Welcome to the future
Here we are, in the 21st century, and what did I just do? I just burned a CD containing a whopping 200k of data. Not just that; it’s 200k that could compress down to 56k without breaking a sweat.
In addition to this, I also wound up printing roughly 30 pages of text. Of course, when I say “pages”, I really mean “sheets”; the actual text on these pages is embarassingly small (Shortest is two lines of text, longest is…maybe 40?)
I’ve complained about this kind of nonsense in my CS classes, so why should a math class be any different?
They want hard copies as well as soft copies of our stupid little matlab programs (or, over in the CS dept, our programs in the language du jour). When they say “soft” copies, though, they really mean hard soft copies, not soft soft copies; a floppy or a CD.
In order to burn the disc, I had to go use Deven’s machine; I don’t have an optical drive handy (I hardly ever need one, so I’ve got a sexy little laptop that doesn’t have one built in) To use a floppy, I’d have to… find a floppy drive. And a floppy. I think the slab for my laptop that provides the CD drive might have a floppy in it too. I don’t honestly know. As for media? God help us all.
I’d much rather shovel some bits across the net, especially since we’re talking about such absolutely tiny amounts of data. Unfortunately, I suppose I’m living in a different world than most, since I consider bandwidth to be free, hosting to be effectively infinite and free, and things to Just Work[tm].
Managing uploads of school files would either require some sort of actual infrastructure on the school’s part (I suppose there’s maybe Blackboard, but I’ve been severely underwhelmed any time one of my classes actually happens to use that), or for email to be reliable. While I consider it reliable, I’m not seeing the “real world” where people sending 60k attachments is likely to have some mail server swallow it, possibly silently, possibly with some accusatory response. I’ve seen people who pull crap like renaming files because people have mail filters that go “oh look, the file is named foo.zip, that MUST contain a virus. Oh, but this foo.txt? That’s ok!” And then give instructions about renaming things so that file-extension based tools can understand them on the receiving end.
So then why not just turn in a CD? Why hard copies too? If I was doing something like this, I know for sure that I wouldn’t want people’s printouts of code; people have crappy printers. People print with stupid formats. I’d want anything that I’d be reading on dead trees to be done on a decent laser printer with my dear friend a2ps.
I suppose, though, that you can’t trust the soft copy; since electronic distribution is out of the question due to reliability issues, you’re down to physical copies. Floppies seem to have incredible mortality rates these days, so you don’t want to bet your entire grade on some magnetic wafer, and even with CDs, I’ve seen serious compatability issues with burning them. There’s a reason I made sure to check the disc I burned in both windows & linux; with my luck, I’d wind up with something that one of them couldn’t read for some reason. Who knows whether old versions of windows would like it. And that’s without even going into the fact that people don’t seem to be able to manage their files, and would “accidently” (both really accidently, and deliberately in order to buy more time) turn in the wrong thing.
So there we are; printouts suck because you can’t compile a dead tree. Soft copies suck because normal people can’t reliably get a set of bits from point A to point B, either physically or over the net. So what do we find ourselves doing? We put on belts and suspenders. And then staple our pants into our hips for good measure.
Welcome to the future.