I just spent the most useless 75 minutes of my life. I'm taking a graduate software architecture class (required) and today was my first lecture. I never knew one person could talk about so little in 75 minutes. He started off comparing architecture of houses and buildings to software architecture. He spent the next 40 minutes comparing and contrasting building architecture and sw architecture. At one point he showed a dog house and said this was like building MS DOS and then showed a McMansion and said this was more like building Windows XP. He then showed a skyscraper and talked about how some cities have them and some don't. Incidentally he let us know that Richardson (the city of my university) does not have skyscrapers. What!? I don't even know how t o respond to that. No, I'm not exaggerating. I wish I were. At some point I wandered onto xkcd to catch up on missed comics and never looked back. From the glazed look in my friend's eyes at the end of class it must not have gotten much better. She looked like someone had just spent the last 75 minutes going over all the anagrams of the word "on." Maybe he just wasn't prepared and didn't want to admit it and let us go home. I hope that was the case. If so I hope he speeds things up for f**ks sake. Someone needs to remind him that it's a graduate course and not a special ed.

Feel free to share you lecture horror stories.

You should have said:

"What this city doesn't have skyscrapers!?! Fuck this!"

and walk out

I disagree with his assessment. OS architecture hasn't changed in essence in the last ~20 years.


I was talking an all day Saturday (don't ask, it was horrible) Psychology 100 class. The following conversations transpired each and every class:

Teacher: "bla bla bla...and that concludes our main subject for today. Any thoughts?"

Me: "Well, I don't agree with anything you said. Your view on [insert hot topic here] is incorrect because of [insert some assumption he made]."

Teacher: "You're wrong. Next..."

Me: "Wait, I thought you wanted to foster discussion?"

Teacher: "Shut up!"

Does Ronald McDonald live in a McMansion?

Odd, my aunt calls then McMansions as well...

I had this one math teacher in high school who had a hard time teaching the material would finally say something like:

"Well it is obvious that you won't understand what I said, so just know that you do this and why doesn't matter."

On the next test he asked why on this same thing and people said becasue that is how you do it you said it doens;t matter why.

He failed them, and needless to say a few complaints latter and he was unemployed.

That would have been funny. Funnier if I'd forgotten my laptop and had to come back.

He didn't say anything about the evolution of OS architecture. That would have been interesting. No - he was comparing DOS to a doghouse because one person can build a dog house and it's not as demanding as, say, a McMansion which requires more planning and people. See, what he was saying was so painfully obvious that saying it out loud almost warranted a good, hard, pride-obliterating bitch-slap.

BTW for anyone wondering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMansion

Wait, are you saying that Bill Gates didn't single handily write XP on two stone tablets? Fuck this!

*walks out*

The first "serious" question my class got asked when starting an advanced computer course was
"Does everyone know how to turn on a computer?"

That sounds like my Trig teacher. She asked the class how we would do a particular problem. Well, based on the page we were on at the time, it was easy to tell she wanted us to use a certain formula. It would be easier to do it the way we did the other problems before. So, since nobody else was saying anything, and I didn't want to just sit there forever, I said I would do it this way... She said that won't work. You have to use the formula. Then she said that normally my way would work, but it's not right because the result you get is not on our cheat sheet. I said, "neither is yours. How do you know you are right?"
Her answer..."I looked in the back of the book!"

I thought at least she would prove mathematically why her method was better, but she couldn't.

But...
















He did.