That is my philosophy as well. I like to mess with all sorts of stuff.....low end development, web design, network administration... Unfortunately that keeps me from reaching my full potential in any one field. It does tend to keep me employed though. I could probably make more money if I specialized but I do not believe I would like my job as much as I do.
Please understand that this post is sincere. I'm not trying to sound like a jerk.
I have no idea why we are still in Afghanistan. We've been supposedly trying to build up their government/police and stabilize the country....but supposedly we've been doing that for nine years or so. You are saying we need a few more years. How many more years? How long do you stay in a country under the banner of "stabilizing" it until you either just admit to formally occupying it or deciding that it is not a situation that can actually be stabilized? With how vested we are in the Middle East conflicts I would like to see us finish up the right way and not have to go back, but information seems pretty sketchy these days.
When I ask other people how/what we are doing in Afghanistan I either get a respond of "I have no idea" or I get a bunch of Partisan nonsense about how either the Democrats and Republicans are totally at fault for everything. Can you point me to a source that has a decent amount of actual facts and information about the topic? I sincerely want to know what the "Mission Accomplished" moment is supposed to be.
Ask yourself this, would you personally be willing to live in a place where it may not be safe to eat plants grown from the soil? I sure the hell wouldn't.
It may depend on your definition of shitty. In my career as a contractor I tended to get the more interesting project that were closer to cutting edge stuff. The internal IT staffs would push it off so they could just hold the line and didn't have to spend time learning stuff. Of course, those IT departments were not very impressive.
And really, the next stage in the evolution of consuming video is streaming/downloading the video. Already I can stream a great deal of the movies/television shows that I want to watch. It is worth it to me to watch lower quality video not to deal with the hassle of finding a physical disc, finding my DVD player remote, hoping the disc isn't scratched, etc. I really don't even want DVD's anymore, much less a more expensive format that is more of a hassle. The video quality of Blue Ray is fantastic, but the average person can get the same quality off their Xbox 360 downloading stuff off the Zune marketplace. Yeah, downloads probably take a little time but it will still be faster than going to a store to get it.
Obviously the price has to fall, but I sometimes wonder if USB Flash Drives of some type will become the standard for what is left of portable media in the future.
No doubt...I work at a small company with fairly lenient IT policies. If an Engineer called me asking me to open ports for his special server I would be at his desk unplugging the thing from our network in about 3 minutes. Think about it. Say that somehow your server ends up bogging down the network, hosting a pr0n FTP site on that port, or is involved in some other breach of security. Who is going to have to pick up the pieces? It would be absolutely negligent for him not to want to check out that server before letting it into production.
All things considered, I think your IT guy is handling this situation very diplomatically. Seriously.
One thing I've also noticed is that there is a segment in academia that think it is a good thing that manufacturing is disappearing from the states. They talk about machining being a hard labor intensive job that we don't really want people from a civilized nation like the United States performing. There is no convincing them that there are people who actually prefer physical labor. I've been finding it difficult to sit in the same room with some friends of mine who rail about this all the time.
For Power Users and such this is definitely true but most people in an office are going to be running Word, Excel, Outlook, Acrobat Reader, IE, and a client for their business system. I have quite a few users where I work running 7 year old computers and they really don't even complain. I extended the life on those by purchasing a bunch of DDR memory 3 or so years ago when it was dirt cheap. I think I paid $23 a stick for a GB of memory. 256MB to 1.25 GB makes a big difference. The engineering workstations? No way could I have boxes that old out there. There would be a mutiny.
Really, the users that do complain have been the ones that whined to management to get admin rights and proceeded to demolish their computer once every 6 months. They'll say "Man, my computer really sucks. IT has to wipe it out twice a year or I can't use it. I really need a new one." If you are lucky enough to have users who take decent care of their machines you can survive with older hardware.
This is so true. It is absolutely incredible to me how people can do things on a computer for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for most of their lives and still have no idea how to properly operate their computer. Heck, I know plenty of them who do not know how to make a shortcut. It is one thing if Joe Schmoe keeps messing up the family computer....that is his problem. When he keeps messing up the corporate computers, that is a problem. Unfortunately a lot of those users have other skills relating to their actual job that would make them hard to replace.
I cannot complain much. In the last year we've had five machines (out of around 100) majorly infected and four of those were machine by our outside sales/service staff who I have little to no control over. I mostly attribute this to my users being greatly interested in what I had to say after one of the more well liked individuals here ended up catching some type of infection and having her bank account drained (she did personal banking on her work laptop.) She did get all of her money back but with this happening to someone in the company everyone suddenly became interested in protecting their assets.
I understand the frustration with gaming on a computer but.....consoles? Aside from having to use the discs (and lets face it, storage on consoles has just recently reached a point where loading the game to a hard drive is reasonable) what hassle is there in console gaming? I don't game a whole lot...maybe one day a week....but from what I have experienced console gaming is pretty awesome right now.
I think the only real issue is that the more radical Christians have a need for the Bible to be 100% correct down to the last word. I think it would be quite easy to rectify the Garden of Eden with evolution. "Adam was the first man that God imbued with a soul." or something like that would seem to square everything up without running afoul with science (I'm guessing at no point will science ever be able to completely eliminate the concept of a "Soul"). Personally if I had faith in God I would be using my knowledge of Science and my knowledge of the Bible to try to set my own spirituality right with new developments in either science or theology. After all, God is the one that gave us the ability to reason, to wonder, to learn, and to progress. Ignoring that gift in favor of spouting random bits of ancient and probably poorly translated text seems like it would be a major sin in the eyes of a truly caring God.
Then I realized that art has a place in this world, and a purpose. Religion, on the other hand, you could do away and there'd be no loss. Sure people need to believe in something - but there's no reason that something needs to be a religion. For many people, a political view, a philosophy or even their local sports club serves just as well.
I'm not so sure. People can have very strong views/allegiances when it comes to politics or sports but nothing secular has the same pull as Religion and the prospect of eternal life, the prospect of seeing the deceased again, the prospect of a place without pain or suffering. Heck, if somehow those things could be guaranteed to me I would worship whatever the hell you wanted me to.
To you and I those things are ridiculous and empty promises that nobody rational should ever believe...and yet there are people smarter than me (probably smarter than you as well) that hold these tenets so dear as to base their lives on them and believe in stories that seem completely insane to those of us that lack "Faith." With all this in mind, I think it is hard to say there would be "No loss" if we did away with Religion.
It all seems like it should be cut and dry but it just isn't.
I hate socializing and I hate Facebook because I am not a fan of people. After all, they are all dumb and I am totally a genius and shit. And no, this isn't socializing. This is me just popping in to let you plebs know how awesome and cool I really am because I don't like people. If you are lucky I will pop back around and try to guide you to the level of enlightenment that I have achieved. Oh, and Ajax sux!
I agree with you here. A great deal of my web browsing is learning something about computers or searching for answers for a problem I am having at work. It would be nice to see sites that have been "liked" by others searching for the same type of information that I do. Seeing what my friends have "liked" wouldn't be too helpful. I have a total of four friends who work in IT and two of them are, to be perfectly honest, not very good at it. One really spends most of his computer related time exclusively writing in Perl, which I rarely do. That leaves one friend whose rankings would benefit me in any way. We might as well just swap bookmarks. I am sure there are other people who are much more effective at using the internet socially then myself though.
Really, I think this is something that Google wants more than the users. I think it is quite obvious that Google has been dying to find a way to slip this in as a "feature". They will no longer need to rely on guesses by your browsing habits to figure out what we like because we will be telling them!
I agree with you for the most part, but I worked at a place where we were not even close to being compliant on licensing. Those handling the money were told...but hey! We already HAD Microsoft Office on every computer. Why should we buy it again? We went as far to take MS Office off a bunch of computers and going with...Star Office I believe it was. Our supervisor went to battle over that and lost. We were told to put MS Office back on the computers. During the ordeal a lot of employees outside of IT learned that we were doing it due to lack of licenses.
That company had a pretty decent wave of layoffs which left me sitting there knowing that too many of them knew about our failure to be properly licensed. We had a pretty good feeling that if someone reported the company, the blame would still be placed on our shoulders. Not saying that there aren't a lot worse situations to be in, but I can't say that I wasn't a tad nervous for quite some time.
On the other hand, perhaps it should not have been surprising. I'd hypothesize that the Technology/Engineering people (or at the very least, just the tech people) are likely to be better at finding helpful information on the internet giving them more of a capacity to cheat.
The big difference is in the players. At the beginning of the season, the simulation would have run with a fully stocked Packers team. Since that time they have lost 13 players from their opening day roster, including their starting running back and a Tight End who looked like a very key piece to the offense. Obviously the Super Bowl simulation was done with these guys pulled off the Packers roster. This actually makes complete sense.
Wow. I'm not so sure I've seen a lunatic rant this solid on Slashdot for awhile.
Seriously? 3000 Applications? Assuming you spend a full eight hours actively using applications every day of the year that would put you at one hour per year per application. Doesn't seem like you could really be producing anything much either.
"Mah Jongg" for Windows v 1.0? Are you joking? Don't you have a better version of "Mah Jongg" amongst those 3000 applications? This is the big deal breaker you could come up with... Windows 7 won't run a game from 25 years ago....a game with thousands of clones out there for you to download?
I don't work with the Audio API but I have worked with VS 2010. I think VS 2008 feels a lot more responsive so you do have a point there.
As for the rest of your post....the only comment I have is that you seem to be a very disturbed individual.
Femto - I definitely wanted to thank you for posting your anecdotal (possibly statistical) evidence. It is quite interesting. I was wondering though if you teach anything above Freshman level classes. After all, a Freshman Chem class (even honors) could have a very large percentage of non-science majors just trying to fill some science credits.
I mention that for a few reasons. First, science/math notes aren't all that easy to take on a laptop without LaTeX or similar. Heck, they aren't too easy to take WITH such a program. I mean...
Cu(s) + H+(aq) + NO3-(aq) ----> Cu+2 (aq) + NO(g)
That is a beast to type out and I do not have anywhere to put the oxidation states! Laptops may be very useful tools for these kids in their OTHER classes so they try to use it in yours.
I'd also have to ask if attendance in lecture is included as a factor. Most of your science tracked kids who should be earning the A's might not even attend your class. I earned A's in my first four semesters of college chem while attending a total of about 10 lectures. I am typically a book learner anyway and had the great advantage of three superb High School science teachers that developed a program on the fly that got us through organic chem.
Obviously you would know much better than I how applicable my points are to your classroom/University but I thought I'd inquire if you have considered the reasons for the laptop/lower grad phenomenon that you have witnessed. Note that I did not have a laptop in college, mostly because it has been a decade or so since I graduated, so I don't really have an idea if I'd find it useful or not.
At my high school (Granted, Java was pretty new when I was in high school) we had a BASIC class and a Pascal class. At one point during the first week of the Pascal class the teacher asked the class "What is a parameter". One of the other guys raised his hand and gave a pretty good answer. The teacher didn't immediately respond and appeared to be thinking. When the student asked if that was the correct answer, the teacher replied "I don't know, that is why I was asking."
So yeah, if you learned C++ or Java to any reasonable degree, that is good.
This is probably the best point I have seen thus far in this thread. To add a bit more to it, CLI is also nice because the documentation is likely to remain relevant for longer than GUI documentation. Even a minor software upgrade might have significant changes in the location of settings and menus. I've spent a lot of time documenting processes only to see them need a complete overhaul three months later due to a service pack/upgrade being released.
On the other hand, CLI commands are usually pretty static. Sure you might get new commands or functionality added to older ones, but there doesn't seem to be much of a tendency to completely remove/rename commands.
Of course, I've met more than a few "Network Admin" types who are completely terrified of anything that is a command line.
I think one thing that you need to keep in mind is that not all drugs are equal. Marijuana is not nearly as harmful to the body and/or mind as Crystal Meth and Heroin. Heck, I know some every day Marijuana smokers and some every day binge drinkers. I'll let you take a guess which ones are gainfully employed and which ones are totally burned out at 40 with no job and no future.
I can't see how anyone can look at that situation and decide that it makes sense from a health and safety perspective.
I'm just curious....what new features are you looking forward to? I'm not a huge Office suite user and will typically fire up Abiword or Wordpad when I need to type up a document. Even when I come across someone who is supposedly an Office package guru they don't seem to use more than 20% of the already available features. I can see some things that are never ending like UI streamlining, tighter integration with Content Management Systems, and more intelligent spelling/grammar checking capabilities. As more and more academic journals get put online, citations could be made a lot easier. Past that....I just can't imagine what else would be needed.
Reminds me of a debate I had in college with about five people that fancied themselves to be extremely intelligent. They argued that if some type of apocalyptic scenario where people needed to kill each other for survival broke out that they would easily be able to adapt and stand a better chance of survival than any of those "Dumb Army Grunts". They had some strange notion that sheer brainpower could make up for the fact that none of them had ever fired a gun, slept outside, or been in a physical confrontation.
Having a high capacity for problem solving or otherwise being very intelligent is a great thing indeed, but it isn't the deciding factor in every situation. Years of experience, a massive amount of knowledge on the topic at hand, and even a "knack" for things can lead to a deficit that no degree of raw intelligence can make up for.
That said....why does it have to be one or the other? Having "warriors" that are more familiar with the goals, methods, and minutiae relating to the "Enemy" working alongside "geeks" who are more familiar with the technical things seems like the way to go. Failing to diversify the skill sets that individual bring to your team seems pretty foolish.
I think I'd believe that the USPS has a higher approval rating than UPS or FedEx because most people use USPS for sending/receiving simple envelopes that don't absolutely need to be somewhere by a certain date. For those of us who actually ship/receive packages and need them in a reasonable time frame, USPS is pretty unreliable. Especially when dealing with International Packages. I routinely order items from overseas.
It is incredible to me, actually. There are times when a package will get sent from Germany. It will hit the States in 2 days. Of course, I don't know that because it isn't posted to the USPS "tracking" system for 7 days. Sometimes the package will make it from New York to my house 6-7 days after getting to New York. I'm currently waiting on a package (Moderately time sensitive) that will be on day 21 tomorrow. That is right. 2 days from Germany to New York. 19 days and counting from New York to Midwest United States. The scariest part about that is that if you call USPS they don't have anyone who has any clue whatsoever where the package is. On the other hand, only about 10% of these parcels get completely lost and need to be redelivered.
When the package does arrive, it needs to be signed for. I pretty much need to watch for the Mail Carrier because they can't be bothered to ring my doorbell to try to actually deliver said package. They'll drop off a slip that I can take to the Post Office and pick up the package. Yeah, the Post Office is only a mile away but it is in a direction I rarely travel in so I have to take a special trip. All because the person delivering refuses to do his/her job. I've complained. It doesn't make a bit of difference. I really really wish all the vendors I order things from offered to send via UPS/Fed Ex. I would be willing to pay extra not to be sitting around for a fucking month wondering if my package will arrive.
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That is my philosophy as well. I like to mess with all sorts of stuff.....low end development, web design, network administration... Unfortunately that keeps me from reaching my full potential in any one field. It does tend to keep me employed though. I could probably make more money if I specialized but I do not believe I would like my job as much as I do.
Please understand that this post is sincere. I'm not trying to sound like a jerk.
I have no idea why we are still in Afghanistan. We've been supposedly trying to build up their government/police and stabilize the country....but supposedly we've been doing that for nine years or so. You are saying we need a few more years. How many more years? How long do you stay in a country under the banner of "stabilizing" it until you either just admit to formally occupying it or deciding that it is not a situation that can actually be stabilized? With how vested we are in the Middle East conflicts I would like to see us finish up the right way and not have to go back, but information seems pretty sketchy these days.
When I ask other people how/what we are doing in Afghanistan I either get a respond of "I have no idea" or I get a bunch of Partisan nonsense about how either the Democrats and Republicans are totally at fault for everything. Can you point me to a source that has a decent amount of actual facts and information about the topic? I sincerely want to know what the "Mission Accomplished" moment is supposed to be.
Ask yourself this, would you personally be willing to live in a place where it may not be safe to eat plants grown from the soil? I sure the hell wouldn't.
It may depend on your definition of shitty. In my career as a contractor I tended to get the more interesting project that were closer to cutting edge stuff. The internal IT staffs would push it off so they could just hold the line and didn't have to spend time learning stuff. Of course, those IT departments were not very impressive.
And really, the next stage in the evolution of consuming video is streaming/downloading the video. Already I can stream a great deal of the movies/television shows that I want to watch. It is worth it to me to watch lower quality video not to deal with the hassle of finding a physical disc, finding my DVD player remote, hoping the disc isn't scratched, etc. I really don't even want DVD's anymore, much less a more expensive format that is more of a hassle. The video quality of Blue Ray is fantastic, but the average person can get the same quality off their Xbox 360 downloading stuff off the Zune marketplace. Yeah, downloads probably take a little time but it will still be faster than going to a store to get it.
Obviously the price has to fall, but I sometimes wonder if USB Flash Drives of some type will become the standard for what is left of portable media in the future.
No doubt...I work at a small company with fairly lenient IT policies. If an Engineer called me asking me to open ports for his special server I would be at his desk unplugging the thing from our network in about 3 minutes. Think about it. Say that somehow your server ends up bogging down the network, hosting a pr0n FTP site on that port, or is involved in some other breach of security. Who is going to have to pick up the pieces? It would be absolutely negligent for him not to want to check out that server before letting it into production.
All things considered, I think your IT guy is handling this situation very diplomatically. Seriously.
One thing I've also noticed is that there is a segment in academia that think it is a good thing that manufacturing is disappearing from the states. They talk about machining being a hard labor intensive job that we don't really want people from a civilized nation like the United States performing. There is no convincing them that there are people who actually prefer physical labor. I've been finding it difficult to sit in the same room with some friends of mine who rail about this all the time.
For Power Users and such this is definitely true but most people in an office are going to be running Word, Excel, Outlook, Acrobat Reader, IE, and a client for their business system. I have quite a few users where I work running 7 year old computers and they really don't even complain. I extended the life on those by purchasing a bunch of DDR memory 3 or so years ago when it was dirt cheap. I think I paid $23 a stick for a GB of memory. 256MB to 1.25 GB makes a big difference. The engineering workstations? No way could I have boxes that old out there. There would be a mutiny.
Really, the users that do complain have been the ones that whined to management to get admin rights and proceeded to demolish their computer once every 6 months. They'll say "Man, my computer really sucks. IT has to wipe it out twice a year or I can't use it. I really need a new one." If you are lucky enough to have users who take decent care of their machines you can survive with older hardware.
Now monitors on the other h
This is so true. It is absolutely incredible to me how people can do things on a computer for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for most of their lives and still have no idea how to properly operate their computer. Heck, I know plenty of them who do not know how to make a shortcut. It is one thing if Joe Schmoe keeps messing up the family computer....that is his problem. When he keeps messing up the corporate computers, that is a problem. Unfortunately a lot of those users have other skills relating to their actual job that would make them hard to replace.
I cannot complain much. In the last year we've had five machines (out of around 100) majorly infected and four of those were machine by our outside sales/service staff who I have little to no control over. I mostly attribute this to my users being greatly interested in what I had to say after one of the more well liked individuals here ended up catching some type of infection and having her bank account drained (she did personal banking on her work laptop.) She did get all of her money back but with this happening to someone in the company everyone suddenly became interested in protecting their assets.
I understand the frustration with gaming on a computer but.....consoles? Aside from having to use the discs (and lets face it, storage on consoles has just recently reached a point where loading the game to a hard drive is reasonable) what hassle is there in console gaming? I don't game a whole lot...maybe one day a week....but from what I have experienced console gaming is pretty awesome right now.
I think the only real issue is that the more radical Christians have a need for the Bible to be 100% correct down to the last word. I think it would be quite easy to rectify the Garden of Eden with evolution. "Adam was the first man that God imbued with a soul." or something like that would seem to square everything up without running afoul with science (I'm guessing at no point will science ever be able to completely eliminate the concept of a "Soul"). Personally if I had faith in God I would be using my knowledge of Science and my knowledge of the Bible to try to set my own spirituality right with new developments in either science or theology. After all, God is the one that gave us the ability to reason, to wonder, to learn, and to progress. Ignoring that gift in favor of spouting random bits of ancient and probably poorly translated text seems like it would be a major sin in the eyes of a truly caring God.
Then I realized that art has a place in this world, and a purpose. Religion, on the other hand, you could do away and there'd be no loss. Sure people need to believe in something - but there's no reason that something needs to be a religion. For many people, a political view, a philosophy or even their local sports club serves just as well.
I'm not so sure. People can have very strong views/allegiances when it comes to politics or sports but nothing secular has the same pull as Religion and the prospect of eternal life, the prospect of seeing the deceased again, the prospect of a place without pain or suffering. Heck, if somehow those things could be guaranteed to me I would worship whatever the hell you wanted me to.
To you and I those things are ridiculous and empty promises that nobody rational should ever believe...and yet there are people smarter than me (probably smarter than you as well) that hold these tenets so dear as to base their lives on them and believe in stories that seem completely insane to those of us that lack "Faith." With all this in mind, I think it is hard to say there would be "No loss" if we did away with Religion.
It all seems like it should be cut and dry but it just isn't.
I hate socializing and I hate Facebook because I am not a fan of people. After all, they are all dumb and I am totally a genius and shit. And no, this isn't socializing. This is me just popping in to let you plebs know how awesome and cool I really am because I don't like people. If you are lucky I will pop back around and try to guide you to the level of enlightenment that I have achieved. Oh, and Ajax sux!
I agree with you here. A great deal of my web browsing is learning something about computers or searching for answers for a problem I am having at work. It would be nice to see sites that have been "liked" by others searching for the same type of information that I do. Seeing what my friends have "liked" wouldn't be too helpful. I have a total of four friends who work in IT and two of them are, to be perfectly honest, not very good at it. One really spends most of his computer related time exclusively writing in Perl, which I rarely do. That leaves one friend whose rankings would benefit me in any way. We might as well just swap bookmarks. I am sure there are other people who are much more effective at using the internet socially then myself though.
Really, I think this is something that Google wants more than the users. I think it is quite obvious that Google has been dying to find a way to slip this in as a "feature". They will no longer need to rely on guesses by your browsing habits to figure out what we like because we will be telling them!
I agree with you for the most part, but I worked at a place where we were not even close to being compliant on licensing. Those handling the money were told...but hey! We already HAD Microsoft Office on every computer. Why should we buy it again? We went as far to take MS Office off a bunch of computers and going with...Star Office I believe it was. Our supervisor went to battle over that and lost. We were told to put MS Office back on the computers. During the ordeal a lot of employees outside of IT learned that we were doing it due to lack of licenses.
That company had a pretty decent wave of layoffs which left me sitting there knowing that too many of them knew about our failure to be properly licensed. We had a pretty good feeling that if someone reported the company, the blame would still be placed on our shoulders. Not saying that there aren't a lot worse situations to be in, but I can't say that I wasn't a tad nervous for quite some time.
On the other hand, perhaps it should not have been surprising. I'd hypothesize that the Technology/Engineering people (or at the very least, just the tech people) are likely to be better at finding helpful information on the internet giving them more of a capacity to cheat.
The big difference is in the players. At the beginning of the season, the simulation would have run with a fully stocked Packers team. Since that time they have lost 13 players from their opening day roster, including their starting running back and a Tight End who looked like a very key piece to the offense. Obviously the Super Bowl simulation was done with these guys pulled off the Packers roster. This actually makes complete sense.
Wow. I'm not so sure I've seen a lunatic rant this solid on Slashdot for awhile.
Seriously? 3000 Applications? Assuming you spend a full eight hours actively using applications every day of the year that would put you at one hour per year per application. Doesn't seem like you could really be producing anything much either.
"Mah Jongg" for Windows v 1.0? Are you joking? Don't you have a better version of "Mah Jongg" amongst those 3000 applications? This is the big deal breaker you could come up with... Windows 7 won't run a game from 25 years ago....a game with thousands of clones out there for you to download?
I don't work with the Audio API but I have worked with VS 2010. I think VS 2008 feels a lot more responsive so you do have a point there.
As for the rest of your post....the only comment I have is that you seem to be a very disturbed individual.
Femto - I definitely wanted to thank you for posting your anecdotal (possibly statistical) evidence. It is quite interesting. I was wondering though if you teach anything above Freshman level classes. After all, a Freshman Chem class (even honors) could have a very large percentage of non-science majors just trying to fill some science credits.
I mention that for a few reasons. First, science/math notes aren't all that easy to take on a laptop without LaTeX or similar. Heck, they aren't too easy to take WITH such a program. I mean...
Cu(s) + H+(aq) + NO3-(aq) ----> Cu+2 (aq) + NO(g)
That is a beast to type out and I do not have anywhere to put the oxidation states! Laptops may be very useful tools for these kids in their OTHER classes so they try to use it in yours.
I'd also have to ask if attendance in lecture is included as a factor. Most of your science tracked kids who should be earning the A's might not even attend your class. I earned A's in my first four semesters of college chem while attending a total of about 10 lectures. I am typically a book learner anyway and had the great advantage of three superb High School science teachers that developed a program on the fly that got us through organic chem.
Obviously you would know much better than I how applicable my points are to your classroom/University but I thought I'd inquire if you have considered the reasons for the laptop/lower grad phenomenon that you have witnessed. Note that I did not have a laptop in college, mostly because it has been a decade or so since I graduated, so I don't really have an idea if I'd find it useful or not.
C++? Java? Seriously?
At my high school (Granted, Java was pretty new when I was in high school) we had a BASIC class and a Pascal class. At one point during the first week of the Pascal class the teacher asked the class "What is a parameter". One of the other guys raised his hand and gave a pretty good answer. The teacher didn't immediately respond and appeared to be thinking. When the student asked if that was the correct answer, the teacher replied "I don't know, that is why I was asking."
So yeah, if you learned C++ or Java to any reasonable degree, that is good.
This is probably the best point I have seen thus far in this thread. To add a bit more to it, CLI is also nice because the documentation is likely to remain relevant for longer than GUI documentation. Even a minor software upgrade might have significant changes in the location of settings and menus. I've spent a lot of time documenting processes only to see them need a complete overhaul three months later due to a service pack/upgrade being released.
On the other hand, CLI commands are usually pretty static. Sure you might get new commands or functionality added to older ones, but there doesn't seem to be much of a tendency to completely remove/rename commands.
Of course, I've met more than a few "Network Admin" types who are completely terrified of anything that is a command line.
I think one thing that you need to keep in mind is that not all drugs are equal. Marijuana is not nearly as harmful to the body and/or mind as Crystal Meth and Heroin. Heck, I know some every day Marijuana smokers and some every day binge drinkers. I'll let you take a guess which ones are gainfully employed and which ones are totally burned out at 40 with no job and no future.
I can't see how anyone can look at that situation and decide that it makes sense from a health and safety perspective.
I'm just curious....what new features are you looking forward to? I'm not a huge Office suite user and will typically fire up Abiword or Wordpad when I need to type up a document. Even when I come across someone who is supposedly an Office package guru they don't seem to use more than 20% of the already available features. I can see some things that are never ending like UI streamlining, tighter integration with Content Management Systems, and more intelligent spelling/grammar checking capabilities. As more and more academic journals get put online, citations could be made a lot easier. Past that....I just can't imagine what else would be needed.
Reminds me of a debate I had in college with about five people that fancied themselves to be extremely intelligent. They argued that if some type of apocalyptic scenario where people needed to kill each other for survival broke out that they would easily be able to adapt and stand a better chance of survival than any of those "Dumb Army Grunts". They had some strange notion that sheer brainpower could make up for the fact that none of them had ever fired a gun, slept outside, or been in a physical confrontation.
Having a high capacity for problem solving or otherwise being very intelligent is a great thing indeed, but it isn't the deciding factor in every situation. Years of experience, a massive amount of knowledge on the topic at hand, and even a "knack" for things can lead to a deficit that no degree of raw intelligence can make up for.
That said....why does it have to be one or the other? Having "warriors" that are more familiar with the goals, methods, and minutiae relating to the "Enemy" working alongside "geeks" who are more familiar with the technical things seems like the way to go. Failing to diversify the skill sets that individual bring to your team seems pretty foolish.
I think I'd believe that the USPS has a higher approval rating than UPS or FedEx because most people use USPS for sending/receiving simple envelopes that don't absolutely need to be somewhere by a certain date. For those of us who actually ship/receive packages and need them in a reasonable time frame, USPS is pretty unreliable. Especially when dealing with International Packages. I routinely order items from overseas.
It is incredible to me, actually. There are times when a package will get sent from Germany. It will hit the States in 2 days. Of course, I don't know that because it isn't posted to the USPS "tracking" system for 7 days. Sometimes the package will make it from New York to my house 6-7 days after getting to New York. I'm currently waiting on a package (Moderately time sensitive) that will be on day 21 tomorrow. That is right. 2 days from Germany to New York. 19 days and counting from New York to Midwest United States. The scariest part about that is that if you call USPS they don't have anyone who has any clue whatsoever where the package is. On the other hand, only about 10% of these parcels get completely lost and need to be redelivered.
When the package does arrive, it needs to be signed for. I pretty much need to watch for the Mail Carrier because they can't be bothered to ring my doorbell to try to actually deliver said package. They'll drop off a slip that I can take to the Post Office and pick up the package. Yeah, the Post Office is only a mile away but it is in a direction I rarely travel in so I have to take a special trip. All because the person delivering refuses to do his/her job. I've complained. It doesn't make a bit of difference. I really really wish all the vendors I order things from offered to send via UPS/Fed Ex. I would be willing to pay extra not to be sitting around for a fucking month wondering if my package will arrive.