| Re: Official bored at work / just shooting the shit / no rails to derail thread So it's 10 at night and I am working on an assignment for college so please excuse the grumbling.
I know it takes a lot of work to update the java on a whole college worth of computers but I really wish they would do it so that I don't have to use pre Java 6 (coming up 4 years old) on my home computer if I want to compile programs that actually run on the college computers. Should point out that if we do a program for an assignment that doesn't run on a college computer, we fail. I am pretty sure the only reason the java is that current is because they wanted to be able to teach the scanner class.
Why do people who write computer textbooks think that the only way we are going to absorb the knowledge is if they write the whole book friendly conversation style with very very poor information organisation and frequent 2 page anecdotes from their life as a college computer science lecturer? *cry* I don't want to know how difficult it is for you to allow students to have custom profiles on the college network and how often they try and steal your password, I want you to describe how a hashing function works.
As someone whose switched over from maths the textbooks for computing are driving me mad. Half the introduction books seem to be written by people who have sat down with the premise of 'people don't like computing, they think it's hard and boring, lets make it funny'. Given that most of these books seem to be written by the guy who comes you over in PC World to tell you about his font collection, funny doesn't really come naturally to them. I do not want to open a programming book and see an Indiana Jones cartoon, ever.
/end rant |