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Your Worst IT Workshop?
suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"
I submitted this post in 1997 when I used the slashdot id suntory. I can't believe the admins are THIS slow. It still was a bad conference then.
I took the How to be the Web's Best Editor workshop offered by Slashdot. What a disaster.
I submitted an article on it a few months ago. They posted it to the front page 3 or 4 times. Just search for keywords: bestt editer
Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*
If you can, could you provide the name of the vendor who gave that course? I would like to avoid them at all costs :)
He is absolutely right, tables are the future and IFrames contain the future. Did this guy work for Microsoft?, lol
with another member of the IT staff from the college I worked at, back in the early PC days. Think it was the fall of 89. It was a half day thing on a Saturday for PC maintenance. In those days power supply to the motherboard was tricky, my co-host found out the hard way when she hooked one up backwards and it kinda went boom when she powered it up.
;)
That was not quite as spectacular as the time a prof at the college hooked up two PC's via serial cables, one of them being on an AV cart (and plugged into it) - seems the cart was wired wrong, when he fired those up there was an small explosion, a fair bit of smoke and some actual pieces of the serial card from one of the pc's strewn about the case.
Ah, the good old days - I worked on Tandy machines that had fully exposed power supplies, took one apart once (the PC not the power supply!) and wondered what the whirring sound was, thing was still running
Oh that I could go back to the day of swapping floppy disks to run stuff.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I took an HTML class online where the "textbook" was of questionable quality. My instructor had posted much better examples on his website. Since I already had experience with HTML, I was able to ignore the class until the very end of the semester. It took six hours to complete all the assignments that I emailed 15 minutes before the deadline. Got a solid "A" even though the textbook was solid "F".
Since the difference between intelligence and stupidity is that there's a limit on intelligence, let's try naming the *best* conferences we've been to.
I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
It was an AskSlashdot session which was full of the worst possible examples.
**Whoosh**! The woman instantly tears into the instructor's hard drive like in one of those hacker movies and starts moving and deleting files! The instructor dived for her own laptop and yanked the Ethernet cable. I'm still not all sure what really happened there.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This sort of ignorance is something I'd expect from an eleven year-old - or, dare I say it, a MySpace user! How on Earth can this person be allowed to teach at a university if they are teaching this as 'advanced' HTML?
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
At our college we used to be able to do our own departmental web pages. Then someone decided that the college's web pages had to have a standard look and feel. Unfortunately, the schools html monkeys don't know how to produce a standards compliant web page. Half the site breaks if you view it with Firefox. It also isn't accessible to the handicapped (I thought that was against the law).
Our department's page used to be the first hit when you googled for that which it teaches. Now it is nowhere.
Not only do they not give us html/css courses, they don't want us to use html or css. So, if they're giving you courses, you are better off than us.
I would welcome a bad html course.
However I DID have an IT guy tell me with a straight face that windows out of the box is more secure than any given Linux install out of the box. He backed down pretty quick when I suggested that we install both OSes on a machine connected to the open Internet, though...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There's perhaps five or six thousand people worldwide who are knowledgeable enough to produce a fully standards compliant, accessible website. Not all them work in web development and fewer still teach.
It's pretty much the same for any discipline, the majority are buskers with barely enough competence to scrape by.
Chin up, film at eleven!
While HTML and CSS are important to know still, I can't help but wonder how many people actually still build websites with HTML and CSS and Java and such? I stopped using plain HTML at least four years ago, when I discovered Content Management Systems (WebGUI back then, now using Joomla). I've built or helped build dozens of sites, all part time, using CMS, and most of my clients couldn't be happier. They have access to add content all day long, and don't have to worry about "design".
If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).
Just my $.02 (actual value subject to market forces)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
While not exactly a workshop per se, it was the biggest waste of time. My employer basically paid for me to have people try to sell me stuff. Aren't the sales people supposed to be paying me for my time in the form of free lunches, dinners, blow and strippers?
I did attend a USENIX tutorial that was bad. Well maybe not bad in the grand scheme of things, and I liked the presenter, it sucks to have to slam him for this... however...
It was, if I rememeber right, "Advanced perl CGI scripting", or the moral equivalent thereof. The point was... CGI, PERL, and Advanced.
It began with a 3 minute speech about how thats what the tutorial used to be, but people kept signing up who barely, if at all, understood perl, and didn't know jack about CGI... so the tutorial had been severely dumbed down.
After the morning session it became clear that I was going to learn nothing, and so I took the afternoon to find some better way to waste my time, since my employer wasn't getting any value out of sending me to that tutorial in any case, may as well get some value out of the time.
Again, was too bad, it looked like it could have been cool, and the presenter certainly knew his stuff and could have given a better course. Its just well... lets just say, it looked like I was among the minority who left.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The worst IT workshop I have ever attended?
Lecturer walks in to the room and goes "Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh....IT flew out the Windows".
back in the Tivoli days I got sent to a 2-day class on how to use it. It was about totally worthless.
I found out the next week that the class had cost $750, and I actually went into the CEO's office and suggested to him that next time they want me to know something, they pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book. He wasn't especially amused.
My
I've GIVEN some great, and somewhat bad talks in my day - every good speaker will tell you the same thing.
Most of the bad talks were situations where I was asked to sub for someone - or an area where I "WANTED" to be an expert - but really wasn't.
Many times, after a talk, I find that something I said was just plain wrong - it happens - to everyone - even the best speakers out there.
They key is, as an attendee, to not sit around and waste time listening to a bad speaker. I just quietly walk out, picking up an evaluation form in the process, and making sure the instructor gets my feedback.
As an occasional bad speaker - the best thing an audience member can do for me is to let me know if I have gotten it wrong! In the end, the only way tp turn a bad speaker into a good one - is through feedback - even if it is "YOU SUCK!"
I once attended a Windows 3.1 seminar back in 1994 where some jackass kept complaining that I sat in HIS chair (out of 300 identical folding chairs) after the lunch break.
He was about a foot taller and at least 30 lbs heavier than me. I finally told him to shut the hell up or we could go outside and I would kick his butt. He shut the hell up and apologized later.
That's about all I remember from that seminar.
5 minutes later, by accident, he clicks on the link, triggering a cascade of pop-ups with naked men in front of the class, which was laughing it's lungs out...
This was a class offered internally by Intel --
...... I lasted until the morning break - then went back ot my office to get some work done .....
So this total propeller head who's teaching the class says "Perl is the easiest language to learn - very natural and logical syntax"
Its not the years, its the mileage
"I had a bad text book. Here's how quickly I finished a class that was below me and got a good grade."
You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).
The Spanish university all these years was preparing the perfect frivolous lawsuit for libel and Slashdot was under a gag order.
I was at a conference one time where an HP guy gave a lecture, and during the Q&A people asked why HP hasn't moved to 64 bit yet, like DEC had, etc.
Guy got really mad and started pretty much yelling at people, saying that 64 bit has twice as many bits and is therefore half as fast as 32 bit computing.
People didn't even bother laughing at him. Everyone just looked at him like he was an idiot.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
About 1/2 an hour into one of those "Know your NT server" 1-day seminars in '98, the out-of-town presenter said, "I really think I have appendicitis and have to go to an emergency room -- right now!"
On the other hand, he was one of the most honest presenters I've ever seen. Took the time to point out the manual page with URL references and said, "You can always get answers to your questions on the web."
Oh, hell. I worked for this lisping idiot from Venuzuela. What a nightmare. By the time I got there he had alienated so many people that I was the only remaining engineer. I lasted six months. To date, that remains my shortest and worst gig. We had a few customers and this jackass would always make me lie to the customers and say that we were 100% on their problem when we were not because we were working on other problems. Just a nightmare. Because of that experience, I have avoided like the plague any shop that even hints of using Swing.
I felt bad for the presenter of a two day course on SOA. No one told him that our business model revolves around building totally custom solutions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to talk to the open 'net. I finally explained this to him and he looked crestfallen. He asked the class (of engineers) and everyone agreed that we couldn't use any of it. A waste of time for all involved, costing many thousands of dollars.
Did you do the attendees a favor and correct the lecturer, or did you just let the misinformation run wild?
It's because quantum mechanics is so passe... they better use their time by lecturing on time cubes.
Mark? Mark V. Chaney?
lol...........LOL does this make sense to anyone? Maybe in another place, but here?
I went to this PLC (Programmable Logic Controller, that's industrial control for you computer geeks). It started OK, with some drone showing off Schneider Electric's new Contactor (the TeSys U, a "smart" contactor with a LCD display, over/under load protection, short-circuit protection,.. whatever). Later on comes this guy, making some really bad jokes and then laughing himself -- the rest of us just laughed at the way he laughed, he was really loud. So, he shows some PLC basics. All was fine...
Next day he said, well, we're finished with the PLC stuff (actually we were finished with some really really bird's eye view of Ladder diagrams), now we'll see some SCADA. So the guy start showing this REALLY CRAPPY 16-bit app, and he showed ONE BY ONE every single widget (buttons, bar graphs, even some motors that changed colors to show when the output was running). And the library was H U G E. THOUSANDS of widgets. And he showed them "oh, look at how many of them there are! Just see how flexible this program is! See! We even have traffic lights! Buttons! Little trucks, big trucks, cars...".
I went outside and came back in 1 hour, and the guy was STILL SHOWING the fucking widgets and how to place and connect them. Needless to say, I didn't stay.
Free Food: Indian, Mexican, HotDogs, etc
Buxom Models
Bean Bags
Comedian presenters
I couldn't bloody well concentrate!!!
"Introduction to Adobe Premiere"
I spent most of the workshop (Practical) cursing at the user interface, only to be told by the instructor that it was the best UI because "it's what the professionals use". My first action after the workshop was to wander down a floor to the media suites where I could use Final Cut to do the same thing in half the time, without buttons where the top and bottom half do different things.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
static is not dynamic..
period..
stop arguing about this fact..
thank you..
Got similar from the "Intro to C++" professor I had. "I'm now showing you an array, which the school doesn't want me to teach," he said. When queried why, it turns out that the morons that the "guidance counselors indicated had high computer aptitude" couldn't wrap their heads around a basic, simple array. We had OUR education dumbed down 'cause of some kid that shouldn't have been in the class to begin with.
I quit attending there when another professor argued that the Apple Lisa never existed, insisting the Mac was the first PC with a GUI... and he'd not heard of Xerox PARC, either....
I don't know what the community colleges are like in YOUR region, but the ones in San Antonio are simply pitiful.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Apple developer conference, I think just before 10 came out. In every session during Q&A we would tell Apple what was wrong with the OS and things that didn't work. The answer in each session was "That's a third party developer opportunity". Everyone was so pissed. It still makes me mad.
It's a copy/paste troll. You'll see that post in just about every story here.
Worst workshop for one of the worst products ever pieced together by purchasing different companies and mashing the results...
This did not happen to me, but to a close friend of mine who works at a college. He does not work in IT, but does most of his work on a laptop. He had got some problems with spy/adware so he decided to attend a staff workshop about computer and Internet security.
One lecture was performed by an old-timer from the Intelligence Community. Instead of talking about the topic at hand, he provided an inappropriate, prejudiced rant about muslim immigrants from the middle-east. He talked about them "invading the civilized world", "stealing our women and making them convert to islam", and "committing acts of terrorism", as if these were traits inherent to islam and all muslims.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
My experience with the CompuMaster "Mastering Java Web Applications" was disappointing to say the least. Anybody considering one of their courses should reconsider.
..."
1. Two ancient computers for 3 students. 933MHz P3 with 256MB of RAM running XP. It literally took minutes for the Java IDE we were using to load.
2. Instructor was completely unprepared - we had to download the Java JDK over the hotels dog slow network and install it ourselves - taking up most of the first morning.
3. The instructors idea of "teaching" was reading verbatim from the powerpoint and the ~50 page info packet we got. Any attempts to break him loose from that revealed that he was completely clueless.
4. That 50 pages of material consisted mostly of step-by-step tutorials of the trained monkey variety (push a button, eat a banana) which were completely bug-ridden. And this is for a class which this instructor alone claims to have taught 6 times before.
5. At the beginning of the class the instructor asked what we wanted to accomplish. I spoke up and said I wanted to learn how to set up a web service. With 2 hours left, I brought it up again - his reply was to find a section on web services in one of his big Java books, put it in front of me and say "here, look at this." I asked him point blank if he had ever set up a Java web service. No
6. The class was 0900 to 1600 with a 1.25 hour lunch and two 15 minute breaks per day. So about 11.5 total hours of "instruction" for about $1200.
Now, I didn't expect to "master" java web applications in two days. But I did expect to come away with a good feel for what they were, where to start, etc. I've taken other short courses on engineering subjects and have been generally happy with what we covered. But they were much more intense, focused, fast paced, and usually put in at least a 10 hour day. And the instructor was generally a recognized expert in the field. This guy did have all the certs though - he rattled off a whole alphabet soup list of them at the beginning of the class.
On top of all that, the guy was a complete MS shill - but he always prefaced those statements with "I'm not a microsoftie but
All in all, a very disappointing experience.
We did complain, and the company offered to credit our tuition toward another of their classes. Sorry, but my time is more valuable then that.
[nt]
In university I took a discrete logic course taught by a tenured professor who was one year away from retirement. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday he showed up to class, opened the textbook, and proceeded to read it to the class in the most monotone voice I've ever heard. There were over 100 students in the class and the average attendance was about 5. Despite the effort involved in keeping my eyes open, I went to nearly every class.
There were two midterms that were each worth about 20% of the final mark. On midterm days everyone had trouble finding a seat. The best part was during the second midterm the guy sitting next to me turned to me and asked "So... like... when do we have to write the second midterm after this one?" When I told him that this was the second midterm and that he'd missed the first he turned as white as a ghost, put his head on the desk and started shaking. It made sitting through all those boring classes worth it.
I'm not dead yet!
I was in a training session where the 'instructor' was asked what a double was and he explained it was called a double becuase it held two variables. I almost walked out of the class.
Went to a Dream Weaver Basics class, motsly made up of folks who wanted to do rudimentary websites. The instructor was a BIG gamer, very high on bells and whistles, which he demonstarted on his sites ad nauseum. After the second session, most of us essentially ignored him and "taught" each other... nit that Dream Weaver was so difficult to begin with.
Was this spanish language course taught by Miguel de Icaza?
It's not an IT story, but it's every bit as much a waste of time as what others are talking about. I'm a music teacher. In my first year, all elementary "specialist" teachers (music, art, PE, etc) were required to attend a six hour course on how to teach the new reading curriculum, because, you know... that's what we teahch... Talk about a waste of time. The classroom teachers that were there seemed bored enough, and basically conversed through the whole presentation. And then, the specialists got split up because we were being too distracting.
My supervisor and I were sent to a Windows Vista course to "get up to speed" where we spent 4 days on all the changes made in Vista. I think within the first 2 hours I'd installed every application we use and some of my FOSS favorites (like Firefox, etc...) and gotten a thumbs up or down on every app. The worst part was that since it was a x86 Debug install of the OS, half of the components didn't work right, and crashed constantly (come to think of it, most of the release version's I've used did almost as poorly.) Where it really lacked though was that none of the computers were joined to any Active Directory so we couldn't see how it behaved from a remote-management perspective which is what we really wanted to know... not "wow! It is a new version of Windows Media Player!" as the entire group were IT professionals wanted to assess it's compatibility and feasiability to implement. My boss and I had to create accounts on our lab machines with identical UIDs and passwords and drop the firewall to test if all our in-house scripts would work properly. (A lot didn't.)
The redeeming part was I was able to show my boss how FireFox, MySQL and Open Office.org ran properly, even on the debug version, and both Adobe Reader and Citrix wouldn't install at all, and IE crashed on 60% of web pages. That and the next 3.5 days were spent playing the actually pretty nice Vista chess game.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The TrollGoons are back!!!
Jombeewoof is a bastard who thinks the world owes him a living. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267807&cid=202 07637 [slashdot.org] Jombeewoof tried to destroy an Internet Service Provider in Massachusetts by expecting large bandwidth without paying anything. Educated alone doesn't pay the bills. Jombeewoof is not worth your mod points and is a MySpace loser. Jombeewoof, give up, get off the Internet. The TrollGoons won't leave you alone.
YOU ARE NOT WANTED ON SLASHDOT!
The university for which I worked promised an "advanced" email workshop. Thinking that I might learn something halfway interesting or useful about the filing system or filtering or whatever, I signed up. After all, I act as my department's tech rep and have to keep up on things in order to counsel my colleagues!
So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.
I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Many years ago I was at a customer, and had my email window open in the background before I opened the PowerPoint marketware deck. One of the mailing lists I was on had a discussion with Subject lines about "Fuck you!" "Yeah, Fuck *You*!" etc. Fortunately it was only with a few techies, and obviously wasn't major non-professionalism on my part
They can accept stories and run them in the future. They must have accepted this one to run "when Duke Nukem Forever is released" and the system got confused by the trailer because it doesn't get much of a workout.
Which reminds me, I wonder how many people still have DNF preorders active?
Needless to say, the talk contained no useful information at all.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The school I work at as a Technician (for the past five years), having set up their entire Windows network from bare metal without any management interfaces but a couple of hand-coded batch scripts, wanted to send me on an ECDL course. That's "European Computer Driving License" to those who don't know. A click-here-to-run-Word-congratulations-you've-passed "qualification" that you give to typists and secretaries. I didn't have the heart to explain to them - I merely said that it wasn't worth their money to send me on that course and they should instead send (besides the fact that I could not only teach that same damn course, but have built networks that the ECDL people end up renting in order to teach the course!
Schools get very stroppy if you don't have all the three-or-four-letter-acronyms to your name until they actually see what you've been doing for the last seven years - they're used to technical people having MCSE's etc. and having to be constantly re-trained on every new OS, buy expensive management software for every tiny little management task etc. because they don't know what they are doing. Then you show them that you've managed all the same networks, on a smaller budget, with greater demands, older hardware and no fancy software and that it outperforms all the ones they've seen and suddenly the little lights switch on in their brains that maybe courses/training/letters/acronyms aren't that important after all.
It has been my experience, having attended my fair share of mandatory IT training workshops, that they are at best inefficient when it comes to learning new materials well (i.e. too many people of various skill and knowledge levels attending to meet the needs of everyone or even most of the attendees) and at worst, which occurs more often than not, they are a complete waste of time. This wastefulness is often further compounded by the fact that training workshops in general, and IT training workshops in particular, are very expensive with costs as high as several thousand dollars for a 1-2 hour session not unheard of. I find that I work better with well written books, self guided research on developer sites with Google, and a little bit of prototyping and for much less money than attending workshops. There may be other people, the so-called audio visual learners perhaps, for whom the workshop would be of greater benefit, but for me self study with the occasional resort to the newsgroups, developer sites, or my books to have a question answered is much more productive. However, to be fair to IT workshops I have heard that training workshops in other fields, real estate and business for example, suffer from many of the same problems so perhaps the problem is not peculiar to IT workshops, but rather indicative of a larger problem with the modern Power Point driven blowhard-jamborees that pass for workshops and conferences these days.
If you absolutely must attend this type of training and you have a choice (i.e. it is a job requirement) then I would suggest laboratory or other hands on courses where you at least open up the IDE and do some hacking around and if you don't like the presenter or the material then, well, there is always Slashdot isn't there?
I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!
The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.
His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.
Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!
I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.
It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.
In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.
It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.
I swear to God, the first words from the presenters mouth: "That Exchange thing Microsoft is building is no threat to us, and here is why....."
... Being the "computer nerd" in the family that everyone and their friends come crying to everytime something stupidly simple confuses them. On a few occasions, they may even go so far as to blatantly ignore your instructions *not* to do something that eventually hoses their system. After that point, it's months and months of redundant "how do I find...?" questions.
I'm still convinced people need to start getting licensed for computer usage, determined by demonstrating their knowledge of basic computer logic and a rough understanding of how the machine works under the hood.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I used to work at a consortium of universities named ACS and our workshops were pretty lame. I think it helped that the majority of the people attending the workshops new very little so they didn't realize how bad they were and I'm sure the FREE food and alcohol we provided at dinners more than helped them forget any lame-ness they experienced....
I'd call my worst IT workshop experience "University".
Best 4 years of my social life, worst 4 years of my actual knowledge.
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
this guy is a lawsuit just waiting to happen.
I'll shake my cane at them while the rest of you hightail it back to my lawn. Quickly now! My boring pointless stories can only hold them for so long!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My worst one was an online 2k3 server admin class using a combination of gotomeeting and teamspeak. Supposed to be 5 8-hour sessions, one day a week. Before the class started, we were given instructions to install VMware, download their edu-licensed images of 2k3 server and XP, and perform a few basic steps to get them ready for class. Basically, set up a virtual network in VMware and configure the sessions. Minimum specs of broadband connection, 1 gig of memory, a P4 CPU, and XP were listed in the instructions.
Nobody bothered to prepare. The first 8 hour session was pissed away with the instructor and tech support walking people through downloading, installing, and configuring VMware and the pre-packaged system images. I was flabbergasted. These people can't even follow simple directions. Nor could they follow the live remote session while the instructor walked through the process of installing the software and configuring it. "Click this then this then that and hit next." "I'm lost. Can you help me when you're done with Fred? Thanks." And by "help", they mean "do it for me".
These "students" couldn't even install a frickin' application and they thought they were ready to handle running servers? That's like showing up at a cockfight with an egg and hoping people will wait for you to catch up. Nevermind the guy on dialup or the one with a P3/500 and 192 megs of RAM. Thank Jebus I was taking the "class" at home. I stuck my 2/3 full Heini keg in a bowl of ice and finished it off while watching movies and listening to the class session babble in the background.
Oh, and there was the unix class with an instructor who didn't know unix. That was pretty lame. A student would sit at the class' VT100 terminal and test her material real-time. Nod if she was right, and she'd move on. If not, "Oh. Okay. I'll figure out the right answer after class.". Yes, I said VT100. With the green phosphor screen. What of it? (Actually, may have been any of the VT1xx terminals. I don't recall the specific model, just the shape and the fact that it was from DEC.)
The workshops I attend now are usually sponsored by local users groups like SFNTUG. The presenters have to deliver because the people they are presenting to are their peers or potential customers.
My university had a Workshop on how to get an IT job for people in the CIS program. They had a panel of local business people answering questions from students. One of them was the owner of a security consulting firm. He responded to a question about how many applicants per entry level job he gets with the answer of 5000+. A lady sitting in from Student Services who sponsored the workshop asked how one would get noticed for position like this. He says work experience. She asks, how do you get work experience if companies only want to hire people with work experience for entry level jobs? Not a single one of them even took a shot at answering that one.
I once signed up for a University Extension class on Visual Basic. At the first session, the instructor kept telling us over and over again to make sure our homework projects worked before turning them in. I kept thinking "WTF is he harping on this?" Finally it emerged that he didn't have a lot of time to sit around reading our source code, and intended to grade our homework solely on the basis of whether the program did what it was supposed to do. Needless to say, I didn't come back for a second session.
This was one of several Extension classes I took that were run by teachers who were teaching just to earn a little extra money, and didn't feel compelled to put a lot of time into it. One guy was in such a hurry that he'd grade quizzes by subtracting 10 points from a possible 100 for each "wrong" answer, no matter how subjective the question or how many questions were actually on the test! Other people have told me that they've had good experience with Extension teachers who are serious and dedicated. I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't encountered any.
Topic was something like "professional document and knowledge management". It was one week(!) full of building folders and excel tables. Also, some Google searching and the only part remotely interesting, the part about Wikis that was in the initial listing was announced as not going to happen.
What, exactly, is "professional" about this? Was the question I asked on the 2nd day. I didn't get a satisfying answer. I did get my money back.
Quite frankly, time and time again I am amazed at what low-level tools people use for jobs. In IT, in many areas, the decision makers are like artisans who work with stone-age tools and think that's the right thing to do. For almost every instance where I've seen an excel sheet being used, for example, there is a better tool in existence that does a better job for less effort. Except that it probably costs money and the guy who makes the decisions doesn't know it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I find a number of people have the misimpression that the reason "everyone" uses Internet Explorer is because it adheres best to the web standards. The proof? "Well gee, everywhere you go it works and there are some sites that IE works great on and those other browsers can't render at all!" Sad really.
I do think the combination of CSS and XHTML make managing a nice web site with a basic text editor possible. Nice to have the layout stuff not mixed up with the content.
--Chuck
Anyway after sign-in the instructor ignored the various props (including a good mock-up of the pump controls and gauges) and simply started reading the pump technical manual word-for-word... slowly... for four hours straight. Even loud snoring from the front row didn't distract him. Once it became clear what was happening several people walked out and I would have too but the training was important since modern pumps can overdraw a line and create a vacuum that will collapse water mains if no suction control valves are in place... so I hung on for the whole time just in case there was one useful tidbit... oddly nobody had any questions during the Q&A.
Sitting in one of the computer ones, the instructor brings up a terminal window to show us pine. I start broadcasting odd messages to his machine, which all show up on the projected screen.
He ended up cutting out that section of the lecture because he didn't know how to stop the messages, and didn't realize it was coming from a student in the room.
We were doing some research on real-time systems at my company and it happened to turn out that there was a conference on real-time systems in a building not too far away so I attended.
Well, there was one talk entitled "how to choose a real-time system", which sounded like it would give a lot of useful information and seemed like it might have a nice broad overview of the industry. I thought I might get a nice comparison between QNX, embedded Linux, VxWorks, and maybe even a small section on how these solutions compare to WinCE.
The first thing the guy says is, "well, I know this talk was entitled 'how to choose a real-time system', but actually the real subject we're going to discuss is 'how to choose a Microsoft real-time system'. Apologies if there are any unix guys out there.." Underhanded sneaky fuckers. Turns out the company giving the tutorial is completely in bed with MS and the whole discussion is related to comparing CE with embedded XP, both which are mostly entirely uninteresting to me, but by then I was already seated on the opposite end of the room from the door so I sat through it. To this day I wish I'd stormed out of the room..
By the way, as an epilogue, to register for the conference I had to give them my email address. Back then I didn't have the presence of mind to go for a throw-away address, so I gave them my work address. Since then, and to this day, it has become the most spammed-out email address I've ever had the displeasure to use, and a very good portion of the spam is related to real-time systems. I can't change it because it's my work email. I've settled for forwarding it to gmail, which does a damn good job of filtering all the crap, but my spam ratio in that account is like 400-to-1. If I see one more "industry" spam inviting me to a "webinar", I'm going to scream.
I attended a 5 day course near London back in 1989 on CA Unicenter.
The course was intended to teach the various aspects of CA's systems management software. However it didn't cover anything you really needed to know, as that would deprive revenue from their appallingly bad consulting arm. So it mostly taught aspects of bundled co-components that no-one in their right mind would use.
About half of the course covered something that was little more than a GUI version of cron which offered no real practical use in a live environment. The whole thing could have easily been covered in 5 minutes. Another day was spent on another equally useless component.
When we did get to the juicy part, a log file parser, the course stated that you could use regular expressions to do pattern matching. Unfortunately they didn't give any indication as to the syntax of these regular expressions, and the solitary example in the course work offered no real clues as to how the syntax worked, and didn't even explain what it was trying to match.
The whole course was a waste of time. I lost my coursework bag somewhere on the journey home. I pity the poor soul who found it, as it was of no use.
Worst class ever was an attempt to "programming in C, 101": while the teacher was somehow acquainted with bare-metal stuff (like addressing the keyboard buffer in machine code), he couldn't write one single application that actually worked.
He spent hours and hours upon *trying* to read a simple list of cities and their corresponding ZIP codes. The catch: in Borland C for DOS (mind you, this was 1997), the memory model was set to "tiny", so the total size of code + data was limited to 64 K. Instead of using the "medium" memory model, he first tried to solve the problem by splitting up the data into two files, then by adding flawed "indexes" and so on...
At the end of the semester, having messed with pointers, choosing the wrong io-functions and ignoring best practices, it still didn't work...His lectures about (ab)using the c language became some kind of an art performance...
Next was a unix-course, given by the same guy. Since he happened to own a 400+ page "AWK" guide, he insisted on writing awk scripts for each and every problem (even when piping a few commands would do the trick). Unfortunately, he had no clue whatsoever, trying to "fix" his lengthy, bug-ridden scripts by just adding more lines of dead-wrong code...
Needless to say, some studentes got flunked because they provided a simple solution that actually worked, instead of cooking up his favourite recipes for disaster...
It's a trash can, and I only get cookies to eat :(
Roll on second semester, we look at our timetable and see a compulsory course with marked attendance called "Computers for Chemists". Hey we think this might be doing cool things with pc's (we were young and naive) but no. The first lecture starts with the Prof holding up his laptop and saying "this is computer" then he holds up his mouse and says (go on you can guess) "this is a mouse". It got worse after that.
I didn't learn anything about computers in there but i did learn how to sleep sitting up in a lecture.
Got similar from the "Intro to C++" professor I had. "I'm now showing you an array, which the school doesn't want me to teach," he said. When queried why, it turns out that the morons that the "guidance counselors indicated had high computer aptitude" couldn't wrap their heads around a basic, simple array. We had OUR education dumbed down 'cause of some kid that shouldn't have been in the class to begin with.
Oh you're telling me. In Ontario, Canada about 4 years ago we were using PII-400s with 4GB hard drives and 64MB of RAM to install Windows NT Server 4 as part of our Advanced Operating Systems course component. Suffice to say it took all class to format/install the OS. Then the instructor informs us that the next class's itinerary included formatting and re-installing NT so we could become more familiar with the installation routine.
A few of us who were expecting to delve into Linux, Windows XP, domains, etc. at the time asked if we could divert and do some other activities or atleast explore the NT server we'd already installed and he told us no, he couldn't set up individual lesson plans for select groups so we'd have to follow with the rest of the class. So we all developed mysterious illnesses the next day.
This class was an advanced component covering operating systems in an industry grade (and "industry developed") three year program and it listed no pre-requisites. Some of the people in our course couldn't even type letalone operate a modern PC - forget servers, switches, routers or the like - a word processor was fascinating and the rest of us had to suffer for it.
Our Telephony course had a mid-term required 30 page (double spaced) report due on the history, present, and future of telephony (one could easily write 300 pages but I digress). So here I am busting my hump, dissapointed in myself for only managing 26 or 27 pages, which I hole punch and hand in in a nicely coloured duo-tang on the prescribed day and what do I see from my classmates? 2, 3 and 4 page reports with a staple at the top corner, pictures galore (lots of photos of Alexander Bell, pictures of old telephones, new telephones) and due to the overwhelming complaints of the students the teacher had to give these people 'A' grades. So 4 pages double spaced with extra wide margins and 25% images with huge headers printed with 30 point font get an 'A' which completely invalidated my 27 page hand-in.
n.b. Our final exam in that class was open book in absurdia. Anything you could bring in on paper was allowed. If you could wheel a filing cabinet into the exam room it was permitted. The failure rate was more than 60% until the students whined.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
The VT100 series were only available with a white, P4 phosphor. You may be thinking of the later ones, like a VT220 or something. They were available in green, amber, and white.
toresbe
Talking about general stupidity in academic practices.
I was a sound recording/engineering (think music, not slide rules) student at the University of Memphis. One of the required courses was Business Law, a 3000 level course. This class had about four prerequisites, which were normally taken by Business majors during their frosh/soph years. But being that it was required for my major, I was automatically allowed to take the class (approval needed, but always given for this type of instance) without needed to take the pres. Well it was a complete disaster. While business "Law" has a greater amount of subjectivity than exacting areas like Math, it was plainly obvious on Day 1 (the only long haired guy in a crowded lecture hall of khaki clad preps and biz majors, I truly looked out of place) that those prerequisites truly gave needed fundamental knowledge to succeed in this course. Imagine trying to take Differential Equations without the pres. I was floundering from minute one. Here I was stuck with taking a required course that had 12 credit hours of prerequisites (that would not even apply towards my major had I taken them) and not being prepared for it. The prof understood my situation, took pity on me and gave me a C. In hindsight I should have either argued with the department heads against placing such a logical roadblock in the degree plan, or audited the prerequisites (had I caught this beforehand). In the end I chalked it up a learning experience, and gained a newfound distaste for too much liberalness in degree plans. I would have preferred a few more technical courses than this Liberal Arts requirement.
Don't even get me started on some of the other useless Music Biz courses the degree plan called for.
But to make this post IT related, I once took an intro C++ course. Another disaster. The prof used a book that assumed familiarity in programming, and mainly taught syntax and ideas germane to C++. it was not a book for the absolute beginner (The Object Concept by Decker), and the class was not taught that way either. I got a D. Took the class again with a different instructor who taught in a beginner fashion, and used a book with an equivalent approach, and aced the class. In hindsight The Object Concept is not a bad book, but I wasn't the right fit for that book at the time.
First time I've saw Google was in the lates 1999, while was beta (It's beta yet?)
but Google Images surely after 2003..... so
It was only a matter of time until 64bit got engineered to run much faster than 32bit in standard applications. If you ask a company representative why they haven't moved to 64bit yet and they cite the speed issue, it means they are probably trying to save their company's name. The problem is, this is a stupid response, and it neither explains the engineering issues behind the move to 64bit nor is believable to an audience which probably has already conditioned (rightly in my view) that 64bit is always better (hence the question). Even saying that the company would produce 64bit when there was sufficient market demand would be much better.
Well, one thing that was correct in the article: tables are still the best way to organise a html page. At least for relatively complex websites. There is absolutely no replacement for tables, when it comes to aligning elements to each other, both horizontally and vertically.
CSS just doesn't cut it for relative positioning to multiple elements in a column. For simple layouts, CSS is great. It works, it looks neat, and is very maintainable. But as soon as you start needing a proper grid style layout, it just falls to pieces. There's no way that CSS can replace tables in that instance, unless you use absolute positioning and meticulously calculate the exact sizes and positions you want. But then you're left with a complete mess, much worse than using tables to begin with.
As long as you keep the table as simple as possible, and use CSS to layout the simple elements, then it's still very maintainable. Just try to avoid using tables for every little thing, and the design is generally fine.
Chicken chicken chicken: Chicken chicken. Chicken!
... and he'd not heard of Xerox PARC, either....
I started reading a Douglas Rushkoff book, think it was Cyberia, had an interesting see-through plastic cover. In the first chapter, among other misfacts, he refers to "Xerox Park". About that point I realized I would have to read slow and verify everything before trusting it as actually true. I had better things to do, so it's been in a box for ten years.My guess is the fact-checking budget was used for the fancy cover.
I gave a workshop on email, requiring some knowledge of mail and internet. About twenty people attended the course. All but one didn't know anything about mail nor internet and their lack to meet the requirements was compensated by their unwillingness to listen to what I told them. So they got lost individually. Some had the nerve to criticize me for not meeting their notion of a beginners' course. I raised the fees drastically...
cb
I worked for a corporate training company in the early 1990s. One client was moving from mainframes from UNIX and the unhappy employees were forced to train on UNIX or find work elsewhere. Naturally they took it out on the instructor. The worst was a guy who didn't touch type, but did all of his typing with the eraser end of a wooden pencil. The only thing more terrible than watching paint dry is watching the pencil-eraser-typing guy learn vi.
5 years ago I had been learning HTML for about a year already, based on tuition from a friend who had taught me how to hand code HTML in a text editor. I had also learned a bit of javascript and ActionScript in Flash (this was in the days when Flash 4 was current and tables for layout was an accepted way of laying out a web page, not THAT long ago?!?).
My Dad said I should get some qualifications (I flunked College/Uni) so I went along to a local 'IT Training' company. At the introductory presentation they showed us a great Flash animation with some really impressive graphics and they promised that within 3 weeks they'd teach us to do that!
Baring in mind that this was just a basic animation with no interface/interactivity, I was a little sceptical, how would they teach us to be graphic designers capable of turning out animated graphics worthy of quake 2 in 3 weeks! After the 'stoke-fest' presentation I went online and checked the company's website and was presented with a pink and black site with 100% font size, Times New Roman, blink tags and a java applet for the navigation that didn't work!
Needless to say I didn't sign up, although I did consider approaching them to re-build their website...
The lecturer claimed he'd previous been working in the industry developing embedded C code. After 15 minutes of him explaining that # directives are evaluated at runtime, I couldn't take it. I put my hand up and simply said "you're wrong. That's what the precompiler does". I had a reputation for knowing what I was on about (I was there for a qualification, not because I didn't know C). He went beetroot red. In hindsight I should have talked to him after the class and had him correct his mistake the next week, but hey I was a cocky 18 year old, and he was talking BS. He was a nice guy and was genuinely trying to be helpful. He just wasn't very good.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This class was conducted in house with about 100 people there. I don't remember the company that did the training, but it took them about 1/2 hour to get the laptop to boot (it kept getting the BSOD). Finally, when they did get it working, it was obviously they were just showing powerpoint slides of the handouts we already had. They didn't have computers for us surf pr0n when we wern't sleeping. My thought: "How am I going to survive 2 days of this? Can powerpoint poisoning be fatal?" Anyway, my co-worker and I ditched the class after the first break.
A close 2nd in 1986, was Windows 1.0 training, also in house I mean, how many ways can you configure a .PIF file? All for a crappy DOS shell that no one (as far as I know) has ever used? At least I survived death by boredom by playing Choplifter when the teacher wasn't looking.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Hey, I know Rick Decker! Not only was he my professor in college, I went to high school with his son ;-)
He is one cool, cool guy. Good professor, too.
And yes, he taught from his books :-)
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
At the annual student staff meeting at my university, we were split up into groups by department. The groups were to then come up with a "super hero" who's "super power" would have something to do with our department's function. We were also to come up with a "super weakness" like Kryptonite, which would also have something to do with our department. We were given large pieces of paper and markers to draw our super hero.
This clusterfuck apparently came together by directors taking suggestions from the full time staff and combining them together, sort of like the cubes in the Cube movies. Since the only mandatory part of the meeting was the annual safety training, most of the students left on the spot.
His voting record is way off-topic in a user-id-measuring contest (mine's big, but prime!)
...! ... wanders off mumbling to himself ...
Mine's a multiple of both 13 and 6131. Nya nya
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
1) Add a nickname to your mailbox so you can receive email at both addresses.
2) Tell everyone you want about your new email address.
3) Watch for email coming in to the old address for a few months, and tell those people about your new address.
4) When you are happy that you warned everyone, give your old address to the email admin for his spamtrap account.
It's a win-win for you both. ;-)
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I highly recommend it if you ALREADY have at least one semester's worth of C++ programming under your belt, or know a different language. But if you are an absolute beginner, this is the WORST book to try, even with an instructor.
"The images identified by the Google Image Search service may be protected by copyrights. Although you can locate and access the images through our service, we cannot grant you any rights to use them for any purpose other than viewing them on the web. Accordingly, if you would like to use any images you have found through our service, we advise you to contact the site owner to obtain the requisite permissions."
Eh, no text apart from the question in the subject which I will repeat here:
Who will build the CMS?
Could you provide us with an example of a website that is too hard to do in CSS? I think that would argue your case more than "yes it IS still needed."
I think people here assume you are cutting complex (non-rectangular) pics in pieces and putting them in td cells. This would be a bad way of implementing a layout, since it's easily placed in a div in its entirety, then positioned anywhere on the page. I assume you're aware of this though, and am interested in seeing a use of tables (outside of tabular data) that couldn't be solved with CSS/divs.
I once attended a company internal IT course in Germany. Although the class was small (about 12 people), about everyone was from a different country. The weirdest part was where the instructor (Spanish) and a class mate (Russian) could only communicate in broken English when a question about the content was asked. The conversations normally ended with dazed looks on both their faces.
I still have a VT100 and a 220 in storage. Up until a few years ago they saw use as console terminals on linux boxen. I still sort of miss using pine in green phos. monochrome with loud clicky keys..
at a local tech school, I had been dabbling and wanted someone to give me focussed information. Turns out the instructor had dabbled less than most of the people in the class so myself and another guy ended up running the afternoon portion of the session just to keep it from being a complete waste of time. Looking back, and considering what a noob-sauce I was, it was a complete waste of time with the exception that I learned to never take one day seminars on new technology ever again.
I actually made SharkTank with this one a few years ago:
The assignment looks simple enough, says this Web developer pilot fish at a medium-size Midwestern university: Take the annual survey given to incoming freshmen, convert it to a Web page and give academic advisers easy access to the results.
"The survey gave the advising department valuable information on each student's academic history, what they were interested in studying, and their extracurricular activities," fish says. So the technology is simple, but the value to the advisers is high.
Fish designs the Web form so the student data will be inserted into a database. Then on the administrative end, he writes code to convert that data into an Adobe Acrobat report.
"And I made sure the administrative end was brain-dead simple," fish says. "I gave the users in the advising office one Web page that had one text box and one submit button. Instructions were printed in a large, bold font at the top of the page: 'To view a student's survey, enter the student number in the box and click the submit button.'
"After clicking the button, the report was generated and displayed in a separate window, so they could save or print it or just read it on their screens. The box would only accept digits and only nine of them, the exact length of a student number. Again, brain-dead simple and foolproof.
"Or so I thought."
But the day after the application rolls out, fish gets a call from the head of the advising department.
"She loved the whole process," says fish, "but wanted me to come talk to all of the academic advisers. They had questions about it."
Fish figures the questions must be about the Web form that the students fill out, so he sets up a training session in a lab, just for the advisers.
"Instead, I spent an hour with 30 advisers showing them how to enter a number into that one text box and push that one button," fish groans.
"When I returned to my office and related to my co-workers how I had just lost an hour of my life, they didn't believe me.
"That was when I received an e-mail from the head of advising -- praising me up and down for being so helpful in training her staff on the use of the administrative interface."
At our college Software Engineering department Professors are pretty creative in grading exams :
- one professor has a binary notation system. Every answer is either 100% right or wrong. He must be a roulette gambler.
- another, this semester, gave out blank sheets on which every student had to write down 5 questions and answer them. Only the ones of 'interest' were graded.
And they wonder why students are just in a hurry to get out of there once they graduate.
I recently had to take an elective in my CS graduate program. Being a seasoned Java professional, I figured a 500-level JAVA class would be a breeze. Boy was I wrong. The instructor was one of these old-school CS purists who HATED Java and loved C++. Each lecture was about how to do some low-level task in Java, and why C++ was so much better for that task (duh). He broke just about every standard Java coding convention that the compiler would allow. Multiple classes per file, ignoring the package structure. Each class was named like: "Class_ptr_adptr" (a class for a pointer adapter [wha???]), methods were named: "func_crt_inst()" (function create instance). And he REFUSED to call them "methods", in favor of "functions". I have no idea why some would deliberately choose to teach an entire course on Java if they hate it so much. Also, when i was an undergrad (c1996), I had a MIS course where the prof was trying to exmplain the meaning of a URL, say "www.company.com". She drew on the board a venn-like diagram, three circles, each one enclosing the next smaller, resembling a bull's eye. In the outermost, she wrote "www", then "company" and "com" in each of the inner 2 and explained "So www stands for th entire world wide web, "company" is for the company you are trying to reach, and "com" means "communicate".
Key Skills IT Level 3 at college - I was there a few years ago in an attempt to get some A-Levels so I could actually go to Uni and get some pieces of paper that say I can do the things I do, because it seems just being able to do them isn't enough for some people. It is the most boring thing I've ever had the misfortune to be submitted to.
If I ever have to do that again, I'm taking my BCS membership card, circling the bit that says MBCS and stapling it to someone's head.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Now we know the true source of Steve Ballmer's chair throwing monkey dance.
You, sir, are a genius.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
A majority of the students were still learning C++. It was obvious to anyone who has studied it to a degree of proficiency and had professional work experience using the language.
When university faculty asks you to do work, it is presumably because they want you to learn the subject they are teaching, or if you already know it, demonstrate proficiency with it. Funny enough, the professors and TAs I encountered who wanted to make their lives as easy as possible tended to be the absolute worst of the lot. They weren't paying me to write this program. If they had been, I would have done it in whatever manner they wished. I was paying them to teach me a subject that, in this case, I clearly knew more about than they did.
I clearly demonstrated that I knew what I was doing and understood the topic, and I wrote code that met the specifications of the requirements they gave me and then some. I was not only penalized for it, my code—which worked perfectly well according to their specifications, I must reiterate—was completely rejected.
No one is denying that being an effective teacher is nontrivial. The point of the quote is to express exasperation with the dearth of effective teachers.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
If you would have stuck around, you could have learned how to do your work using only 2 lines of perl.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I never did use the techniques they taught - it was an "all employees must take" class and it was completely irrelevant to my work at the time. Some PHB had the class on a list of qualifications that SysAdmins were supposed to have, so we all had to do it.
I once took a business course aimed at new entrepreneurs in my city. As it turns out, the lecture I'm about to elaborate on was more of a sales push for this persons consulting company (which was, coincidentally, out of town, and anyone hiring her would have probably had to pay her fee in addition to an hours worth of gas-mileage).
In addition, the instructor was... not advanced, per se, but learned a few things from "Windows XP for dummies" the previous day.
She spent a great deal of time explaining why people shouldn't keep all their documents in 'my documents", because "it would be easy for hackers to just find the folder and delete it or modify the files".
Keeping in mind, that, in 2002-2003, most of these people had 56k at best, and get this: Her solution to the problem was do make a folder in c:\ called "data", and then... change the "my documents" icon path to be c:\data... and save all your documents in there
I was the only technical person in the room, so I stood up to inform the crowd (most of whom I knew from other meetings held by the same organization):
1. Hackers breaking in to home PCs? Fat chance. (Not to mention the hacker vs cracker vs phreaker vs script kiddie etc)
2. Most of you are all still on 56k. As a result, the way dialup works, a "hacker" would have to know a few things about your system in advance, OR you'd have to be broadcasting your vulnerabilities EG you'd already have a virus.
3. c:\data is easier to get to (in windows 2000 or xp) than c:\documents and settings\....... and a "hacker" will just use the %mydocuments% in any script, so if you go changing that my docs path, it doesn't matter where your files are actually stored.
4. Install security software (firewall and virus scanner, even if its zone-alarm and avg)
5. Don't open email attachments, unless you know what they are.
6. This is a waste of time. Can I teach the next tech class?
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Jombeewoof is a well-known pinko commie. YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED! We, the TrollGoons, have relentlessly pursued Jombeewoof. We will continue to relentlessly pursue Jombeewoof. You will be profusely exposed as a deleterious child-raping sex offender and incompetent academian every time you post on Slashdot. Just as we have done in the past. You are on McCarthy's list, you pinko commie scum!
The TrollGoons are ubiquitous!!! We are Slashdot police!
Jombeewoof is a bastard who thinks the world owes him a living. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267807&cid=202 [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] 07637 [slashdot.org] Jombeewoof tried to destroy an Internet Service Provider in Massachusetts by expecting large bandwidth without paying anything. Educated alone doesn't pay the bills. Jombeewoof is not worth your mod points and is a MySpace loser. Jombeewoof, give up, get off the Internet. The TrollGoons won't leave you alone.
YOU ARE NOT WANTED ON SLASHDOT!
P.S. Vote George W. Bush for a third term so we can win the war on terrorists/commies! Constitution supporters shall be searched for and subject to seizure, indefinite imprisonment without trial, and double jeopardy!