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On 16-2-2015 13:37, Doctor John wrote:
> On 16/02/15 10:07, Stephen wrote:
>> On 16/02/2015 09:26, Thomas de Groot wrote:
>>> Beware of the /binary/ nature though. I must have told this story many
>>> times, maybe even here...
>>
>> Not to my knowledge. I have seen the same, a few times with slide
>> projectors. When the carousel has been loaded in the wrong order and the
>> ensuing panic ends up with the slides on the floor.
>> Ah! Well. It was the best that we had at the time.
>>
>
> Guilty!
> Been there, done that. All I need is the t-shirt.
>
> John
>
Oh dear, oh dear, yes... (once I /forgot/ my slides)...
--
Thomas
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On 16/02/15 12:52, Thomas de Groot wrote:
> Oh dear, oh dear, yes... (once I /forgot/ my slides)...
>
"... and as you can see..."
:-D
John
--
Protect the Earth
It was not given to you by your parents
You hold it in trust for your children
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On 16-2-2015 14:04, Doctor John wrote:
> On 16/02/15 12:52, Thomas de Groot wrote:
>> Oh dear, oh dear, yes... (once I /forgot/ my slides)...
>>
>
> "... and as you can see..."
>
Yes, but happily I could draw on an overhead projector what the audience
was supposed to see :-)
It felt a bit like 'dancing the Charleston and talking at the same time'
Andrew suggested earlier.
--
Thomas
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> My school experience was quite the opposite; there was even a fair
> competition between pupils to get the highest scores. Good teachers were
> venerated; the bad treated with contempt. It was hard work too, from
> 8:00 till 18:00 on average, six days a week, with only the thursday
> afternoon free. I don't know. Time (50s and 60s) and place (Paris) may
> play a role here...
I wish it had been more like that where I was, but it was sadly not the
case, rather it was "cool" to not do any work and if you weren't "cool"
you were likely to get bullied about it (mostly verbal but sometimes
physical). It got slightly easier at age 13 (IIRC) when we got split
into classes by ability for most subjects, but some subjects were still
mixed abilility so you had complete losers who were only there to cause
trouble in the same class as people who were hoping to make something of
their life.
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On Sun, 15 Feb 2015 22:35:00 +0200, Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> On 15/02/2015 02:56 PM, Nekar Xenos wrote:
>> I don't get it. We learned about logarithms in high school.
>
> In which country?
>
> For that matter, we learned about fractions in school. But I've yet to
> meet anyone from my own generation who has the slightest clue how
> fractions work... [I suppose that's another one of those "nobody cares;
> the computer does it for you" type things.]
South Africa. 1988. But my eldest son is now doing his final High-School
year and they haven't done logarithms yet. So I'm not sure what to make of
it.
--
-Nekar Xenos-
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On 16/02/2015 08:40 AM, scott wrote:
> I have to agree with Andy here, my experience of school (compulsory up
> to age 16) and sixth form college (optional up to age 18) is that most
> people didn't want to learn.
At college, every lunchtime my classmates would walk across the road to
the Winter Gardens, and come back after lunch obviously drunk. Every
single day. The lecturers claimed we were the worst class they'd ever
seen. [But they presumably say that *every* year...]
> It was only when I got to University that it was suddenly full of people
> who actually wanted to be there and wanted to learn.
Well, I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. I went to some no-name
university that nobody's ever heard of and isn't even there any more...
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On 16/02/2015 08:23 AM, scott wrote:
>> According to the Academia Stack Exchange portal, it seems if you have a
>> PhD, everybody immediately assumes you're going to be hellishly
>> expensive to hire and summarily drops you from consideration.
>>
>> Unless you want to work in the finance industry, which only exists in
>> London.
>
> I work for a manufacturing company about 50 miles away from London,
Wait, I thought you were in Germany?
> and
> we have quite a few PhDs working in our R&D team (physics and chemistry)
> and in more senior positions elesewhere in the company. We certainly
> wouldn't reject your application just for having a PhD.
Mmm, interesting.
> My previous employer was much more R&D oriented and at least 50% of the
> staff had PhDs. Didn't you have some at your previous job too?
I don't call anybody having a PhD.
> Maybe the
> problem you highlight is unique to people with computer science PhDs?
I guess the other problem, of course, is that if you're a salesman or an
accountant or a purchasing clerk... *every* business needs those people.
If you program computers... well, not that many people actually need
such a person. (But then, the same goes for CNC operators, presumably.)
But yeah, the general impression I got from Stack Exchange was that
unless you intend to spend the rest of your life working for a top-tier
university publishing academic papers, there is basically *no point* in
possessing a PhD. You might as well go way 4 years' commercial
experience instead.
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>> Nobody thinks this will work. Nobody ever tries this. Because nobody is
>> that stupid. But replace being able to write French with being able to
>> write C#, and suddenly everybody thinks that somehow "nobody will
>> notice". Wuh?!
>
> I assure you the sames happens for French and everything else. My gf
> works for a company that sells stuff mostly outside the UK, so they are
> always recruiting people for customer service that are fluent in German,
> French, Italian etc. People *do* apply for jobs that blatantly state
> "German speaker" that cannot speak more than the 3 words of German that
> everyone knows. Their reasoning is often along the lines of "well I can
> speak a bit of French and I thought you wouldn't notice, and if you did
> you would anyway see how uber cool I was and see I could learn German in
> a few weeks and hire me anyway". Err no, go away!
Really? WTF?
I still have to ask: Are 95% of the people applying totally talentless,
or is it just a small minority? Because where I work, we LITERALLY
CANNOT HIRE ANYBODY because we just cannot find anybody who knows what
source code is...
> The same happened to me in Engineering in my last job too. A guy applied
> quoting 20 years experience in analogue electronic circuit design and
> test. We got a bit concerned when he couldn't even say what a simple
> 2-component RC circuit was meant to do, let alone how to calculate any
> response. After a bit of drilling down we got to the question of "have
> you ever actually used an oscilloscope?". His answer was No. I mean come
> on!
I presume such people tend not to get hired, though.
I think perhaps the difference with software is that you can sometimes
get away with it. If you produce a physical product and it's crappy,
it's *very obvious* that it's crappy. But you can write software which
*looks* fantastic, but is actually a steaming pile of failure. It's not
so easy to spot...
> LOL
For the LOLZ: [I may have posted this already]
We asked a guy to implement the abs() function. It took him about 20
minutes to write this:
public int abs(int x)
{
int a = x;
int b = 0;
while (a < 0)
{
a++;
b++;
}
return b;
}
My boss described this as "the most bizarre thing I've ever seen". The
correct answer, of course, is a 1-liner. When we pointed out to the guy
that if x is *already* positive this function won't work, he sat there
for *literally* half an hour thinking before we asked him to stop. It
turns out he could work out "which standard library function tells you
if a number is negative".
We did not hire.
Frighteningly, this function does work for negative arguments.
Terrifyingly, for *positive* arguments, it still correctly negates them.
So this abs() function is actually a negate function - one that takes
about 45 seconds to negate a small positive number. (Can you work out
why? It blew our minds when we noticed it...)
> The scary thing is these people will probably be able to get a job
> somewhere and somehow blag there way along. If they're lucky they may
> even get to interview people at some point :-)
Indeed. I believe Coding Horror had an article about this very thing.
The fact that there are so many of these people means they must be
succeeding somewhere.
You may recall, at my last place, the Director of IT seemingly had no
clue about how computers actually work... but was very skilful at
speaking in management power-words.
>> I wonder... Does anybody have this much trouble hiring a carpenter?
>
> Have you ever seen shows like "cowboy builders" or "rogue traders"...
Yeah. And they're a tiny minority, before they get sued out of
existence. The majority of reputable builders can actually do the job.
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On 16/02/2015 18:03, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> that nobody's ever heard of and isn't even there any more...
LOL
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 16/02/2015 18:06, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> But yeah, the general impression I got from Stack Exchange was that
> unless you intend to spend the rest of your life working for a top-tier
> university publishing academic papers, there is basically *no point* in
> possessing a PhD. You might as well go way 4 years' commercial
> experience instead.
That is your impression about everything and why you keep getting your
ears rattled.
Just mentioning. :-)
--
Regards
Stephen
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