[OT] Re: [CLUG] hey guys.. college stuff

[Peter Flynn]

> Azathoth :: Ben Crosse wrote:
> > 
> > howdy,
> > i don't mail the list much... (real life/ programming mainly)...
> > i have a couple a questions tho...
> > 1) where's the best college in ireland for computer science / software
> > development?

[Donnchadh]
> Doesn't matter. You don't even need to do a degree these days to get a
> job. If you show a flair for computers you'll learn a lot more by
> yourself.

However, later in your career a degree may start to matter. Many
senior tech jobs require a degree as proof that you have had (at some
stage in your life) to sit down and prove your knowledge of some of
the formal aspects of the field. At that stage, no matter that you've
had 20 years doing Webmaster or whatever, a company which has a
contractual relationship with its customers to use only staff with
certifiable skills is not going to look at someone without a degree,
however right or wrong you may feel that to be.

> > 2) how good is UCC in terms of the Computer Science Degree?
> 
> Probably better than CIT right now, but that's only because they
> have Linux workstations and offer work placement. CIT has gone
> completely NT, though you can telnet to an AIX box,

Wow :-) But then NT is the market they obviously want to fill.

> > 3) is it worth me grabbing my money together and going to england?
> > are computer colleges better than the ones here?
> 
> Not unless you want to move away from home.

Or unless you really feel the cachet of Edinburgh, Cambridge, Oxford,
or Imperial is worth it.

> > 4) does UCC have a perm T1 or such connection?
> 
> All the major colleges and universities have permanent connections
> to the Internet, but shared between several thousand students all
> going to hotmail.com it's slow most of the time. (Apart from late at
> night and weekends if you're so inclined.)

UCC has a private 10Mb/s circuit to the HEAnet (the Irish academic
ISP).  This is currently underused, so it's not slow at all -- any
slowness comes from other links elsewhere (see next para). The figures
are all public: see http://mrtg.hea.net/mrtg/atm/atm.pvc.ucc.html

The HEAnet has a private 45MB/s circuit to New York (upgraded
yesterday from 34Mb/s), and two circuits (10Mb/s and 2Mb/s) to London
and Belfast respectively. They also have a 10Mb/s circuit to the INEX,
which is what connects them to the other ISPs -- some speed problems
may occur here, as the ISPs' connections to the INEX are probably not
as good, so there can be times when you dial up and try to connect to
a university Web site, and find you're going down a piece of wet
string to the INEX.

Figures for all these are at http://mrtg.hea.net/mrtg/

Anyone who uses HotMail from UCC must be mad.  There is no need for
any student to suffer HotMail: UCC has its own WebMail server which
provides advert-free access from anywhere (webmail.ucc.ie), and all
students automatically get an email account here anyway.

///Peter