I would guess that one factor - besides being crusaders on a mission of course
- is the repetitiveness of it. As Klumpen alludes to above, more or less this exact thread tends to pop up every 3 months or so, and in the end some of the more temporally advanced board dwellers tend to lose their temper a bit.
Which is a bit unfair to every new person asking the same question, but still. I do get the same urge, sometimes, when I'm grading exams. By the 35th identical error I tend to want to write "I've already told you that is wrong!!! Why do you keep making the same error!!!" It takes great effort to remember that it is actually different students behind every exam
The major difference is that the people asking these questions here did not sit in class and get told all of this already. I am pretty sure the official internet rules say you should look on your own before asking, though. The problem is "expensive" and "outdated" depend on how you are measuring them. Sometimes $50 is expensive and sometimes $1000 is cheap; it just depends on how much money you have and what you want. If you only want a device that is bleeding edge everything is outdated nearly as soon as it is available, yet if you are only trying to do very simple things, or play games on the go for a handheld console that came out 25 years ago the Pyra will blow you away and give you so much more (with far better controls than touchscreen devices if you are used to physical buttons). The best solution is a FAQ section that discusses why it has the specs it does and why it will still cost what it does despite the lack of a 3GHz octa-core x86-64 processor and 32GB of RAM, then point at that and lock the thread.
If you extend that example into an analogy though, here the students take the exam one by one, and each student has the opportunity to review all the already marked exams before taking the same exam themselves, yet they still make all the same mistakes...
-Neelix
I didn't study for my exam. You guys can stop rubbing it in now.
As I understand it, there weren't too many computers that were present in large numbers on both sides of the Atlantic between the late 70s and early 90s. I only personally know of one or two people that had British computers in the US back then (ZX80, I think), and everyone else was using something from an American company. I think Commodore was one of the exceptions to this, having products that were fairly popular in Europe and North America. Feel free to correct me and fill in any gaps in my knowledge.
Yeah, the Commodore machines and to a certain extent, Atari machines were successful in Europe (well, Britain at least). We also had the Spectrum, Amstrad machines, and BBC micros (plus various also-rans, from Dragon on down). Makes me wonder sometimes what else the Americans had for 8-bit machines; little old blightey had five major makes, America must've had more than those two and the TRS-80/Co-co (though I guess America was also into consoles in a bigger way than we seemed to be back then).
I thought I had seen people over there mention Atari. The funny thing is for a while back then I didn't think Atari computers were that popular even though I knew 2 families that owned one, and I knew none that owned Commodore machines. We had an IBM compatible (not really for young hands to touch, though...actually, that is a lie, there was one at each of my parent's houses and I don't think I was restricted from using the one my father had, but I didn't mess with it as much as I wish I had when younger since I was busy doing other stuff), and most schools and libraries had things from Apple (but in my experience it was a rare treat to use them, and that was often restricted to educational games...if you wanted to learn more you had to find another way to get time with them, which I did but it was still not enough to be of much value). Over here almost every family with children I knew had some sort of video game console, so I do think that played a part. I guess our NES was supposed to be fore the kids, and the computer was supposed to be for adults (even if the kids knew better how to use it). Based on conversations I have had as an adult, some people that were a little older than me seemed more likely to have computers when they were younger. That would be people who were able to put them to use in the late 70s up to the mid 80s. It really seems to me that NES and the next generation of consoles took a big chunk of the market. One of my schools even had a subscription to Nintendo Power, and my friends always tried to be the first ones there when a new issue was released. People younger than me were also more likely to have a computer in their home after the WWW became popular, and by that point computers were widely used in school and were present in many of my classrooms, with plenty available in libraries, both in schools and not, but we are talking early to mid 90s here. Since I was already spending all my free time at libraries I just shifted most of my time from books to computers, often helping out the librarians.
Some people thought they got away scot-free if their code was accepted by the automatic grading system.
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Don't cheat! You're only cheating yourself if you do!
A couple years ago when I started on my education again I had a class where the assignments were automatically graded. The instructor didn't care about that. He would go in and look at everything you had done, and even if everything was set up properly and fully functional if you did things that were not on the instructions he would take points away. He also added points if you did things in a different way than what was being automatically checked and your method worked. It seemed a lot of people didn't like that he did this or how he taught, and he is one of my favorite instructors. I don't know if I expressed to him how much I appreciated how he did things before he retired. The person who took over that department from him seemed to spend a lot more time focusing on question and answer tests rather than the practical stuff, and is much more tolerant of errors (and not as suspicious of cheating, which I know happens). Grades are higher, and they have a higher retention rate in that program now, but I strongly feel that they don't know as much. Sneaky people using their smartphones may be able to get around that the practical exams are a huge portion of your grade, but as you said, they are cheating themselves (and their future employers, and those that have actually worked hard to learn and didn't get the job...they don't care, they are getting paid for now, screw those that put in effort. I also have a problem with those that use brain dumps for certification exams.).
In some more recent classes we had a grading script that didn't work so well sometimes, so other students that didn't understand what was being looked for would get frustrated and spend hours working on assignments and still getting major errors in their grading results even though they had done nearly everything correctly. I spoke with the instructor and got permission to help them, so I went through all of the assignments and identified errors (there were many, one telling you over and over to create and work with specific files, then in the final step to execute one that had never been mentioned, and which was not needed for grading, and was actually because someone didn't verify what they submitted to the course material, as you were supposed to use what you had been working on the whole time), then found places where I thought people would be confused. The deliverables were usually listed so I stopped reading scenarios and just took the list of deliverables and my notes and talked to two other students who had a good grasp of what they were doing and they made sure what I was saying was clear, so if someone said "I missed #3 on the chapter 6 lab" we could respond with exactly what was different between what they did and what was being looked for, or with a quick view of the history (or by scrolling up) we could point out syntax errors. This helped others get caught up and allowed the instructor to focus on more severe issues. I eventually started helping tutor later classes, and assisting in one with a different instructos where I did the same thing on their lab days. I used this to show people that they did know what they were doing, since most were intimidated by the CLI, and if they truly didn't know I could direct them to where the answer was. At first I was concerned the instructors might consider it cheating (which is why I approached the first with what I wanted to do) however when the instructions for assignments coming from a corporation are full of errors it is a waste of everyone's time if it is not addressed, and requires some help from others when everyone is working independently and at their own pace so that even if the instructor says "do this other command for #5 on this assignment in this chapter" since some people will not hear it, or will forget. It is still funny that one error was over 7 years old, and some Q&A tests had all blank answers or were missing half the question.
You are all evil teachers/bosses/managers/directors!!! Who cares how the problem gets solved as long as it gets solved
Is it better to have somebody that knows what they are doing, can identify why something isn't working, and think through the problem, fixing it themselves quickly, and then move on to the next thing, or a warm body that knows how to search using Google but doesn't understand the basics so they keep searching and never bother reading to understand (search, copy, paste, "nope, not that") and spends 12 hours, which they are getting paid well for while others have to deal with what they are neglecting, working on a problem, and probably causing more problems along the way, when the other person would spend 5 minutes on it? Unlike others here, I do care that the problem gets solved, quickly, because what I have had to deal with prevents others from being able to do what they need to. Downtime is expensive, and I don't just mean money.
