Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#21

Post by IsaacSchlueter » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 8:38 PM UTC

The strange thing, to me, is that I seem to hear this a lot from people I know who go to "top notch" CS schools. Cambridge, Austin, these are supposed to be great schools!

I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.") I left in 2002, so maybe things have changed, of course.

For a college that felt a lot like a high school with dorms, we had fantastic computer labs.

In two of the dorm buildings, there were labs full of Macs and PCs (20 of each in each lab). There were another 3 PC labs in the science building, and another PC lab and Mac lab in the library. In the CS department, there were 2 unix labs, one with about 20 BSD+KDE machines, and the other with 10 SunOS+OpenWindows. There was also the VAX/VMS system that anyone could use from anywhere via telnet, and provided access to all university services (including the ability to ssh into the Unix mainframe.)

Though I didn't really appreciate it at the time, the computer science education I got there was fantastic. I've talked to friends and coworkers of mine who have masters degrees from "good" schools and I'm aghast at the gaping holes in the curricula. Many of them never had to compile a program until they entered the work force, had never seen O() notation, and so on.

I think the moral of the story is that you should be wary of judging books by their covers: the campus might be beautiful, and the reputation might be sparkling, but take a look inside the buildings before choosing a school.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#22

Post by catz » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 8:48 PM UTC

You make some excellent points. My experience have been with Windows. The situation is this – they install shitloads of programs on these machines (most of it BS) . This all run at startup – the system tray is half the taskbar.

All this crap makes the machine maddingly slow. Then they mount network drives on the machines (20 or so). This means that if you use a flash drive you must start unmounting the network drives until your flash drive appear.

While you log-in 10 or so programs give you error messages (for which you must press the Ok button).

The quotas are still a problem – why must we have 100MB quotas? Hard-disk space is cheap – google gives me 7GB for email.

The worst is the internet costs. They give you 200MB for a year. After that you have to pay R2 (20 US cents) per M.B. That price is four times as expensive as GPRS through your cellphone.

Oh – it is crap working on CRT screens with a burned in log-in bar.

---

Ranting aside – the admin for the clusters in my dept. really knows his stuff.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#23

Post by catz » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 8:55 PM UTC

IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #21

The strange thing, to me, is that I seem to hear this a lot from people I know who go to "top notch" CS schools. Cambridge, Austin, these are supposed to be great schools! I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.") I left in 2002, so maybe things have changed, o…

> I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.")

You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards.

Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education often provide a better education than large research oriented universities.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#24

Post by smokey_the_bear » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 9:03 PM UTC

grinich wrote: post #20

First of all, root access to the machine should be granted to anyone at a terminal. Physical access bypasses any sort of realistic security placed on the system. At MIT, the computing infrastructure is largely a collaboration between students and admins. This has worked incredibly well, and led us to have a continually evolving system and created a great system for tech support. Right now we're in the process of test…

My university copied one of MIT's old versions of Athena, and called it project Vincent. It was fantastic, so far ahead of anything else I'd seen in 1998. Too bad they started to phase it out and lessen support in favor of a big microsoft network. Though it happened when non technical students started to use computers too.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#25

Post by endtime » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 9:13 PM UTC

Well, for what it's worth, at Stanford every cluster I've used works just fine. I wouldn't mind a bigger quota (I don't think I even get 1GB) but other than that, no complaints.

Well, it would be nice (no pun intended...) to force people to run long MATLAB jobs with nice, but oh well.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#26

Post by frustrated » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 9:15 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #8

I assume you have a student union at your university? Some CS professors? Other people who know what's going on? Get together, schedule a meeting with whoever has the power do put a stamp on whatever draft you can write before the meeting. Make sure there are some admins and the head CS department in the meeting too. I bet it's a nice feeling to write here about the situation, but HN can't do much to help you. If you…

That makes perfect sense, thanks. There are a few reasons why I posted it to HN:

* I had to pick my battles when I was there and this wasn't one of them. I've emailed this to friends who are current students; hopefully something will come of that.

* I wanted to confirm that this wasn't just a UT CS thing. As I expected, there are a bunch of responses attesting to similar experiences at other places in the comments below.

* I was also curious to see the discussion on what people think would be a good way to run the labs (or at all.)

For anyone who wants to take the lead in trying to get things to change at their univs, I hope this post will serve as a confirmation that you're not alone and you should be able to find many other students to join you in pushing for change.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#27

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 9:54 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #8

I assume you have a student union at your university? Some CS professors? Other people who know what's going on? Get together, schedule a meeting with whoever has the power do put a stamp on whatever draft you can write before the meeting. Make sure there are some admins and the head CS department in the meeting too. I bet it's a nice feeling to write here about the situation, but HN can't do much to help you. If you…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#28

Post by IsaacSchlueter » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 9:54 PM UTC

catz wrote: post #23

IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #21

The strange thing, to me, is that I seem to hear this a lot from people I know who go to "top notch" CS schools. Cambridge, Austin, these are supposed to be great schools! I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.") I left in 2002, so maybe things have changed, o…

> I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.") You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards. Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate educatio…

Yes, it often seems that SCSU's only failing as a university was that the landscaping and architecture weren't as nice. The bureaucratic hassles were often pretty annoying, and from what I've heard, they aren't so bad at private schools.

But yeah, there are lots of very good, very cheap schools in this country. I have almost no student loan debt to speak of, and I got a great education. Not to mention that you can watch a lot of lectures on youtube and whatnot.

The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#29

Post by tlrobinson » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 10:22 PM UTC

USC had a couple big (by 1990's standards) time sharing Sun machines we used for CS and EE classes, which you could login to via SSH or VNC. Or you could use one of the few dozen Sun workstations in the lab which had the same software but ran locally, I guess.

The window manager was CDE by default, which sounds about as bad as fvwm2. You could run Gnome but I don't think most of the software worked very well with it (ePD! Cadence!)

Fortunately most CS projects could be developed locally on any Unix/Linux/OSX machine, then thrown up on the time sharing machine for testing.

Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

#30

Post by tlrobinson » Sat, Mar 28, 2009, 10:29 PM UTC

catz wrote: post #22

You make some excellent points. My experience have been with Windows. The situation is this – they install shitloads of programs on these machines (most of it BS) . This all run at startup – the system tray is half the taskbar. All this crap makes the machine maddingly slow. Then they mount network drives on the machines (20 or so). This means that if you use a flash drive you must start unmounting the network drives…

Yeah the quotas are ridiculous. I don't think we had a bandwidth quota in the labs though. 200MB seems pretty extreme. In the dorms the quota was like 10GB a day.

I just logged into my account (I graduated more than a year ago but I guess they forgot to deactivate my account...) and it looks like they bumped the storage quota from 100MB to 200MB. Yay.