My favorite was 'Hmm, you need an elective. Here, take Fortran, it'll come in handy someday.'
I have yet to be in a situation where only my one quarter of experience in Fortran would come in handy. Apparently, he envisioned me being stranded on a desert island with only a Cray to keep me company, and it's instrumental in saving the Earth. Sadly, I'd probably screw up a loop and it'd end up infinitely saving the Earth from the same threat until it crashed, taking the Earth with it.
PARIS (11/28/2001) - The French subsidiary of one of the world's most vocal opponents of software piracy has itself been convicted of pirating a French 3D animation program. This is the first ruling on a matter that dates back to 1995, when Microsoft Corp. bought Softimage, a 3D computer-generated image (CGI) specialist whose software violated the intellectual property of a small French software house.
The Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft France 3 million francs (US$422,000) in damage and interest for software piracy. "It's a start," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs, "although Microsoft continues to stall on the provisional execution of the judgment."
I took a 'Programming in C' course at the University of Minnesota a couple of years ago. The way they handled it was by having us work in teams for our labs (if we wanted; we could work individually if we preferred), and then on the written tests during the lecture, we had to work on our own. Since all of our projects could be done outside of the lab environment, they really wouldn't have been able to control who we worked with, but on the tests they could make sure we were doing our share.
I'm generally a 'go it alone' sort when it comes to coding, but now that I'm actually writing code for a living, I'm finding that being able to read other people's code and collaborate with them is quite useful. Without some collaboration skills, projects with multiple people will take longer or even fall apart. I've even found it easier to learn APIs, because it gives you some better insight into what another coder was thinking if you're used to working with someone.
>So of course, what happened to airline prices? They went up, up, up! If I compare a flight from Minneapolis to any given city, and a flight from Des Moines (few hundred miles away) and that same other city, the Des Moines flight will usually cost less.
Nitpicking slightly, but it's cheaper for people in Des Moines to drive to Minneapolis or Kansas City and fly from there than to go nearly anywhere from the Des Moines airport. This is also because of Northwest. They have a tighter grip on the Des Moines market, since Northwest moved in and undercut the existing competition there (Vanguard, I believe it was) until they had to withdraw from the market. Northwest then promptly raised the prices to whatever they wanted.
The people mentioned specifically in the article ran websites dedicated to Northwest employees that had had postings on them encouraging a sickout; in each instance, they were followed by a posting from the administrator discouraging anyone from doing so.
I'm not sure how many other people follow this show, but Michael Moore (of 'Roger and Me', 'The Big One', and 'TV Nation') has a show that's been running for a season now called The Awful Truth, where he goes after assorted cases of corporations sticking it to the little guy. I emailed him through the website for the show (http://www.theawfultruth.com), and received this response:
>Thanks so much for writing about the etoy.com >story. Michael Moore greatly appreciates your >support and forwarded your letter on to me to >respond to. He thanks you for bringing this >story to his attention and has asked that the >subject be researched further.
>Mr. Moore showed a great interest in this story >and asked me to keep it on file for possible show >segment topic. He is currently extremely busy >with pre-production for the second season of "The >Awful Truth," however he wanted me to convey his >best wishes.
Looks like a form letter, but if he gets enough interest in the story, he might be more interested in doing it, and it could get us some more of the right kind of coverage.
I'm not remembering who owned the satellite, but a company paid to have a commercial satellite put into orbit. There was a mistake, and it ended up written off as a loss. It was in an essentially stable orbit, but the orbit it was in was useless. They took their insurance settlement, and now Lloyd's owned a satellite. Someone at NASA, with a bit of spare time, started playing with figures. They took the figures up the chain until they finally asked Lloyds if they could try something. They used some of the remaining fuel in the satellite's thrusters to knock it into orbit around the moon. As it hit apogee, they fired again, and brought it back into Earth's orbit, with a better margin of error and more fuel remaining than had originally been planned.
(I've heard this one a number of times. If someone has an URL with more info I'd appreciate it, since I'm pretty sure I'm not getting all the details).
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite was 'Hmm, you need an elective. Here, take Fortran, it'll come in handy someday.'
I have yet to be in a situation where only my one quarter of experience in Fortran would come in handy. Apparently, he envisioned me being stranded on a desert island with only a Cray to keep me company, and it's instrumental in saving the Earth. Sadly, I'd probably screw up a loop and it'd end up infinitely saving the Earth from the same threat until it crashed, taking the Earth with it.
(What did we do before google? ;)
http://www.pcworldmalta.com/specials/MSPiracy
PARIS (11/28/2001) - The French subsidiary of one of the world's most vocal opponents of software piracy has itself been convicted of pirating a French 3D animation program. This is the first ruling on a matter that dates back to 1995, when Microsoft Corp. bought Softimage, a 3D computer-generated image (CGI) specialist whose software violated the intellectual property of a small French software house.
The Commercial Court of Nanterre fined Microsoft France 3 million francs (US$422,000) in damage and interest for software piracy. "It's a start," said a lawyer for the plaintiffs, "although Microsoft continues to stall on the provisional execution of the judgment."
I took a 'Programming in C' course at the University of Minnesota a couple of years ago. The way they handled it was by having us work in teams for our labs (if we wanted; we could work individually if we preferred), and then on the written tests during the lecture, we had to work on our own. Since all of our projects could be done outside of the lab environment, they really wouldn't have been able to control who we worked with, but on the tests they could make sure we were doing our share.
I'm generally a 'go it alone' sort when it comes to coding, but now that I'm actually writing code for a living, I'm finding that being able to read other people's code and collaborate with them is quite useful. Without some collaboration skills, projects with multiple people will take longer or even fall apart. I've even found it easier to learn APIs, because it gives you some better insight into what another coder was thinking if you're used to working with someone.
>So of course, what happened to airline prices? They went up, up, up! If I compare a flight from Minneapolis to any given city, and a flight from Des Moines (few hundred miles away) and that same other city, the Des Moines flight will usually cost less.
Nitpicking slightly, but it's cheaper for people in Des Moines to drive to Minneapolis or Kansas City and fly from there than to go nearly anywhere from the Des Moines airport. This is also because of Northwest. They have a tighter grip on the Des Moines market, since Northwest moved in and undercut the existing competition there (Vanguard, I believe it was) until they had to withdraw from the market. Northwest then promptly raised the prices to whatever they wanted.
The people mentioned specifically in the article ran websites dedicated to Northwest employees that had had postings on them encouraging a sickout; in each instance, they were followed by a posting from the administrator discouraging anyone from doing so.
Lincoln was a Republican, and he's the only Republican candidate that the city has not gone with (to parse that properly).
I'm not sure how many other people follow this show, but Michael Moore (of 'Roger and Me', 'The Big One', and 'TV Nation') has a show that's been running for a season now called The Awful Truth, where he goes after assorted cases of corporations sticking it to the little guy. I emailed him through the website for the show (http://www.theawfultruth.com), and received this response:
>Thanks so much for writing about the etoy.com >story. Michael Moore greatly appreciates your >support and forwarded your letter on to me to >respond to. He thanks you for bringing this >story to his attention and has asked that the >subject be researched further.
>Mr. Moore showed a great interest in this story >and asked me to keep it on file for possible show >segment topic. He is currently extremely busy >with pre-production for the second season of "The >Awful Truth," however he wanted me to convey his >best wishes.
Looks like a form letter, but if he gets enough interest in the story, he might be more interested in doing it, and it could get us some more of the right kind of coverage.
I'm not remembering who owned the satellite, but a company paid to have a commercial satellite put into orbit. There was a mistake, and it ended up written off as a loss. It was in an essentially stable orbit, but the orbit it was in was useless. They took their insurance settlement, and now Lloyd's owned a satellite. Someone at NASA, with a bit of spare time, started playing with figures. They took the figures up the chain until they finally asked Lloyds if they could try something. They used some of the remaining fuel in the satellite's thrusters to knock it into orbit around the moon. As it hit apogee, they fired again, and brought it back into Earth's orbit, with a better margin of error and more fuel remaining than had originally been planned.
(I've heard this one a number of times. If someone has an URL with more info I'd appreciate it, since I'm pretty sure I'm not getting all the details).