[SunRescue] Re: Hardware, Students and Schools [was] Q on "optimal" OS for Sun4c machines, now that Solaris 8 won't run

[EricJohnsoneric_j at novia.net]

I don't want to start a flame war here, but in my experience, schools
never really provided all that great a diversity of hardwares to work on,
it was just that a higher proportion of the Computer Science (or whatever
the program is called) students were interested in learning the material
in the 'olden' days.

This is not to say that the number of really motivated students has gone
down, just that the percentage has. There has been an influx of people
into technical fields who are just looking for a meal ticket. In the last
year, I have had to help recruit and hire programmers -- it's like panning
for gold; you look at a lot of dross before you find one nugget.

I have recently seen surveys that say that the number of 'computer'
students is going down again. While many find this a horrible trend, I do
believe that it at least offers the benefit of raising the percentage of
the 'true' students. I have hope!

-- Eric Johnson
-- eric_j at novia.net

"Smoke me a kipper; I'll be back for breakfast!"

Ace Rimmer

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, P.A.Osborne wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 12, 2000 at 05:04:50PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > 
> >   Microsoft is pushing NT into schools as hard as they can...so
> > they'll have wave after wave of college grads who've seen nothing but
> > NT, so they'll order NT when they get to their new jobs.
> 
> We notice that.  Some of the students here are starting to demand 
> Unix access (they dont get it by default - Unix isnt sexy - apparently)
> so they can mention it on their CVs - worringly though the Comp Sci 
> students do get access to Unix and only around 20% of them use it
> during their first year - at least.
> 
> I do notice as News Admin (amongst other things) that our local unix
> questions news group gets quite a lot of traffic.
> 
> However UKC has 'won' a contract to help get other  colleges initially
> connected to JANET and hence the internet - and we are not overly
> keen to recommend MS software for running mail/www/proxys etc.
> 
> So hopefully word will spread about Unix - the problem is training them.
> 
> --Paul
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