And now we've learned how an adversary might go about hiding an implant in a personal computer. With more sophisticated fab techniques this would be undetectable.
Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#22Beautiful. If I were teaching the class, you'd get the A and I'd remember when it was time to write recommendations. But I remember some professors who might have failed a student for pulling something like that. Or even accused him of cheating, for "sneaking in an unapproved piece of rogue equipment." You need to pick your spots.
Identifying professors that would fail someone for this is actually worth a failing grade.
(Though at the age when you are most likely to be a student at a university it probably would seem better to conform and get a good grade)
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#23You probably could have done the project for real in less time than routing out the chip and soldering in the other chip but this is pretty sweet... For all of my EE projects I always did the extra stuff and as a result learned a ton.. The concept that engineering professors have to have stretch goals is really clever to motivate the overachievers.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#24Beautiful. If I were teaching the class, you'd get the A and I'd remember when it was time to write recommendations. But I remember some professors who might have failed a student for pulling something like that. Or even accused him of cheating, for "sneaking in an unapproved piece of rogue equipment." You need to pick your spots.
Identifying professors that would fail someone for this is actually worth a failing grade. (Though at the age when you are most likely to be a student at a university it probably would seem better to conform and get a good grade)
What aspect of identifying them would make it worth it? I can see some potential fringe benefits -- don't take future classes from that prof, etc. But it's hard to imagine that those fringe benefits would actually be worth the drop in GPA, which does matter.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Identifying professors that would fail someone for this is actually worth a failing grade. (Though at the age when you are most likely to be a student at a university it probably would seem better to conform and get a good grade)
What aspect of identifying them would make it worth it? I can see some potential fringe benefits -- don't take future classes from that prof, etc. But it's hard to imagine that those fringe benefits would actually be worth the drop in GPA, which does matter.
What does GPA matter for? Except special circumstances, like scholarships or visas tied to GPA? I stopped 7th grade and truly dropped out at 10th, so I'm biased. I've just never heard of GPA actually mattering.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
What aspect of identifying them would make it worth it? I can see some potential fringe benefits -- don't take future classes from that prof, etc. But it's hard to imagine that those fringe benefits would actually be worth the drop in GPA, which does matter.
What does GPA matter for? Except special circumstances, like scholarships or visas tied to GPA? I stopped 7th grade and truly dropped out at 10th, so I'm biased. I've just never heard of GPA actually mattering.
Many companies, including the one I work for, use college GPA as a filter. The theory is: you miss some good folks by filtering out people below 3.5, but you save a lot of effort on a group that has a much higher proportion of bad candidates. If there are enough good candidates above 3.5, this can be a worthwhile trade.
Of course, there are ways around this (become famous in the industry, work somewhere else first and do well there, etc.). But most resumes, especially of new grads or people who have only been in the industry for a couple of years, will be run through this filter.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
What aspect of identifying them would make it worth it? I can see some potential fringe benefits -- don't take future classes from that prof, etc. But it's hard to imagine that those fringe benefits would actually be worth the drop in GPA, which does matter.
What does GPA matter for? Except special circumstances, like scholarships or visas tied to GPA? I stopped 7th grade and truly dropped out at 10th, so I'm biased. I've just never heard of GPA actually mattering.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does GPA matter for? Except special circumstances, like scholarships or visas tied to GPA? I stopped 7th grade and truly dropped out at 10th, so I'm biased. I've just never heard of GPA actually mattering.
Many companies, including the one I work for, use college GPA as a filter. The theory is: you miss some good folks by filtering out people below 3.5, but you save a lot of effort on a group that has a much higher proportion of bad candidates. If there are enough good candidates above 3.5, this can be a worthwhile trade. Of course, there are ways around this (become famous in the industry, work somewhere else first an…
Not caring about your GPA sounds like a great way to filter out companies that use bogus criteria as a way to filter prospective employees.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#29Generally if you can pull that off you are way past the course material :-) I had a FORTRAN problem which asked to print the current bowling score given a series of numbers between 0 and 10 (number of pins knocked down) and I had it print out spares as '/' and strikes as 'X' and it didn't print the actual score until you didn't get a strike (as is the custom on bowling.) and the TA complained. (the assignment was to…
I had a similar experience with a Visual Basic class at community college (required credit for the degree at the time). Since the class was kind of boring (was already a C programmer, Basic was way in my past at that point), I wanted to make the projects more interesting. So, on a calculator project, we were to make a hand-held calculator emulator. I asked if there were any restrictions on the type of calculator, and…
It baffles me that there are college-level CS instructors who haven't heard of RPN before -- my high school CS teacher had us write an RPN calculator.
That said, I can see an argument that an RPN calculator "trivializes" the assignment compared to an infix calculator, especially if the latter was supposed to do order-of-operations.
Re: Microcontrollers Not Allowed – Trolling a college instructor
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many companies, including the one I work for, use college GPA as a filter. The theory is: you miss some good folks by filtering out people below 3.5, but you save a lot of effort on a group that has a much higher proportion of bad candidates. If there are enough good candidates above 3.5, this can be a worthwhile trade. Of course, there are ways around this (become famous in the industry, work somewhere else first an…
Not caring about your GPA sounds like a great way to filter out companies that use bogus criteria as a way to filter prospective employees.
That's an option, but you're going to end up filtering out a lot of the best companies to work for if you go that route. I have personal knowledge that it's a factor at least at Google and Microsoft. As I understand it, Facebook and Twitter use it as well.
All depends on what you value. Personally, it seems like getting a high GPA isn't very difficult, so why not do well in school to keep your opportunities as open as possible? Doesn't seem worthwhile to do poorly for doing poorly's sake. That's just me though. Everyone has their own priorities.