very intelligent.
But there are always bad apples, and they are fun to make fun of. Universities are huge, and they make mistakes on choice of faculty. But they also have some awesome faculty.

Things you can do at a big university that a community college can't offer:
1.) Participate in research projects that actually contribute to the scientific and engineering communities. My school (Iowa State) is developing magnetic refrigeration, among many other things (that one is just the coolest).
2.) Listen to speakers in your chosen industry from around the world, who are actually working on big money projects in their field.
3.) Learn from professors who are researching in their field, and continuing there learning through their own mind instead of community college classes.

What you can do at a community college:
1.) Take night classes. Universities suck for night class offerings.
2.) Save money, not a lot (it costs roughly twice for tuition at my school). Room and board is much more expensive.
3.) Take remedial classes.
4.) Have REALLY bad teachers who don't even know what curriculum is.



If you wanna see academia at it's worst go to a public high school. The Universities are a zone of enlightenment compared to those school boards.

[mXskweeb]

Originally posted by canon006
A close friend of mine did a DeVry type thing, school's called Citone. They taught him how to pass the A+ and MCP exams, that's about it.
Not to split hairs (I assure you I don't have a dog in this fight--not that it is a fight), but DeVry doesn't include classes relating to passing A+ or MCXX exams in its regular curricula. They offer accredited Bachelor of Science degrees in CIS, EET, Business and Accounting. That means their degree requirements meet the same minimum standards as all of the state and private univerities who share the same accreditation. I am not trying to proselityze here, I just wanted to point out a common misconception that DeVry is a technical school, when it is actually a university (hence the name DeVry University (http://www.devry.edu/) ).

madcompnerd, I don't dissagree with anything you assert regarding top-shelf universities, or community colleges either. And you are so right, one doesn't go to college to learn a career. The point is that educational pitfalls and advantages, and the life benefits associated with them, can be found in many paths. Thus, a person evaluating his options should not feel roped into only one just because in the past that route has been credited with the greatest rewards. So if one likes his university and thinks what he is getting out of it is worth his (or his parent's, or the taxpayer's) money, great. But if you think, as others have noted (http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/1998/may_1998_5.html), that the American university system is and has been for some time in a downward spiral regarding the value of its educational product, then save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and go get a library card. Along the way get your degreee wherever you can, go to work and earn some money so you can travel the world, go to conferences featuring industry leaders, and have those experiences you missed out on when you weren't attending PCU, but on your own terms.

Shwew... must be my day to rant.

[canon006]

DeVry doesn't include classes relating to passing A+ or MCXX exams in its regular curricula

I was not aware of that, I stand corrected. I guess I never paid enough attention to the TV ads.

[Citadel]

DeVry is okay, but it is less demanding than the local University, however DeVry tries to be realistic about it's goal and they are up front. The goal at DeVry is to train students to work in the IT field and than help facilitate them into a job. On the other hand the local University is more focused on the 'science' and 'theory' of computers.

Another way to look at it is that the local University will focus on system implementation more than Devry which is more focused on solution implementation and commercial products, for example, Java and .Net. The reason for this is because DeVry bases it's success on getting the student into the entry level or higher job.

So after completing DeVry you will know how to program in .Net and you will know how to administer Oracle, you will know UML, you will be familiar with Visual Studio.Net and you also will have taken many business courses such as economics, financial mathematics, managerial accounting, financial accounting, organizational behavior, and statistics.

At the local University you wouldn't take many business courses but it is more math intensive (Discrete math, theory of computation).

I also agree that probably the best route would be to spend $10,000 on the best books and learn on your own, however who the hell can afford to do that. Who would be motivated enough to follow through, and most people need a job. From what I've seen, the local University is becomming more of a business like DeVry, it is charging more money and well the truth is that neither one is worth it.

If you graduate from DeVry than you will have a long way to go in order to call yourself a computer scientist. Here are the courses at MIT < http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html >. They have some graduate courses up there too that you can download. I think that the local University even though it concentrates more on system implemenation such as how to build a compiler, an operating system, etc. You will still have a way to go even when you get out of there.

Say you go to DeVry and you get your job afterward, well that's not bad at all for someone with a family, or who plans to have a family, however it would be dissapointing to the guy who want's to design his own middleware platform and operating system because he won't be prepared! lol.

[mXskweeb]

I had an instructor for a 300 level networking class once explain that DNS servers were routers that routed traffic across the Internet.

Citadel, I agree. Although I would add that while DeVry may be considered less demanding academically, they are more demanding that you demonstrate practical ability before they hand you a degree, thus more or less equalizing the the levels of difficulty. As one former employer put it, he could hire graduates from DeVry and expect that they knew how to do [fill in skill here]. Whereas he could hire an ASU graduate and expect that he had studied [fill in job skill here]. Of course as you noted, that does cater to the goal of getting a job more than that of pursuing life as a computer scientist.

[Darksamurai]

What cracks me up is I'm working at a retail computer store, and I'm certified all over the place...

What stopped me complaining is the guy with the bachelor's in information technology working the register...

computer science degrees are becoming the equivilant of "journalism" and "literature" degrees these days...

[Trogdor]

What cracks me up is that I know more about the G5 and OS X then the salesman. And I've only used OS X twice. And I am 15. And he was impressed that I could use the terminal :eek: .

[madcompnerd]

I also work a computer retail store, it's impossibly hard sometimes to break down what I know to a level that a non-technical person can understand (without 10 hours of backgrounding).
People ask the difference between Athlon and Pentium 4, and I have to cringe and just say "they're compatible." Well, they are but it doesn't do justice to some of differences between the two.

The hardest to do though, is when they ask about Windows XP. Heh, it's hard to sell that load of overpriced junk to them. The boss claims to have tried selling linux boxes in the past, with no success. I admit it can be hard, as the word incompatibility is so unfashionable; but it'd make for less tech work later.

[jeremymh]

Last year (in year 10) I had a teacher that was correct in his knowledge - just not for the current year. He wasn't stupid, just fairly out of date.

A domain name costs at least $10000 (AU), so only a business or uni would ever buy them.

This year, however, I am faced with a teacher much like many descriptions already on this thread. The exams are full of questions about absolutely useless things in the field we are studying. This semester has been on relational databases. Half the questions were on the exact buttons you would click doing a report wizard in access - testing your memory, not whether you could actually do it if it's infront of you.

I, unfortunately, read the material he used when he teached us (he summarised it when explaining it to the class).

That means I have a proper understanding of the material, when the class has his understanding of it. I lost marks in my assignment because I "didn't need" a few of the tables. His method breaks the rules of decent relational database usage.

The assignment was to make a database for a restaurant. His orders table had the order details as well as the information for the item in the one table - so, the order details (date, served by, table number) were repeated for every item in an order. I split it into one table for the details, one for each type of item (no duplication of the orders details). Gah.

It's horrible to see students that have absolutely no idea of the topic getting higher marks than me.

[Mi}{alis]

Originally posted by Jeff Dyer


4) using a variable name 'p' instead of 'rho', minus 5%


actually the letter "rho" in Greek, when written looks exactly like P (capital) and almost exactly like p (non capital. its more round at the top).Also its use is more like "R". (Rodos=Podos) Just a sidenote...

Greek language is connected to all scientific lingo (Paleontology anyone?) but not computers. Well I dont know how this "rho" get there by the way...

[skubiszm]

This has been happening ever since my TAs stopped grade the projects by hand and now only use shell scripts and diff. (On a side note I can't blame them, my compiler was over 4000 lines!). Here are just a couple of problems I have had with grading.

TA: You didn't output the message in the form "ERROR: Null pointer"
Me: How was I supposed to know, the spec says "report a null pointer exception" and thats what I did.
TA: Yeah, but you didn't pass the script.

---

TA: Your output files didn't match the naming convention and you failed half the testcases, you get a 50%.
Me: I miss read your specs and the files are named incorrectly, but the program works. Look, rename the files and it will pass.
TA: I am sorry, I can't do that. You didn't follow the script.
Me: So you are telling me that because my files are named wrong I lose 50%, even though the main focus of the project was steganography and not on my ability to manipulate strings and properly name output files?!?!
TA: Yes

---

I think this must stem from the fact that when they were undergrads, they had sh]tty TA. So now they are taking out all that built up anger on us. Oh well, that god I am graduating in 3 weeks. Then I can start posting to the thread "Stupidest things my boss has said in a meeting"

Skuba

[terra_ryuu]

One time, my computing(ph0r dhummi3s) class "student teacher" said that robots work exclusively in Vase Factiories. I find that rather odd, but I argued with him the whole period about handmade work and clay consistancy. Lovely.

He's the "Don't like Internet, only like Champ Manager" sport type "I CAN B A COMPUTING TEACHER!" guys who can, to give him credit, pick up a mouse very confidently and shout "ON!" down it.

Hate his guts, man. Just can't stand such retards. He probably can't install a program under Windoze without salivationg on the screen.

[madcompnerd]

TA's are powerless that's a common problem. They are only allowed to run a script to grade your program. Luckily, the TA for my Com S class doesn't care about the rules and just gives us better grades, usually.
In High school I had a teacher that would take it on paper and still counted off when my output was formatted incorrectly. But, I was usually to lazy or forgetful to label the output; so that's understandable.

He'd check a thousand programs in a week, all by hand.

[Emerald Wolf]

Originally posted by Boris27
Laugh in his face. A real operating system... pff... Ask how much BSODs he gets a day.

:rolleyes:

I don't like Winbloze, but have to use it to get some things to werk quickly (I'm still a newbie) I was running Red Hat 8.0 when I bumped up to 1 gig of RAM....Couldn't figure out what the problem was when I popped in my Winbloze drive (I love drive swap bays) and it would barf every 5 minutes.

My Dad gets on me about Linux...but mainly because there are a few things that just drive me nuts.

Catchya on the Flip Side.....

Emerald Wolf -- Looks forward to the permanent move to Linux.

[madcompnerd]

There's always the occasional Linux doubter. But they are usually impressed to see how well it really works. And if you can demonstrate that it really does run faster than Windows XP\ (that's the favorite defense for Windows lovers) than you'll easily make a convert. I don't know if you'll be able to see a speed increase with RH though, my RH system was a dog.

[Emerald Wolf]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
There's always the occasional Linux doubter. But they are usually impressed to see how well it really works. And if you can demonstrate that it really does run faster than Windows XP\ (that's the favorite defense for Windows lovers) than you'll easily make a convert. I don't know if you'll be able to see a speed increase with RH though, my RH system was a dog.

I dunno....I had a slackware 9 system for a while....I liked some of the features, although I did miss GRUB (it was still using LILO) and I had the same amount of trouble when it came to trying to compile and run programs....(to me this is the ONLY advantage of Winbloze, stuff installs easily...well except for this MechWarrior 4 demo I have...<<sigh>>) I'm fairly certain that it had something to do with differences in gcc versions. (I've not had a chance to test this theroy with a number of lower versions of Red Hat I have.....)

Catchya on the Flip Side.....

Emerald Wolf -- SANE is my other pet aggravtion....

[Admstng]

I was in one of my "Windows" classes and I was asking the teacher wich server was natting (routing and remote access lab) and he interupts me and say "Network address translation" than smiles, releived that he didn't say anything stupid. i than began to ask my buddy the same question and got the correct response.

[madcompnerd]

Try:
Debian, Gentoo, Arch, or anything else with a netinstall system that isn't RPM based.
Installation is easy.

[Emerald Wolf]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
Try:
Debian, Gentoo, Arch, or anything else with a netinstall system that isn't RPM based.
Installation is easy.

I might just try that. I've been looking into Debian, it looks promising.

Catchya on the Flip Side.....

Emerald Wolf -- heh...

[blkmage]

"This is a programming course. We'll be doing HTML and Javascript this year."

Oh how I hate that class (this is high school, btw).

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by Emerald Wolf
I've been looking into Debian, it looks promising.

I suggest Gentoo, if you have an ok processor (1000 mhz +). It shows much more promise than Debian, which is bogged down in the egos of developers, and there hasn't been an update since /forever/.

[MB[DK]]

Originally posted by Trogdor
I suggest Gentoo, if you have an ok processor (1000 mhz +). It shows much more promise than Debian, which is bogged down in the egos of developers, and there hasn't been an update since /forever/.

I believe RC2 was released a few days ago. Your attentionspan is quite short!

[Sepero]

Originally posted by Trogdor
I suggest Gentoo, if you have an ok processor (1000 mhz +). It shows much more promise than Debian, which is bogged down in the egos of developers, and there hasn't been an update since /forever/. A person that obviously knows next to nothing about Debian.

Debian "unstable" has updates virtually everyday and you can do the exact same builds as gentoo with our "apt-build" tool. So what's the real difference? Besides the fact that Debian has about twice as many packages, it doesn't _FORCE_ you to build any of them.

[madcompnerd]

Yes, just don't use Debian stable for a desktop PC. I made that mistake, heh Gnome 1.4 is a bit weak! My mistake for trying Stable for a desktop though.

Use unstable, it's the most stable instability it can be.

[davholla]

My brother-in-law went to PC world (a shop here in the UK with the adverting slogan we are experts) and asked how to connect 2 PC's to one broadband connection they said it is very difficult and easier to pay £40 ($60) a month to get another connection !!!

[knute]

Originally posted by davholla
My brother-in-law went to PC world (a shop here in the UK with the adverting slogan we are experts) and asked how to connect 2 PC's to one broadband connection they said it is very difficult and easier to pay £40 ($60) a month to get another connection !!!

A null modem cable (or cross-over cable) between the 2 comps (nic to nic) and the broadband connection to the second nic and ip forwarding and masquing isn't that hard.
I wonder what would happen if your brother-in-law went in and asked them how much a cross-over cable would cost! ;)

That or a hub are the easiest. :D

Do you know what expert means if you break it down?

ex ===> washed up
pert ==> drip

ex-pert => washed up drip :D

hehehe....

[davholla]

Originally posted by knute
A null modem cable (or cross-over cable) between the 2 comps (nic to nic) and the broadband connection to the second nic and ip forwarding and masquing isn't that hard.
I wonder what would happen if your brother-in-law went in and asked them how much a cross-over cable would cost! ;)

That or a hub are the easiest. :D

Do you know what expert means if you break it down?

ex ===> washed up
pert ==> drip

ex-pert => washed up drip :D

hehehe....
I know that is the easiest I learnt that from the internet which makes think that maybe I should complain to the Advertising Standards agency

[MartinB]

PC World really know bugger-all about anything. I remember a few years back when they used to sell MIDI keyboards for computers, I bought one and didn't know why I wasn't getting any sound out of the speakers on the keyboard, it only came through the computer speakers.

Anyway, I took it to the store and they told me that "Those are not speakers on the keyboard, they just look like speakers. The sound is only supposed to come through your computer speakers."

Disappointed, I got it back home again and was randomly trying stuff, and connected a cable from the line-out of my soundcard to the line-in on the keyboard, and what-d'ya-know? Sound comes through those "not speakers" on my keyboard! :)

I like those things they do where, you give them £50 and your PC, and they supposedly do maintenance on your PC, check it for viruses, spyware, trojans, and clean it, optimise it and speed it up and stuff, and then give it back to you the following day. I know someone who actually did it, and his PC didn't seem any better setup than the average user's. I'd love to do it with a spare Linux box just for a laugh, just 'cause I know they don't even know what Linux is, much less how to do any sort of checks on it.

[Liquido]

Dunno about this, but I disagree with this anyway.

One of my CS profs told the students how he loved and admired XP (Xtreme Programming). I dunno but I just hate XP, i think it's pretty funny that its main thing is "testing before coding". isn't testing part of coding and you can't make the test if you haven't coded anything yet?!

[Brink]

Comon, I mean, some of you are probably right, some teachers shouldn't even be teaching, BUT, when you discredit someone entirely over 1 little point?

I mean it's like the guy who got angry because you said your linux system boots faster than 2000? He was probably more angry because what you said wasn't in the least relevant to the topic, which was 2000 server no? If you make it a pissing contest or your just trying to get that response, I don't have any sympathy for you.

I have a CCNA teacher right now, I consider him a good teacher. 2 weeks ago though we were talking about routed protocols and he flat out says Netbios is unroutable, which under TCP/IP it actually is. It's just 1 small aspect of the full picture though, nothing to start judging people with.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Liquido
isn't testing part of coding and you can't make the test if you haven't coded anything yet?! Not at all. That's part of the difference in paradigm between XP and normal coding.

You write the test before you write the code. You can even run it once if you want, but obviously it'll fail, that's a given. (If it doesn't fail, then you move on to the next feature because you have no work to do.) But once the code is written (and it's written correctly), the test will succeed. At that point you move on to the next feature on the list.

The only real trick is coming up with a test to make sure whatever feature you're working on is implemented correctly.

[Kaligraphic]

Originally posted by Brink
I have a CCNA teacher right now, I consider him a good teacher. 2 weeks ago though we were talking about routed protocols and he flat out says Netbios is unroutable, which under TCP/IP it actually is. It's just 1 small aspect of the full picture though, nothing to start judging people with.
Maybe he meant regular netbios?

But I agree completely with your point. No-one can know everything. Not even us Linux users.

[Beavbo]

For my Operating Systems class, we had to modify some code supplied by our prof to make sure mutual exclusion was being enforced.

I wish I had saved the email, but the quote was something to the effect of "There's a bug in my code for the project. I have no idea what it is, but keep working on the project anyway. If you find out how to fix the bug, send me the response via email to receive 10 [meaningless] extra credit points"

We had a laugh at that one........then a cry because we are still in the class :(

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by MB[DK]
I believe RC2 was released a few days ago. Your attentionspan is quite short!

Wow! To quote debian.org (checked on december, the fourth /2003/:
"The latest stable release of Debian is 3.0r1. The last update to this release was made on December 16th, 2002. Read more about available versions of Debian."

/HOW/ long has woody been the stable one?

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by Sepero
A person that obviously knows next to nothing about Debian.

Debian "unstable" has updates virtually everyday and you can do the exact same builds as gentoo with our "apt-build" tool. So what's the real difference? Besides the fact that Debian has about twice as many packages, it doesn't _FORCE_ you to build any of them.

I use debian stable on my desktop, and I'm a pround user of kde 2.1! And I have the new "internet" thing all the stable users are talking about!

Just kidding. I never would use debian on a desktop. I consider it one of the top five distros, but Gentoo will always have a place in my heart.

[DragonHead]

In my Data structures class, we were studying "quasi-dimensional matrixes" and how to optimize them. I was having trouble understanding the math involved.

The prof was an "old school" type of teacher. I went to talk to him about it. He looked at me and said "What's your problem, it's basic linear algebra."

I explained to him that I had not yet taken linear algebra because it was not a perquisite for data structures. He laughed and said "Ha!, I bet this looks like Greek to you!". He then walked away.

[madcompnerd]

That's the point where you complain to advisors, department heads, and etc that the class didn't have the right prerequisites and the professor is unwilling to have a brief discussion with you.
One of the professors here lost his job cause of the way he was teaching. But then again, that's because he was showing code that didn't work and obviously had no idea what he was doing.
Somebody complained to an advisor and bam, someone else will be teaching to course next semester.

[Phekno]

A teacher I had for a computer engineering class (Intro to Microcontrollers (assembly and C)) told us that she didn't really know how to program in C when we asked her for some help on a project she had given us. Later that semester she started an unsuccessful attempt at getting the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department's Chair position.

Later,
Phekno

[camaro71633]

My operating systems teacher said the other day that the only diffrence between linux and dos was the way the slash goes!

The same teacher allso stated that linux is just like dos cuse it has no gui. I said well what is KDE and Gnome then and he just avoided the question.

Yet the same teacher (yes this guy is a moron and not just bcause of his views on linux) told the class that linux would never be suted for office use because you cant run M$ office on it. Gess he never heard of open office. :rolleyes:

[whessles]

ok this is sort of a tangent but in the same basic idea

U.S. history teacher to a rather well educated class cut-up on freedom of speech in class:

"The first amendment when included in the declaration of independence was not meant to be used like that, and in my class you're not covered anyway"

Ladies and gentlemen I give you the hands that mold our future. :D

[Trogdor]

Originally posted by camaro71633
Yet the same teacher (yes this guy is a moron and not just bcause of his views on linux) told the class that linux would never be suted for office use because you cant run M$ office on it. Gess he never heard of open office. :rolleyes:

Or KOffice, or Gnome Office. Or Wine, or CrossOver.

[davholla]

This is not stupid but it was funny.

When I was learning linux (sadly not many lessons) all the machines were interconnected and they all had the same root password.
I connected to my neighbour's box and logged in as root.
I then asked the teacher how to do a reboot (I was new) she helped and then said why is not rebooting - she then looked at my neighbours PC and understood !!

[trashthing]

my version isn't great.

my teacher: "now, please repeat, the language that the computer understands is 1's and 0's."

meanwhile, she had no knowledge of what she was saying! then when i would correct her on a subject, she would say: "(Name), i'm the teacher, quiet."

[GlennaclawZ]

my teacher did pretty much the same thing except he would insult us by asking us if he needed to teach us how to add again. and when we corrected him he would be like... "yes... you could do it that way... if u would like a grade that somewhat resembles an F...

[DragonHead]

I have one to tell on myself...

One of the classes I had was system admin. The teacher was pretty good. She was the actual system admin for the school's UNIX labs. For projects we had to compile kernels, network Linux computers/printers.

Anyway, the end of the year we each had to do a presentation. I was showing several slides. All of a sudden, people started laughing. Laughing hard.

I asked "What's so funny?" The teacher said, "Look at your slides and your spelling."

In the drawing of my network, I had mistyped "Diskless" terminal with DICKLESS terminals. In big bold letters.

It was funny.

[bpasternak]

Well, my experience isn't quite "tech" related but once when the class got out of control one of my instructors said, "This is causing great upsetment!".

Now, keeping in mind that I'm paying $14,000 for this education I pounded on the table and yelled, "Upsetment!? That isn't even a word!".

I feel that for that kind of $$$ the instructor should be somewhat versed in the english language.

[madcompnerd]

Colleges seem to be famous for research and not excellence in teaching, although excellence in students helps. So they look for professors who will be profitable for research, and let the students learn on their own.
Personally, I don't care that they can't teach. I generally don't learn much in class anyway. However, when they grade like pompous *******s who have no clue what being a student is then they should be fired.
I don't pay to be failed over minor errors that exist because of bad documentation in the assignment.

But I haven't received a failing grade...yet.

[lagdawg]

I'm telling on myself here and this is not related to college. I have been running Damn Small linux on an older computer (Pentium 1 100 mhz or so and 32 mb or ram) as a live cd for a little while. I hadn't touched this computer for about a year before I used DSL on it. I decided that it ran well on this computer so I wanted to do a Hard drive install. So when I went to set up my hard drive my system didn't recognize it at all. I couldn't mount it, or use cfdisk or fdisk and my bios didn't recognize it. Being an old computer I figure the hard drive has finally given out, as it wasn't working too well to begin with if I remember correctly. So I continued to use the DSL live disc and worked on my system. In the mean time I posted several messages on forums asking about what could be wrong with my hard drive and nobody could give me an answer. After a while my cd drive began making funny noises while running and DSL was working extremely slowly. When I took my computer apart I realized why I couldn't install to my hard drive. It didn't exist. A few of my buddies had a good laugh over this one.

[gofigr]

when i started school we had 8088's to play with. *joy*. when asked for assistance the teacher would state 'check the book,' after hemming and hawwing of course. once i asked him what a virus was (being a curious little tot), and his response was:

'a virus is a uhhhh, ummm, a file, ummmm, uhhh....'

well i won't finish it. needless to say i didn't continue the course that year.

[MighMos]

In my High School, in Technology, we were taking apart a computer, and putting back together :confused: don't know why, the teacher didn't know much about _anything_. When we opened it, we realized it had no RAM, and we told him it had no memory. There was no way to explain to him that reinstalling windows wouldn't work to get it more memory. *sigh* You can't drop classes in High School...

[RCrow21]

Yeah, teachers can say some pretty funny things. I remember one thing my chemistry teacher said. Last year some girl had been collecting humerous quotes from different people. At the end of the year they showed my chem teacher the book which he read. At the end his response was, "I actually said that outloud???"

[Radar]

My C++ teacher said to the class "Tomorrow, let me see your balls", regarding an assignment to make graphical spheres move around the screen.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by bpasternak
Well, my experience isn't quite "tech" related but once when the class got out of control one of my instructors said, "This is causing great upsetment!".

Now, keeping in mind that I'm paying $14,000 for this education I pounded on the table and yelled, "Upsetment!? That isn't even a word!".

I feel that for that kind of $$$ the instructor should be somewhat versed in the english language.

Thats priceless. Has a real Simpsons feel to it.

[madcompnerd]

Is he an english teacher. I don't care how my math teacher's english is, so long as I know what he means. Personally, I think great english is overrated. They reguard Shakespeare as a great writer, but he made up words!

[Trogdor]

I have one to tell on myself (I made a real GeorgeBush-ism):

"If not here, when?"

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by Trogdor
I use debian stable on my desktop, and I'm a pround user of kde 2.1! And I have the new "internet" thing all the stable users are talking about!

Just kidding. I never would use debian on a desktop. I consider it one of the top five distros, but Gentoo will always have a place in my heart.

Awww....now thats just not right. :D I honestly think that most of the myth surrounding Debian not being up to date comes from newer Linux users that don't have much experience. You can find pretty much any package you want for Debian. You just have to add the entry in your apt sources file. I have used Debian for a desktop for about a year and a half and am quite pleased. Running a 2.6 kernel, it performs quite nicely for me. I guess it is all a matter of preference. I myself will never sit and work on installing a OS for three weeks. Thats just way too much time for what it is.

[Wolface]

well you can install gentoo with precompile packages in 1 1/2 hours. Updating, that's another thing....

[nko]

I recently took a low level CIS class. The teach didn't know much, to put it nicely. He'd never heard of ogg, mysql or postgresql, which I can forgive him for, since he's a Windows man by a far stretch. I had to correct him when he was talking about the "811-2" wireless "...standard." He never once knew a thing about what he was doing unless it had something to do with digital cameras. He's a serious digital camera 'ho. He even bought himself a mini-digital camera to hang on his keychain for Christmas. He claims to have experience with UNIX and Linux, but me and a couple other guys found out it amounts to having a login on the CS despartment's HP-UX server, which he occasionally uses for command line e-mail and nothing else. For this, he claims that UNIX is just a harder way of doing anything, and then goes on to show you how easy it is to use MSN Messenger with your digital camera to talk to your mom in any country.

I offered to bring in a Knoppix CD so students could see a non-Windows desktop, just for reference, and he said he was going to show Linux, command line only. He didn't, but he did show a couple things in HP-UX, which is close enough, but it'd be nice if he knew the difference.

He tried to argue with me that UNIX is ridiculously insecure, one day. He explained to me that if root gets an e-mail that comes with an attachment, and opens it, it could be a script that formats the hard drive. Lets put aside the idea of root opening e-mail attachments on a production system and just consider that at least he didn't claim the script would format the C drive. Kudos for him!

I think part of the problem is that these instructors got their degrees in the 80's, when telnet and DOS were big. Since then, they've lost interest in computers in any way that doesn't relate to keeping their jobs.

[Vortrex]

Originally posted by bwkaz
That is kinda weird, though (and it happens in C, too).

If x=7, then (x--) == 7, but x == 6.

http://kadzban.is-a-geek.net/notallthere.gif

;)

Well that's because it's supposed to happen that way. Post-decrementing a variable actually decrements the value of the variable AFTER the current value is used.
Assuming x = 7, (x--) == 7; does the following:
x == 7;
x--;
After this, x == 6 is true.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Vortrex
Well that's because it's supposed to happen that way. I am well aware of that fact.

It's just surprising if you haven't seen it before. That's what the image was all about.

:)

[H2O-linux]

"Those that can't do, teach" :)

[Dr Grasshopper]

We Computer Science teachers do say silly things, but that's not exclusive to us. A friend is a Manufacturing Technology professor and had years in a machine shop before graduate school. He admitted he once told a class they coudn't break anything he couldn't fix.

It is sad and frustrating when a person has to teach something he really isn't prepared for. Sometimes it happens because there is nobody else to do it. (Size of load, faculty out of town for a semester, etc. The department head has to do the best he can with the faculty who are available.) Unfortunately, I had to do teach a class involving material I had no experience with last semester and I'm glad I had a good class, for they managed to get through the work very well. Should I have to teach it again, I'll do better.

Everybody enjoy your holidays.

================================================
People may forget what you say. People may forget what you do.
But they will never forget how you made them feel.

[madcompnerd]

Unfortunately, the students have to pay a lot of money for there to not be enough money for the department to keep enough personal to teach the education we pay to receive.
So do tell, who's the middle man; making all the money?

[Dr Grasshopper]

A perfectly reasonable question. Unfortunately, right now it isn't anybody, or any single person you can complain about. Since the economy has been down, the income of the schools has also been down. Other things certainly make a difference, too, like laws that don't let the tax revenue rise as fast as the economy. My university would have been better off if we'd had the same increases as the economy ten years ago; we wouldn't have needed any increase in tax rates.

The schools in the northeast didn't get a magic infusion of funds when the blizzard hit. If my area has lower temperatures than the "average," the funds to pay the utility bills can't be used for anything else, including overtime for people to clean the snow off the sidewalks before I want to walk on them. Fortunately, my personal needs are not extravagant, as I haven't had a raise in two years and the last one was two percent. We've heard that we're going to get another two percent raise this year and we hope the staff--the people who make it possible for things to get done--do at least as well. However, that raise--if we get it--will be eaten up by the increased cost of medical insurance and the increased deductible.

Where else does the money go, or not go? Patching roofs, rather than replacing them. Not replacing 50 year-old windows with energy-efficient ones. Buying weather radios that go off screaming for every warning within a hundred mile radius, rather than ones programmable for warnings for our immediate area.

I'm glad I'm not the college president. I don't want to have to be responsible for the decisions required just to keep going. Making substantial improvements isn't an option right now. He--and the people who work with him--make the best decisions they can. Sometimes they make decisions that frustrate me. Sometimes they make decisions that hindsight shows weren't the best. We just hope what they decide ends up being what they ought to be most of the time.

If you think this is a long, boring answer to a short question, I'll agree with you. Sometimes life doesn't have short answers. If you have the name of somebody we could all get mad at and make it all better, I'll join you.

Take care.

[madcompnerd]

What you said in one word, well pretty much:
Buearocracy.

[Wolface]

In any case, as far as I remember, I never went to school to be teached, I went to learn for myself.
I guess I had stupid teachers on elementary too.

[Dr Grasshopper]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
What you said in one word, well pretty much:
Buearocracy.

Did I say "bureaucracy? As I recall, I talked about getting the sidewalks shoveled, getting the utility bills paid, replacing inefficient windows, fixing the roof. paying my medical bills, and hoping the secretaries who copy my exams get a raise. "Bureaucrats" usually don't do those jobs.

Bureaucracy is an administrative structure. People get mad at it when things don't go their way, but often it works fairly efficiently. It fails when the people involved don't try and sometimes that makes big problems. Hopefully the problems get found, but sometimes that takes time, and that's not good. But many of us think as a structure, it's preferable to some of the alternatives, like autocracy and dictatorship.

Your message would have been a little more emphatic if you had spelled the word correctly. Expressing yourself clearly is an important part of being taken seriously.

[madcompnerd]

I'm Com S, not english. I don't care if you take me seriously or not, it doesn't put food on my table or pleasure in my life. Worrying about my spelling of words like bureacracy in a technical forum is an extremely low priority. Let me put it this way, I spelled it close enough for you to easily identify it; thereby completing the purpose of writing and speech; communication.
I hate English teachers, they're usually the worst.

[knute]

Hey, madcompnerd, Mr. Com s duuude.

Because you are in computer science, and are supposed to know a little more about computers than the average guy, let me introduce you to what I call spell check... :D


:rolleyes: (I see a future computer teacher in the works.) :rolleyes:

[madcompnerd]

No thanks, you know levenstein checks only find something close to the string you input; they don't check spelling errors like they're, their, there.
Please don't harrass me over my spelling, I'm not an English teacher and I get sick of people who try to be superior by pointing out spelling errors.
This is a forum, I am not about to spell check my replies.

[Sepero]

Ho Hum....

I'm started to bore of your sub-discussion...


Does anybody else have more stories?

[knute]

Originally posted by madcompnerd
No thanks, you know levenstein checks only find something close to the string you input; they don't check spelling errors like they're, their, there.
Please don't harrass me over my spelling, I'm not an English teacher and I get sick of people who try to be superior by pointing out spelling errors.
This is a forum, I am not about to spell check my replies.

That would be a grammar checker not spelling, and if you are like me that has a tendancy sometimes to spell the word the "t-e-h" then a spelling checker works just fine.
And there are automatic spelling checkers out there that can correct your mistakes, and such without much input from you.

In a support role, such as Computer Science, I would think that it would be of the utmost importance to be able to communicate well in your native tongue, as well as to be able to communicate with a computer.

And I don't see why you are getting so upset over spelling. I mean a computer would harrass you over spelling if you had one variable as beauty and the other a baeuty, and it would absolutely refuse to do what you want it to.

And an inability to communicate to someone that has less knowledge than you, could lead to a severe shortening of the corporate ladder that most people aspire to.

Another 2 words come to mind as well: Tech Docs.

My 2 cents,

[sharth]

But if you consitently mis-spell a word the same way, then the computer loves you :p

[knute]

ROFLMAO

That's exactly the point. It's the details, and consistancy.

If you want to be taken seriously, it's the little things like spelling, and grammar that will add to that over all effect so that you will be taken seriously and loved by your bosses. :)

Boss seriously impressed by your work ===>>>> More Money $$$$$$

:cool:

[bwkaz]

ANYWAY... now that we're done talking about spelling... (hint hint ;))

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by knute
That would be a grammar checker not spelling, and if you are like me that has a tendancy sometimes to spell the word the "t-e-h" then a spelling checker works just fine.
And there are automatic spelling checkers out there that can correct your mistakes, and such without much input from you.

In a support role, such as Computer Science, I would think that it would be of the utmost importance to be able to communicate well in your native tongue, as well as to be able to communicate with a computer.

And I don't see why you are getting so upset over spelling. I mean a computer would harrass you over spelling if you had one variable as beauty and the other a baeuty, and it would absolutely refuse to do what you want it to.

And an inability to communicate to someone that has less knowledge than you, could lead to a severe shortening of the corporate ladder that most people aspire to.

Another 2 words come to mind as well: Tech Docs.

My 2 cents,
I'm being pissed about it because I hate it when people are anal retentive about spelling. Yes, compilers don't fix your spelling, which is one reason I don't use long variable names.
Second, when sending formal documents I do check my spelling. Forum replies are not formal, and therefore are not subject to the same strict rules. In other words: You know what I meant so don't harrass me about it.

[afterthefall]

Originally posted by Dr Grasshopper
Did I say "bureaucracy? As I recall, I talked about getting the sidewalks shoveled, getting the utility bills paid, replacing inefficient windows, fixing the roof. paying my medical bills, and hoping the secretaries who copy my exams get a raise. "Bureaucrats" usually don't do those jobs.

Nah, bureaucracy is having heated sidewalks but uncovered bus stops. Ah well, at least our football team is finally winning (MAC champs no less).

- Brian

[gofigr]

"you cannot run active directory on windows 2000 advanced server in mixed mode."

i turned my back to him and 10 min later (allowing time for active directory to run) i had it up and running. it may or may not have an effect but, hey, it runs.

not really from a stupid prof. he just trusted the white papers from microsoft. IMHO if you want the services provided by something like active directory, you should be using novell.

[d0zs]

zz

[Sepero]

Originally posted by d0zs
she wanted to see some image source or something so I ctrl + f and typed in the image name and it found it...
"What was that? How did you do that?" ...i told her... then she says... "Remind me to show that trick to the class tomorrow!" ...i never did...:p Ha!

[tix]

I'm in my first year cs at university (only 1 semester so far!), and I can't say that any of my profs have said anything stupid or wrong. They seem smart enough, mind you it is only first year. My one cs teacher just couldn't speak english very well (like half of my profs).

HS was a different story though. If you guys are like me, you were probably the ones who would write a 3 line program that the teacher wrote in 30. I remember getting 0 on programming assignments for this. I would have to go in and explain the program to them for full marks.
What i also go 0 on:
Q: Name a register?
A: eax
(comment from him: there is no eax, but there is an ax)

[madcompnerd]

Wow your high school classes made you work with assembly?
Mine just did the first year of college object oriented programming (although they have changed to java from c++ now, which boggles my mind since they just do terminal programming).

[Literatii]

Wait til you get into the working world.. it can be worse.

me: "If you want to write some simple sys-admin type scripts, use Perl"
guy: "I thought our programming standard was Java? Can't I write all my scripts in Javascript?"

------

sys-admin: "Ok, what's the problem you're having with this billing software?"
guy: "It says it's net enabled but it isn't working"
sys-admin: "What's the name of the software package?"
guy: "Apache"
sys-admin: "um... Apache is the web-server"
guy: "Yeah, like I said, the package is called Apache"

-------

and my favorite.... this new coder had been working on VB and C code for about 2 years:

guy: hey you know C pretty well?
me: yup
guy: ok, I have a question about pointers
me: shoot
guy: so.... what are they?

[madcompnerd]

Then you point at him and say "it's when you point at someone, don't do it it's rude."

[Nayus Dante]

These are hillarious!

I am currently in a private christian high school, and they have only three computer classes. The first one is on MS Office, which after I install Mandrake 9.2 this afternoon, will never use again. This is a required course. Comp 2 is a beginning programming class on MSVS. Not as bad as office and such, but still im switching to better tools (except directx, but thats not really MSVS now, is it?). You MUST take Comp 1 before Comp 2. I hate Office classes. ALL THROUGH MIDDLESCHOOL, (again, private christian, so class selection is nonexistant) we learned office. Actually it was about half of it. From 3rd grade through 8th, i had the weirdest computer teacher I will probably ever have. She made us play educational games that were YEARS below our level. She didnt really know what she was talking about. When I asked if we could do some kind of programming instead of that crap, she replied,

You need to know advanced math to do programming.

Maybe assembly or something, but the rest is commands and syntax and such. She then quit teaching Office because she lost the book. Why anyone needs a book to teach MSWord, I have never fully understood. Those PPoint worksheets didnt do much for us either. I learned more in those apps just messing around and stuff than doing those assignments where we type letters to nonexistant companies. After that she just gave us random assignments. It got really boring. Sadly, I and a few friends were the only mature ones in the class. The others drove away three english teachers over three years. So then the computer teacher fills in for the rest of the year and shes still teaching that class now. Although this isnt really computer related, the weirdest thing about her was that she would constantly say, "Excuse me!" in a very rude tone. We often heard it through the walls.

I didnt get Comp 1 this year, and I HOPE i get it next year. The earliest time I will be able to get ANY advanced computer education in school will be my junior year. Yes, I am pissed. Oh well, I have my C and DirectX books to keep me happy. Ill just use this time to master the material and amaze the teacher when I finally manage to get in the class. Kinda ironic how the only geek in the entire school doesnt have any computer classes. At least I dont have to put up with my last teacher anymore!

[sharth]

Originally posted by Nayus Dante
I am currently in a private christian high school, and they have only three computer classes. The first one is on MS Office, which after I install Mandrake 9.2 this afternoon, will never use again. This is a required course. Comp 2 is a beginning programming class on MSVS. Not as bad as office and such, but still im switching to better tools (except directx, but thats not really MSVS now, is it?). You MUST take Comp 1 before Comp 2. I hate Office classes. ALL THROUGH MIDDLESCHOOL, (again, private christian, so class selection is nonexistant) You get some choice around 11th and 12th grade :)

[Nayus Dante]

Actually the only other course besides the first two is some digital media class where u just develop whtever u want or something.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Nayus Dante
im switching to better tools (except directx, :rolleyes:

DirectX is not a "good tool". It's bloated, it's slow (because it's based on COM / ActiveX), and it's single-platform. SDL, on the other hand, is fast (since it's written in C, with no crappy vtable junk sitting in the background), is cross-platform, and gives you a good way to get at hardware OpenGL (which is really fast).

If you happen to think that OpenGL is crappy, that's because you've only ever seen OpenGL 1.2 on your Windows boxes. The spec is up to 1.4 now, but Microsoft won't distribute that because they want everybody using the inferior D3D.

</rant>

Sorry, but I get a little carried away sometimes... :)

[Nayus Dante]

I actually quite like opengl. Yes, I have updated my videocard drivers and Im pretty sure its all the new version 1.4.

[bwkaz]

Updating drivers on Windows won't necessarily upgrade your OpenGL version string, though. (Actually, what with SFC, it may not even be able to.)

Check the properties of your opengl32.dll file, on the Version tab. Its version might not even match the OpenGL version string, but if it says 1.2, then you're most likely still using 1.2. I'm sure there are OpenGL programs out there that will just print the version string (kind of like glxinfo on Linux), so that might be worth looking at too. If you really care, and I can see why you might not... ;)

[random0]

In my CS class it is not so much the teacher, but the class. An entire 50 minute class was devoted to explaining the modulus operator to the class, of course they were having toruble with division in general.

[madcompnerd]

I think OpenGL display's excellent graphics. I've never had complaints, and I have found it more efficient than things designed for DirectX, although I'm not really against DirectX; if it were cross platform or at least provided documentation so that it could be easily remade for other platforms it would be pretty good.

And your Christian School offers pretty good computer classes. My High School did too, however most public high schools offer nothing more than M$ Office classes, and at most AP Com S A. We were lucky enough to have AB, and I beat the change to Java so we still learned c++. Then we had extra time at the end and picked up some terminal Java (hardly any different, syntax wise, than c++; but I think that was our teacher's point).

[Nayus Dante]

Well, I *think* they go over java and C and stuff in comp 2, but still....
One of my friends is in public school and he has a VB class. Now ive moved beyond VB and into C, AND gone anti M$. I guess it doesnt really matter. Why dont they teach DirectX and OpenGL in high schools? Id rather learn that than doing punnet squares on imaginary creatures. (yes that is the basis of my biology I honors class) Id kill for a 3d modeling course. Oh well, the school uses ALL M$, so I wouldnt bet on anything too great, but I do have a lot to look forward to.

[PhriedPhish]

No CS stuff, sorry, but I've got a nice pre-cal one:

My pre-cal teacher is completely obsessed with the "Unit-circle" which can be used to do certain things quickly and easily as he explains to us every class to us for about 10 minutes. So, we're listening to one of his lectures one day about his obsessions with the Unit-Circle and he says:

"I know it may sound redundant and all, but I really like to get off to the Unit-Circle."

[madcompnerd]

Originally posted by Nayus Dante
Well, I *think* they go over java and C and stuff in comp 2, but still....
One of my friends is in public school and he has a VB class. Now ive moved beyond VB and into C, AND gone anti M$. I guess it doesnt really matter. Why dont they teach DirectX and OpenGL in high schools? Id rather learn that than doing punnet squares on imaginary creatures. (yes that is the basis of my biology I honors class) Id kill for a 3d modeling course. Oh well, the school uses ALL M$, so I wouldnt bet on anything too great, but I do have a lot to look forward to.
Because DirectX and OpenGL are not "computer science." They are supposed to teach you the science of logic, data storage, and other things involved in computer programming. OpenGL/DirectX is one small group of programmers, and those who want to learn it will prolly do this on their own anyway. I think it would be pretty silly to teach OpenGL at a high school level, there are more important things to learn first. I agree with the idea of focusing on processing and almost ignoring Input/Output/Interface; until one understands processing.

There are some excellent resources on OpenGL programming, I would suggest purchasing a text book; it's like a class without a worrying that your professor will fail you.

[Citadel]

Originally posted by PhriedPhish
No CS stuff, sorry, but I've got a nice pre-cal one:

My pre-cal teacher is completely obsessed with the "Unit-circle" which can be used to do certain things quickly and easily as he explains to us every class to us for about 10 minutes. So, we're listening to one of his lectures one day about his obsessions with the Unit-Circle and he says:

"I know it may sound redundant and all, but I really like to get off to the Unit-Circle."

Next time he gets off in front of the class, call the police. Teachers these days.

[Livia]

It could be worse. When I was in year 10 of my secondary school it changed to microsoft. The worst thing was that the students knew Word inside out and things like that better than the teachers, whereas when we were using RiscOS (anybody heard of it?) we haad to ask the teachers about cryptic error messages. At least it didn't "blue screen of death" on us. So I learnt office type things in RiscOS, and then when we got microsoft they started all over again.

[Source43.1]

stupidest thing i heard was

"no one needs more than celeron 500 it is powerful enough for everything"

[jailbreaker]

My friends dad said this to me today

"Linux is based on DOS"

"Linux cannot play games because there is no GUI"

"KaZaA doesn't work"

and all this while he was on my Fedora PC with XpDE with LimeWire running and play UT2K3 lol

[Trogdor]

Mine claimed that Java is an interpreted language. He taught me C++ (I already knew it, I just needed it so I could take CS in university). He also taught Java, which makes it sad.

[madcompnerd]

Java is not an interpreted language, it is not a compiled language...
So...what is it?

One will notice when they compile java programs the size of the "compiled" file is relatively the same as the source file. javac doesn't do a whole lot, it is not compiled. And since it depends on a runtime I would consider it interpreted.