• guest (unregistered) in reply to JOHN
    JOHN:
    guest:
    Dave:
    Another was insistent that a megabyte was 1000 kilobytes rather than 1024.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

    Wikipedia is wrong.

    A Megabyte has been and always will be 1024 bytes, no matter what some group of obsessive-compulsive nerds says.

    I'm not arguing that 1 megabyte is x bytes, but that considering 1 megabyte as 1000 kilobytes is not a sign of cluelessness. And you seem to agree with me.

  • theorem (unregistered)

    the picture in the article looks like it was taken in the quad at RPI.

    is it ?

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Thijs:
    Cloak:
    Alex T.:
    My web-programming teacher was also incompetent. We were learning PHP and he removed me 5 points for source code inconsistency, because sometimes I would use double-quotes and other times single quotes...

    Its good programming practice (GPP) to remain consistent throughout your entire program. Writing things once like this and once like that makes it unnecessarily more difficult to read; It also must look like there were at least two programmers at work.

    This is a joke, right?

    Which part? AlexT's might be, Cloak is not and is actually correct. If you think Cloaks statement is a joke, I hope I never have to fix the bugs you are creating; and you should hope I never do a code review on you.

    The problem here is that in PHP (I don't know how much you know about it) is that strings surrounded by single quotes act differently than strings surrounded by double quotes. There are different uses for each.

    http://us3.php.net/types.string

  • (cs) in reply to Veinor
    Veinor:
    Random832:
    seejay:
    (the only one that stands out was her putting 333.333.333.333 as an IP address on an exam two years in a row even though several students had told her it wasn't a valid IP address).
    Who gives a crap if it's a real IP address? Movies and TV will use invalid IP addresses too, like 555 numbers.

    Except that if we really needed to, we could extend the phone numbers into the 555s (in fact, there already are some 555 numbers). 333.333.333.333 will never be a valid IPv4 address (or, for that matter, a valid IPv6 address). That's like saying your phone number is 8$6 2%6-2*)3 (i.e., never valid).

    Yep. and nevermind that it isn't movies or television... it's a class where you're supposed to learn. Using invalid information while asking where the IP address will go on a network diagram just confuses the hell out of those people who know it's invalid and wrong and does a great disservice to those who don't know it's wrong and are there trying to learn.

    You can make valid, yet go-nowhere, IP addresses for examples in a class. Using dummy data that can never exist is teaching something that can cause problems later.

    -- Seejay

  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    Another was insistent that a megabyte was 1000 kilobytes rather than 1024.
    It is, if you're dealing with drive space. (At least, according to the drive manufacturers.) There, 1K = 1000, 1M = 1000K, and 1G = 1000M.

    For example, a 250GB HD has approx. 250,000,000,000 bytes of storage, not 268,435,456,000.

  • CGomez (unregistered)

    Geesh when I took the AP Computer Science A and AB exams, they both used Pascal.

    I suddenly feel old, and I'm not even that old.

  • MATMAN (unregistered)

    I disagree with those who say that a "bricks and mortar" high school can't effectively teach programming. I think it's true that they would have a hard time teaching all the latest tricks and techniques and keeping up with the newest changes to programming languages.

    HOWEVER, at the secondary school level what is more important is the foundational principles of how computers work, how they understand code, and how to write good code. All else being equal, I'd rather have someone who learned all that from a competent teacher using Pascal than someone who taught himself C++ just using the documentation and some online tutorials.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to savar
    savar:
    The rela questionis, how do I stopp hackaerz from steeling the HTML kode on my web siet?!?

    $ apachectl -k stop

    or

    c:> net stop iisadmin

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to AdT

    That should be c:> net stop w3svc, of course. Although

    c:> net stop iisadmin this that and everything /FORCE

    will not hurt either. Better be safe than sorry.

  • (cs)

    I had a required CIS101 class that basically ended up being "Intro to Office." They did have to cover lots of other basic things, though, and 99% of what came out of the prof's mouth was incorrect.

    She stated:

    • Dual-layer DVDs are interlaced, with half the picture on one layer and half on the other
    • The .tv domain is for TV stations
    • Bluetooth is that little infrared port on the front of computers (when was the last time you saw IrDA on anything?)
    • The effective area of wireless networks are encircled by an antenna wire in the ceiling
    • Access control is achieved by not allowing unauthorized users "in the room with the wireless"
    • "the www tells you which part of the internet you're on"

    It was horrific.

    Addendum (2007-08-24 13:36):

    When assigned to spec a computer for school, I was docked points for omitting a dial-up modem ("how would you get online?") and MS Office.

  • Ken (unregistered) in reply to CGomez
    CGomez:
    Geesh when I took the AP Computer Science A and AB exams, they both used Pascal.

    I suddenly feel old, and I'm not even that old.

    When I took the AP Calculus test, the didn't even have an AP CompSci test.

  • Walter L (unregistered)

    I almost never add my comments but I had one on one of my first CS classes. The teacher was explaining how to telnet to the computer science server. He gave out a handout, and was explaining to the class:

    Go to Start. Then go to run. Type in telnet space comsci space [hostname] space edu.

    Of course it did not work for anybody. The teacher told them to try it on another computer. I had to tell the teacher that I tryed replacing the spaces with dots by accident and it worked.

    Thats when I realized I chose the wrong school. Stayed their anyway.

  • halber_mensch (unregistered) in reply to Heron
    Heron:
    Most high school "programming" teachers are more or less that incompetent, because they're not really supposed to teach that subject (mine was the golf coach and the very-basics-of-math-for-students-who-are-behind teacher). I spent most of my time in my high school programming class playing Starcraft - and it was supposed to be an AP class (good for college credit, if you pass the AP test). Only three of the thirty-ish students took the AP test.
    Sadly, I'm comforted to know another student had the same high school experience. My AP CS class was taught by a coach as well. He really didn't know enough to answer any questions that weren't addressed in the book. I once asked him what he knew about "Linux", and he told me that they (Lennox) make good A/C systems. To add insult to injury, the class was taught completely in C++, but damn! wouldn't you know the test was in PASCAL! A minor oversight, to be sure. I'm glad I didn't waste my money on the test though... the CS prereq's at my university made up for the damage.
  • misha (unregistered)

    I "studied" IT GCSE and Computing A-Level in the UK, the sheer number of WTFs in the syllabus is mindblowing, but one of my favourites was an exam question that went "Describe the TCP/IP protocols" for 3 marks out of a possible 100. It cunningly penalised the knowledgeable, since I was only supposed to know three marks worth of stuff about TCP/IP. I had to rack my brains to work out what I was supposed to know, while all the average students just regurgitated what they had rote learned.

    I think the correct answer was something like:

    • HTTP is used for the world wide web
    • FTP is used for transferring files
    • SMTP is used for email
  • misha (unregistered) in reply to MATMAN
    MATMAN:
    I disagree with those who say that a "bricks and mortar" high school can't effectively teach programming. I think it's true that they would have a hard time teaching all the latest tricks and techniques and keeping up with the newest changes to programming languages.

    HOWEVER, at the secondary school level what is more important is the foundational principles of how computers work, how they understand code, and how to write good code. All else being equal, I'd rather have someone who learned all that from a competent teacher using Pascal than someone who taught himself C++ just using the documentation and some online tutorials.

    I don't see why teachers should have a problem keeping up with new trends in computing. Pro developers, sysadmins etc are all expected to stay on top of new technologies as part of their job. Why can't teachers? A subscription to Dr Dobbs and a few training weekends every year is all it takes.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to guest
    JOHN:
    guest:
    Dave:
    Another was insistent that a megabyte was 1000 kilobytes rather than 1024.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte

    Wikipedia is wrong.

    A Megabyte has been and always will be 1024 bytes, no matter what some group of obsessive-compulsive nerds says.

    Oh crap, didn't know about that! lol - disagree with it though, I've never even heard of a mebibyte before!

  • jayh (unregistered) in reply to Brandon
    Brandon:
    Too bad he didn't stay for the inheritance lecture...

    You mean like:

    class Mother { ... };

    class Father { ... }

    class Milkman { ... }

    class Child : public Mother, public Father, private Milkman { ... }

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Ken
    Ken:
    It is, if you're dealing with drive space. (At least, according to the drive manufacturers.) There, 1K = 1000, 1M = 1000K, and 1G = 1000M.

    It is not, and I have bolded the reason why it has been changed. Hard drive manufacturers, who were selling drives by the fraction of a gigabyte, started calling 1,000,000,000 bytes a gigabyte in order to improve their marketing. (It's much like the 289/302/305 and 350/351 engine size wars of the 60's, 70's and 80's.)

    If you look at a Seagate ST-225 20 megabyte hard drive, the byte count (notwithstanding bad sectors) was always over 20,000,000 bytes, usually slightly below or slightly above 20MB (20,971,520 bytes.) The fact that 360K and 720K floppies were measured that way (368,640 bytes in the case of the 360K floppy), and that RAM is STILL measured that way, indicates that this was a money grab by hard drive manufacturers, and only then did they get the standards bodies on-board.

    It didn't matter that much in the 1.2GB vs. 1.3GB days, but now you're getting 36.8GB out of a 40GB drive, and only 931.3GB out of a "terabyte" drive--that's 70GB you're not getting.

  • Loveknuckle (unregistered) in reply to Thijs

    No joke. If you intermix single quotes and double quotes throughout your code it's an indication that you don't have a logical brain. I'd hate to see your code. In fact I think I hate you.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Loveknuckle
    Loveknuckle:
    No joke. If you intermix single quotes and double quotes throughout your code it's an indication that you don't have a logical brain. I'd hate to see your code. In fact I think I hate you.

    If you haven't got a clue about PHP, Perl, bash or any other language where single and double quotes actually don't do the same thing and still feel compelled to express your opinion on their usage, it's an indication that you don't have a logical brain. I don't think I hate you, though. Hate is an indication of an illogical brain.

  • Loveknuckle (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Loveknuckle:
    No joke. If you intermix single quotes and double quotes throughout your code it's an indication that you don't have a logical brain. I'd hate to see your code. In fact I think I hate you.

    If you haven't got a clue about PHP, Perl, bash or any other language where single and double quotes actually don't do the same thing and still feel compelled to express your opinion on their usage, it's an indication that you don't have a logical brain. I don't think I hate you, though. Hate is an indication of an illogical brain.

    PHP, perl, bash, and their ilk aren't real languages (all have been replaced by superior languages). Pick a real language and you'll see the light. Real languages use "" to indicate strings and '' to indicate characters. Put that in your pipe.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to djork
    djork:
    * Dual-layer DVDs are interlaced, with half the picture on one layer and half on the other * The .tv domain is for TV stations * The effective area of wireless networks are encircled by an antenna wire in the ceiling

    Oh my goodness! It must have been Paula!

    djork:
    * Access control is achieved by not allowing unauthorized users "in the room with the wireless"

    Well, I guess that's what the average PHB thinks, so it's not too bad. Or what the PHBs think is not too good - whatever.

    djork:
    * "the www tells you which part of the internet you're on"

    Oh, come on, don't be so hard on her - this is almost remotely correct given that it stands for the World Wide Web aspect of the Internet. Though of course there is no longer a 1-to-1 mapping between the hosts named www and the WWW.

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to Loveknuckle
    Loveknuckle:
    PHP, perl, bash, and their ilk aren't real languages (all have been replaced by superior languages). Pick a real language and you'll see the light. Real languages use "" to indicate strings and '' to indicate characters. Put that in your pipe.

    Real men don't use logical fallacies. Put that in your |.

  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    boogieman:
    High school teachers... what a laugh...
    Why would a skilled developer become a high school teacher when he/she could earn twice as much writing software?
    I had a friend who graduated right at the onset of the dot-com bust, so nobody was hiring junior developers right out of school. After many months of looking for work, he ended up going to teacher's college, and now he teaches high school math and CS. So in his case it was mostly bad timing rather than lack of skill.
  • (cs) in reply to tgsegse
    tgsegse:
    Huh. Did anyone actually have good teachers? All my CS/MIS teachers were quite competent. Heck, other than my elective management accounting course, all the teachers I had in university were fairly decent.
    I guess I'm also one of the few lucky ones who mostly had compenent CS teachers. Even my Grade 12 teacher who admitted up front that he only learned C the summer before having to teach the class (this was around 1992). Whenver we gut stuck on something, we would all work together to figure it out, and it ended up being a great real-world learning experience.

    I really only had two incompetent teachers. One was in my 4th year of university (the class was Software Engineering Principles). The prof had a BA and MA in Philosophy, and somehow got a PhD in CS, which evidently made him qualified to teach the class. The few classes I went to, he would show up reeking of pot smoke, and ramble on about topics that had nothing to do with computers at all. If you ever had to see him during office hours, chances are he would be hot-boxing his office. It was fun to knock on his door and listen to him shuffle around trying to pretend he wasn't there.

    The other useless teacher I had was for a Unix Administration course the me and a few coworkers took several years ago (and paid for by our employer, which was a rarity). Each class consisted of reinstalling various flavours of Linux (RH5, RH6, Caldera, etc) and learning how to navigate the various GUIs (KDE, GNOME, etc). Nothing about actual adminstration. Most of our time was spent playing Minesweeper or helping the teacher when he had problems, and after about 4 classes, we dropped out and demanded our money back.

  • (cs) in reply to jayh
    jayh:
    class Child : public Mother, public Father, private Milkman { ... }
    More like:

    class Child : public Mother, protected Father, private Milkman { ... }

  • DavidTC (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird

    My thinking is that the best programmers are those who can self-teach the language constructs and have some intuitive level of how programming works, so that you don't NEED to be weighted down by bad teaching.

    Fast forward to C++ lectures in first year engineering, 1996... The prof was decent, and I did learn some C++, but I could not believe how many people were signed up for software engineering who had no clue about computers or software or programming concepts. Call me arrogant if you like, but I think that if you really want to be a good programmer you need to have had some level of computer exposure prior to first year engineering.

    I'm convinced there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can program, and those who cannot. There is some abstract thing, an 'aptitude' that people either have or do not have. People who have it often teach themselves to program at a young age, and people who do not will never program usefully.

    This is not intended as any sort of insult, I suspect the same thing applies to mechanical engineering and playing music and acting and surgery and charmismatic speaking and boxing and writing fiction quite a lot of professions out there.

    I could memorize lines, cues, facial expressions, and where my mark is, but that doesn't make me an 'actor'. Some jobs require training, which anyone can do, some require higher-than-normal physical or mental skills, which is more selective, and some require aptitude in some specific skill-set that is completely impossible to teach. And, of course, many jobs require two or all three of those. Acting takes training, aptitude, fairly good memory, and a lot of energy. (Stage acting, that is. That and a willingness to stare into bright lights and then walk blithely into total darkness without any night vision.)

    However, those other jobs are older than programming, old enough that people realize you don't just decide, in college, that acting pays well (This is obviously hypothetical) so you will be an actor and take an acting class.

    Right now, people see they can operate a computer (Which is something that just requires a lot of training and moderate intelligence.) and assume they can program a computer, that programming is simply a subset of 'operation' that pays more, and maybe requires slightly more intelligence.

    When you think about society's exposure to computers, that is, normal people's exposure, it's been, at this point, 20 years. We're just now reaching the mark where normal people could have grown up with computers their entire life. Parents see their kids having a lot more training on computers than they do, and, not knowing anything about programming, assume that they could do that to, and the kids don't know better, and they go into college and fail, or, even worse, succeed. (It's more a societal thing than any specific 'parents' and 'kids'.)

    I suspect in a generation, as people come to understand the difference between programming and operating a computer, we'll see less of this insanity fade away.

  • (cs) in reply to Loveknuckle
    Real languages use "" to indicate strings and '' to indicate characters.
    That's an awfully silly way to differentiate "real" languages from not. There are exactly five languages that do this, only three of which are "real" in my book, and that's including Ada. Many other languages, of varying degrees of "real"-ness, either lack the concept of a character altogether (algol, near as I can tell), use a different notation for them (lisp), use an entirely different notation for strings (postscript), etc, etc. But, regardless, it was a PHP assignment, and in PHP, they have different meanings and both produce strings.

    Not everything in the world has to do everything the same way as C#.

  • (cs) in reply to Landy
    Landy:
    bstorer:
    If I recall correctly, I took the CS AP test the last or second-to-last time it was given in C++. And our school's compiler of choice? Borland Turbo C++ 3.0. DOS-based, no namespaces, no STL. Good thing my internship had given me my own copy of VS6.0 and some newer C++ reference material.

    You didn't happen to be from Tulsa, OK and go to go Union did you? Thats exactly how my c++ class was... I had one year of c++, then we switched to java, and things got better!

    What things, precisely?

    Not to put too fine a point on it, and no disrespect to Java as a programming language, but it's rubbish for teaching people the bones of computer science. I'm not even sure that C++ (my language of choice) is ideal: purists would argue for LISP or for Motorola assembler. Or maybe even Python.

    I suspect that the only thing that got better was your grade point average. But is that worth coming out of the course without having learned anything worthwhile?

    (And to repeat: in the real world, and in a properly decontaminated environment, there's nothing wrong with Java. As an academic language, it's useless.)

  • (cs) in reply to David C.
    David C.:
    Fortunately, STL isn't that hard to learn. Buy a copy of Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" and read it cover to cover. It even includes homework assignments at the end of each chapter.

    If you don't yet have an STL-compatible compiler, they're easy to find. Gcc has supported it since version 3. Mac OS X includes gcc version 4 (or 3.x, for some older releases) on the developer-tools CD that comes with the OS. Linux has come with gcc for a long time, and all recent distributions come with at least version 3. Windows doesn't come with a C++ compiler, but you can download gcc if you don't want to buy a commercial package. Other platforms may or may not include a compiler, but gcc is available for just about everything.

    Better still, ignore Stroustrup's books entirely. (But don't ignore Stroustrup.) Meyer, more Meyer, the other Meyer, and both Herb Sutters. And the definitive STL reference is still Matthew Austern, which is awesome as both a reference and a textbook.

    Don't mind me, I'm currently working on Rogue Wave's laughable wrappers around their equally laughable tools++.h.

    And I'm sure that a number of people have referenced one or more of these books earlier on. Too many posts, too little time to check. And it's very, very late at night here.

    Oh yeah. David, I'm afraid you're wrong. The STL is indeed "hard to learn." How many people do you know who habitually use STL algorithms at all, let alone correctly? (Discuss: member algorithms versus non-member algorithms.)

    It is, however, easy to use. And extremely portable. And extremely powerful.

  • (cs) in reply to misha
    misha:
    I "studied" IT GCSE and Computing A-Level in the UK, the sheer number of WTFs in the syllabus is mindblowing, but one of my favourites was an exam question that went "Describe the TCP/IP protocols" for 3 marks out of a possible 100. It cunningly penalised the knowledgeable, since I was only supposed to know three marks worth of stuff about TCP/IP. I had to rack my brains to work out what I was supposed to know, while all the average students just regurgitated what they had rote learned.

    I think the correct answer was something like:

    • HTTP is used for the world wide web
    • FTP is used for transferring files
    • SMTP is used for email
    Baby Jesus is definitely crying.

    I used to wonder why my father, an admissions tutor in Computer Science at an English University (back in the days when we had Universities, rather than Kindergartens for the post-teens), would refuse to consider an applicant with an A-Level in Computer Science.

    It seemed sort of counter-intuitive.

    On the other hand, if you truly have the expected answer (which does indeed add up to three), then you fail. Well, you would have passed the test, perhaps. However, not a single one of the set (HTTP, FTP and SMTP) is a TCP/IP protocol. Arguably IP, but to be honest not even then. And why miss out the joy of IPTV (which had better bloody well be over TCP/IP) or Goatse/IP -- you need a good broadband connection for this one?

    I think my father was right.

  • Gex (unregistered) in reply to Dan
    Dan:

    I said the same thing in college. In the US, if the prof doesn't speak English well (and I mean, little to no foreign accent), then his TAs damn well better. To have both be barely comprehensible, so that you spend half your brain just trying to figure out words, was unacceptable and very frustrating. The worst classes I had were those; the best ones were when at some point, a native English speaker was involved, be it the prof or a TA.

    politically incorrect, maybe, but if thats what needs to be done to get our own workforce up to speed...

    Yeah, but what are you gonna do? People who really know this stuff can earn more in industry instead of education. And the majority of PhD candidates in this country are not from this country.

  • misha (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:

    I used to wonder why my father, an admissions tutor in Computer Science at an English University (back in the days when we had Universities, rather than Kindergartens for the post-teens), would refuse to consider an applicant with an A-Level in Computer Science.

    You think that's bad, I got loads more. Like the fact that CD-RW drives were classified as "output devices", along with printers, speakers, monitors etc. And yet ordinary CD drives, floppies and so on were "storage devices".

    Sorry, I know it's too late for anyone to read this anyway, but I still feel the need to vent after all these years...

  • Rob Baillie (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that the student in question felt so superiour that they left the class rather than try to correct the teacher.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Tony

    Note that to modern compilers, the keyword "register" is largely unneeded. Mostly, it's a promise by the programmer to never take the address of the variable. In general, modern optimizing compilers are pretty smart about register allocation, unlike the compilers in the 1970s.

    If you declare a register variable, either the compiler will ignore/take it as a hint, or the compiler will keep that variable in a register for the duration of the function regardless if the code optimizer determines that it would be better to keep the variable in a register for only part of the function, and keep another variable in the register for another part of the function.

  • Tim Lesher (unregistered) in reply to csrster

    You need to review your logic.

    "Those who can't [do], teach" != "Those who teach, can't [do]."

  • (cs)

    How exactly is Java useless as an academic language?

    In a course that teaches you object oriented programming, it's good to be able to focus on just that... The objects, the principles of OOP (encaps, inheritance, abstraction) while keeping all the technical things out of the way. I would REALLY rather spend time learning that as a first year rather than learning "what are C++ function prototypes and why do we need to put them at the top before we can write the actual functions", or, my favorite, the nuance differences between a reference and a pointer.

  • (cs) in reply to Tim Lesher
    Tim Lesher:
    You need to review your logic.

    "Those who can't [do], teach" != "Those who teach, can't [do]."

    Proof that the quote "Those who can't do, teach" is false:

    1. Prove the following:

    "Those who can't do, teach" == "those who don't teach, can do". (If the first one is true, I want to prove that the second one must be true as well).

    Proof:

    Let T be "I teach" Let D be "I can do"

    Premise:

    ~D->T (If I can't do, then I teach)

    Using law of transposition:

    ~T->~(~D)

    Using double negation rule:

    ~T->D

    Which says, "If I don't teach, then I can do".

    (If you want to be really picky, you'd have to use predicate logic and say "for all members of group people, if member X does not have predicate "can do", then that member has the predicate "teaches". It will, however, lead to the same conclusion, namely "for all members of group people, if member X does not have the predicate "teaches", then the member has the predicate "can do").

    1. Acknowledge that in our existing universe of discourse, NOT all people who are not teachers are competent. There are many people who cannot do, yet have never taught.

    2. Our initial premise "those who can't, teach" has led to a contradiction, and therefore, the premise must be false.

    Q.E.D.

  • misha (unregistered) in reply to SamP
    SamP:
    Tim Lesher:
    You need to review your logic.

    "Those who can't [do], teach" != "Those who teach, can't [do]."

    Proof that the quote "Those who can't do, teach" is false:

    1. Prove the following:

    "Those who can't do, teach" == "those who don't teach, can do". (If the first one is true, I want to prove that the second one must be true as well).

    Proof:

    Let T be "I teach" Let D be "I can do"

    Premise:

    ~D->T (If I can't do, then I teach)

    Using law of transposition:

    ~T->~(~D)

    Using double negation rule:

    ~T->D

    Which says, "If I don't teach, then I can do".

    (If you want to be really picky, you'd have to use predicate logic and say "for all members of group people, if member X does not have predicate "can do", then that member has the predicate "teaches". It will, however, lead to the same conclusion, namely "for all members of group people, if member X does not have the predicate "teaches", then the member has the predicate "can do").

    1. Acknowledge that in our existing universe of discourse, NOT all people who are not teachers are competent. There are many people who cannot do, yet have never taught.

    2. Our initial premise "those who can't, teach" has led to a contradiction, and therefore, the premise must be false.

    Q.E.D.

    Sir, I award you the title of Grand High Pedant and the office of Nitpicker General.

    Personally, I suspect that Bertrand Russel, being a philosopher of some repute himself, intended the quote which seems to bother you so as some form of witticism or "joke", rather than an axiomatic principle.

  • jdj (unregistered)

    I got my SCJP (Sun Certified Java Programmer) certificate years ago (in 2001). To prepare for the exam, our company had arranged for us to get classes to study all the details we had to know.

    The classes were a total waste of time; the teacher didn't even know if Java was case-sensitive, she wrote an example program using 'TRUE' while it should have been 'true' and then she was scratching her head over why it wouldn't compile...

    She was a former COBOL programmer who had never used Java for a serious project. And she was supposed to teach us this...

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    Not to put too fine a point on it, and no disrespect to Java as a programming language, but it's rubbish for teaching people the bones of computer science.

    And your assignment is: find two computer scientists who agree on what the bones of CS actually are.

    real_aardvark:
    As an academic language, it's useless.

    I don't like Java, but obviously many CS educators consider it a useful teaching tool for some purposes.

    real_aardvark:
    Better still, ignore Stroustrup's books entirely. (But don't ignore Stroustrup.)

    If all you want to do is code, you don't need Stroustrup's books, right. But if you really want to understand the language, then there is no alternative to both The C++ Programming Language and The Design and Evolution of C++*, plus Meyers, plus Sutter.

    Also, I don't quite understand how you would ignore Stroustrup's books without ignoring him entirely. There are not a lot of other ways of directly coming into contact with his views, at least for most people.

    *) But the Reverend said design and evolution were mutually exclusive...

  • AdT (unregistered) in reply to real_aardvark
    real_aardvark:
    However, not a single one of the set (HTTP, FTP and SMTP) is a TCP/IP protocol. Arguably IP

    HTTP and SMTP, although being used almost exclusively over TCP/IP, are transport layer agnostic. But more recent versions of the FTP protocol are defined as an application layer protocol on top of TCP/IP. True, there used to be an NCP version that preceded the TCP version, but to my knowledge it is considered about as obsolete as IP versions 3 and lower.

  • D (unregistered) in reply to Luke Gaddie
    Luke Gaddie:
    Sounds like my High School teacher. The school decided to start a "Computer Programming" class, teaching Java. This would have been alright, had:
    1. They not bought Java books that were a little more than 4 years old.
    2. If they had installed Java correctly on the computers as well.
    3. Had the teacher actually known the language and/or was interested in learning it.

    Unfortunately, I couldn't get admin access to permanently fix a few of the problems, so we managed with passing out .bat's to be run at the start of class. That still didn't fix all the syntax errors that, according to the book, were legal, but according to the compiler, were illegal.

    <3 Public School Budgets

    My highschool was very similar:

    1. We wrote in C++ (though they tought a wierd combination... basically C in C++ syntax (cin cout))
    2. There was some security software that made the following code illegal #include <stdio.h>

    int main(){ printf("Hello"); return 0; }

    The above code would sometimes throw general protection windows errors (YEY). Infact all compilation errors would go though and instead we would get general protection errors... o well who is to say i'm wrong for thinking that that was stupid...

    So one year a student decided that he was sick of it, and just hit alt+crtl+del during logon, killed the security process and went about his business... sigh the evil h4x0rz of alt+ctrl+del in a programming class. sigh

    GOOOOO PUBLIC SCHOOLS!!!! Did I mention that IDE meant to them: "Notepad"? Eclipse? forgetaboudit! So narually I came out of that class knowing one thing and one thing only: 1+1 = general protection error!

  • Maxam (unregistered) in reply to JOHN

    That's funny, I've always been under the impression that 1024 bytes is a kilobyte, not a megabyte.

  • 008 (unregistered) in reply to Maxam

    Sort of like in my CS class, when we were exploring function pointers, most of the class got several SIGSEGV messages followed by the system hanging with "Warning:" in the IDE.

  • psilo (unregistered) in reply to bstorer

    Daniel? Is that you? Really though, she was a nice lady. Give her a break.

    I do believe high schools SHOULD get a break teaching all the wrong stuff, because all they're really supposed to be teaching is conditionals and looping anyway. Who cares if nobody uses TC++ 3.0 for DOS. She was a nice lady.

  • (cs) in reply to ExiledSwagman
    ExiledSwagman:
    btnOk.enabled := (field1.text <> '') and (field2.text <> '') .... ;
    Yes, with the brackets, to make it clearer. Immediately the question came, "what do the two arrow symbols next to each other mean?"
    If that's Delphi, the brackets aren't there for clarity - they're required, as and has higer priority than <>.
  • .oisyn (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Also, I don't quite understand how you would ignore Stroustrup's books without ignoring him entirely. There are not a lot of other ways of directly coming into contact with his views, at least for most people.

    Try posting in comp.std.c++, or use the contacting information provided on this page: http://www.research.att.com/~bs/

    Pretty much anyone can get in contact with him if he/she wants to ;)

  • (cs) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    real_aardvark:
    However, not a single one of the set (HTTP, FTP and SMTP) is a TCP/IP protocol. Arguably IP

    HTTP and SMTP, although being used almost exclusively over TCP/IP, are transport layer agnostic. But more recent versions of the FTP protocol are defined as an application layer protocol on top of TCP/IP. True, there used to be an NCP version that preceded the TCP version, but to my knowledge it is considered about as obsolete as IP versions 3 and lower.

    SMTP and HTTP only use a single byte stream; FTP needs to negotiate opening additional sockets to transfer the files over.

  • (cs)

    My ASM instructor did the same exact thing. He'd make literal explanations of obtuse computing concepts.

    The only difference.

    He was competent and was completely joking.

    I feel sorry for Amro.

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