[geeks] SGI Sadness

[Mike Meredith]

On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 14:22:23 +0000, wa2egp at att.net wrote:
> damn little)and parades around the building carrying cables (same
> cables all year).  

You can detect the difference between patch cable #29647 and patch cable
#92764 ?

Said person could be an ex-operator who has never been re-trained.
Sometimes training for support staff in the academic world can be
abysmal ... I once asked for a week's course on Unix system
administration (I was hoping to find out what I'm supposed to do (I'm
still wondering)) to get turned down. Why? Because the cost of that one
course (pretty average cost) was more than the entire department's
training budget for the year.

> in the classroom (in 50 pitch because the resolution is so bad), and
> we can communicate with other schools (no one out there).  And the
> only thing I can say to those of you in the IT w
>  orld......

There's all sorts of reasons why IT can sometimes be awful in education.
Try comparing the salary of an IT technician in your place with salaries
in the "free world" (I could probably double my salary, but I'm too
busy having fun).

And it's not always the fault of the IT people ... a couple of stories
about how academics can help cause problems :-

* From the end of the 1980s through to about 1983, my late boss would
  regularly go to the University IT committee to present a case for
  upgrading a VAX 11/750 to something a little less archaic. The
  academics representing the users would regularly say no. And a little
  later in the same meeting would pass along complaints about how bad
  the performance of this VAX was.

* We have some software that *must* run on the latest XP desktops
  because it is used on a small module of an unpopular course. Said
  software was originally written in the early 1980's for a BBC micro,
  then transferred to PCs using a BBC basic compiler around 1987 or so.
  Said software is unbelievably simple ... it takes two or three numbers
  and draws some kind of graph. Yet we're not allowed to touch it or
  write a replacement (would probably take about 30 minutes) because
  the lecturer insists on keeping things the same. If Windows ever stops
  running 16-bit software, we'll be stuck at the previous version.

> at least it's hard for me to lose my job. :-> 

Yes, but sometimes in weak moments you wonder whether it's worth it :)