@blakeyrat I am working at an auto manufacturer at this exact problem. There is a lot of work underway across the whole industry to reduce the complexity.One of the problems is simply that there are so many parts, that they cannot be fitted in the factory floor. Even with just in time delivery, a few parts have to be placed on the floor, and when there are 3425235 possible variants, even the biggest floor gets cramped. Plus, every part has to be designed, tested etc. which leads to very high up-front costs, even if you never build a part at all.
Additionally, customers get mad if they have to choose between meaningless variants. Also, there are some combinations, which look perfectly valid to an engineer, but no customers buy them - e.g. nobody buys a car which has a lane departure warning system, but no speed control, or at least it's so uncommon that you will annoy ~2 customers worldwide if you stop building this variant.
Posts made by HdS
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RE: Product naming rant
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I would love to work with modern technology
I am currently working on a new product and we want to use a self hosted discussion forum. Should be easy? Just use one of the 324502502935 available ones which doesn't suck edit your docker-compose file to include the forum and do some work on the frontend?
No, not for us - it needs to be windows, should run in IIS and booo docker is evil.
Argh! I spend the whole day trying to monkey patch something to be usable and get it to run in iis. Which is especially nice because the used FastCgi module basically just says "does not work" and thats your whole error.
It'S 2017.... -
RE: Python 3 angst 2016 edition
I really do not understand why people dislike python3 at all - the language has some massive advantages.
For example, the "all things are unicode" change does not sound like much, but it has reduced our locale related bugs massively - in python2 it was exceedingly difficult to not accidentally do something like "Cannot process the string: " + u"Gütiger Himmel" - which would end in a funny unicodedecodeerror. Especially third party libs like matplotlib where extremely annoying in such circumstances. -
RE: Python Babel
Granted - but why have I to invent that damn script again?
Thats whole worklof screams "lets build and IDE for it!" - hell, you could even integrate it into something like PyCharm, which is otherwise quite nice. -
RE: Python Babel
Nope - the coding is rather straightforward, just the process is like crawling through a pipe, swimming 10 kilometres upstream and digging 10 meters deep just to translate some text.
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Python Babel
I am currently building a medium sized website using Python + flask - most is really nicely done from an architecture view. But today I started to look into internationalization and my skin started to crawl - I am accustomed to .NET ressource files, where most of the work is done "under the hood", but flask uses babel, which in turn uses PO files - and generating those files is a ton of work. At least three different console programs, cryptic as hell, funny editors for those files and constant head scratching.
Small example:
$ pybabel extract -F babel.cfg -o messages.pot .
$ pybabel init -i messages.pot -d translations -l de
$ pybabel compile -d translations
And that throws all in one gigantic file, but I would like to have separate files for different parts of my website.I'm looking at defining some json structure and do it all myself, at least the amount of senseless commands will be smaller.
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RE: Breaking a Setup program.
I ran once into a hitch where click once forget to include two system libraries, which where included into the actucal buld just fine. Took me days to find out why my program run fine on my dev pc, but crashed when installed. I finally resolved this by adding both dlls manually to the project.
For complicated setups I like wix installer, it's free and powerful. The documentation is shit, though - typical open source. Also the name is hilarious, I am a german and wix almost sounds like a slang for jerking off or maybe the result of jerking off.
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*Sigh* Company-Password rules and Win10 PINS
I got a new laptop on friday, which has WIn10 installed. So far so good - when entering my insane Password (15 Chars, special char, numbers etc. needed) I remembered that Win10 has a sweet 4 digit PIN to log in. So I tried to set that - which has to be at least 12 chars with special characters and numbers per GPO.
sigh I am 95% at our premises and we need to log out when we leave the place even for 10 seconds - so entering such monstrosities is a huge pain. Not to mention Bitlocker is active - so I have to enter that thing more often than not. -
RE: 🐧 Lunix
That's probably due to the fact that shell-lover are as conservative as they come. Additionally, there are a lot of CLI programs, so changing the interface is realy hard.
PowerShell is gaining traction, but it's slow going, not least because it is more complicated than understanding the basics of the CLI. -
RE: 🐧 Lunix
I find it fascinating that linux has such a problem with whitespaces in paths. Some articles are even suggesting not using it because it might break shell scripts easily. The only problem: Whitespace is probably the most important "special" character you can have: Everyone and their dog uses it to name files. Probably all other characters don't need to appear in a filename, but a fucking space is clearly a must.
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RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
That I wanted to express by "winking" - excuse my non-native english skills ;)
But you are totally on the spot - nothing is more enchanting like a friendly smile.Todays parking wtf:
I was at a busy super market and had to back out of my parking lot. Normally not a problem at all - there are people and others cars around but everybody is aware that cars are moving and so it's just not very stressful at all. Except this guy in an very old Audi, which looked like an 80s model in piss poor shape. He started honking when he was like 50 metres away because I apparently blocked him - but that happens there all the fucking time, because the space between the parking lots is not very big. I simply continued my manoveur because every other option would he caused even more congestion. The guys smashed his horn like a madmen and began to scream - so that other people looked at him and asked what the fuck was going on. When I was driving away he followed me for half a cilometre, and smashed the horn ALL the time. At an intersection he even tried to get out of his car, but onrushing traffic blocked his way.
I was seriously considering calling the police when he finally left. -
RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
I have a really low tolerance for Tailgating, especially for white Audis, which are typically driven by idiots who think "hey I have a car leased by my firm! I am so fucking important! make way!!!". I especially love the use of leights, tailgaiting and horns to tell me that I need to give way for them. Usually that happens at 130 kph on the leftmost lane, when some slower car is in front of me and it is impossible to drive any faster. So usually I take the use of such signals as a hint to drive slower, stay longer in the left lane and maybe wink the nice fellow behind me. Funny to see the red angry faces...
Funnily, I use the horn too - but I usually do that when some idiot switches lanes without watching oncoming traffic or because somebody is driving ~30 in a ~100 street in good conditions.
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RE: Driving Anti-Patterns - Necro Edition
I am living in the border region between germany and the netherlands - I am extremely hesitant to overtake a netherlander because most of them do not like blinkers at all. Instead, they are slowly creeping to the middle lane and then switch the lane. It is quite ibvous when you know the style, but the first time around it was scary as hell.
My personal pet peeve are "Elefantenrennen" (Elephant race) - trucks are limited to 90 kp/h, but their speed varies a little bit, so there are "faster" and "slower" trucks, the difference is like 1-5 kp/h. Oftentimes, they are trying to overtake each other, which blocks an entire lane for ages - which causes a lot of congestion, especially on 2 lane streets. Even more fun is that most truck drivers don't bother to use their blinkers and are simply switching lanes without lookg for other traffic. Last week I was travelling at 160 kp/h and a truck switched into my lane - I braked like hell and managed not to ram the truck, but it was a very close thing.
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RE: Haskell Isn't for Everyone
When I was at school, I had a course in Prolog. They mentioned several projects where it was used, but only one I can still name: A program to diagnose various rare diseases. Prolog is well suited to the job. But any kind of GUI or so would have ben better done in an imperative language.
But I have to confess I rather disliked the syntax and especially the editor ("wtf?! why is this false? Oh it works...oh now the editor crashed...). But I think the knowledge helped me to grok functional concepts in R and C# years later.
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RE: TeX emulating an 8-bit AVR CPU
I wish you where right! I am working with a domain specific language for data analysts called GESS. Unfortunately, GESS has a crappy compiler which only allows ifs nested to 5 levels. Combined with some other restrictions (most notably the missing "and" operator) this leads to lots of very ugly code, which could be so much better if I could define real functions
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RE: STOP DOING THAT!!! </b>
@Mikael_Svahnberg At our department, there is a huge table which contains all courses as rows, all study paths are the columns. The table is used as a master table to determine if a specific course can be taken in a certain study path (e.g. Intrroduction into politics might be part of political sciences, but not a part of sociology). There are around ~300 courses and ~50 study paths. Our secretary does not know excel, so she used word in landscape mode - every column is ~4 chars wide, but a lot of columns need comments, so the rows a very tall...
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RE: 7Zip WTF
When I needed to build an installer for our inhouse application I was totally floored by the amount of time I needed to build one.
I was forced to use WiX because Clickonce did not work for some reason and spend a week or so crafting the installer file. And that was an easy "copy files, create shortcut" installer - I shudder when I think about more complicated projects.
Clickonce is easier to build, but it's errors are arcane as hell and debugging it is a total pain, so I am still on the look for an easy installer- -
RE: Making the best of MS Office files
The main problem with the pdf export is, that sending files as PDF is inconvienient as hell.
Most of the time, I send the docx / pptx format because I don't know if the recipient needs to do something with the file. -
RE: Making the best of MS Office files
Writing OOXML directly is annoying, but there are lots of really good libraries to read/write it, like EPPLUS for excel.
I a modifying the DrawingML part of a presentation directly and while the format is not really good, it is easily doable.As for the length: As I understand it, OOXML holds a lot of legacy definitions because the MSO family has a lot more history than LibreOffice - so I do not think the length is really a problem.
And to the google doc: It very old and pretty much outdated. Also, google hates microsoft and wanted to hurt them. But my main concern: WHY does everybody expect microsoft to adopt the odf standard, when it's the 900kg gorilla in the jungle? LIbre office would have much more reason to switch to OOXML than MS would gain from switching to odf.
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RE: Making the best of MS Office files
When I wrote my master's thesis in latex I had to add several very large tables in landscape mode. That twitch expierience was totally horrible.
A few weeks ago I tried to help a friend whose bibliography was not rendered - we never figured out which part of the tooolchain broke: biber, bibtex, latex, texworks...
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RE: Conservapedia: The funniest site in the world
Yeah, I think this is bullshit too. Some of this is the fact that other countries effectively have an extortion racket with respect to pharmaceuticals. "Allow us to enforce bullshit price controls or we'll ignore your fucking patents." So most of the rest of the world free rides on our subsidies for drugs.
We also have a heterogeneous demographic like you guys cannot fucking believe. Even so, if you look at
As for the quality of HC: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/06/16/u-s-healthcare-ranked-dead-last-compared-to-10-other-countries/ . The problematic think about the US healthcare is that it is quite good at the top, but it's quality is dropping fast if you are not a millionaire.
As to for the quote: Germany is extorted by pharmaceuticals, not the other way aroud - our pcies are 50% above the next european country. And we are still better and cheaper than the US system.
As for the ignoring the patents stuff: that happens in developing countries, whose health system is not really comparable to first world countries. If you look at first world countries, the US still sucks, sorry. -
RE: Conservapedia: The funniest site in the world
From what I understand about the US system, there are two main problems:
- costs are out of control. Vox recently published a study that a simple blood test can cost from $100 to $10.000, which is totally redicolous. Germany, my country of origin, has one of the most expensive health care systems in europe. but even that is only half or so of your costs.
- You are not getting a lot of bang for all the bucks: you average life expectancy is lower and there is not enough prevention, because it costs money. Reasons (as I understand): Too much healthcare in some cases, where doctors are doing every possible test just to make money and cover themselfes from lawsuits. And not enough healthcare because the costs are disturbingly high for uninsured people. Obamacare tries to fix the latter problem, but I guess that there would have to be a lot of other reforms to resuce the ship.
Personally, I really like the system from Shanghai(?): Everyone pays into a medical care fund and can spend that money on medical procedures. If you are chronically ill, are state founded subsidy will kick in. This forces people to think about their medical spending, and keeps prices down because people have an incentive to get the best care for the least money.
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RE: C# hate
The constructor syntax is really confusing - I learned VB.NET first where you can call the constructor with base.New() (or something like it, haven't done VB.NET in years). and was terribly confused when I tried to do this in Cä.
Clearly the IL supports this syntax, why not C#? -
RE: Procurement also has it's WTF moments
At one time, I wrote an proposal for a BMBF (government research funding society) project.
We had to specifiy every last item, we wanted to use in the project, which was planned for three years and involved ten people.
It was so much fun to guess how much money would be needed to buy books, pens or even wages. Even worse, it is impossible to change the "destination" afterwards, e.g. you have spend less on pens but you want to go to that conference, which was established in year 2? No luck, the money can only be used for pens.
Project controlling is a great idea, but the german research funding system is redicolous.
oh I forgot: We could not buy computers, because that should be done by the university. But the university had no money to do so - so we had to use ~10 year old computers with 15 crts....nice -
RE: Someone needs to learn about the incognito mode
Argh, really good misstyping ;)
No, we did not return the DVD, we destroyed it...I am unaware if somebody copied the content before ;) -
RE: Someone needs to learn about the incognito mode
I remember a similar but life story;
When I did my Master, we had a new post-doc who was slightly out of place in the social sciences and behaved more like an IT guy in many aspects, e.g. good at programming, extremely inept at any social function like talking, teaching or dressing.
Fun actions of him:-
when giving an introductory IT-lecture ("this is a folder....") he accidentally cliked into his porn folder on the laptop and happily chatted away, without noticing the problem.
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When he was let go, I and a friedn of mine inherited his disk and quickly noticed that one drwaer did not close. We disassembled the whole thing and discovered that he forgot a porn dvd behind the drawer - something like "best cum shots 2010" or so. We where carefully cleaned the whole desk...that was icky. Worst of all, he really licked us and contacted us several times afterwards...
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RE: Find and Replace, by way of Ctrl+F, Ctrl+V
Does this addon help?
I am little shocked that Onenote does not Find Replace. On the other hand, it can do simple calculations in tables, which I love.
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RE: How not to save money in a laboratory
The issue with genetics is basically green ideology: modifying genes is BAD because big pharma, nature is perfect and other weirdness-... YOu will find lots of produkts labeled "without genes" in a german supermarket, which is hilarious as hell.
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RE: How not to save money in a laboratory
Sorry, I used mediciner - but the more accurate term would be medical specialist. In german the term would be "Facharzt für Humangenetik". I am unsure how to translate that - it's a doc specialized on genetic disorders. E.g.: If you are pregnant and there are anomalies in the ultrasound, you will be reffered to such a doc.
@aapis: We are in the process :D
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RE: How not to save money in a laboratory
We try to run, but it is not that easy since germanys insurance reduced the budget for genetic analysis by 50%. Background: There was a loophole in a regulation which allowed it labs to sequence a whole chromosome but to claim money for every gene - some labs used that to rip off huge sums of money. So the insurances reacted and simply are not paying for next generation sequenching anymore. Now the labs are literally scraping the bottom of barrel to survive.
Ah, and its called next generation for a reason - but germany hates genes with a passion, so the public loves it when funding for genetic research is curtailed. -
How not to save money in a laboratory
My fiance started working for a genetics laboratory last year and her role was advertised as assistant manager - since the previous manager left for greener pastures a while ago, the state of the laboratory was disorganized and part of her job would be fixing the mess.
But it quickly became apparent that the real source of dumbness and disorganization at the laboratory was not the lack of a manager, but the owners: The laboratory is owned by a couple in the early 70s which are genetic mediciners. Especially the female mediciner has a bipolor disorder and is a pain to work with, hence I will cal her ancient shedragon in the future.
The workflow SHOULD look like this: Somebody goes to the doctor, who sends a sample and a description of the symptoms to the lab. The lab recieves the sample, my fiance coordinates the analysis and the result is given to the mediciners who are adding medical expertise and sending it back the to doctor.
Unfortunately, the mediciners cannot resist to meddle with the lab, but have no leadership, business or genetic analysis skills.
Which leads to a plethora off wtfs, here are my favorites:
- The lab manager was fired because he tried to establish workflows, which was disliked by the owners because they felt they knew better how to run everything.
- Different symptoms require different analysis techniques but the wrong analysis was often ordered. My fiance tried to fix this, but was stalled by the ancient shedragon mediciner, because most of the errors where caused by her, and she disliked to be corrected. This costs a lot of money and time.
-The shedragon forbade talking in the lab because people need to work, not to talk. - They tried to hire a new secretary but the person hired was fired on day 3 because they disliked that she asked questions about her job and even talked to the lab to understand the workflow.
- Now the man tries to make office work, but he is a terrible secretary so a lot of deadlines are missed and customers are scared away.
- They have to save money, so my fiance was ordered to find replacements for lab equipment like gloves, which cost ~10€ per month. She was forced to spend a week on the issue.
- All work needs to be entered into home grown database which needs around a minute to process even the smallest change. My fiance often spends ~2 hours a day waiting on the database. For bonus wtf: the database backend is a filemaker database on a server.
- The computers are the best macs money can buy, but they refuse to spend money on new chairs, which is unfortunate because the chairs are so damaged that they are unstable.
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RE: Any bool will do
The "great" think is that the implementation screws up conditional logic - if you could to checked="false" or checked="true", implementing this behaviour in, sayASP.NET MVC would be a no-brainer. But no, you have to remove the entire "checked" element, which leads to ugly as sin code.
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RE: Predictive text on Windows phone
I have a Luma 920 and was also really suprised by the quality of the suggestions.
It is much more fun to write longer texts on the Lumia, and I do it frequently.
Whereas my Sony Xperia ARC S was a catastrophe: the suggestions where crappy and they took ages to appear...type a wort...wait a second...type...wait...ARRRGHHHH!!! -
RE: Really folks?
Funny - I read the answer on SO today which explained the problem.
Excel adresses cells in other workbooks with the name of the Workbook.
If you could open two workbooks with the same name, a lot of problems would pop up - like which wb was intended by the adress?So I wouldn't blame this on Microsoft stupidity - it's the result of a reasonable design choice.
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String concatenation? What's this?
Today I was talking to a vendor who develops a scripting language which is used to produce tables for Market research.
The language is a bastard between SPSs-syntax C and their own "ideas" - so it is difficult to learn. But it is still better than ra SPSS-table scripting, which is laughably bad.
Today I was talking about one of my pet peeves of this language: There are huge amounts of text in a Table, especially a header, a footer and descriptions for the rows. The best method to define this text is to
simply copy & paste the text into each "field".
That is time consuming, error prone and annoying as hell, since most of the text is not terribly variable - defining it once would often be enough. Most of the rest is only partially variable, like three lines of text with
a short fourth line which is variable. Which begs for string.Format()
I described this to our vendor, who was quite surprised when I showed him how Pythons string concatenation and string.Format() methods.
But at the end he reduced me nearly to tears when he asked: "But why do you need that? You can simply copy & paste the text, that's so easy!"
sigh -
RE: Einige tolle Nike -Schuhe!
No, not really. But it was worse than the average spam....
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RE: Einige tolle Nike -Schuhe!
I am a native german and that post contains german words, but the grammar is totally fucked. Also, I cannot identify any meaningful parts whatsoever.
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RE: Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
Ok, than it is out of the window - our server is an old Windows 2003 server with ~250Gb hard disk, which is totally clogged. At the moment, I am spending my time compressing SPSS files so there is some room to breathe.
I use Python for some Operations within the SPSS environment, but .NET interop for some advanced stuff which is beyond the scope of spss. Mainly, I am generating syntax for another program which works with SPSS data.
And just now I am realsiing that I am putting myself out of work - at the beginning, I was fighting with a workflow which lasted for about 16 work hours per project. Now I am down to 8 and, by end of the month, down to 5 or les... -
RE: Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
Unfortunately, we need some features auf 19, especially the programmabillity.
The CLI argument is a good one, I think I will try that. -
RE: Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
IDE? Bwahaha!
I use Notepad++ with a custom syntax definition file, so I can use highlighting. Before that, there where Notepad and Textpad... -
RE: Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
Sigh, I don't know what was / is worse:
The joke of "syntaxeditor" of the older SPSS versions, which was simply notepad with no highlighting whatsoever or the newer one, which can do fancy thinks like text highlighting, but is so slow that you can see how it draws the characters on the screen.
I have a looong inherited syntax file with 5000 LOC which simply choked my old computer and my new one is barely able to handle it (4 cores, 8gb of ram to display some text...). This is SPSS 19, which is full of enterprisey java. Newer versions are better, but I don't have them.
Now the file is broken up in smaller parts, but I need a full blown python script the execute the files, because SPSS cannot handle relative file paths... -
RE: Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
That is a rather good explanation....
Oh my good, I would really love Basics Line Numbers and gotos in the language I use here..
All I have is a crappy "IF #DEBUG ELSE" syntax, which just doesn't cut it. But the developers do not understand the need for a logic flow... "Just uncomment or comment when you need a specific element not every time..." -
Saving newline just in case your keyboard loose them...
I am no programmer, but work in a closely related field. Part of my job is handling statistical data analysis - which involves a lot of poorly documented scripting in esoteric languages.
Everytime I read a script from my predecessor I am asking myself "why did she love newlines so much?!". Basically every line of code is seperated by 5 newlines or so.
Reading the code is a total pain - you cannot see the beginning and end of an statement at once. Logically related lines of code are seperated by huge walls of no text, whereas meaningful breaks are absent.
Now I am going through a 10.000 LOC file with 30% newlines without purpose. Cleaning and organizing it is a pain, but afterwards I can actually see what I am doing.
Some code to show the problem:
text Q11Multi = "Table 11: Statiscial Analysis
Some text
";
tabselect text "Base: Use only a subset of the data;
#t1 table = #Header1 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header2 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
{#t1 table = #Header3 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header4 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header5 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header6 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header7 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;
#t1 table = #Header8 by Variable99 sort position slice 19;}
#ifdef ascout
spsslongnames = yes;
asciiout ID1 = 1 13;
setdecimals systemweight = 4;
asciiout systemweight = 15 10;
spss asciiout = "gew.sps";
asciioutfile = "gew.dat";
#end
end; -
RE: Firefox Cache
Once I really liked Seamonkey but I never liked Firefox it's somehow bloaty and featureless at the same time.
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RE: Buy a new computer, this one has a virus...
There is lots of corruption in germany, see the Transparency international rport - although it is not as bad as greece or Italy.
And taking it to the repair shop would have involded privately owned businesses - something most of our teachers frown uppon.
That sounds like a very nice class ;) I was lucky and had a very good teacher at school - we covered Pascal / delphi in detail, designed CPUs and worked with Prolog. Others told me later, it was probably worth 1 - 2 semesters at the university.
But that was luck: most of my friends got shitty computer classes - it depends on the teacher(s) -
RE: Buy a new computer, this one has a virus...
Seems pretty "normal" for me as a german.
Most schools in germany have no IT - the IT is done by someone who happens to know more about IT than the rest of the Staff. And, considering the age of the staff, this knowledge is very little.
In my school days (until 2004) computer courses where RARE and often covered something like "this is a computer, press this button to start it".
There where exceptions, but they where driven by individualy -
RE: When 1024x768 is too much (bringing back the fullscreen thread)
As a german I have a read a great deal on our submarine war effort in that time, and the failures of the Nazi germany leadership was amazing:
Dönitz (leader of the submarine) was presenting plans for crippling great britian with 300 submarines. But this was rejected by the leadership of the Kriegsmarine (Reader and Hitler) because they liked "bigger ships" more. Do look up the z-plan, which essentially was an effort to build a gigantic fleet, without relaizing that there is no need for that.
When war broke out, there where not enough submarines and the ones which where in service, spend a lot of time while searching for targets. The Luftwaffe could have provided critical reconaissance, but never got around to that, because Göring was too busy to get his next shot of Morphium.
In 1939 there where trials for new submarines which would have vastly outperformed all existing designs, especially they where faster submerged than floating - they could have litterally teared apart the british convois. But they where build 1945, because the plans get stuck in the muddled waters of byzantine beaureaucracies.
But to put this into context: Germany could not have won the war. While the american leadership had leadership and "doing dumb shit" issues - they worked for a common goal. The german leadership was divided into different sections and competed for Hitlers favour - effecticely creating so much friction that everything would have stopped working sooner or later. Also there was no sensible goal or agenda to that conflict - so Germany faught at war, but had no Idea how to end it. -
RE: How to import a SPSS Database into our Web application
No, we where not awars of that. What does it? I will google, but I am interested in an insiede view.
Basically: We did everything for ourselves, which was a recipe for wasted time...