[OLUG] *@&^$%@# ballistic mouse

[Chris Garrity]

The more to tell is that the quality of instructing at CIST can vary
wildly.  Not just a little bit, but WILDLY.  Case in point, I've got an
instructor for Graph Theory that hasn't wasted a minute this semester,
and one for Digital Structures that has used an entire half of this
semester on K-maps.

I thought DBMS would be good, but the lectures are useless (absolutely)
and the grade for the entire semester hinges on two assignments.  At
least this instructor admits his faults, and he says "take it again next
semester if you don't like the grade".

I say *varies wildly*, I had one of your students teach my 1620, he was
excellent (perhaps a natural talent <g>).  Nobody liked him because he
actually taught.  I've also had excellent instructors for 1400, 3320,
and now again for 2850 (names not important).  But this semester I'm
stuck with two dud's.

I spoke to a classmate the Thursday before last, who is in his final
semester.  He claims that the only thing he's gotten from the program is
C++ syntax, which is very unfortunate.

The "luck of the draw" can determine your education at CIST.  And
another thing, if you want UNIX, which is almost required for upper
level courses, you have to get it yourself.  UNO doesn't offer a course
on UNIX per se.

Oh, if you have a question, and you ask someone in the lab, or at CDC,
you can forget about getting an answer ... I've tried, the best they're
for is fetching paper from the printer ... lol

I can think of it as job security, because only the very motivated will
be competent after they've spent their time and money.  Case and Point: 
4850's term project has me implementing a small database system using
PostgreSQL, Apache and Perl on Linux (of course).  I'm doing it this way
because I'll actually learn something ... as opposed to doing it VB and
Oracle style (puke).

Come to think of it I owe a good deal of everything I know (of value)
about computers/computing to    GNU/Linux and Open Source, but when I
open my mouth about it at UNO, you should see the stupid looks people
give me "its free? how do they make money? why do something if you're
not paid?"

-Chris Garrity

"Matt G. Payne" wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 24 Oct 1999, Chris Garrity wrote:
> 
> > perhaps its possible that when you switch into vmware and NT (that i
> > want to see) a different driver gets called to handle the mouse? just an
> > idea ... could be worse, you could be wasting your time at UNO :)
> >
> 
> Chris - What's this UNO flame-bait?  Interesting!  Please tell me more...
> 
> Thanks! -Matt