Posts by GrumpenKraut 1841 posts • joined 9 Sep 2014
> I find the std classes to be INEFFICIENT
Inefficient is not a valid critique about std classes. Used right they are more efficient than the vast majority of home grown solutions. Also more correct than the vast majority of home grown solutions.
If you can match std classes with your own solutions, congrats, you are quite a gifted coder.
> and CUMBERSOME
Erm, have you ever looked at C++ 11? It is out for ten years now!
Btw. I do come from the background of what was described as "dipshit C programmers" in a comment above.
Your description is entirely accurate.
Here is a detail I'd like to add: we tend to over-plan everything and end up doing nothing or at least being terribly late to implement.
Covid-19 did change that in a way, things had to be implemented right away, basically no matter how. At Unis (I work at one) you got a license for Teams and Zoom and you had to start right there. I was lucky because I could emulate my usual style pretty well. Others (interestingly many who used a much more "multi media" approach) were essentially out of luck, some lecture simply did not happen.
> At Uni we had lectures of 60+ and there was no way you could ask any questions without disrupting the whole thing.
IMO a good lecturer should regularly ask for questions. The number of students is not that much of a problem in my experience. I never had more than 100 students in a lecture, though.
Getting no feedback from students tends to make me slightly nervous and I will ask whether the lecture was OK at the end.
> having seen one of my lecturers take all the copies of his book from the library 2 weeks before term started
Wow, that is completely unacceptable.
> what is the educational divide?
My personal view is that it is largely family background. If your father is, say, an engineer and has tons of books, this is a huge advantage against coming from a family where the only printed matter is the daily mail.
Nowadays with the internet offering all information for everybody one may think that the above is much less important. I'd argue this is not the case: kids still need guidance in order to find/pick useful stuff and not just sink in a torrent of crap.
> To my mind, the key to all success in education is teachers.
Yes, a thousand times. As far as I know this is the *only* parameter that significantly determines learning success. There is a current thought in Germany (and surely elsewhere as well) that if teaching becomes "digital" (whatever this means) everything magically gets better. Whenever I hear this, I really want to slap someone in the face.
> On shifting vs. multiplication, I once worked with a very interesting system where doing something like x*=2 was actually faster than x<<=1
I can only suggest to also always try the unoptimized code and see what the compiler makes of it. Many optimizations that were OK two decades ago are actively bad today.
I meanwhile stopped to do the shift-for-multiply stuff because the compiler outsmarts me as a rule. Compiler-writer-appreciation-pint ---->
With platforms/compilers where the optimizer is not so great things may well be different.
Learned the following an hour ago from an emergency responder (Austria).
People avoid getting vaccinated get a fake certificate, no news so far. Of course they distrust the "evil government", so they pay 100 Euros and submit their personal info including *all* details of their ID/passport to a random web-site for the fake cert. A whole new level of brilliance right there.
> It's entirely possible that an employee in SAP's home country of Germany would not be dismissed for doing something outside of work.
She'd absolutely positively be fired. Some idiots have challenged similar firings in court, that's when they find themselves in the news.
> Anyone know of other programming languages that use another language or glyph system (Cyrillic, Hiragana, etc) at their core?
There was some version of Pascal(?) in German. So a for-loop would be a für-loop, I kid you not. It didn't help that ü has no ASCII encoding, at a time where UTF-8 wasn't heard of.
Anyway, using keywords not in one's own language is in my opinion an advantage, no confusing connotations!
> "beers made with other ingredients cannot actually be labelled as beers"
To the best of my knowledge: this is not true anymore, after some court case. You can mention "brewed after Reinheitsgebot" (or somesuch) to advertise that fact.
Btw. the old ruling (not Reinheitsgebot, so not beer) was somewhat of a protectionist thing from German breweries.
> It seems the current crop of new computing graduates are being taught nothing more than...
At least where I live (and teach) this is not entirely true. However, students tend to switch off when it comes big-O and some finer points of computing/programming. Telling them stat stuff *is* important turned out to be fruitless. Nowadays I say something along then lines off "If you ignore this you will not get a good job, and you will totally deserve it.". Funny enough this seems to work.
But yeah, I have seen the content of courses that are not even a joke.
Very unlikely any data will be recoverable. While it is quite difficult to flatten a hard disk, a steam roller(*) will have no problems. Just note how flat the rigs are afterwards. A hard disk may still be one piece, but the platters will be very much non-flat. For SSDs, a single chip (of several) might survive if it is very lucky, not sure what one would get out of that.
(*) weight up to 30 tons for not really huge ones.
> For one i don't beleive that this pauses a threat at all to privacy. What's the problem ? I don't see any.
One reason for and usage of telemetry they list goes like this: "Why we collect: For legal enforcement; Personal Data we collect: Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any); Legal grounds for processing: Legitimate interests of WSM Group to defend its legal rights and interests."
Not a problem, really?
Vendors of commercial software used to fight against FOSS because they did fear what you seem to fear. The last three decades showed that they did worry with no good reason. Commercial software will never go away and even more money will be made selling or renting it.
You can give software away for free and still make good money, by selling support contracts. See Suse, Redhat, and probably a lot of other firms.
In https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/ I find the following.
"Why we collect: For legal enforcement; Personal Data we collect: Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any); Legal grounds for processing: Legitimate interests of WSM Group to defend its legal rights and interests."
This is not acceptable at all. Funny I had to type the text above, it is an image on the web site.
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