>>6428
>quite

Ironic

>>6429
It would be if >>6427 was a student at Oxford. You need to get better at reading things, old boy.

I didn't study at Oxford, don't work there and in fact have never even been within forty miles of the place.

I, also, couldn't tell you why the collegiate system is structured how it is.

>>6431

I don't think anybody knows.

I think that even if you got all the college heads and departmental heads together to draw a diagram of how it all worked they wouldn't be able to.

It's probably a veritable labyrinth of bureaucracy and tradition.

>>6433
It's fairly simple. The college's have their own money, some of them lots and lots of it, and so historically they have been powerful enough to either make unilateral decisions, or influence the university body as a whole.

The university departments, and the university administration, are new fangled things of the last 100 years.

You need a reference manager. Mendeley and Zotero are free and as good as anything else. Mendeley is a proprietary product owned by Elsevier spit while Zotero is free and open source.

You also need to know about sci-hub and libgen, which are essential tools for any modern student or researcher.

https://www.mendeley.com

https://www.zotero.org

https://sci-hub.tw

https://libgen.me

>>6417

>>6417
It took me far too long to realise that wasn't Aki in the corner.

>>6420
That's Aki in the corner, Aki in the spot light.

>>6419

Sneaky sneaky.

>>6417
>>6419

Not sure if taking the piss but the book Unmasking the Face by Ekman and Friesen might be of interest to you.

>>6333
>What works for revision is going to the library and physically moving to a new location, but with this, all my files are on my main PC and so I have to stay in my room.

Sounds like a bit of an excuse there, m8. Use cloud storage or bring a portable disk like My Passport. A 1TB model is less than £30.

You know what works, so do what works.

>>6334
I don't have a functional laptop (or, presently, the cash to acquire one) and the library PCs don't have the software. I'm developing in Visual Studio for Windows.

For an update after all this time, I dropped out. It took a number of years to admit to this to myself but the university itself offered little in terms of support or even outline what I was really supposed to be aiming for. This felt like being setup to fail and there was a good deal of frustration as a result but I can hardly turn back time. Eventually I dusted myself off and got into a professional career where I'm doing really well which feels good after fucking up my life.

Still, the failure annoys me and I'm of the mind to look into part-time research somewhere else just because I have unfinished business. I need to plan though, the first thing will be convincing an academic institution that I will stick it out which starts with putting together a strong proposal. That flows into my next item which would be in doing as much as possible beforehand because I'm not going through all that bullshit again.

Any of you lads have advice on getting back into academia, part-time learning and operating on pure rage?

>>6412

Are you still a god botherer then?

>>6413
Don't be daft.

>>6391
Not with the state of schools today. Some people have dire knowledge of history.

Jacob Bronowski, despite not being a historian as such, gives one of the most beautiful overviews of human development I've ever come across in The Ascent of Man. It's more like anthropology, really, or a kind of history of science -- but the scope goes a lot wider than that, drawing on culture, biology, geography, and politics.

I'd recommend watching the television series and using the book as a companion. Finding this series in my early twenties genuinely made me a more a more compassionate person. If I could redesign a history curriculum from scratch, I'd probably draw heavily on this work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH7SJf8BnBI

>>6390

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2145007.History

This will give you the basics, then you can research further individual topics. It is massive though.

>>6395
Not OP, but bookmarked for later viewing, ad book title noted. Thank you.

Sage for old thread.

some odd history https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4sEmXUuWIFlxRIFBRV6VXQ/videos

>>6401
Better on your record than your liver.

>>6399

There's a whole thread in /A/ for us resting actors.

> if I have raw chicken

You mean on purpose? I googled that pic and it turns out Chicken sashimi is a thing.

I drank it consistently although not that heavily transitioning from my late teenage years to early adulthood. I will say it probably impacted my health in a very negative manner coupled with my sedentary computer NEET lifestyle and barely working out.

Can't even process things that fast anymore and I often struggle to find the right words for my sentences in realtime talk and if I say something erroneous I'll try to correct myself.

I do hope I don't have early-onset dementia, that would suck a great deal.

>>6408
I'm fairly sure that talking on the computer and talking in person use different parts of the brain. You may be overestimating how much damage the alcohol did and underestimating how much better trained you are to talk via a keyboard than in actual face-to-face human interactions.

>>6382

>AFAIK recruiters won't even look at your CV unless you have a degree.

Recruiters are scum. Hiring managers for the kind of companies you want to work for are often very interested in self-taught candidates, because they know just how utterly useless a lot of graduates are.

>>6384

I've seen worse. The quality of teaching at Manchester has become distinctly patchy since the UMIST merger.

>>6383
I do electronic engineering and we were taught that in first year. I was amazed at how little CS students seem to do; stuff we did in third year about computer architecture far exceeded what they ever did, and stuff we did in first year is third year for them. I can't really fathom what it is they actually do in CS.

>>6383

Well, I can give you my current understanding and if I'm wrong about anything I'm happy to be corrected.

They're both sections of RAM set aside for program execution that respectively deal with static and dynamic memory. What this means in practice is that the stack is faster and more procedural as the size of all objects is known at compile time and when moving between them the stack pointer is simply incremented or decremented accordingly as LIFO is systemically applied. The heap, as its name suggests, is larger and less structured so generally slower, although the degree to which this manifests is dependant on the processor architecture. In compensation it is more flexible, not only capable of handling larger objects but also ones whose size isn't constant at compile time. For instance, in C++ one cannot create an array with a variable as a size without having to employ pointer syntax that places the array on the heap.

The heap can also be less secure since in languages without garbage collection - again, C++ would be a prime example of this - improper use can lead to memory leakage if objects aren't manually deleted. For programs that handle sensitive information this would be a security issue. Ideally I'd put as much onto the stack as possible for the sake of performance, particularly any computationally costly algorithms while reserving the heap for objects of uncertain size like user inputs.

If there are any glaring mistakes or gaps in my knowlege please let me know. Also why is it so strange for a webpage to be coded in Java? It sounds odd to me since most websites are a mixture of JS, PHP, HTML/CSS and things like Ruby while Java (I think) is generally used for Windows desktop applications but am I missing something else?

>>6378

OP again here.

I had a good talk with the tutor, the only teacher that made some sense. I learned something interesting: the good part of the syllabus, the Cisco qualifications and the lab work, are completely optional. Some tutors decide to put those parts in from the kindness of their hearths, not because the department for education tells them so. However, all the useless part of the course are made mandatory by the Pearsons.

So, the government is actively pushing to make the courses as useless as possible. The few colleges that manage to teach useful skills and qualifications are doing it against the will of the gov't.

By the way, if you are in a crappy college you can get a Level 5 networking qualification and not be able to console into a router with a laptop. Now I understand why so many recruiters laugh off people with HND/HNC, many of them have absolutely no marketable skills. Fuck.

>>6387

You're about 80% there.

Using too much stack is generally a bad idea, as each process (thread) only has so much stack allocated to it. If you allocate huge buffers on the stack and then do some nested function calling you're going to run out of stack space and go boom.

The stack should be used purely for singular variables like integers or pointers.

In C++11+ there is almost no excuse to use the stack for storage.

If you want to store data in a super fast and easy place to be found then you can use the .bss / .data segments of your executable, albeit increasing the size of the eventual program.

Everything that is greater than the size of a pointer on your architecture should probably be stored in the heap. Compiler optimisations and wonderfully architectured heaps such as Windows LFH and things like jemalloc for *nix mean that the old overhead of dlmalloc() is a thing of the part.

tldr - the bottleneck in your code isn't going to be the heap implementation written and tested by probably millions of people.

>>6368
Not him, but I've heard clearing is now a buyer's market since they lifted the cap on the number of university admissions.

>>6368
I'm not going anywhere fancy, mate. Likely the only reason I got in was because I'm vastly overqualified for the school but not enough so to even scrape into anywhere with any actual academic standing.

>>6368
You didn't apply because you thought you'd need at least A Level maths? Why didn't you just check the entry requirements? Maybe you do need to look further down the league tables.

>>6371
What gives you the impression I didn't check them? I did, at a couple dozen unis. Where do you think I got the idea that A Level maths is indeed very important? I don't see your point.

>>6373
>Where do you think I got the idea that A Level maths is indeed very important?

On the requirements for pretty much every course outside (and sometimes within) clearing. "ABB including English and Maths" and the like isn't uncommon at even supposedly shite unis.

>>6361

Any job.

>>6362
Financial advice. To get the Diploma in Regulated Financial Planning you need to pass five multiple choice tests and one two hour written test which you can bullet point. The bar isn't set overly high and you can qualify in about a year or two.

Demand exceeds supply in the industry so, with a bit of report writing experience, you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to never earn less than around £25,000 -
£28,000 ever again but you can walk into a job paying up to £40,000 if you're any good at it; the highest I've heard of a Paraplanner being hired for is £55,000 and that's in Yorkshire. If you go on to be an adviser then I believe the average salary is about £90,000 but earning six figures is feasible.

>>6360
Speak of an open question, mate, and it really depends on your target income and luck.

A friend of mine got his CSCS, put in the graft for a bit and build some connections then financed his forklift license. The connections were necessary to get the required hours on a forklift to get a decent job doing that. It's a "once you have it, you're fine" kind of deal. It's a very relaxed kind of job for ~£35k.

Through a previous job (warehouse monkey in an electrical wholsalers) I met a few electricians. If you're good and get the qualification out of the way, you can do alright at £30-£40k. If you find an SMB and you are the site electrcian, expect £40-£50k while having a bunch of possibly interesting responsibiilities. Others more well versed in these industries can advise you better, I defected to IT.

>>6350

Just following up on the links you posted. These textbooks are fantastic, thank you, genuinely. If this thread is still around by the time I finish my course, I'll stick in another update then.

>>6365
Yeah, me too, thanks >>6350 - I don't know why I didn't know about libgen before, but I'm glad I do now.

>>6344

Not sure it is quite as bleak as you paint, but I mostly agree we live in an age of people being compelled to quantify their decisions so the best candidate is the one who can be most easily justified on paper rather than the one whose personality suits best.

The more public facing the institution the more true the above statement.

>>6346

I just mean that if he's on the reserve list, that means whatever decisions they do make have already been made.

To give an update, and for the sake of having double-Bugs, I'll bump to say that unfortunately it looks like I wasn't selected.

It also seems like the university is under no obligation to give me a definitive "yes" or "no", as the programme has already started and the admissions website still says I'm number X on the list.

Strange, but I'll have to live with it and continue applying to other universities ready for next year.

Onward and upward, lads.

>>6375

As it turns out, I was offered a place on a very similar programme by the same university. Whether this was down to my persistence, I don't know.

Never give up hope, I guess.

>>6376

Nice one la. Have fun!

What's wrong with Jstor?

Well last time I checked Google scholar was good for showing what's available without a licence

There's that subreddit where people exchange journal articles.

Also libgen.

And then there's this http://aaaaarg.fail/

>>6338

Everything is available without a license. Just copy the DOI and paste it here:

https://sci-hub.tw/

For health related stuff, PubMed and UpToDate are fine sources of information, as long as you read a bit about the structure and flaws of our current methodology for clinical trials so you know how to pick out potential bollocks.

Thing is with journals, they're often so mind-bogglingly specific you'd probably be best off saying what your exact interests are.

>>6325
Dunno how it compares to the usual but I was told there were around 1500 applicants for 90 places.

Holy shit. I fucking did it, lads. They accepted me unconditionally. I'm ecstatic.

>>6327
Good on that man, purpz activate the confetti!

>>6330
Thank you, bro. I know people were saying Uni isn't everything but I've been searching for my passion for years and finding a way out of my current situation. To find that and then be accepted to my dream uni is quite frankly, fucking unreal. Y

>>6327
Well done ladm8!!

>>6311

You might as well ask how a collection of cells makes a person? Seemingly impossible tasks are just a series of possible tasks put together.

>>6311
But that's my point about needing to find a reason to do it - the point of entry is thinking "this is a problem I want to solve" - in the early days of learning programming you have to contrive that. With practice, you'll create more complex systems that actually solve a real problem and if you can keep doing that, you will be a real programmer who earns money doing this, solving other peoples actual problems.

What is the most popular word over five letters used on .gs? How many minutes per month do you spend here?
You have a folder on your computer full of images, music and text files - how would you create a simple way of browsing them?
Your hobby is bird watching, how would you create a database that records what you observe, with images?
Your local kids football club needs a way of managing all their players and statistics for games
You and your mates play the same video game every Friday - how do you record the scores and performance every week to create a league table?
You setup a webcam that points out your front window - create me a simple HTML page you view in a browser that shows all the colours of the different cars that pass by? Bonus points - you recognise all the number plates.

I don't know what the fuck you're interested in, but whatever it is, you can create programs to help you. Start on that path, initially they will be contrived and fake, but with practice, they will become real.

>>6313

> Your local kids football club needs a way of managing all their players and statistics for games

Now then, now then.

>>6311

If you've already completed an introductory course in programming, I'd recommend Codewars. It's a series of real-world programming problems presented a bit like a puzzle game. You complete each "level" when the code you've written passes a set of pre-determined tests. Once you've solved some of these problems, you should start to see how your skills can be used to solve real problems.

https://www.codewars.com/

If you haven't completed a beginner's course, then pick a good one that's based on practical project-based learning. For example, Udacity's Intro to Computer Science course teaches you how to build a basic search engine and social network using Python. Other courses structure their teaching around games or mobile apps. Learning how to break down an apparently insurmountable problem into lots of little chunks is arguably the most important skill in software development.

https://eu.udacity.com/course/intro-to-computer-science--cs101

>>6313

>How many minutes per month do you spend here?

Well that's got to be my first 'solo' project for sure. I don't think I truly want to know, mind.

I do appreciate the way you talk about this stuff, though, it definitely inspires me, for lack of a less poncy word. Expect a few related question posts sneakily targeted at you over the coming few months.

>>6266

You need to talk to your GP mate.

>>6266
You're too thick to go to university, and thats saying something.

>>6267

"Do some exercise, and here's a prescription for some tenner a pop pills, but only if you beg and repeatedly state how suicidal you are. We don't want to be helping you before you're absolutely, positively, irreversibly at rock bottom."

>>6268

No, I'm plainly too angry to apply for university. It's a totally different set of circumstances, idiot.

>>6269

Go back and keep going back until you get the treatment you need. GPs aren't psychic - if they prescribe something and don't see from you again, they assume that the prescription worked.

May have gotten a bit wound up last night, my mistake.