Berkeley's Air Bears Wi-Fi works pretty well most of the time.
Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
61–67 of 67 posts
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#62A tweak on the "let the students run it" idea would be, for undergraduates at least: Let each year's class run their own systems. I could list a bunch of benefits (and a few drawbacks) that would fall out from this, but they seem pretty clear, probably no need to list them - they range from the social to the technical to the logistical.
Another tweak: keep a locked-down simplified version of the operating system on a separate partition. Post signs telling the newbies how to get to it if the main OS got broken by some student. Hard drive space is cheap, right?
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#63hey, fvwm with the right configuration is quite nice... It was my windows manager of choice before switching to os x 4 years ago (and I still miss it some times).
I used to run the gnome panel with it and found it much nicer than metacity+gnome...
But of course, fvwm is good only if well configured and I doubt they took the time to do that. And I do agree that most people will not see want to spend hours configuring it...
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#64I 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…
No problems at back at my undergrad at Bath Uni either. You could have graduated using just the Uni machines. Plenty of desktops spread around campus, good wifi accessible with a username and password.
Plain old Fedora at the The University of Edinburgh here. Pretty reasonable setup, a few things a bit out of date, default quota a bit on the tight side if you need to install your own version of anything large (like wxwindows etc) but all in all pretty fair.
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#65The 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…
Another thing that I have noticed is that, the better the school's reputation, the more likely it is that people will try to BS their way through, knowing the that name on the paper will be enough to get them where they want to go. A lot of students at "second tier" schools recognize that they need to be on top of their shit because nobody's just going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#66OK, 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…
CS is not about state-of-the art tools, but it is most definitely about good tools. In fact, I'd argue that much of undergraduate CS is about learning how to recognize, use, and build good tools, and part of the way that you do this is exposure. I think that people still forget that CS is, at least partially, a creative discipline, and the solutions that its practitioners come up with are often influenced by the tools that they use.
Re: Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab
#67I 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…
Slightly off-topic: I consider applying at Warwick for a PhD position. Could we get in contact to talk about your university? You'll find my email address in my profile. Please drop me a line. Thank you!