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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?"
American Society of Professional Education. I refuse to link to them through the intellitxt ads here, so I'm not going to put up the acronym.
Not sure, but I think I bought this guy's book. The "for Dummies" book on CSS gives the same bad advice. I'll never buy a Dummies book again.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
except Google wasn't around in 1997....
nice troll
many university lecturers get sent free books and gifts by publishers, the publishers hope that the lecturer will use it as the basis of their course, in theory if the lecturer has good ethics s/he will choose the best book for the job. However, they might curry favour with a particular publisher to get their own book into print, or might use a book written by a friend as a favour.
When I was at university (too many years ago) some lecturers pushed very hard to get you to buy their book, making it clear that the notes from their lectures would be insufficient - those lecturers were usually a bit crap, coasting through the lessons and so meaning you just didn't have sufficient material to get through their exams - i.e they were able to avoid the hard work of preparing good lessons. Most lecturers were quite good, the books were supplemental, but if you took good notes and borrowed a book from the library you'd have fairly comprehensive coverage.
I love the feedback scores. I try to achieve the best marks and usually hit the nail on the head.
Then I went on a seminar series that had vendor sponsors. I got all top evaluation marks-- hundreds-- and only a rare 'good' instead of excellent.
I was replaced on the next seminar tour by a vendor sycophant-- because the vendors had complained. His marks? Not so good. Did they replace him? Of course not. Sponsors fill the gas tanks.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What year was this? A few years ago, some linux distros had some pretty dumb default ports open. Likewise, Microsoft at least showed some sense in enabling the XP SP2 'firewall' by default. Not that I'm disagreeing with you, but a few years ago, an "out of the box" linux install was arguably just as bad as windows.
funny you should mention playgirl... They were an early "pioneer" in name based virtual hosting...
A friend of mine left the company but left his vanity domain on our DNS server.
So i resolve www.playboy.com and place the resulting IP address in my friends www entry for his domain.
I verify the DNS is resolving to the correct address and never bother to see if my prank works.
Well, turns out instead of the relatively mild and innocent playgirl page, which was only about as shocking as a cosmo magazine front cover, the default page for the server hosting playgirl, when accessed with an unknown URL, was some horrifying goatse like thing instead. Not the actual goatse, but pretty bad.
I felt horrible, and he didn't talk to me for awhile, but looking back it was pretty funny.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I signed up an account in the early days before I really understood what slashdot was. Moved on and forgot the account details. I still remember spending time at the logon trying to get back into the account solely for the low userid :)
You mean like Apple, Microsoft, Digg, Yahoo, Mozilla, Adobe, and Download.com? Even AOL.com has a tableless layout.
It's not necessarily easy, especially when dealing with IE quirks. But many complex sites have switch to tableless presentation.
http://web2.0flow.com/top-30-popular-websites-are-not-using-tables-as-main-layout-structure/
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi