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Comment Re:What would a comp sci course want with Linux? (Score 1) 432

I take it that you go to a community college? That's the only explanation I would see for such a massive ego mixed with such stupidity. I see many of your kind interviewing for work. I have yet to be desperate enough to hire any.

For your future reference, Computer Science students learn about operating systems and filesystems so that we can learn how best to use them. College kids learn how to code (probably better than University students), but they get an incomplete education. Learning how to create a dialog box does not make you a proper programmer. It makes you able to do little more than data entry style "programming". If you want to learn how to talk to the hardware, I think it's pretty clear that you need a University education.

Comment University of Lethbridge (Canada) (Score 1) 432

It's been about 6 years since I graduated. But my University had a couple of Solaris labs for the CS students. They later switched to Linux, as it was cheaper to maintain x86 computers than Sun Workstations. Every CS student was required to submit programs that worked in Unix.

The greater campus Network was all Windows (save for the file shares and email servers), but you could connect to it via WiFi, if you registered your device's MAC address with IT. IT would require you to install a firewall and antivirus software before accepting your MAC. I showed up with my Linux laptop, and the requirements were waived, and they simply took my MAC address.

I thought it was a brilliant system. It's easily defeatable by anyone with a bit of tech skill, but people with tech skill aren't going to cause the problems they were trying to solve by MAC filtering the network.

So no, there was nothing of the sort on my University network. Linux was a first class citizen.

Comment Re:Canada isn't as metric as you think (Score 1) 2288

I am actually from Canada. Yes, I order my beer by the pint. I know my weight in pounds, not kilos. I know my height in feet/inches, rather than meters. However, all those measurements are extremely specific. Almost to the point of being a traditional name for something, rather than an objective measurement. I have no real frame of measurement when something is 3000 yards away, or even 3 miles. And I just find ounces/fahrenheit to be confusing, which is why I mentioned them specifically, as I've never used them in my day to day life. They are as alien as cartwheels or leagues.

Comment Re:Because.... (Score 2) 2288

It's frustrating for us though when you air your documentaries in Canada, and are quoting ounces, Fahrenheit, yards, etc, since I honestly have no clue what you are talking about. I think it would be a nice gesture for us if you could at least subtitle the imperial measurements in metric or use both, if you must.

Comment Re:Open office != MS Office (Score 5, Interesting) 421

The company I work at has Office installed on everyone's computer. I generally use Excel, since that's the default for spreadsheets on my PC (too lazy/apathetic to change it). However, whenever I have to deal with some complex data, I will always use Calc. Why?

I will log a bunch of program output from my software (such as memory allocations), and I want a simple way of sorting them by file and line number, then I can see the ones that I really want. I could write a tool for this of course, but I would rather take an extra minute to do it by hand, as this doesn't come up that much. But importing arbitrary data (not comma separated but separated by words/spaces/newlines/various) is a pain in the ass in Excel. It involves saving it out as a txt file then importing. Calc will simply pop up a box asking what your delimiters are.

I've never had Calc crash on me, and I honestly don't know what the problem is. In fact, I've never seen any reason to use Office over OpenOffice. Granted, I spend more of my day in Notepad++ than Office, but still. People keep citing macros, but that just seems like an abomination to me anyway. Good riddance.

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