Black Raven Dragoons

[Haiku]

I finished the four assignments given before most people even started their first. Yawn.


not to mention i teach the teacher something *amazing* about computers every day.

That's what I get for overestimating *intro* to computers. :/




Read: Wooooo easy A this semester.

[Rawrbob]

I've taken that class and dropped it twice due to being unable to take being treated like a 12 year old.

It's hard to take a class seriously when your personal knowledge outstrips that of the instructor.

[Zancarius]

"Does any body know what a hard drive is?"

I remember having to suffer through that class once. He was generally pretty annoyed by me most days, because I 1) have a hard time keeping my mouth shut and 2) have a pretty snide attitude when I'm faced with a situation where I don't want to be somewhere and find it an awful abuse of valuable time.

[Grimblast]

I recall our incident with the young instructor a few years back. We had no idea that the woman sitting with the students in the front was the instructor until we inserted foot into mouth action. She stood up and went to the teachers desk and we were so screwed.

[Snobal]

[Quote="Thalaria"]2) have a pretty snide attitude when I'm faced with a situation where I don't want to be somewhere and find it an awful abuse of valuable time.[/quote]

Couldn't agree with you more on that.
You wanna know what I did today in "commuters" (how my instructor says computers)?
I made a power point presentation! I bet none of you have done that before, so HAH!

My computer class: 1 You're classes: 0

But really, I'm getting quite tired of "Timed Writings" and PowerPoint Presentations.

[Zancarius]

CS 110 (or equivalent "Intro to Computers" at your local university or community college) is a joke, but it's leaps and bounds above high school computer literacy courses.

In fact, it doesn't get any better at the higher levels. My last IS class "455: Online Business Systems" is pathetic. It's a .NET class, but it's starting with the very basics of Visual Basic. As far as I'm concerned, if someone doesn't understand basic programming by that point, they probably need to consider a different degree plan. Once you learn one language, others are generally pretty easy to pick up--the concepts are largely identical (unless you're using reverse Polish notation, which I think Scheme uses). Unfortunately, since a lot of courses are cross-listed elective credits outside of Information Systems, you have business students taking it without realizing that... yeah! It's a programming course.

Although, I think Sno and Haiku would much prefer this course over their respective newbie classes that assume zero knowledge. I would argue that universities should offer some basic literacy tests to determine student placement in computer-related courses, because for most students, CS 110 is just a stupid course. The only thing useful you're going to ever take out of it is exposure to some of the more esoteric parts of MS Office (no, I'm not kidding). It might be worthwhile in that regard, because there are some cool tricks that you can use in Word, Excel, and Access that will help out later in the curriculum. Plus, most of the more generic tips tend to cross over into other similar office suits, like OpenOffice. Unfortunately, you don't go through any of those points until much later--maybe halfway through.

If you do cover Access, I would strongly recommend paying close attention to things like primary keys, foreign keys, and so forth. I don't believe the intro classes go much beyond primary keys, but it is important knowledge to serve as a simple foundation for later courses if you plan on going into CS or IS. Hell, I think there's a few MBAs who have had to stick around in my database courses, so I'd imagine exposure to that wouldn't hurt.

Stick with it through October and then you might get into somewhat more interesting things. If not, there's always next semester. Anyway, that's my rant.

[Snobal]

The only thing useful you're going to ever take out of it is exposure to some of the more esoteric parts of MS Office (no, I'm not kidding)

NO! Don't tell me this.


*covers ears* LALALALALALALALA!!!111!one1!

I'm ready for MS crap to go-away. NAO! I'm *really* sick of it. How sick? REALLY sick.

[Zancarius]

It does have some useful features, though. Nearly all of which have been adopted by OOo.

Although, I'd argue that one of the most obnoxious changes is the removal of the menu system to be supplanted with Ribbon (the cruddy tab-based UI). Ribbon does have some use if there's certain features you frequently access, but finding advanced functionality that could otherwise be located somewhere under a submenu of "options" is hit or miss. Ribbon makes easy things easy and hard things hidden.

[Haiku]

I had to tell my teacher the difference between UNIX and Linux.

/facedesk
/facedoor
/computerwindow

[Zancarius]

Now that's rather comical.

I suppose it would be a stretch to suggest that you ought to ask him if he knows the differences between System V and BSD?

Edit: Send him to this link:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html

(Yes, I really do keep that on hand.)

[Snobal]

Thankfully we're using the MSO 2003 instead of 07. I can't find anything since the Ribbon update. It's fine for changing text and the likes, but for much of anything else, it's rediculous. But OOo has implemented nearly every freature from MSO and it's open source. I say Microsoft burns. NAO!

[Tarlas]

lol, I got stuck with frickin MSO 08. Word is impossible

[Tirian]

As someone who worked for about two years in a production/publishing position relying on the MSO suite, I can tell you that our whole staff universally hated (and still hates) MSO 2007 and we've very specifically maintained 2003 on all our hardware. For power users of MSO, the 2007 features significantly add, not reduce, time needed to do our tasks.

I heard they also completely changed (i.e. screwed up) a lot of the VBA that comes with Office, but I have no personal experience of that (thankfully).

[Zancarius]

As someone who worked for about two years in a production/publishing position relying on the MSO suite, I can tell you that our whole staff universally hated (and still hates) MSO 2007 and we've very specifically maintained 2003 on all our hardware. For power users of MSO, the 2007 features significantly add, not reduce, time needed to do our tasks.

Now that is interesting. It sort of leads me to believe that wouldn't be an isolated incident, either. In fact, I'd imagine a lot of places are probably going to wind up holding on to Office '03 or potentially make the transition to something that's a little easier on their users.

To be honest, making such a drastic UI paradigm change is a pretty bold and potentially stupid move. I found I was able to adapt to it, but I think that might be largely due to the fact that I think something like a developer and can figure out more or less what they meant to do. As such, learning UIs isn't terribly difficult. But, I know I'm not representative of the average user, and I have a very difficult time thinking like one! So, it's entirely possible it isn't at all straightforward.

Plus, when ever other software package in the world uses a menu-driven UI, it's a bit silly to try changing things that much. Seems to me that it's MS arrogance at its best: Make the world so dependent upon their suites that it winds up confusing the hell out of anyone who doesn't know any better. (Doubtful, but that may have been part of their incentive.)

I heard they also completely changed (i.e. screwed up) a lot of the VBA that comes with Office, but I have no personal experience of that (thankfully).

Actually, they removed VBA completely, but I believe they wound up having to re-add it because of so many legacy applications requiring it. I know that VBA works unchanged under MS Access 2007 since I had the misfortune of using that for an entire semester as our database management software. However, as I understand it, the changes they made to a .NET variant that didn't work worth beans broke a lot of things.

I could be completely wrong, of course, but that's roughly what I recall.

[Tirian]

Actually, they removed VBA completely

Our entire publishing "assembly line," if you will, is driven by templates and VBA, much of which interacts between Excel and Word. Without that functionality, literally our entire research operation would shut down in an industry relying on up-to-the-minute news updates covering the US, Western and Eastern Europe. If our research operation shuts down, we cut off thousands of clients, as well as the president, CEO and oligarch of our bank. This is bad.

And I know that many other small-scale publishing outfits use the same principle of relying on templates and VBA, though, obviously, every shop uses their own custom work.