Professing for Dummies?

01000101 · Post by **01000101** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:36 am

In the college I go to, I decided to do most of my degree backwards by taking the 'more challenging' classes first from my associates course outline. Now I am finishing things up and I found out that I needed to take a class title Micro-Computer Applications A & B. sounded like a breeze so I started the class and was more than prepared for whatever could have been thrown at me... except this.

The professor was a graduate of a french college and spoke extremely poor english.... teaching in an english college, but I thought, that's fine.

The FIRST class she asked some basic questions to the freshmen asking things like 'what is the internet?', 'who invented the internet?' .. and blahblahblah. Then she asked 'when was the internet created?' and I decided to speed things up and start answering, and replied '1969', and she gave me a strange look and said 'wrong'.

well... it's not, and I challenged her response, and she dished back a 'it was invented in '1959' and we exchanged a few 'no it wasn't' and finally she said that she was right and that was it. I even brought up the "summer of love" commercial about the creation of the internet hoping she would be able ot comprehend the dummed down explanation, but to no avail.

Later during a lecture on basic components of a x86 computer system she said that Hard Drives had no real math to their data access process.... W-T-F! I started to get the feeling that this lady knew as much as her 'computers for dummies' book taught her and now she was bringing down students to believe her teachings. There were a few other discrepencies with what she was dishing out so...

After a few talks with some senior staff, they sympathised with what I was trying to get across, and had her reassigned to another course. =)

ah, sweet victory.

xyzzy · Post by **xyzzy** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:44 am

I frequently have to correct teachers at my school on such simple stuff. One of my teachers thought memory (RAM) is the same as the hard disk, and that Windows *was* the computer, i.e. hard coded into it somehow... *shudder*.

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 2:49 am

I got in serious trouble from my IT teacher when I was 12 for creating a VB applet - we weren't allowed access to the internet at the time but I was running the applet in an IE5 window - Needless to say she was actually a German teacher and thought I'd "Hacked the internet".

Hmm.

Combuster · Post by **Combuster** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 3:18 am

I had a C++ teacher who claimed that

Code: Select all

if (x=y) 
{
   something(); 
}

would always enter the body, even if:

Code: Select all

if (x=0)

I had to come down with my laptop to have him admit that mistake.

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 4:08 am

The man doing my C++ lectures was pretty good at his job. I got the distinct feeling he enjoyed having a "coder type" in his course, with most of the others being somewhat unexcited about programming. He didn't make any major mistakes, and took it in good stride when small ones were pointed out.

The Big Bug hit in the final exam, which (among other assignments) included a "brace stack checker", i.e. a program that checked a source file for proper bracing order. He provided int main() and the class declarations, implementing the functions was the assignment. A simple stack class and reader class. (Reading char-wise, pushing opening braces on the stack, and when encountering a closing brace checking that it's of the same type as the one on top of the stack.)

The brace stack being the simplest assignment of the exam, I left it for last. The exam was of the "let's see how much you get done in the allowed time" type, i.e. 100% wasn't even expected. I made it in the nick of time, even had the time to write a couple of tests for it. And what the heck, one of the test files kept resulting in a "false positive": One unclosed brace didn't get caught.

I checked and double-checked my code. Looked fine. Time was running out. Damn, where's that bloody bug? (I wanted that 100% score.)

Then I looked at the int main() provided in the assignment. At the end of input, it didn't check if the brace stack was empty!

This was one minute before the end of the exam. I called him over and pointed the bug out to him. He smirked and blushed. Luckily (for him), no one else even found the bug.

nekros · Post by **nekros** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:02 am

AlexExtreme wrote:I frequently have to correct teachers at my school on such simple stuff. One of my teachers thought memory (RAM) is the same as the hard disk, and that Windows *was* the computer, i.e. hard coded into it somehow... *shudder*.

I see this all the time, people ask "if I clear out my hard disk will my computer run faster?"

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:06 am

nekros wrote:
AlexExtreme wrote:I frequently have to correct teachers at my school on such simple stuff. One of my teachers thought memory (RAM) is the same as the hard disk, and that Windows *was* the computer, i.e. hard coded into it somehow... *shudder*.
I see this all the time, people ask "if I clear out my hard disk will my computer run faster?"

This isn't stupid. The answer is normally "yes".

xyzzy · Post by **xyzzy** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:12 am

JamesM wrote:
nekros wrote:
AlexExtreme wrote:I frequently have to correct teachers at my school on such simple stuff. One of my teachers thought memory (RAM) is the same as the hard disk, and that Windows *was* the computer, i.e. hard coded into it somehow... *shudder*.
I see this all the time, people ask "if I clear out my hard disk will my computer run faster?"
This isn't stupid. The answer is normally "yes".

Right. My sister's box had hardly any disk space left, and it was really slow and getting spurious BSODs. I clear out some space, it speeds up and the BSODs stop.

nekros · Post by **nekros** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:13 am

Clear out here means, wipe out, and they usually do that before they ask.

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:20 am

nekros wrote:Clear out here means, wipe out, and they usually do that before they ask.

I do that all the time. I maintain a vanilla windows XP partition that I use for gaming - end result is that my computer loads counter strike source maps up faster than anyone else I play with (online), and I play with people who've got liquid cooled GFX cards and quad core CPUs. And my HDD is about 3 years old

Reason? No fragmentation on the drive as I only install the stuff I need. Everything else I do on linux.

Brynet-Inc · Post by **Brynet-Inc** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:25 am

I create a full MBR-style partition on all my workstations, allocate a few gigs for individual labels.. and then leave the rest unallocated.

..I can't say I've ever seen a drive slow down as a result of "being too full" though, that doesn't even make sense.

01000101 · Post by **01000101** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:29 am

I have a partition dedicated to gaming (CS:S / Stronghold / NFS) and then my normal one, both XP.

When I was working on a computer repair shop I would do defrags quite often and see amazing results with loading times and alleviation of minor glitches.

nekros · Post by **nekros** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:37 am

defraging is not the same as blowing away your hard disk.

JamesM · Post by **JamesM** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:38 am

..I can't say I've ever seen a drive slow down as a result of "being too full" though, that doesn't even make sense.

The drive itself wouldn't slow, but filesystem access times would increase because of heavy fragmentation and windows has been known to BSOD when it hasn't got enough swapspace...

01000101 · Post by **01000101** » Thu Mar 20, 2008 5:50 am

also, the average computer user probably doesnt own a gaming rig, therefore they will mostlikely be using up hard-drive swap space in place of physical memory, and when disk access is slow due to high usage (seeking fragmented files), it essentially slows down anything that accesses swap space.

and I'm aware of the difference between defragging and whiping a disk clean, they both have their place. Defragging can be a lifesaver post-infection (virus/work/etc), wiping is mainly used when that virus has already wreaked more havok than anything can handle haha.