Re: One View On The State Of Education

Straydog wrote:


On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, BMJ wrote:

morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I long gave up trying to figure out what engineering educators try to
accomplish.

Wait until the day when google goes offline for more than a week, and
see what happens to the kids.


They might actually have to do some actual work rather than copying and pasting, won't they?

It saddens me to see how the professionalism that my profs instilled in me isn't even mentioned in universities nowadays. When there are, say, physicists teaching engineering courses, let alone being properly registered, I can only wonder where students are going to learn it from. Certainly not industry, as any notion of professionalism will be team-built and warm-and-huggied out of them.

I guess that's why the profession is pushing mentoring. On the other hand, how did things get to that state to begin with?


Lots of guys have been trying to figure out why the Roman Empire declined and fell, too.

So, now that you have played with Linux for a while, how about telling us your impressions? I've been waiting with baited breath for many days now.

So far, it's gone a lot better than I expected.

The leading contenders for favourite distributions of the ones I looked at are Ubuntu and FreeBSD. Both installed quite easily on my machine, though I noted that I needed a later version for the latter due to hardware incompatibilities. It took about an hour to go through all 3 CDs while Ubuntu was ready to run within a few minutes.

Ubuntu's default desktop is Gnome, which I like as it's easy to navigate and the menus are nicely laid out and well-organized. FreeBSD runs KDE by default, but after finding the right preferences file, I got it to run Gnome.

I only used Ubuntu to access the Internet and that was quite simple to do. I connected an Ethernet cable to my modem and then launched Firefox. I haven't tried e-mail yet.

I still have to work on partitioning the hard drive but I have a number of CDs with utilities that should let me do that. Maybe then I could install at least two distributions and then compare them. (During my initial attempt to install FreeBSD, I accidentally trashed the Vista that came with the machine. No great loss, there as Vista didn't impress me in the least.)

I tried a number of other distributions but they tended to be variations of either Ubuntu or FreeBSD, often with fuzzy graphics and rather pedestrian desktops. The website I referred to for this is at:

http://distrowatch.com

and I've been going through its database. In addition to Linux from Scratch, there appears to be another website where one can build one's own distribution and that may be the direction I'll eventually go once I have some experience in using Linux. At least I won't have to install all sorts of "cool" crap on it without having a choice in the matter.


Mind you that I'm still using my Win98SE box w Pentium I (75 mHz [Neanderthal to Brother Zack] PC) and Netterm as a telnet client (actually a Win3.1 ap), right now. Zone Alarm 2.6, too.

I actually got quite a decent machine. It's a Compaq Presario which has a dual-core Pentium D processor, so it's fairly fast.





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