• (cs) in reply to verisimilidude
    Anonymous:
    I always search the web to find out if the project I have been given has been done before.  When I do find code, discussion, etc. my boss loves it if I use that to get my work done faster.  I don't think that the majority of college assignments are so pedagogic that students will be malformed by learning from what was done before instead of working from scratch.  The WTF is the prof's that won't make up new exercises each semester. 


    Agreed.   I find that a great many  problems I need to solve have already been solved by somebody else.  No sense reinventing the wheel.  That said, if your only skill set is ctrl+C and ctrl+V, odds are you might wind up as the daily feature here.  And  for a college student, I think there is added value to working something from scratch vs. learning from an example.  Problem solving skills are important too.
  • (cs) in reply to WhatDidIJustEat
    Anonymous:
    ...
    Why the hell are you in CS??  Googlecoders always boggled my mind in college.  It seemed like 1/3 of the class actually did the coding assignments and the rest either "MSNed" the code or "borrowed" someone elses and changed variables if they weren't retarded.  Why would you take Computer Science if you're not going to actually learn?  It's not like you'll be able to just search for exact solutions off the internets when or should I say IF you get a job after college dealing with programming (or anything computer-esque)....
    <font size="5">T<font size="3">o paraphrase the original post: H</font></font><font size="3">e</font> <font size="3">is</font> our future [creator of WTFs].

  • Anon (unregistered)

    What's with the cliffhanger? I'm guessing Ishai didn't copy the assignment? Did the professor finally post the library or give the class an extension? Should I stay tuned til next week?

  • (cs) in reply to themagni
    themagni:
    ...
    One of the buildings at UVic is so bad that the Fire Department Will Not Enter Under Any Circumstances.
    ...
    <font size="5">T</font>hat's amazing.  I didn't realize that birch-bark teepees were not up to fire code or is it that the concrete blocks are made out of crushed match-heads?

  • (cs) in reply to ryan
    Anonymous:
    during my freshman year (i'm now in my fifth) at the university of oregon, i used my cs department account...


    The WTF here is that U of O (my alma mater) doesn't *have* a CS department. They have a CIS department, which, when I was a student there, was associated with the business department. The engineering-type departments are up the road at Oregon State (home of the Firefox crop circle).
  • (cs)

    This sounds like a CS major to me. They're learning computer science. Not "how to program" or "how to secure a windows box".

  • alexb (unregistered) in reply to evanm

    That woudn't be the University of Waterloo? Would it?

  • ERTW (unregistered) in reply to evanm
    evanm:
    My university is pretty similar, atleast for mathematics, Computer Science, and engineering (with a few other programs). You start in September, and the year is broken up into 3 full, 4-month terms. Every 4 months, you switch between a school term, and a paid co-op term. Then you do 8 months straight of school either in your first year, or your last. At the end of April in your fifth your (typically), you're done.

    So for those keeping track, you end up with 8 x 4-month school terms (your typical 4-year program length), and  6 x 4-month co-op terms (for 2 years of "work" experience). To get around all this confusion, we typically refer to our school terms as 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, etc.


    Sounds like someone went to school in Kitchener!

    captcha: mustache!
  • Webzter (unregistered) in reply to kuroshin

    kuroshin:
    fifth-year ? Now that's a WTF.

    Well, that depends.. .was it his fifth year as a senior or his fifth year as a student? (the choice of wording really does leave that wide open). Starting at 12 credits a semester and then working up to 16, it took me 6 years to get around to a degree. I had to take a semester off for an internship and had to work to pay for college / etc so things went slower. My wife graduated in 3 years, it would have been 2 and a half but she had to take a semester off for an internship as well. She took 32 credits her last semester, I'm not sure I'd wish that on anyone.

  • some moron (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Anonymous:
    well we had a student ahve full read/write on his C drive in the dorms...i overwrote the hidden desktop.ini file so all ihs new windows had gay porno attached to it...i betcha he formatted his computer to remove it too!  but before i did it, i did copy all of his mp3s and mpgs :-)        


    ...and did it make you feel better?
  • (cs) in reply to alexb

    Well, I am the poster of this WTF and I agree its not as funny as most things here. but please understand - the guy had a photo of his ID card in there. he had "funny pictures" in there. He had all his school assignments in there.

    And all because he installed Kazza (if I remember correctly) on top of tomcat, and left the option to take over port 80.

    The problem was, I was in the Israeli branch of the university, and he was in England, so I had no way to communicate with him apart from notifying the WTF-U about his mistake...poor guy.

    And if you are wondering, like Alex posted in the second comment, I didnt use his code which was worthless, but I did use the missing assignment papers to write my own code.

     


    Whats the definition of a super computer?
    Its a computer that finishes an infinite loop in under 3 hours!

  • fregas (unregistered)

    Students don't count.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ishai Sagi

    English version:

    There are 2 types of people:
     - These Evil, Boring Uninteresting people that dont care about CS
     - These Evil, Boring Uninteresting people that care  about CS

    Even on a CS the people that care about WTF or not WTF are a very small minority. Most people are lazy, bad, evil and retard AND dont care nothing about bad or good code. The concept don't even exist. If you really need proffs, try to show your code to people that want your program and make these people read it. Naaa.. no one care about your code quality.

    Spanish version:

    La cosa 261 que aprendi en la universidad es:
     - Si bien los geeks les parecemos a los demas aburridos, sin interes y quizas perversos.
     - El resto de la gente es realmente aburrida, malvada y sin interes.

    La diferencia es que en mi carrera de informatica los interesados por la informatica (o por extension algo geek) eramos una diminuta minoria. Para que hablar del resto de la sociedad. Realmente hay muy poca gente y muy selecta que le importe un pedo la diferencia entre un WTF y un no-WTF.







  • Nick (unregistered) in reply to kuroshin
    kuroshin:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     Now if you're thinking, "big deal, so a P2P user exposed himself," keep in mind that this was a fifth-year senior, studying Computer Science and Systems at WTF-U.

    He is our future.



    fifth-year ? Now that's a WTF.


    I spent 5 years in college (ok, actually 4 and a half), due to a combination of one semester being taken up by an internship and my (arguably regrettable) decision to pursue two majors and two minors.

    College is not a race, you do not get a special prize for finishing first.  If you put on your resume that you graduated in only 3 years, employers are just going to ask questions.  Like why you didn't try to fit an internship or something in there?  Why did you take only the bare minimum classes when you had a chance to give yourself a well rounded education?  Why didn't you take a part time job to help pay for your education instead of mooching off your parents?  Hell they'll probably ask those questions if you graduate in a 'normal' 4 years.
  • bow (unregistered) in reply to Nick

    int i=0; *i; ?

  • (cs) in reply to Nick

    Ok, time to put this to rest,

    The "fifth year" thing was all Alex. I didnt mention anything about years. and personnaly, I wasnt a 4th year student - my whole BSC took me 3 years (10 hours a week...hehehe - thank you wtfu!)

  • (cs) in reply to verisimilidude
    Anonymous:
    I always search the web to find out if the project I have been given has been done before.  When I do find code, discussion, etc. my boss loves it if I use that to get my work done faster.  I don't think that the majority of college assignments are so pedagogic that students will be malformed by learning from what was done before instead of working from scratch.  The WTF is the prof's that won't make up new exercises each semester. 
    Tis true. The difference being students aren't paid to solve their exercises. Employees are. Students, IMHO, should learn to solve the exercises given to them. As an employee myself, I find learning from others' code to be invaluable. But I have a foundation of knowing how to solve problems myself, so understanding how other people solve problems via code extends my foundational knowledge base.
  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    Anonymous:
    Also, something to realize, is that 4 year degrees only take 4 years for the insane.  At my school, it involves taking 17-20 credit hours per semester which is nearly double "full time".  Unless you have no life and no job, that's just crazy.


    What university do you go to? At my alma mater, most people get done in 4 years, and not by overextending themselves. I got two 4 year degrees in 9 semesters. (But I was one of those insane people taking tons of credits. Out of the 8 fall/spring semesters I had, there were only two in which I took under 16 credits, and four of them I took more than 18. My high was 20.5. The summer I took no classes and only finished an honors thesis. I also entered with 29 AP credits.) If you look at what the dept. reccommends as a schedule, there are two semesters with 15 credits, one with 15.5, three with 16, one with 16.5, and one with 17. 15 credits is a "typical" courseload across departments and schools.

    There's no shame in taking longer than 4 years (almost whatever the reason -- and that includes if you just totally slack off and fail for a couple semesters), but at the same time, I would be surprised if most programs that don't incorporate co-op rotations into the required sequence are as hard to complete "on time" as you suggest.
  • (cs) in reply to pjsson

    pjsson:
    When I studied for my MS in CS Google didn't exist so we had to look in the garbage can next to the printer to try to find some printouts of other student's solutions. This was in fact so long time ago so surfing for p0rn meant that you had to go to usenet, then judging by the name of a post cut ascii code from often four or more posts and paste into a text editor, then  run the text file through some decoder to finally produce a bmp file to view before actually being able to see the pic.

    I graduated 1995 if anyone wonder.

    thats fantastic... i remember when we were in high school we all got sat down and explained that the school was getting this thing called "the internet" and that it was to be used only for study purposes. After they explained exactly what it was and how it worked, the first thing my mates at the time did, was went to one of the computers and typed in "playboy" :) 

  • (cs) in reply to lomaxx

    Could it be that the student that offered his C: drive to the whole world is the highly paid consultant from two days ago?

    <font size="1">Community Server must go! Seriously, how can we laugh about WTFs every day using this pile of mumbo jumbo software!</font>

  • MaHuJa  (unregistered) in reply to verisimilidude
    Anonymous:
    I always search the web to find out if the project I have been given has been done before.  When I do find code, discussion, etc. my boss loves it if I use that to get my work done faster.  I don't think that the majority of college assignments are so pedagogic that students will be malformed by learning from what was done before instead of working from scratch.  The WTF is the prof's that won't make up new exercises each semester. 

    If you don't know how to do things yourself, you won't know if you're copying a wtf. That doesn't mean you have to do it yourself in a work situation; but in an academic situation you're supposed to do it yourself to show that you can.

  • (cs) in reply to ole gustie
    ole gustie:
    Anonymous:
    During my fifth year studies in CS, my profesor had us complete a program.  She gave us a function with several lines of code missing in key areas.  A clever student Googled, I mean MSNed the function and lo and behold was the exact code.  It waS a small class in which everybody did the same thing bc this wasnt kept a secret for long.  Anyways, those that handed in verbatim minus new name got a B. Those that changed the code, variables, etc got the A.  I got the B.

    Yay for Google.com!!!  

    On a similar note... I went to school with a couple guys who ended up having to repeat a class after being busted for cheating.  They didn't share or copy each others work.  Independently,  they both googled for possible answers to the assignment and came across the same sample.  Turns out that the sample they stole had  one particular variable spelled incorrectly throughout, which is how the prof got wise... Oops.

    <font face="Tahoma">I remember on my junior year, almost everyone in our class was caught cheating... well, except me and some other classmates...

    our prof handed us a test and whoever failed to reach a certain score (i forgot the exact number), will have to pass in a software proj... some of us who got passed the score helped the others who didn't in their software projs...

    i remember i helped someone with his code... after the submission, the prof found out that some of them basically copied the exact code from that guy, they just basically "searched and replaced" every variable names...

    funny enough, the prof commented that if only they removed some blank lines, changed the comments, tabbings, etc, he wouldn't have noticed immediately the similarities and might just let it pass...

    </font><font face="Tahoma">oh, and they did not repeat the class...</font>
  • Balder (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Anonymous:
    well we had a student ahve full read/write on his C drive in the dorms...i overwrote the hidden desktop.ini file so all ihs new windows had gay porno attached to it...i betcha he formatted his computer to remove it too!  but before i did it, i did copy all of his mp3s and mpgs :-)        

    Good thing you had som gay porno lying about, so you could attach it to his windows.

  • (cs) in reply to Balder
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    well we had a student ahve full read/write on his C drive in the dorms...i overwrote the hidden desktop.ini file so all ihs new windows had gay porno attached to it...i betcha he formatted his computer to remove it too!  but before i did it, i did copy all of his mp3s and mpgs :-)        

    Good thing you had som gay porno lying about, so you could attach it to his windows.



    If not, newgroups and the web are full of them. At least I heard so.

  • Senor Monkeyboy aka Gareth (unregistered)

    Go Ishai !!!!

    :o)

  • (cs) in reply to ole gustie

    ole gustie:
    On a similar note... I went to school with a couple guys who ended up having to repeat a class after being busted for cheating.  They didn't share or copy each others work.  Independently,  they both googled for possible answers to the assignment and came across the same sample.  Turns out that the sample they stole had  one particular variable spelled incorrectly throughout, which is how the prof got wise... Oops.

    I always wondered why refactoring gets such a lot of hype.  This clearly explains the need for it.

  • (cs) in reply to ammoQ
    ammoQ:
    Balder:
    Anonymous:
    well we had a student ahve full read/write on his C drive in the dorms...i overwrote the hidden desktop.ini file so all ihs new windows had gay porno attached to it...i betcha he formatted his computer to remove it too!  but before i did it, i did copy all of his mp3s and mpgs :-)

    Good thing you had som gay porno lying about, so you could attach it to his windows.

    If not, newgroups and the web are full of them. At least I heard so.
    Good thing you know where to look for gay porno

  • (cs) in reply to pjsson
    pjsson:
    ammoQ:
    Balder:
    Anonymous:
    well we had a student ahve full read/write on his C drive in the dorms...i overwrote the hidden desktop.ini file so all ihs new windows had gay porno attached to it...i betcha he formatted his computer to remove it too!  but before i did it, i did copy all of his mp3s and mpgs :-)

    Good thing you had som gay porno lying about, so you could attach it to his windows.

    If not, newgroups and the web are full of them. At least I heard so.
    Good thing you know where to look for gay porno

    Yeah, it allows me to help people who don't know.

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Nick
    Anonymous:
    kuroshin:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     Now if you're thinking, "big deal, so a P2P user exposed himself," keep in mind that this was a fifth-year senior, studying Computer Science and Systems at WTF-U.

    He is our future.



    fifth-year ? Now that's a WTF.


    I spent 5 years in college (ok, actually 4 and a half), due to a combination of one semester being taken up by an internship and my (arguably regrettable) decision to pursue two majors and two minors.

    College is not a race, you do not get a special prize for finishing first.  If you put on your resume that you graduated in only 3 years, employers are just going to ask questions.  Like why you didn't try to fit an internship or something in there?  Why did you take only the bare minimum classes when you had a chance to give yourself a well rounded education?  Why didn't you take a part time job to help pay for your education instead of mooching off your parents?  Hell they'll probably ask those questions if you graduate in a 'normal' 4 years.

     

    So what if they ask those questions?  At least they're not asking, "why are you so stupid you got held back a year in college?  Did you have to take the short bus to class?"  Which is exactly what they want to know.

    The fact is, most college students today are there because they consider it some kind of vocational training.  If you can't copmplete your job training in the normative period, why should anyone hire you?

  • (cs) in reply to anonymous

    Anonymous:
    English version:

    There are 2 types of people:
     - These Evil, Boring Uninteresting people that dont care about CS
     - These Evil, Boring Uninteresting people that care  about CS

    Even on a CS the people that care about WTF or not WTF are a very small minority. Most people are lazy, bad, evil and retard AND dont care nothing about bad or good code. The concept don't even exist. If you really need proffs, try to show your code to people that want your program and make these people read it. Naaa.. no one care about your code quality.

    Spanish version:

    La cosa 261 que aprendi en la universidad es:
     - Si bien los geeks les parecemos a los demas aburridos, sin interes y quizas perversos.
     - El resto de la gente es realmente aburrida, malvada y sin interes.

    La diferencia es que en mi carrera de informatica los interesados por la informatica (o por extension algo geek) eramos una diminuta minoria. Para que hablar del resto de la sociedad. Realmente hay muy poca gente y muy selecta que le importe un pedo la diferencia entre un WTF y un no-WTF.

    Your english and spanish versions don't even say the same thing?!

  • (cs) in reply to Anon

    Anon:
    What's with the cliffhanger? I'm guessing Ishai didn't copy the assignment? Did the professor finally post the library or give the class an extension? Should I stay tuned til next week?

    That should read

    <FONT face="Courier New" size=2>/* </FONT><FONT face="Courier New" size=2>wtf is up</FONT><FONT face="Courier New" size=2> with the cliffhanger? */</FONT>

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to rmg66
    rmg66:

    Your english and spanish versions don't even say the same thing?!



    I am not skillfull enough with english to write complex expressions, so the english one is a dumbed down version.

    Its a lot like .NET Perl
  • (cs)

    Me and some friends once found a public ftp-site where the guy operating it had not only shared all his drives (including A: and cd-rom!) but also in read-write mode. Since we're reasonably nice guys, we tried to come up with some way of signaling this fact to him, and finally downloaded the startup pictures (WinNT I belive), modified them slightly (spraycan tool in Paint :-) and uploaded them again.

    The next day the site was gone.


  • Sofal (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    Anonymous:
     

    So what if they ask those questions?  At least they're not asking, "why are you so stupid you got held back a year in college?  Did you have to take the short bus to class?"  Which is exactly what they want to know.

    The fact is, most college students today are there because they consider it some kind of vocational training.  If you can't copmplete your job training in the normative period, why should anyone hire you?



    Vocational training? Did you go to some hyped-up tech school or something? The kind that has to advertise on TV?

    "I got my degree in 2 years and I already have a job scraping the crud off of people's toenails!"

    Maybe you don't quite understand all of the reasons that many people here have already given for taking 5 years to graduate, but that is a reflection on you, not them. I'm not going to waste time spelling them out for you again.
  • (cs) in reply to lToro
    lToro:
    Me and some friends once found a public ftp-site where the guy operating it had not only shared all his drives (including A: and cd-rom!) but also in read-write mode. Since we're reasonably nice guys, we tried to come up with some way of signaling this fact to him, and finally downloaded the startup pictures (WinNT I belive), modified them slightly (spraycan tool in Paint :-) and uploaded them again.

    The next day the site was gone.



    I found a similarly open door on the college network with thousands of .mp3s. I did not see any music that I liked so I deleted all of them - except the one that was obviously being accessed/played at the time of the delete. (I was a good samaritan and threw some music that I liked onto the drive.)

    sincerely,
    Richard Nixon
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The fact is, most college students, at the substandard "college" that I am familiar with, are there because they consider it some kind of vocational training.  If you can't copmplete your job training in the normative period, why should anyone hire you?


    Fixed that for you.

    sincerely,
    Richard Nixon
  • (cs) in reply to Sofal

    What I do not understand is why people here do not take into account that the WTFU might be in a different country where CS takes 10 semesters instead of 8. E.g. in Austria it's like that.

  • CJH (unregistered)

    A few years back I graduated with a Computer Engineering degree at a pretty good engineering school in Ohio. Now most other students that actually were able to finish also were mostly competent (or at least would be able to figure projects out after some amount of time), but I recall one particular student I had a lab with who didn't even know what WinZip was.... It was joked later that this student will likely get a decent engineering job and probably go straight into management. But who knows - we could all be wrong.

    I barely knew anything when I got to college in '97 - I had a 486DX2 that ran Win3.1. Mind you I was quite good at math (and actually enjoyed it) and had taken a handful of programming classes, but I sure learned a lot of theory from the classes and real-life experience from now 6+ years of software engineering work.

    If you're going to college for anything relating to software (Computer Engineering/Computer Science/Computer Information Systems/etc.) and want to do that, get a job while in college and learn it! And if the school has a co-op program, don't expect it will become a FT job after you graduate!! I knew a bunch who couldn't find anything when they graduated.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    Anonymous:

    I'm currently on year 7 of my "4" year degree.  I took 2 years off (cause I was an idiot) and the rest of the time, I've been mostly part time owing to the fact that I currently work as a programming in the industry full time.  I should graduate next year (year 8 of my "4" year degree).

    ...snip...

    Now had it been the professor who's hard drive was open to the World Wide Web... that's a worthy WTF.  The professor should be smarter than that.

    I'm amazed how many people have been in college for years and don't know the difference between "who's" and "whose".  "Who's" means "who is".  You should be snmarter than that.  Surely you took SOME English classes during that time?  Or maybe in high school?

  • (cs) in reply to Ishai Sagi
    Ishai Sagi:

    Well, I am the poster of this WTF and I agree its not as funny as most things here. but please understand - the guy had a photo of his ID card in there. he had "funny pictures" in there. He had all his school assignments in there.

    And all because he installed Kazza (if I remember correctly) on top of tomcat, and left the option to take over port 80.

    The problem was, I was in the Israeli branch of the university, and he was in England, so I had no way to communicate with him apart from notifying the WTF-U about his mistake...poor guy.

    And if you are wondering, like Alex posted in the second comment, I didnt use his code which was worthless, but I did use the missing assignment papers to write my own code.

    The question that was asked (and not answered by Alex or by you) is whether the prof granted the extension that the other students expected, because the library was missing from where the prof said it would be.

  • Webzter (unregistered) in reply to DWalker59
    DWalker59:

    You should be snmarter than that.

    Maybe he just mistyped as well? Be careful, glass houses and all that....

  • snoofle (unregistered) in reply to no name

    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    During my fifth year studies in CS, my profesor had us complete a program.  She gave us a function with several lines of code missing in key areas.  A clever student Googled, I mean MSNed the function and lo and behold was the exact code.  It waS a small class in which everybody did the same thing bc this wasnt kept a secret for long.  Anyways, those that handed in verbatim minus new name got a B. Those that changed the code, variables, etc got the A.  I got the B.

    Yay for Google.com!!!  


    Why the hell are you in CS??  Googlecoders always boggled my mind in college.  It seemed like 1/3 of the class actually did the coding assignments and the rest either "MSNed" the code or "borrowed" someone elses and changed variables if they weren't retarded.  Why would you take Computer Science if you're not going to actually learn?  It's not like you'll be able to just search for exact solutions off the internets when or should I say IF you get a job after college dealing with programming (or anything computer-esque).  Congratulations on wasting 4 (or probably more) years worth of college money.

    Oh and for a wtf, I remember a graduate CS student having to ask an undergrad what the hell ftp was...not how to use it or even what program is best for it, but what it was.


    Does just renaming the variables actually work???

    It seems like it would be trivial to write a program to detect that?

    When I was a TA in grad-school, part of my job was to grade the undergrad's assignments and exams. With over 500 students in one particular class (the other TA dropped out in the middle), I wound up reading the same assignment ~500 times. Most of the time, everyone just coded from the pseudo code the teacher had on the slides, using the same cutsie variable and method names (lots of foo(bar) code). Whenever someone changed anything, I could spot it from three feet away just be the shape of the code layout on the printout.

    Who needs a program when you have eyes?

  • rlemon (unregistered) in reply to kuroshin
    kuroshin:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     Now if you're thinking, "big deal, so a P2P user exposed himself," keep in mind that this was a fifth-year senior, studying Computer Science and Systems at WTF-U.

    He is our future.



    fifth-year ? Now that's a WTF.


    This is the type of guy who you can convince to run:

    format c:


    captcha = billgates
  • Think Outside the Box (unregistered) in reply to I am not a robot

    What's curagious?  Is that supposed to mean courageous?  Or is there some sort of cure involved?

  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Richard Nixon

    Richard Nixon:
    Anonymous:
    The fact is, most college students, at the substandard "college" that I am familiar with, are there because they consider it some kind of vocational training.  If you can't copmplete your job training in the normative period, why should anyone hire you?


    Fixed that for you.

    sincerely,
    Richard Nixon

    Any degree, from any University, that comes from any College other than that University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is nothing but a vocational diploma.

    That means all you people from Colleges of Engineering, and all you people from Colleges of Business, you're no different than the guy who changes the oil in my car.

    And learning programming in college?  Good grief!  In my day, they only taught programming to English majors who wanted to learn about computers.  If you were a math or science major, or even an engineering major, you were just expected to pick it up on your own.

  • (cs) in reply to triso
    triso:
    themagni:
    ...
    One of the buildings at UVic is so bad that the Fire Department Will Not Enter Under Any Circumstances.
    ...
    <font size="5">T</font>hat's amazing.  I didn't realize that birch-bark teepees were not up to fire code or is it that the concrete blocks are made out of crushed match-heads?



    Touché.

    I'll tell you about the Elliot Building.

    There are two sections. There is a lecture hall which is full of asbestos. It won't get torn down because it houses 2 of UVic's 6 200+ capacity rooms. That section isn't the problem. (Although there are occasional gas leaks that require evacuation.)

    The other half, connected by an underground causeway, holds the Physics department and some of the Chemistry department. Nobody knows what's actually in the building. I mean that in the literal sense, not in the esoteric flavour text sense.

    My brother in law works security there, and he said that if it goes up, the smoke will have colours "that there aren't names for." Recently, a grad student went out to the local pub for lunch. He left a hotplate on, which started a small fire. When the fire department arrived, they called the dean to ask "what's on fire?".

    The reply was, "I dunno. It could be anything."

    The Fire Department waited until Hazmat from CFB Esquimalt showed up.
  • (cs) in reply to anonymous
    Anonymous:

    Richard Nixon:
    Anonymous:
    The fact is, most college students, at the substandard "college" that I am familiar with, are there because they consider it some kind of vocational training.  If you can't copmplete your job training in the normative period, why should anyone hire you?


    Fixed that for you.

    sincerely,
    Richard Nixon

    Any degree, from any University, that comes from any College other than that University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is nothing but a vocational diploma.

    That means all you people from Colleges of Engineering, and all you people from Colleges of Business, you're no different than the guy who changes the oil in my car.

    And learning programming in college?  Good grief!  In my day, they only taught programming to English majors who wanted to learn about computers.  If you were a math or science major, or even an engineering major, you were just expected to pick it up on your own.



    I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I can't resist noting that the absolute worst programmers I know are the ones who "pick[ed] it up on their own".  The best?  Those are the ones who worked closely with good mentors, either in the classroom or on the job.
  • Erik (unregistered)

    Ah, insecurity in networked machines... the school I graduated from had a very liberal policy for sharing files over the network, before the first round of lawsuits came down from the RIAA: you could tag any folder to be shared, and it would show up when someone browsed through the list of students on the network.  You could poke around until you found something interesting, or find a search client that would peruse through the shared directories, which were usually music and movie folders.

    Except for the guy who shared C:.

    I almost felt bad for the guy, since he obviously had no idea what he was doing... I opened the first document I found to find his name, and sent him an anonymous email telling him that it was probably a bad idea.  A week later, it was still shared.  So I changed his background image in Windows to a BMP announcing "Your computer is not protected."  A week later, still up.  Having decided that subtlety had failed entirely, and that a man who was unwilling to institute basic security measures when BEATEN OVER THE HEAD WITH THEM was undeserving of my pity, I randomly started renaming files in windows\system32.

    I guess I've got a mean streak.

  • (cs) in reply to kuroshin

    kuroshin:

    fifth-year ? Now that's a WTF.

    Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada has a six(6)-year Engineering course. The first year is pre-req's, with a summer off. The next year is two semesters of introductory Engineering courses, and a work-term (internship) over the summer semester. The remaining four years (with no summers off, I might add) are, in this order:

    Fall: In-Class, Semester 3.
    Winter: Work-Term 2.
    Summer: In-Class, Semester 4.
    Fall: Work-Term 3.
    Winter: In-Class, Semester 5.
    Summer: Work-Term 4.
    Fall: In-Class, Semester 6.
    Winter: Work-Term 5.
    Summer: In-Class, Semester 7.
    Fall: Work-Term 6.
    Winter: In-Class, Semester 8.
    Summer: Blessed, Sweet, Graduation, and a beer-bash that makes all previous ones look like a watching-paint-dry contest.

    So why be a Computer Engineer, when you can be a Computer Science grad in two years less, you ask?

    1: Beer.
    2: Work-Terms are full-paid-salary... no student loans.
    3: It sounds cooler to call yourself an "Engineer".
    4: In similar fashion, after beating your head against a wall for six years, it feels really good when you stop.
    5: Beer.
    6: It gives you a really good understanding of a variety of foreign accents (Indian, Chinese, Scottish, Japanese, and English, for example).
    7: Beer.
    8: Beer.
    9: It's good treatment for dyslexia.
    10: reeB.

  • xix (unregistered) in reply to Erik

    Not the same type of situation, but mildly amusing.

    Back at waterloo, in the computer labs, if you needed to leave your machine, you locked it.  Fairly simple.  Course, the problem here is that it actually required people to lock it.

    Sometimes my friends and I would get into a lab really early (or really late, depending on personal inclination) to find computers still logged in, sitting at a terminal, just crying out to be abused.
    In those situations, the poor unfortunate one could find everything deleted, including the login scripts, which could make things trickier. 

    We didn't do that, since we're not evil, or at least, that kind of evil.  Another thing to note was that from your account you could run a script that would setup a public_html directory and some dummy pages and run a page from there, and it would be registered with the directory listing of student pages.  This person didn't have one set up, so one of us ran it, and replaced the index.html with, if I recall, H1'd pink text of "Hello, I'm [username], and I leave my computer unlocked in the labs, LOL!!111" or something equally silly.  Then we logged the computer out.

    That was in like 3rd year.  By 5th year, I beleive it was still there.

Leave a comment on “A Peek Into Our Future”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

« Return to Article