
Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab - frustrated
Note: I'm a regular HN reader/commenter, but posting this under an anonymous account for obvious reasons.<p>There has been some discussion here recently about the value of computer labs in universities. This is my experience with the university computing facilities as a CS graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. While it is a personal perspective, it is also pretty representative, as you will see.<p>When you walk up to one of the machines in our lab, you are greeted with a text login. I guess that separates the men from the boys right there--if you aren't l33t enough to know how to run X, you can't even get started. And X is set up to run fvwm2 by default.<p>No, that's not a typo. I really meant fvwm2.<p>If you haven't used it, you really can't even imagine how bad it is. It's one of those Unix beasts from the 80s which uses desktop metaphors that aren't in use today. Mostly it just draws windows, everything else is up to you. Windows gets focus when you mouse over them. Things we take for granted in a desktop like the task bar aren't available. You need to right-click to do anything, but the right click menu isn't stable--it disappears when you release the click. I could go on, but you get the idea.<p>Here's the kicker: since most students have never used Unix before, <i>they assume that's what Unix looks like</i>, and they spend their entire college years dealing with this shit. Our department has been expending major efforts to increase computer science enrollment; I'd say everything they're doing is a <i>rounding error</i> compared to the effect that students' first impression of being a CS major will have.<p>Often, I'd be working in the lab, and some kid will come up to me and ask something like, "hi, I downloaded this text file, now I have no idea how to edit it." The <i>really</i> ironic thing is that all the machines run Ubuntu, the whole point of which is to have Mac OS-like usability! Note that Ubuntu doesn't even ship with fvwm2 by default, which means they actually went and installed it. They are not lazy or incompetent, it seems they are actively trying to hurt their users. (To be fair, they have an FAQ that tells you how to start other window managers, but of course no one's ever read it, and even if they did it wouldn't do them an ounce of good because they don't know what a window manager is to begin with.)<p>One time, when a student asked me a question about the window manager I showed her how to edit her .xinitrc to start Gnome instead. She was like, "Oh my GOD!!" and wouldn't stop thanking me. After this happened a couple of more times I felt heartbroken and powerless to stop the atrocity and stopped going to the lab. I mean, many of them are 18 and 19 year old kids, they shouldn't have to suffer like this :-(<p>By the way, you might wonder how the professors put up with the admins (their machines are also set up to start fvwm2). Since most of the professors graduated decades ago, fvwm2 is probably what they used as students. They don't seem to find it all that painful, since they probably never upgraded from pine and fvwm2.<p>After a while, I got my own office, which meant I could go and work there without having to see the other students and scream silently to myself. But that didn't last long.<p>There was no sound on any of the machines, even those in semi-private offices. I don't mean no speakers--they removed the audio drivers from Linux; /dev/dsp didn't exist. While that was mighty annoying, it was nothing compared to my troubles when my research started to involve writing code. Other than the fact that our disk quotas were 1GB, that is.<p>They wouldn't let me run jobs overnight. I had to get some kind of special permission; the reason was apparently "security." I have no idea what that had to do with security. I bet the character "Mordac, preventor of information services" was based on these guys. It was truly a synthesis of everything that's wrong with academia and everything that's wrong with corporations.<p>Apart from security, the only other thing they cared about was covering their asses. (Now that I think about it, their emphasis on the former might have been merely a manifestation of the latter.) If I went down to their office to ask a question, they'd say "send an email." The idea being they'd have a record in case of a dispute, I guess.<p>One time I needed a package installed. After a week of passing the buck, they said they couldn't do it. The worst part? It was something that was available in the Ubuntu repositories! But apparently they don't install things using aptitude, the easiest package management system in the world; they have a policy of installing everything from source (!!)<p>That was when I gave up; I worked from home after that until I graduated. I would still occasionally go in to use the printers, which gave me a chance to observe things deteriorate even further. At some point, campus IT removed the guest wireless access.  As for the authenticated access, I don't know why they couldn't authenticate you through your browser like everyone else, you actually had to install their crypto shit. I got it working on Windows after some hair-pulling, never did on Linux (which is what I was on 90% of the time).<p>The incredibly ironic thing about this is that since Austin is #1 in the country in Wi-Fi hotspot density, you can get wireless from somewhere as soon as you step out of campus but the campus itself is a Wi-Fi wasteland.<p>While my experience with IT might have been exceptionally bad, many a time, when I complain to students in other universities, the answer I get is, "oh my god, I know, right?" I have some first-hand experience of it since I travel a lot for research. When I go to Berkeley, for instance, I know that the campus Wi-Fi AirBears is nearly unusable, we just go to Brewed Awakening and use the free Wi-Fi there.<p>So there. I hope this adds something to the discussion of whether Universities should have computer labs. By far the best approach, IMO, would be for the department to buy the machines but <i>let the students run them</i>. Of course, this leads to questions of who gets to be root and so forth, but that's kinda the whole point: working together, building trust, resolving conflicts, and administering networks of computers are all vital parts of the education that CS students should receive but currently don't. Some Universities may not be bold enough to go this route for fear of lawsuits. The second best option would be to scrap the labs altogether, rather than prolonging the insanity.
======
IsaacSchlueter
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.

~~~
catz
> 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.

~~~
IsaacSchlueter
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.

~~~
catz
> 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).

~~~
mst
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 :)

------
viraptor
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 see the problem - go now - book a meeting room if you have them. If
it's that bad, do you have anything to lose?

~~~
frustrated
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.

------
ableal
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 not 'read the FAQ',
or do anything to improve their conditions by themselves, if they feel it's
important. It either is not important, or the culture of helplessness has
reached too far.

Also: C.S. is _not_ about this week's 'state-of-the-art' tools - as the late
Dijkstra (who taught at U.T.Austin) put it, it's like astronomy and
telescopes.

P.S.: in any organization with more than a few dozen people, support staff
will ask for emails or web-tickets. That's for two reasons: accountability and
knowledge sharing.

~~~
ams6110
Agree! My C.S. undergrad program did not even cover specific languages. There
were no courses such as "The 'Foo trendy du-jour' Programming Language" -- the
language was incidental to the subject matter, and you were expected to learn
the language, editor, OS utilities, compilers, debuggers, etc. on your own
time.

------
grinich
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 testing Athena 10, a ubuntu-based overhaul
to our old redhat system. It's a huge task, and a majority of the bugfixes and
patches have come from student hackers.

You're running linux, so that's a start. I'd suggest seeing if you can get
some of the defaults changed (such as fvwm2), and maybe start a discussion
about moving to a more user-friendly distribution.

#

Here's a few resources about Athena@MIT:
<http://web.mit.edu/ist/isnews/v24/n02/240203.html>
<http://blog.spang.cc/2008/01/10/mit-athena-not-dead-yet>

~~~
smokey_the_bear
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.

~~~
sketerpot
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.

------
windsurfer
I'm at a university right now in a program that involves some 3D modeling and
rendering. Our 'render farm' was purchased about 4 years ago, and is now
barely capable of rendering the scenes the students create in less than a few
weeks. So the IT guys had to come up with a solution...

They installed some sort of batch render daemon on the lab computers (windows)
causing them to take, and I kid you not, 1 hour to log in. We essentially
don't have a lab anymore. Your experience might make the computers seem
unusable, but mine truly are for a while.

------
raquo
That's really sad. I'm in Russia, I thought that worst computer labs are here
(CRT monitors, Windows 98/2000, 100Mb quotas, no running overnight jobs, etc).

IMHO what you're describing is a clear manifestation of oldskool 'computers
are complex systems and are to be used by professionals' ideology (as opposed
to 'computers are easy tools for everyone').

------
philh
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 without too much frustration using the university
systems. I can even use dvorak.

(Noone else seems to have problems with them either, so it's not just that the
admins are as insane as I am.)

Not that this is meaningful data. But I'm not sure your experiences are
either. Whether computer labs provide value depends on the labs and the
students. There's no answer that will apply to all universities.

~~~
DougBTX
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.

~~~
VBprogrammer
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.

------
shard
I grew up at a time when unix computers were UNIX computers, SUNs and HPUXs.
The HPUXs were student run. They all had interfaces similar to fvwm2, and I
don't recall having many problems learning how to use it. In fact, the reason
that I can navigate so well in linux is because of the things I learned from
doing stuff on the unix machines back in college.

~~~
frustrated
There's nothing inherently wrong with fvwm2. I'm sure it was cutting edge back
in your day. But it's ridiculously outdated in 2009. You might have learnt to
use it, but today's students need to _unlearn_ everything they've learnt. Even
if they manage that, it's plain inefficient. By a big margin.

Whatever technology you grew up with, you're bound to think of that as the
natural interface. That's exactly the point I was making about the professors.

There was a time when you had to do typesetting by typewriter. There was a
time when all cars were stick-shift. There was a time when farmers had to
plant seeds manually. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to do any of those
things today.

I'm not sure if you were claiming you will learn linux better if you use
fvwm2, but that's simply not true.

But that is not the main point I'm making. What you need to understand is that
no matter what you, the admins or anyone else might think of fvwm2, it's
turning away the students in _droves_. This needs to be stopped.

~~~
ableal
> fvwm2, it's turning away the students in droves. This needs to be stopped.

Why ? Is the school losing any good computer scientists ?

~~~
jibiki
I had to use the computer lab for many of my comp sci courses. If the lab had
had an unusable window manager, then I wouldn't have taken nearly as many comp
sci classes. Undergrad CS course aren't just for CS majors.

------
systemtrigger
I think uni labs should just focus on providing great hub access - big
monitors, ethernet, wifi, disk. Students should be issued or be assumed to
have laptops and there ought to be a tech support center. Why do colleges
continue to overbuy hardware when it's clear from the outset every year how
many machines and licenses are needed?

~~~
javanix
Its hard to imagine a large group of CS majors managing to maintain a Unix
desktop suitable for development when pre-class discussions in senior-level
classes involve people complaining about the difficulties involved in
compiling from source.

I'm pretty sure most of the money saved by ditching the CS labs would go
towards Unix classes and a 24/7 support hotline.

~~~
frustrated
In my experience, the hacker qualities of CS undergrads fall on a pretty broad
spectrum. Even if the majority of students have trouble with basic Unix tasks,
I'm sure there will be 5% of them who will make excellent admins. And that's
more than you need.

~~~
javanix
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 things even more.

Granted, there are obvious upsides to forcing people to learn systems other
than Windows for their own use, and I think enough people would _eventually_
adapt, but I think the initial hurdle would just be too much to overcome in a
decently sized department.

~~~
wmf
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.

~~~
sketerpot
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.

------
drinian
I'm sorry, I thought that the CS computer lab was for doing CS work.

Yes, there's some stuff you probably should have had available -- automount
and a better print manager come to mind. But, really, what are you doing in CS
classes that can't be done well using fvwm?

------
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.

------
ShabbyDoo
Why would anyone use the computer lab? How many undergrads actually do any
computing for which $500 desktop computers in their dorm rooms would not be
more than sufficient? Do the labs require special, non-OS software? In this
day in age, that would be really weird. Even if classes are taught using
Microsoft stuff, the basic tools are all free anymore.

I recall reading that universities are doing away with dorm phone lines --
between cell phones and VOIP, students have no use for them anymore.

~~~
nomoresecrets
For the social aspect.

There was a famous story about some University's computer lab (I forget the
details) where they got fed up of the coffee machine. There was a perfectly
good cafeteria close by where the students could get coffee. Plus they had to
keep the machine stocked, service it, etc. It was just a pain in the ass, so
they got rid of it.

Within about a week, their TAs were swamped with demands on their time from
students. They had to take on like 2 extra people to meet the demand.

Turned out, that coffee machine was a social hub, and people would chat about
their problems, ask each other for tips and advice, and solve a large
percentage of their problems on their own.

So they bought a replacement coffee machine.

Now I'm imagining those students doing all the work on their computers in
their dorm rooms on their own. Hmm.

Sure, there's lots more connectivity these days and places you can ask for
help, but when learning/starting out that sort of personal contact etc is
quite useful.

------
slater
Sounds like a case of the bad ol' "I'm the boss here!"-style 'administrating',
eg. some grizzled unix wizard knows only HIS way of doing things, that's
automatically the way things SHOULD be done, these young whippersnappers'n
their fancy GUI-driven installers, get off my lawn etc.

All they have to show for themselves is a flawlessly running system, which, to
Those That Make The Decisions, is all that counts.

------
bartman
It's too bad to hear this.

I am very satisfied with our computer labs. We're having 7 labs with about 10
PCs each, all of them equipped with recent Intel CPUs and quite a lot of RAM.
Windows or Linux (Debian or SuSE I think) on all machines. Possibly all apps
that you're ever gonna need installed (ranging from python+IDEs to MS Visual
Studio, Qt, Gimp, MS Office, Open Office, ...). No hard disk quotas are
enforced, instead there's a fair use policy. Admins are very friendly and
talkable to about anything...

And if you don't like the machines in the lab, grab an ethernet cable or use
the WiFi available all over the campus.

The labs are used by many students, even though I'm not aware of anyone
without a laptop or a machine at home. It's just too comfortable... sit down,
have all the apps, all compilers you need for your studies ready for use.

In my opinion, this is how you should run a computer lab - user friendly
policies that encourage the use of the public machines. After all that helps
the students to get to know each other better and help each other.

For the record, I study at Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

------
snprbob86
Drexel University had decent labs of every variety: Linux, Mac and Windows.
The Linux labs -- used by the computer science and software engineering
students -- had reasonably modern single-core machines with 4:3 LCDs
approximately 20 inches in size. There was often a shortage of available
machines around project deadlines. However, the digital media students, just
one floor below us (in the basement), had beefy Windows machines with larger
dual monitors and access to powerful render farms! They had plenty of machines
to spare, but CS and SE students couldn't even get onto that floor with our
key card access. I have no idea who had access to the Mac labs. It certainly
wasn't us or the digital media students.

I'm pretty sure the reasoning for this is as follows:

1) Computer science and software engineering students prefer to use their own
computers

2) Digital media students can't afford the expensive licenses for the software
they need to use (Maya, Max, Photoshop, etc)

3) Typical personal laptops aren't powerful enough to do proper rendering work

4) You can always SSH in, use VIM, and compile from your personal laptop

------
cmars232
Back when I went to school (mid-90s), our computer lab was a bunch of orange-
screen vt220s connected to a Vax cluster. We didn't have fancy NCSA Mosaic
like UT, we had Lynx and gopher. We learned C on a VAX with a broken scanf.
Students dropped CS because they couldn't figure out EVE and EDT (visual
editors). Our internet connection came through a narrow tenuous pipe from UT
Austin. When it went down, I'd do a traceroute and then give "Mordac" over
there at UT a hard time.

Oh yeah, there was a PC lab. Running Windows 3.1. That was a place to type
your paper. You couldn't do real CS there.

And I had to bike uphill to class both ways in the Texas heat. :)

I think if you can take busted up hand-me-downs and backwards old crap, make
it work & explain how to others, and learn how to sidestep a
lazy/stubborn/indifferent IT (build your own stuff in ~/local, etc.), you can
adapt and do fine anywhere.

------
utnick
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 own computer labs that are not
restricted like the main cs lab. I know at least that in the robotics lab they
gave out root passwords to their ubuntu machines and you could pretty much do
as you like.

~~~
llimllib
> 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.

------
natch
A 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.

~~~
sketerpot
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?

------
endtime
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.

------
wmf
I see nothing has changed since I was there ten years ago. At that time the CS
admins _were_ students, but the job seemed to attract the BOFHest of the
BOFHs.

If you had an office you probably should have just put your machine on csres
and run it yourself.

------
tlrobinson
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.

------
dangrover
Northeastern's CCIS computer lab is a little bit like that. Lots of rows of
SUN workstations with some crufty old default window manager (even though you
can switch to Gnome).

------
Confusion
I find myself doubting the veracity of this article, because I just cannot
imagine this kind if lunacy. I majored in physics at the Delft University of
Technology and although it wasn't perfect, I might as well call it perfect
compared to what you are describing. The helpfulness of the IT department in
attaining goals made up for every shortcoming.

~~~
ashot
I went there, its true

------
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.

------
zitterbewegung
At UIC they have two kinds of computers. Computers that run according to ACCC
specifications and computers that are owned by the department of computer
science. Guess which ones are easier to deal with...

------
jlees
s/University of Texas at Austin/University of Cambridge/

All true, up to the point about package management, which didn't quite take a
week.

But as a result I use fvwm2 as my coding WM of choice. It's distraction-free!

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gommm
hey, 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...

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chanux
But the uni is for CS right? I think your uni has made a lot of good hackers
:).

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jesseendahl
Berkeley's Air Bears Wi-Fi works pretty well most of the time.

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gojomo
At UT, perhaps it's a Dell plot to defend Wintel.

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catz
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.

~~~
tlrobinson
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.

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hamidp
Let the students run their own machines?

Considering the difficulty of the entry-level classes (weed out) and the fact
that students often have 3-4 extra classes just like it, having them spend
hours upon hours of admin work. They're training to be computer scientists not
admins.

My school runs RHEL/gnome on some beefy quad-core machines. Whatever is needed
for a class is installed immediately and just works. No need to spend hours
hunting down packages and installing them, and then no need for the
professors/TAs to spend hours upon hours of duplicating configurations in
order to make sure that everything can be graded.

Students will acquire enough Unix knowledge throughout their 4 years by using
a well-maintained system. Most of them spend about 10-20 hrs/week using it for
development -- no need to add another 30 for sysadmin work.

