I'd like to interject for a moment...

TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 613 points –

Taken from the CompTIA IT Fundamentals Exam Guide book (2nd edition, published 2021). I'm not sure if they fixed this in newer versions, if at all.

117

These textbooks are trash and written by morons. When I was in college one of the required books said very clearly that sleep and hibernate are exactly the same thing. It said that both suspended to RAM and hibernate was just some lower power version of sleep. It was even a question on an exam that I got wrong for some reason. I argued with the professor about it and proved to him thats not the case by taking one of the lab computers, hibernating it, physically taking the ram out and swapping it with another computer and resuming into the same state on power on. He said “Well thats what it says in the textbook so I have to mark it wrong”

It really highlights that there are probably a lot of other inaccuracies that I didn’t notice. This is the standard of education nowadays.

He said “Well thats what it says in the textbook so I have to mark it wrong”

The mark of a great teacher. It's nice however that he had the patience to wait for your experiment (or maybe he was expecting it to fail miserably?): no prof of mine would have went along with something like that (not to mention, I'm pretty sure we couldn't take apart the lab PCs at our leisure).

The mark of a great teacher.

Perhaps not great, but effective. This attitude is exactly how working in the corporate world works. Reality and being right are rarely, if ever, the important thing. Following the rules, doing what you're told, and sitting the fuck down and shutting the fuck up? That's what this teacher was teaching their students.

They're not testing you on what you know, they're testing on did you study the course material. I had the same problem when trying to pass my written motorcycle test when I moved to California after riding in Canada for years.

To be fair, when you drive in California you really have to apply the Californian traffic laws and not the Canadians.

It wasn't the rules/signs portion of the test. They litereally had questions like:

Which is more dangerous when riding beside a row of parked cars?

A) A car pulling out.

B) Someone opening a car door.

C) A child running into the street from between two parked cars.

It's not an opinion question, personally I'd rather hit the car and the door over the child, but they want to know the answer that the study material gave.

Oh yes, I remember the paper test in California and it was really stupid. Things like "what should you do in foggy weather?" And the correct answer was "stay at home and don't drive".

Their whole booklet was a joke, instead of clear rules it was a mix up of actual rules, advice and trivia with no meaningful organization.

In the UK all our questions were things like 'You are about to drive into a wall, do you (a) honk your horn, (b) speed up, (c) stop'.

The rule was if there was a 'stop' answer, use that one, otherwise use the 'slow down' answer. You'd pass easily.

I always wondered if one day they'd throw in a curve ball.. 'you are being chased by a hoard of zombies..'

What a bullshit question. If they don't want people to drive in fog they should make it illegal. Otherwise, they should just acknowledge that people are going to do it and not coerce them to lie on a test

Following the rules, doing what you're told, and sitting the fuck down and shutting the fuck up? That's what this teacher was teaching their students.

Sadly, this is opposite of what teacher should teach.

I went to college early 2000s. The textbook said something along the lines of "The fastest RAM is 100 MHz".

DDR was still relatively new then. I took a clipping of an ad showing higher speeds, and he literally claimed I faked the printed ad ...

Missed opportunity to amend and reprint the textbook every time a faster RAM was launched and force all the students to buy the new edition.

That's messed up. When this kind of thing happened when I was in school the instructor would mark both answers as correct since the book did state it. I highly appreciated that.

most CS "textbooks" are a scam these days I'm general. a huge red flag when I scan resumes now is actually if they have a textbook published without some sort of advanced degree or qualification to write a textbook. I get resumes of people a year out of college, work a junior position, and have a "Advanced JavaScript" or "JavaScript the not boring way" or "Complete guide to typescript" or some other quirky textbook name. if you actually click into any of these books, they're complete nonsense written by somebody who just copied another textbook from another idiot who knew nothing. all these people are over confident resume padders. in practice they don't know shit and didn't legitimately write a lick of the book. I've had some of these applicants claim their books are used by professors too.

Gentlemen, a short view back to the past. Thirty years ago, Niki Lauda told us ‘take a monkey, place him into the chair and he is able to use the computer.’ Thirty years later, Sebastian told us ‘I had to start my computer like an F1 car, it’s very complicated.’ And Nico Rosberg said that during the compile – I don’t remember what compile – he pressed the wrong button on the keyboard. Question for you both: is Linux today too complicated with twenty and more buttons on the keyboard , are you too much under effort, under pressure? What are your wishes for the future concerning the technical programme during the development? Less buttons, more? Or less and more communication with Torvalds?

As a huge Formula 1 fan and daily Linux user for a few decades now, while also being quite stoned.. this fusion broke my brain, haha, well written. I could hear the words in the voice of Lauda, Seb, and Rossberg.

Pastor Maldonado I would assume is a windows user.

Ukyo Katayama was a Xenix user then

can you explain for a casual scroller-by with a less-than-mild interest in both?

A reporter asked a very very long question in a press conference 2-3 years ago. It has become a quaint F1 copypasta due to this. The author took that quote and replaced all of the Formula 1 references with Linux references.

It's obscure as hell but funny to encounter as a fan of both.

I am pretty sure the long question is used in Netflix's Drive to Survive series in one of the seasons with Sebastien Vettel. Good show even for a non-F1 fan, but I admit I am biased.

Here's some more excerpts from the book that I found amusing:

As you learned in Chapter 1, Linux is an open source operating system, meaning that anyone can download and modify it. Open source operating systems can benefit from improvements contributed by thousands of programmers. Some people choose open source operating systems out of an anti-establishment spirit; others choose them as a practical matter because they are free.

"Anti-establishment" isn't the word I'd use, but I guess that fits.

One of the most popular distros for casual users, Ubuntu, comes with a DE called Unity (shown in Figure 5-16)

That hasn't been true since 2017.

Be suspicious of free apps. In the best-case scenario, the app does what it says but installs ads or other software. In the worst-case scenario, the free app is, or contains, malware that might steal personal information from your device, encrypt your data files and demand a ransom for decryption, or monitor your device usage. Installing an app sometimes asks for specific permissions that the app will use. Be selective in allowing app privileges to items such as contact lists, GPS location, e-mail messages, and so on.

Okay, I'll admit this is good advice if we're talking about "freeware", but there's also free/libre/open-source software, which has all of the benefits of freeware, and also gives you the freedom to read/mofify/share the source code, if you wish.

As for that "malware" you speak of, you might as well be describing Google Chrome.

No media player supports all formats, so it's important to find one that supports the formats of the clips you want to play.

Clearly, these people haven't heard of VLC.

Codec is short for "compressor-decompressor"

It actually stands for "coder/decoder".

And that's just one page...

Paid apps can also steal user data and also I'd be way way more concerned about 'free' mobile apps than open source programs.

Mobile apps can and will get a jarring amount of your data just for being installed.

Or the paid app doesn't even exist. Carders now trade your credit card information. Achievement unlocked.

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The "best-case scenario" is adware or malware. Someone didn't get hugged as a child.

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GNU's Not... Linux

At this point RMS should seriously consider changing the name to GNL.

Might as well make it ANL since the first letter is arbitrary 😹

Missed opportunity to talk about tar being a tape format that we just happen to use on disks too (so it's accessed linearly, and in fact if you cat two tar files together they make a valid tar file.. or you can create a multi volume tar file that'll prompt you to change the tape).

CompTIA is a scam. No job that's worth a shit will require it.

Not disagreeing about it being a scam but the government uses Sec+ as an IAT level 2 requirement. Helps meet some contract requirements.

have you... seen the state of IT and technology in general in the government? I mean actually that explains a lot.

I'm just saying that government contracts == money and so my point is that while Comptia may be (read: most definitely is) a scam/racket it can make a person eligible for a paycheck. Agreed that it doesn't mean they're competent.

not entirely. It makes it easy to filter out the kind of applicants that would put that on their resume. Very useful for hiring managers. Saves lots of time.

GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix

id like to interject for a moment. what your referring to as gnu, is actually linux/gnu, or as ive taken to calling it, linux + gnu

In an alternate universe the sentence reads 'GNU is not UNIX' and leaves it at that.

I think you'll find that's GNU/Zip, or as I've taken to calling it GNU plus Zip.

This whole table raises multiple questions. I guess I'll never hire someone mentioning comptia on their cv

Failing to mention that JAR is just a ZIP file with special contents and calling tar a compression format sure is a bit incompetent for a textbook.

Am I blind or do they call tar an archive format and not a compression format as you say?

The headline under the table says compression formats

I mean, it's technically correct? The G does stand for GNU, and GNU tools can be used to build Linux. It is indeed worded very badly.

No, that's a big confusion.

I hate the RMS rant about how you're supposed to say "GNU/Linux", but here we're talking about a GNU package that can be used without Linux. It's on FreeBSD and even macOS.

It just goes to show how important it is to come up with a good name. Recursive acronyms are clever and all, but if no one likes saying it they aren't going to. T

No basically all Linux uses gnu Coreurils as a foundation and is therefore best called gnu+Linux. There’s a great RMS rant about this , it’s what the title is referring to.

Aren't their embedded systems that run the Linux kernel without the core-utils (maybe with busybox instead) and would therefore be non-gnu linux variants?

They should make a new version of Linux From Scratch where all you get is the Linux kernel source code and you write the compiler and core utils yourself. Now that would be Linux.

And the next time RMS invent Linux, he can call it whatever he wants.

GNU is the name of the operating system. GNU packages like glibc and gcc can be used for an operating system. Gzip is a GNU package.

So much to unpack here.

GNU is not a Linux variant. It is a set of programs and shared libraries.

ISO 9660 has nothing to do with compression. Just calling it ISO isn't a good idea for an intro class like that because it is a set of MANY standards. They should have put a little side blurb and called it ISO 9660 in the table.

tar is an archive tool. It has no compression.

Why no mention of compression algorithms algorithms vs archive tools?

Why not have different compression algorithms and their tradeoffs?

ETA: jar files are just zip files for Java libs/programs. You can open them with zip file tools.

Just calling it ISO isn’t a good idea for an intro class like that because it is a set of MANY standards. They should have put a little side blurb and called it ISO 9660 in the table.

This is the only thing here I disagree with. The table is quite clearly putting extensions on the left and intro classes do not need to know about the International Organization for Standardization.

That line implying 7zip and 7z are different formats has just been pulled out of the air too

There actually is a compression format that used .jar as an extension, a would-be successor to .arj. It’s quite archaic though, and God help you if you find one in the wild at this point.

http://www.arjsoftware.com/jar.htm

GNU is not a set of programs or libraries, it's an operating system.

GNU packages is what you are referring to. But GNU itself is the name of the OS.

It was intended to be an OS and is if you use the Hurd kernel. In practice, Hurd isn't really used, so it is just a bunch of programs and libraries. I guess it can go either way.

Agree. GNU Hurd is the OS. GNU Utils is a bunch of libre utilities that replicates the function of the UNIX utilities.

It is not "intended" to be an OS if you use GNU Hurd. That is literally the name of the operating system that launched the entire libre software movement. You don't engage with it that way because linux comms don't bother to educate their users at all.

Rms was right, "linux" users don't care about history and "linux" communties stopped giving a shit.

This is why I never bothered formally learning anything computer-related in school.

When I was a young 'un we learnt a lot of this basic stuff just by being interested in computers and using them. These formats are so ubiquitous that anyone who hasn't come across them must have pretty limited experience using computers. So I guess this textbook is for people who want a job in IT but aren't motivated enough to actually use computers? Seems like a bad formula for a career.

Sorry CompTIa is fucking garbage. In all my years at faangs, startups, Silicon Valley ycombinators, mid west tech, have I ever hired or worked with someone who has comptia certs.

Is it a good start to level 1 help desk at a hospital? Maybe. But I feel like it’s a fucking scheme where the time to learn any language instead would make you leagues better. Or study and get Cisco certs instead for neteng.

I’ll add it’s not that I chose not to hire CompTIa cert people. But I think in my 15 years I have never seen one come across the desk. The only time I saw it on a resume was level 1 help desk at a shop that thought Windows ME was the best release at the time and should be used in all rural hospitals and it was 2006 and anything beyond it was full of bloatware.

His company went bankrupt. Fuck you Arco

Yeah, it's misleading but technically still correct. GNU/Linux is a variant of an OS using the linux kernel.

Edit: nevermind they didn't even mention GNU tar but instead calls it "Linux"

When I had to learn Novell NetWare the textbook we received was just as bad and the instructor didn't have a clue either. Because internet wasn't exactly widely available for information like this then, we wrote a DOS batch file that discarded our input and miniced the output of the client for the practical exam. We all passed.

@TheImpressiveX I’m still confused about GNU/ Linux thing.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.

There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

Literally please stop posting this copypasta. I know you "linux" users only have like 4 jokes but this is just outdated and also false.

Ehh... Not really incredibly outdated? I mean most Linux systems with a few exceptions (looking at you Alpine) use gnu software in them, and it is a somewhat fair argument to say that a kernel isn't an entire operating system and other factors should be considered. Also why the quotation marks? It is a Linux joke, and if you don't like our humor than you can just kinda... Ignore it? I mean it's not like someone has you chained to a chair, forced to only look at linuxmemes.

First of all, this copypasta has never been said by anyone at the FSF or from the GNU project. People falsly attribute it to rms even though he has already made his thoughts clear on the matter. It's just misinformation and a bastardized take on the naming discussion.

I mean most Linux systems with a few exceptions (looking at you Alpine) use gnu software in them

It's not "GNU software in a linux system", again, GNU is the name of the operating system. GNU packages were developed for that operating system. Alpine is not GNU, it is a NonGNU/Busybox + Linux operating system mainly targeted for embedded devices. Linux is not a GNU package, but was liberated by Torvalds to be included in the GNU operating system which we now refer to completely as GNU/Linux.

and it is a somewhat fair argument to say that a kernel isn't an entire operating system and other factors should be considered

Such as the freedom of software writers and computer users. Calling the operating system "Linux" is taking away (even if not by intent) the very principle of freedom of the GNU operating system. It isn't "somewhat fair", far too many people who use Free software do not understand it entirely and thus are vulnerable to closing their hands from further liberation.

Also why the quotation marks? It is a Linux joke, and if you don't like our humor than you can just kinda... Ignore it?

If "Linux humor" is repeating the same 5 or so jokes and endless banter about the same topics then it isn't productive. Especially if that humor is just spreading misinformation in service of a cheap gag made by others. I'm just calling it out when I see it because I'm done giving a lot of yall the benefit of the doubt anymore.

So any time someone posts the "I'd just like to interject for a moment..." speech, we should now copy and paste the "First of all, this copypasta has never been said..." speech in response, thus making the meme a) longer, b) interactive, c) technically correct?

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Well, GNU is a Linux based OS. Is they would write „GNU is a LINUX/GNU variant“ it would confuse more than it would teach.

Well, GNU is a Linux based OS.

Not exactly. GNU/Linux is an OS using the Linux kernel and the GNU Software Suite. But GNU can also be its own OS on its own if you use Hurd.

There also used to be Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, pretty sure there have been GNU/NetBSD variants in the past as well

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What is GNU?

GNU is an operating system that is free software—that is, it respects users' freedom. The GNU operating system consists of GNU packages (programs specifically released by the GNU Project) as well as free software released by third parties. The development of GNU made it possible to use a computer without software that would trample your freedom.

Directly from the official GNU website : https://www.gnu.org/home.en.html

And btw an OS is more than a kernel, the kernel is „just“ the foundation on witch the OS works. Hardware communication is on kernel level, for example.