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

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

#51

Post by mst »

catz wrote: post #37
IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids. Another advantage is that you can casually mention it repeatedly on HN (casual university name dropping).

And be completely ignored by the non-US people who're more interested in clue level than an atlantic-away university.

And the non-university people.

And all the people who ignored nicknames changing colour.

But I'm sure it'll impress everybody else :)

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

#53

Post by megaman821 »

I graduated from UT with a degree in CS a couple of years ago. Those Dell machines are God-sends compared the the Solaris ones they have. Last time I tried to use the Solaris machine it didn't have ls installed on it.

I totally agree with you about the Linux setup. The first time I start fvwm2 I was like wtf is this. That actually encouraged me to figure out what a window manager was and how to start a different one.

You are wrong about the overnight jobs (at least when I was there), you can only run them on certain servers that are designated for overnight jobs. For most cases you did not have to get permission.

UT has enough money and computers that each student should be given their own vm.

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

#54

Post by Oompa »

I was about to go to UT Austin, but after this story, I'm glad I came to Georgia Tech instead. The lab computers are pretty good, and the ones in the College of Computing are just thin clients that VNC you into Red Hat or Windows, which you can VNC into from your own laptop. On top of that, the Wifi network is fantastic.

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

#56

Post by llimllib »

utnick wrote: post #44

I went to UT cs also. While its not ideal, I thought the cs computer lab was fine. It's not meant to replace your main computer, as a CS major you should probably have your own computer. Its meant more as a place to hang out and work on class projects together and for that I think it does fine. Also, if you are a cs major you can probably figure out how to 'startx gnome' Also, for many research groups they have their…

> Also, if you are a cs major you can probably figure out how to 'startx gnome'

Don't imagine yourself at a computer, think about the marginal user. That is, the kid who could be a good CS student but doesn't do it because the first class' experience is extremely frustrating not due to programming, but due to stupid computer admin shit.

The argument is that the unnecessary complexity and intentional backwardness of the computer labs is pushing away marginal CS students, not that it's a system that's impossible for anyone to figure out.

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

#57

Post by sketerpot »

ableal wrote: post #35

OK, now for the contrarian opinion: you're barking up the wrong tree. A good university does not coddle up students like kindergartners, feeding them pap. It's more like boot camp - in the mud, on foot, carrying a heavy pack. Apparently, it's pointless, sadistic, exercise: the 'product' of the work has no value. Except for the connections your synapses make ... Frankly, it's hard to feel sorry for students who will n…

There's a difference between expecting students to overcome adversity in a tough curriculum and making things pointlessly painful.

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

#58

Post by sketerpot »

smokey_the_bear wrote: post #24
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.

Iowa State University, right? I'm a student there right now. They've improved since the Microsoft dark age, moving their server infrastructure to Linux and clearing away the legacy cruft except in the humanities departments. No, the big problem now is that the computers are so locked down you can't install software on them! This isn't so much an issue on Linux or MacOS -- you can install everything to a folder easily -- but the Windows machines are a pain in the bum when you need some software you don't have. Even if you have standalone exe files they sometimes refuse to run for permissions reasons.

This is a major software issue. In the happy land of Ubuntu, I can just use "./configure --prefix=~/myroot", and everything will work out more-or-less fine. On MacOS I'm just dragging around application bundles. But on Windows this whole process is colossally painful, and the situation would probably be dramatically improved if you gave everybody the damn Administrator password and carte blanche to use it responsibly.

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

#59

Post by sketerpot »

philh wrote: post #16

I also use a text login, fvwm2, and install things from source (albiet in Gentoo rather than Ubuntu). As a 19 year old kid, should I feel hard done by? :) Maybe it's different in England, but I've found my university's computer labs (Uni. of Warwick) to be useful, and not insane. I know from experience that if I didn't have my own computer (as was the case when it was broken during my first week), I could get by with…

> I also use a text login, fvwm2, and install things from source (albiet in Gentoo rather than Ubuntu). As a 19 year old kid, should I feel hard done by? :)

You're accustomed to using a command line, you probably chose fvwm2 because you were looking for a no-frills window manager, and Gentoo's emerge system makes basic installation from source as easy as using apt-get. People who aren't as nuts as you and I have every right to be ticked off at computer labs that act like your computer rather than computers for mortals.

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

#60

Post by sketerpot »

wmf wrote: post #31
javanix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you propose we set things up? Most of the need for CS labs is conformity in grading/teaching. I see the appeal - both fiscal and hacker-practical - for dropping the Uni labs, but I think that forcing 95% of CS majors to rely on 5% of their peers for support would cause enough grading and deadline ("I couldn't get the package to compile in time!") arguments that both faculty and undergrads would come to hate…

In college I often sshed from my computer into a lab computer, so I didn't really need the physical lab. Of course, maintaining servers may cost almost as much as maintaining a lab. Maybe preconfigured VM images are the answer.

People ssh'd into a computer are seldom using all of its power. A big multicore server with plenty of RAM can support quite a few users more economically than individual computers. This is part of the reason why people invented timesharing OSes in the first place.
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