Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[RedKing]

We hit 70F this past Friday afternoon. It snowed for 12 hours on Saturday. Hell, it was nearly 40 degrees outside, and it was still snowing.

I gave up trying to understand the weather.

NC has crazy weather anyway, it's the only place I've ever lived that could have a tornado, a flood, and a snowstorm all in the same month.

We also occasionally have a plague of cicadas with a chance of kudzu.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[nenjin]

Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy. The best f***ing card game Steve Jackson ever made.

[GlyphGryph]

Oh man, that brings back some memories...

[RedKing]

Technically, it's Illuminati: New World Order. Me and my roomies in college had a big ol' stack of cards, used to kill time drinking and playing NWO. Which got even more amusing when people were a bit tipsy, just trying to keep track of the control chains.

[Darvi]

Illuminati: The Game of Conspiracy. The best f***ing card game Steve Jackson ever made.

Of course, many lawyers are very nice people, and they are vital to the protection of our freedoms.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It's too bad the actual conspiracy theorists latched onto it and destroy anything related to it on the internet with a flood of actual conspiracy theory.

[Nadaka]

It's too bad the actual conspiracy theorists latched onto it and destroy anything related to it on the internet with a flood of actual conspiracy theory.

The government is trying to make people think conspiracy theorists are crazy by making this game!

Actual conspiracy theory!

[Mego]

So I found out about some bullshit in one of my uni's compsci courses.

A submits a program with some formatting errors, but it does the job correctly.
B submits a nicely formatted program that gives incorrect output.
Guess who gets the higher grade? That's right, B does.

The worst part? There's nobody to complain to about this bullshit, because the professor is also the department chair! He is literally the head of the chain of command in the compsci department. He reports to the dean of the college, who doesn't do any compsci whatsoever, and therefore wouldn't be any use to complain to.

While I agree that correctness should be the primary scoring mechanism for a program, I suspect we're not getting the entire picture here.  If B is almost correct and is very easy to read and thus fix, but A looks like it was written by a chimp who picked up a "Teach Yourself X in 24 Hours" book to write the program, I can see there being a point to this.

Professors really ought to take points off for poor formatting.  Every time I run into poorly formatted code that I have to maintain, two things happen.  I want to strangle whoever wrote it, and I waste more time than usual trying to read and understand it.

Nonono... Student A lost points for indentation not being aligned and for missing comments. Student B lost points because the output was completely wrong.

And ftr, I'm not in this course. I had the course with another professor, who emphasized correctness over prettiness. His point was, in the "real world", the main priority would be getting software to work, not making the code look nice. Once it works, *then* focus on formatting.

[Nadaka]

In the real world, I work on enterprise software with hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code built up over 5+ years by dozens of different developers, most of whom have moved on to other opportunities over the years. The ability to conform to a rigid style guide with descriptive comments is VASTLY more important than just pooping out some shit that happens to work at the moment and it may or may not break something else you didn't consider or that hasn't been implemented yet.

My rage for the day?
After telling my family about my high blood pressure and informing them I need to make changes for my health yesterday... I come home for work today to find them eating chocolate cake for dinner.

[Max White]

Not only does B deserve those marks FOR DOING IT RIGHT but while B's final output might not have been correct, but they might have sufficiently covered what was actually being marked.

[nenjin]

In the real world, I work on enterprise software with hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code built up over 5+ years by dozens of different developers, most of whom have moved on to other opportunities over the years. The ability to conform to a rigid style guide with descriptive comments is VASTLY more important than just pooping out some shit that happens to work at the moment and it may or may not break something else you didn't consider or that hasn't been implemented yet.

I'm not a programmer but I'd echo this because that's the environment I work in. Decade old software, multiple product lines that share a little code, half a dozen developers over the years. Plenty of those guys made it "work." The real issue is when that code needed to change. And when someone has a particular way of doing things, or enjoys "novel" solutions to problems, it can cause headaches for everyone that has to touch their code, and at worst leads to an entire rebuild. Actually at worst it leads to a client saying "FU" to your timeline and losing their business.

Kinda reminds me of high school math and "show your work." I seem to recall losing almost as many points for a wrong answer as I did for not showing my work. If you didn't show your work, it was hard for the teacher to tell you what you did wrong without walking through every step with you. Ain't nobody got time for that!

[MaximumZero]

We hit 70F this past Friday afternoon. It snowed for 12 hours on Saturday. Hell, it was nearly 40 degrees outside, and it was still snowing.

I gave up trying to understand the weather.

NC has crazy weather anyway, it's the only place I've ever lived that could have a tornado, a flood, and a snowstorm all in the same month.

Michigan: Where all that stuff can happen in a single day.

[freeformschooler]

I had a medical procedure so painful that I nearly recited the Seven Dirty Words.

[Frumple]

... there's only seven? Or is that, like, a particular seven out of the wider pantheon of innumerable dirty words?

[freeformschooler]

... there's only seven? Or is that, like, a particular seven out of the wider pantheon of innumerable dirty words?

If you're a sailor there's thirteen