I work in a small company where everyone is required to do and know a little of everything. So far that includes some C/C++, VB, COM, ASP, IIS, Oracle, NT, PL/SQL, and lately even a little *nix. Knowing a little of everythin usually leaves you knowing a lot of of nothing. It's nice to have a book on the shelf you can go to for any situation, even if you only open each up once every few months. They are more for quick reference than for reading cover to cover.
Now the people who have entire bookshelves filled with ancient Oracle Tomes, I was never sure whether I should be laughing at them or crying with them.
As far as I'm concerned, the most important quality in an engineer is not what you know but what search engine you use to look stuff up.
I agree completely. A lot of times someone comes over and asks me a question, and I just type it in verbatim to deja and then read them one of the ten answer posts that comes up. Still though there is something very useful about being able to search through digital copies of books. Books are a good fall back for problems that are too stupid or too complicated to have been asked about or otherwise resolved in a public forum. Anyways, sometimes the problem is as much about staring at a computer screen too long as it is about whatever is actually causing the problem, so books help there too.
Along the same lines, it seems one possible way to win would be to make yourself very tense before starting gameplay, then bring yourself into a normal everyday state. A game designed to make you relax could make you more tense.
Nah not a bit like Doom. Sounds more like Counter Strike. I've got 0 military experience, but most of the attributes you describe are what distinguished the good players from the bad. Admittedly, a game like Counterstrike is nothing compared to real world training, however when you're up against completely unarmed/untrained individuals, I imagine it counts for something.
In my game the protagonist battles the evil Xargnathians from the planet Quartonogthonia. Any resemblence to humans from Earth or any other planet is completely coincidental.
With GI-Joes, outside of the figures, the kid generates the plot and imagery of his game by himself. So in theory anything twisted or sadistic that finds its way into playtime originated not with his action figures but with the kid himself. With video games the plot and imagery are provided blood, frags, and all. PS. The day after I got halflife I stayed in a server until I had accumulated over 1000 kills (had to take a break for dinner though).
The lawyers, judges, and other people with the power to make decisions aren't knowledgeable enough to make well informed decisions.
I agree with your point, however, you've got to admit it is hard to find someone who is qualified to judge/try/defend technology cases. As you say, most judges and lawyers are not familiar enough with the details. At the same time, most tech people are completely unqualified to handle any sort of complicated legal matter.
When people who were alive before computers retire and the next generation comes into power I'm sure we wont have these stupid problems anymore, because people with power to decide will be more knowledgeable.
I'm sure we'll have a new set of problems by then which our generation won't understand. Think of these old uninformed judges as brakes that help ease society's technology growing pains. If a ruling is truly unfair,hopefully it will be overturned a few years down the road.
I like to snag Austrailia too, but let's be honest, it's in the middle of nowhere. Once you have Austrailia where do you go from there? Asia and Europe are the hardest continents to win and hold.
The best strategy is to go for the Americas. You only have to defend two territories in South America and it gives you an excellent staging ground to move into North America which only has three territories to defend. But perhaps best of all, if you take North America you only have to worry about attacks from South America, Europe, and Kamchatka. In all likelihood, your enemies along these fronts will have much larger fronts to defend elsewhere so they won't be able to commit as many troops to attacking your 3 key territories. If you own north America, any South American player will either be dying or fighting for Africa while trying to hold you back. A European player has far too many possible points to defend to be launching an assault into Greenland. Similarly, an Asian player will be fighting to secure the most difficult continent in the game. Provided you don't piss him off by taking Kamchatka every other turn it is in both of your best interests to leave each other alone.
that its OK to check in changes without bothering to test them at all
Sometimes it is temporally impossible to test all possible areas your change could have impacted. I've almost never seen anyone actually not do any testing. By the way, you used its when you should have used it's. Sometimes it is more important to get your changes into the source base so someone else can start their work. You don't always have time to check everything.
sometimes checking in changes that don't even compile
The vast majority of the time I have encountered a problem like this it is a result of dll hell. Do you have all the latest stuff, have you re-registered any new typelibs? Did some goof register some 2000 specific dll so now it won't work on NT? When you are developing software, you can usually only be sure it will compile on your own configuration.
If engineers were a tenth as sloppy as software developers,
In my experience, some of the worst programmers are engineers who routinely have to do a little coding. They tend to write stuff their own way, often reinventing the wheel in the process. They also tend to be overly optomistic. Furthermore, I suspect that Engineers are every bit as sloppy as Software Developers, it's just that they are given enough time to correct their mistakes before release.
I agree. This particular statement seemed to contradict many of his other comments. He proposed that manufacturers, content owners, and consumers agree upon a standard that will protect IP rights while not infringing upon fair use rights. If you can make a backup copy/time shift/space shift/whatever, then you can upload it to the internet or do whatever you want with it. The only way to prevent something from getting to the internet is to prevent any uncontrolled copies from being made (via approved technology). There are mutually exclusive agendas at work here, consumers|manufacturers|ip owners will never agree on a format capable of protecting ip. Is this his way of pretending to be supportive of IP rights, by proposing a reasonable sounding plan that is destined to fail (not protect ip)?
Hmmm Krogers (midwest grocery) gave me 2 cards and 2 keychains. Let's see, one for my friend in Columbus, one for my sister in Dayton, two for me in Huntsville. That's odd on tuesday all he got was fruit/veggies/morning star hamburgers. On Wednesday he came back for 10 pepperoni and sausage frozen pizzas and 4-12 packs of cherry seven up. On Wednesday he came in for Milk, OJ, Bread, Lunch meat, hot peppers, and cheese. Hey, where does this guy live?
That is the result of lazy open source driver authors with selfish attitudes
[sarcasm]I hate those lazy bums...[/sarcasm]
This is not a priority for 99.99% of the computing population.
And yet none of this changes the fact that recognizing bootable parititions is a job required of a boot manager. 99.99% of all people out there never run Disk Defragger, does this mean it doesn't have to work right?
Re:If true best buy did break the law.
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the tip... Failure to disclose accurate shipping prices was one of the main reasons I stopped shopping there. Just looking at the ads, I can see S&H is much better marked. What they ought to do is rank the items by full price (base price + max shipping) this way there would be no room for fooling around.
Still though, I imagine many of the same vendors that used scum-like business practices to get ranked 1,2,3,4,5... are still among the top ranked vendors. Pricewatch is a great idea, and it's good to see they're weeding out some of the trash, maybe I'll give em another try in a year or two.
Re:If true best buy did break the law.
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 2
I had similar problems on pricewatch with vendors advertising lower prices when the store was closed for the night and then raising them when they were open to accept orders. I thought about applying legal threats to get the advertised price because it was obviously bait and switch. But when it came down to it, I didn't feel like making a large purchase from a company I didn't trust. I mentioned my concern to a rep, when he did nothing to immediately resolve that concern, I hung up and purchased fomr a local store I trust and later reported the bad vendor to the BBB. A company that partakes in bait in switch is no better than the guy selling "As Is" parts from a dark booth at a computer show.
Maybe pedestrian/auto traffic wouldn't be so bad if Las Vegas (aka the strip) was designed to allow people to easily move from one point to another. Sometimes if you wanna cross the street, you have to go in one casino cross over a walkway into another Casino and then exit. Also, the walkways tend to suck you towards the main casino entrance so instead of walking in a straight line you have to wiggle around a lot. Some of the outdoor shows (like Treasure Island, Bellagio Fountains maybe) are placed in such a way that they completely cut off all flow of pedestrian traffic. A few people stop to watch and then everyone gets jammed up. It's sometimes faster to cut through the Casino. My point is the Strip is designed to pull people into Casinos, not to help people get around. Point and case, the monorail actually appears to avoid most of the strip. The only strip stops shown on the map are around the Bellagio and MGM (owned by the same group right?).
My browser probably does more to extend my zoning than anything. Seriously, when working on a real problem, I'm always needing info off of deja (err google groups) or other online sources. Of course if I can't find the answer after 10-15 minutes, all hope is probably lost and soon the browser magicly finds its way to slashdot. Part of the key to preventing this from happening is to set your browser's home page to something that won't distract you from your work (google groups).
Interesting you should mention that... I'm a perl/C++ guy whose current job entails lots and lots of VB. I almost always have trouble finding the Zone while working in VB. Today I spent an hour writing a little perl script and the time past so fast I hardly noticed. Most of the VB work I do tends to be superficial upper level interfaces and stuff. I think to get in the zone, you need a topic you can sink your teeth into and a language you are comfortable with.
Things like snack machines, pool tables in the office, etc, may improce employee morale, but they also tend to be a distraction from real work.
Yeah they are a distraction, but sometimes that's just what you need in order to get out of a rut and back in the zone. When I've been beating my head on a problem for a while, the best thing is often to stop, turn off the monitor, and go for a 5-10 minute stroll outside. The first half of the walk I don't think about anything. After the halfway point, I start thinking about the problem and I've usually got a good guess on how to solve the problem by the time I get back in the office.
When I was in college, I used to do the same thing using the pool tables in the dorms. First game clear your head, second game solve the problem. Maybe it's just me, but I'm usually in best form after a break physically away from work.
The kinds of things which bother me are interruptions, not being able to play my music sans headphones, sharing an office with someone, loud servers/noise, and bad flourescent lighting. The worst for me though, is sitting near a high traffic area where people are constantly talking outside your door or moving by the periphery of your vision.
How about a 10 minute (or according to what subscription level) head start over the average viewer?
I like that idea in principle, but it would give subscribers a fp style advantage for posts, sort of like paying for Karma (assuming you allowed them to post in this 10 min).
From a different perspective, Taco/Hemos indicated that the vast majority of users only had only a few page loads per day. If you only load slashdot 10 times a day, what is the probability you will be able to take advantage of your 10 minute window? Is that worth delaying the news an extra 10 minutes for everyone else?
If I'm giving money to the government, and they turn around and spend that money to help develop software, then I sure as hell deserve a piece of it!
Maybe you get your piece of it in terms of increased government efficiency or in terms of a usable binary program. Would the general public rather pay $50,000,000 for the complete ip rights to an email client or would they rather spend it on a couple dozen programs to which the ip rights are maintained by the creators? I think it all depends on what kind of things we are talking about.
If I helped fund it, I want something tangible in return, and the GPL provides that.
Yeah, I bought 95/XP so I have helped fund Microsoft and a buck of my money probably went to each and every one of their products. They should all be GPL'ed damnit.... When the government contracts software development they are usually paying enough money for a product not enough for product ownership.
Bull. Schools are made for education. I've had teachers at the High School and University level that did nothing but tell completely irrelevant stories all day. One of them in high school, would occassionaly just start chanting, "Hey Hey LBJ How many babies..." for no particular reason. (I'm not kidding). I had another at the college level that would repeatedly insult students who asked questions. Yet at the same time, I've had teachers and classes that left me thinking about things for hours, days, weeks after class ends.
There are times in high school / college GECs and even some core curriculum when you are jumping through hoops, but AI with Jim Davis, Software Systems with Paul Sivilotti, 3D Graphics with Rick Parent, LISP with Matt Curtin, Algorithms with Mathias, Discrete Math with Chris Miller, etc... are all worth jumping through a few hoops.
My first quarter at Ohio State, I had Samdeep Prabhu for an intro programming course. He was a grad student teaching his first class (of about 40-45 students). I was a quiet guy sitting in the back corner of the classroom. 3 years later I ran into him on campus. He greeted me by name (I didn't recognize him at first) and asked how my CS program was going and offered a little advice about some of the classes I was in. Now that's a teacher.
From a slightly different perspective, classes are only half of what a school is about. There is something to be said about being immersed in a culture of 25,000 people attending a university. In an environment like this you can learn as much from your peers as you do from your classes.
Imagine how safe our streets would be if could just lock people up on suspicion.
Sure, of course we don't, I've never heard the phrase, "the police took the suspect into custody." Besides the kid didn't get an F, he got an I pending an investigation into the allegations. If he was cleared he presumably would've gotten his B.
If you turn in a program that doesn't compile you have proven something about yourself far more compelling than a core dumping off by one algorithm.
Back in college I took a class from a particular professor for whom I gained a strong dislike. I dropped the class and signed up for it the following quarter. Well, I later heard the teacher had assigned a super hard (or rather super large) coding project due in about 2 weeks. The catch was, it didn't have to compile, you could turn it in as paper print outs if you wanted. Guess how many of his students turned in working programs? Guess how many of those students got any sort of real feedback on their programs?
From a slightly different perspective, how are you supposed to accurately grade something that won't run. If I were a grader, there is no way I would sit around looking over 40 students non-executable source code trying to first make it compile and then figure out what all they had wrong. If you can't get your code to compile, you should've asked the teacher, TAs, graders, or even friends for help.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in a small company where everyone is required to do and know a little of everything. So far that includes some C/C++, VB, COM, ASP, IIS, Oracle, NT, PL/SQL, and lately even a little *nix. Knowing a little of everythin usually leaves you knowing a lot of of nothing. It's nice to have a book on the shelf you can go to for any situation, even if you only open each up once every few months. They are more for quick reference than for reading cover to cover.
Now the people who have entire bookshelves filled with ancient Oracle Tomes, I was never sure whether I should be laughing at them or crying with them.
As far as I'm concerned, the most important quality in an engineer is not what you know but what search engine you use to look stuff up.
I agree completely. A lot of times someone comes over and asks me a question, and I just type it in verbatim to deja and then read them one of the ten answer posts that comes up. Still though there is something very useful about being able to search through digital copies of books. Books are a good fall back for problems that are too stupid or too complicated to have been asked about or otherwise resolved in a public forum. Anyways, sometimes the problem is as much about staring at a computer screen too long as it is about whatever is actually causing the problem, so books help there too.
Along the same lines, it seems one possible way to win would be to make yourself very tense before starting gameplay, then bring yourself into a normal everyday state. A game designed to make you relax could make you more tense.
Nah not a bit like Doom. Sounds more like Counter Strike. I've got 0 military experience, but most of the attributes you describe are what distinguished the good players from the bad. Admittedly, a game like Counterstrike is nothing compared to real world training, however when you're up against completely unarmed/untrained individuals, I imagine it counts for something.
killing of humans with lethal weapons
In my game the protagonist battles the evil Xargnathians from the planet Quartonogthonia. Any resemblence to humans from Earth or any other planet is completely coincidental.
With GI-Joes, outside of the figures, the kid generates the plot and imagery of his game by himself. So in theory anything twisted or sadistic that finds its way into playtime originated not with his action figures but with the kid himself. With video games the plot and imagery are provided blood, frags, and all. PS. The day after I got halflife I stayed in a server until I had accumulated over 1000 kills (had to take a break for dinner though).
The lawyers, judges, and other people with the power to make decisions aren't knowledgeable enough to make well informed decisions.
I agree with your point, however, you've got to admit it is hard to find someone who is qualified to judge/try/defend technology cases. As you say, most judges and lawyers are not familiar enough with the details. At the same time, most tech people are completely unqualified to handle any sort of complicated legal matter.
When people who were alive before computers retire and the next generation comes into power I'm sure we wont have these stupid problems anymore, because people with power to decide will be more knowledgeable.
I'm sure we'll have a new set of problems by then which our generation won't understand. Think of these old uninformed judges as brakes that help ease society's technology growing pains. If a ruling is truly unfair,hopefully it will be overturned a few years down the road.
I like to snag Austrailia too, but let's be honest, it's in the middle of nowhere. Once you have Austrailia where do you go from there? Asia and Europe are the hardest continents to win and hold.
The best strategy is to go for the Americas. You only have to defend two territories in South America and it gives you an excellent staging ground to move into North America which only has three territories to defend. But perhaps best of all, if you take North America you only have to worry about attacks from South America, Europe, and Kamchatka. In all likelihood, your enemies along these fronts will have much larger fronts to defend elsewhere so they won't be able to commit as many troops to attacking your 3 key territories. If you own north America, any South American player will either be dying or fighting for Africa while trying to hold you back. A European player has far too many possible points to defend to be launching an assault into Greenland. Similarly, an Asian player will be fighting to secure the most difficult continent in the game. Provided you don't piss him off by taking Kamchatka every other turn it is in both of your best interests to leave each other alone.
that its OK to check in changes without bothering to test them at all
Sometimes it is temporally impossible to test all possible areas your change could have impacted. I've almost never seen anyone actually not do any testing. By the way, you used its when you should have used it's. Sometimes it is more important to get your changes into the source base so someone else can start their work. You don't always have time to check everything.
sometimes checking in changes that don't even compile
The vast majority of the time I have encountered a problem like this it is a result of dll hell. Do you have all the latest stuff, have you re-registered any new typelibs? Did some goof register some 2000 specific dll so now it won't work on NT? When you are developing software, you can usually only be sure it will compile on your own configuration.
If engineers were a tenth as sloppy as software developers,
In my experience, some of the worst programmers are engineers who routinely have to do a little coding. They tend to write stuff their own way, often reinventing the wheel in the process. They also tend to be overly optomistic. Furthermore, I suspect that Engineers are every bit as sloppy as Software Developers, it's just that they are given enough time to correct their mistakes before release.
No, no, no. They are talking about people taking sick days after seeing the movie, not to see the movie.
I haven't felt this awful since we saw that Ronald Reagan film... (Airplane)
I agree. This particular statement seemed to contradict many of his other comments. He proposed that manufacturers, content owners, and consumers agree upon a standard that will protect IP rights while not infringing upon fair use rights. If you can make a backup copy/time shift/space shift/whatever, then you can upload it to the internet or do whatever you want with it. The only way to prevent something from getting to the internet is to prevent any uncontrolled copies from being made (via approved technology). There are mutually exclusive agendas at work here, consumers|manufacturers|ip owners will never agree on a format capable of protecting ip. Is this his way of pretending to be supportive of IP rights, by proposing a reasonable sounding plan that is destined to fail (not protect ip)?
Hmmm Krogers (midwest grocery) gave me 2 cards and 2 keychains. Let's see, one for my friend in Columbus, one for my sister in Dayton, two for me in Huntsville. That's odd on tuesday all he got was fruit/veggies/morning star hamburgers. On Wednesday he came back for 10 pepperoni and sausage frozen pizzas and 4-12 packs of cherry seven up. On Wednesday he came in for Milk, OJ, Bread, Lunch meat, hot peppers, and cheese. Hey, where does this guy live?
That is the result of lazy open source driver authors with selfish attitudes
[sarcasm]I hate those lazy bums...[/sarcasm]
This is not a priority for 99.99% of the computing population.
And yet none of this changes the fact that recognizing bootable parititions is a job required of a boot manager. 99.99% of all people out there never run Disk Defragger, does this mean it doesn't have to work right?
Gorilla Neck?
Thanks for the tip... Failure to disclose accurate shipping prices was one of the main reasons I stopped shopping there. Just looking at the ads, I can see S&H is much better marked. What they ought to do is rank the items by full price (base price + max shipping) this way there would be no room for fooling around.
Still though, I imagine many of the same vendors that used scum-like business practices to get ranked 1,2,3,4,5... are still among the top ranked vendors. Pricewatch is a great idea, and it's good to see they're weeding out some of the trash, maybe I'll give em another try in a year or two.
I had similar problems on pricewatch with vendors advertising lower prices when the store was closed for the night and then raising them when they were open to accept orders. I thought about applying legal threats to get the advertised price because it was obviously bait and switch. But when it came down to it, I didn't feel like making a large purchase from a company I didn't trust. I mentioned my concern to a rep, when he did nothing to immediately resolve that concern, I hung up and purchased fomr a local store I trust and later reported the bad vendor to the BBB. A company that partakes in bait in switch is no better than the guy selling "As Is" parts from a dark booth at a computer show.
Maybe pedestrian/auto traffic wouldn't be so bad if Las Vegas (aka the strip) was designed to allow people to easily move from one point to another. Sometimes if you wanna cross the street, you have to go in one casino cross over a walkway into another Casino and then exit. Also, the walkways tend to suck you towards the main casino entrance so instead of walking in a straight line you have to wiggle around a lot. Some of the outdoor shows (like Treasure Island, Bellagio Fountains maybe) are placed in such a way that they completely cut off all flow of pedestrian traffic. A few people stop to watch and then everyone gets jammed up. It's sometimes faster to cut through the Casino. My point is the Strip is designed to pull people into Casinos, not to help people get around. Point and case, the monorail actually appears to avoid most of the strip. The only strip stops shown on the map are around the Bellagio and MGM (owned by the same group right?).
My browser probably does more to extend my zoning than anything. Seriously, when working on a real problem, I'm always needing info off of deja (err google groups) or other online sources. Of course if I can't find the answer after 10-15 minutes, all hope is probably lost and soon the browser magicly finds its way to slashdot. Part of the key to preventing this from happening is to set your browser's home page to something that won't distract you from your work (google groups).
Interesting you should mention that... I'm a perl/C++ guy whose current job entails lots and lots of VB. I almost always have trouble finding the Zone while working in VB. Today I spent an hour writing a little perl script and the time past so fast I hardly noticed. Most of the VB work I do tends to be superficial upper level interfaces and stuff. I think to get in the zone, you need a topic you can sink your teeth into and a language you are comfortable with.
Things like snack machines, pool tables in the office, etc, may improce employee morale, but they also tend to be a distraction from real work.
Yeah they are a distraction, but sometimes that's just what you need in order to get out of a rut and back in the zone. When I've been beating my head on a problem for a while, the best thing is often to stop, turn off the monitor, and go for a 5-10 minute stroll outside. The first half of the walk I don't think about anything. After the halfway point, I start thinking about the problem and I've usually got a good guess on how to solve the problem by the time I get back in the office.
When I was in college, I used to do the same thing using the pool tables in the dorms. First game clear your head, second game solve the problem. Maybe it's just me, but I'm usually in best form after a break physically away from work.
The kinds of things which bother me are interruptions, not being able to play my music sans headphones, sharing an office with someone, loud servers/noise, and bad flourescent lighting. The worst for me though, is sitting near a high traffic area where people are constantly talking outside your door or moving by the periphery of your vision.
How about a 10 minute (or according to what subscription level) head start over the average viewer?
I like that idea in principle, but it would give subscribers a fp style advantage for posts, sort of like paying for Karma (assuming you allowed them to post in this 10 min).
From a different perspective, Taco/Hemos indicated that the vast majority of users only had only a few page loads per day. If you only load slashdot 10 times a day, what is the probability you will be able to take advantage of your 10 minute window? Is that worth delaying the news an extra 10 minutes for everyone else?
If I'm giving money to the government, and they turn around and spend that money to help develop software, then I sure as hell deserve a piece of it!
Maybe you get your piece of it in terms of increased government efficiency or in terms of a usable binary program. Would the general public rather pay $50,000,000 for the complete ip rights to an email client or would they rather spend it on a couple dozen programs to which the ip rights are maintained by the creators? I think it all depends on what kind of things we are talking about.
If I helped fund it, I want something tangible in return, and the GPL provides that.
Yeah, I bought 95/XP so I have helped fund Microsoft and a buck of my money probably went to each and every one of their products. They should all be GPL'ed damnit.... When the government contracts software development they are usually paying enough money for a product not enough for product ownership.
Bull. Schools are made for education. I've had teachers at the High School and University level that did nothing but tell completely irrelevant stories all day. One of them in high school, would occassionaly just start chanting, "Hey Hey LBJ How many babies..." for no particular reason. (I'm not kidding). I had another at the college level that would repeatedly insult students who asked questions. Yet at the same time, I've had teachers and classes that left me thinking about things for hours, days, weeks after class ends.
... are all worth jumping through a few hoops.
There are times in high school / college GECs and even some core curriculum when you are jumping through hoops, but AI with Jim Davis, Software Systems with Paul Sivilotti, 3D Graphics with Rick Parent, LISP with Matt Curtin, Algorithms with Mathias, Discrete Math with Chris Miller, etc
My first quarter at Ohio State, I had Samdeep Prabhu for an intro programming course. He was a grad student teaching his first class (of about 40-45 students). I was a quiet guy sitting in the back corner of the classroom. 3 years later I ran into him on campus. He greeted me by name (I didn't recognize him at first) and asked how my CS program was going and offered a little advice about some of the classes I was in. Now that's a teacher.
From a slightly different perspective, classes are only half of what a school is about. There is something to be said about being immersed in a culture of 25,000 people attending a university. In an environment like this you can learn as much from your peers as you do from your classes.
I thought the whole Computer Science degree lost all its credence long ago.
That's a funny thing to say since a vast number of the CS programs out there are not accredited. How can we lose what we don't yet have?
Imagine how safe our streets would be if could just lock people up on suspicion.
Sure, of course we don't, I've never heard the phrase, "the police took the suspect into custody." Besides the kid didn't get an F, he got an I pending an investigation into the allegations. If he was cleared he presumably would've gotten his B.
If you turn in a program that doesn't compile you have proven something about yourself far more compelling than a core dumping off by one algorithm.
Back in college I took a class from a particular professor for whom I gained a strong dislike. I dropped the class and signed up for it the following quarter. Well, I later heard the teacher had assigned a super hard (or rather super large) coding project due in about 2 weeks. The catch was, it didn't have to compile, you could turn it in as paper print outs if you wanted. Guess how many of his students turned in working programs? Guess how many of those students got any sort of real feedback on their programs?
From a slightly different perspective, how are you supposed to accurately grade something that won't run. If I were a grader, there is no way I would sit around looking over 40 students non-executable source code trying to first make it compile and then figure out what all they had wrong. If you can't get your code to compile, you should've asked the teacher, TAs, graders, or even friends for help.