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.

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[–] 294 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (17 children)

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.

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  • [–] 131 points 3 years ago (8 children)

    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).

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  • [–] 45 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 47 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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 ...

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (3 children)
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    [–] 76 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Has anybody mentioned yet that tar isn't even a "compression format"?

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    [–] 73 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    Fun fact: G in GNU also stands for GNU.

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    [–] 63 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    If someone send this to Stallman, he'll write a stern email on emacs to the book's author reminding them that gnu is not linux.

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    [–] 53 points 3 years ago (9 children)

    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?

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  • [–] [S] 50 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 46 points 3 years ago* (5 children)
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    [–] 36 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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).

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    [–] 36 points 3 years ago (4 children)

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

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    [–] 30 points 3 years ago

    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

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  • [–] 27 points 3 years ago

    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

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago

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

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago

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

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  • [–] 23 points 3 years ago (3 children)

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

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  • [–] 21 points 3 years ago* (10 children)

    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.

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    [–] 19 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    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.

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    [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    High probability it is not fixed. This is the typical level of CompTIA quality I’ve encountered.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago

    This is great.

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