Oh, I did hear that doing an EE internship with HP at their Corvallis, OR facility was pretty simple, but also very uneventful and not as frutiful as one might expect. A friend of mine complains about it being boring and simple, as he and the other interns aren't expected to really do much.
I heard similar points from a CS major that did another internship with HP as well.
True. Internships are wonderful things but there are other options available besides that (at least if you're at a 4 year institution like me and are in a semi-science related field)...
Research projects - This will provide you with other means to accomplish your goals and maybe further your interests beyond where you currently are at. Who ever knew that that robotics vision recognition project or P2P software project (2 projects that were given at my school to CS/EE majors) could look so good on a resume, would help you get contacts with faculty for grad school and possibly pay for things as well as help you earn credit towards your degree?
Co-ops - Although it's not really something I'm looking for because I'm up to my neck in earned credits (pre-high school community college program - Running Start for anyone that knows..), it is another available alternative to internships. Sure, you might have to pay some money and write a paper, but you get paid in return most of the time and get credit for your work.
Just a thought. But yeah.. doing either an internship, co-op, or participating in a research project is important in order to advance in many business pertinent fields nowadays. Employers want to see someone who got more than their cap and gown.. they want to see potential, interest and experience.
Personally, I find this an interesting debate because this is a very important issue with planning out IT infrastructures within a business community.
I personally think-as I wrote in my title-that the right tool should be used for the right job.
I will not do a my distro is better than your distro response, but rather give my opinions on a series of distros that I have come across.
Debian: Most likely the best system for hardcore admins out there. The packages and software are stable, and even the "unstable versions" of programs have been available for a great deal of time. The only issue is that finding software and getting support for newer hardware can be a bit of an issue since Debian is so stable that many packages are outdated.
Gentoo: Best server package if you intend on staying on the bleeding edge in terms of software and hardware support, and a very simple package installation system with stability kept in mind. Great support because many people in the forums are available to answer questions related to software and hardware issues, and just for general how-to-solve-this-problem type of issues. The bad thing about Gentoo is that in some cases there are issues with package maintainence, support, and the compile times for source are an issue.
Redhat: Wonderful out of the box system with simple setup. The horrible part about Redhat though is that it's terribly inefficient and the packages are old sometimes and deprecated. This is wonderful for stable systems, so maybe in fact this is the ideal system for a beginning admin and for a group of people who need support from a third party (in this case Redhat), since that is ultimately your only option for support really other than user groups, etc. Many server makers such as Dell and IBM provide server support through Redhat as well because they provide (IMO) the best enterprise support for people without admins. It's package system is RPMs though, which is notorious for having dependency and installation issues due to the way it's setup.
Slackware: Great for minimalist servers that need as many services as possible without the bloat that Redhat and-sometimes-Debian have. Supposedly the install system has improved since I last used Slackware (a package management tool called slapt-get, similar to apt-get, was made), but support is sometimes limited and many of the packages that aren't available on the CD or via slapt-get need to be compiled/installed manually.
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Oh, I did hear that doing an EE internship with HP at their Corvallis, OR facility was pretty simple, but also very uneventful and not as frutiful as one might expect. A friend of mine complains about it being boring and simple, as he and the other interns aren't expected to really do much. I heard similar points from a CS major that did another internship with HP as well.
True. Internships are wonderful things but there are other options available besides that (at least if you're at a 4 year institution like me and are in a semi-science related field)...
Research projects - This will provide you with other means to accomplish your goals and maybe further your interests beyond where you currently are at. Who ever knew that that robotics vision recognition project or P2P software project (2 projects that were given at my school to CS/EE majors) could look so good on a resume, would help you get contacts with faculty for grad school and possibly pay for things as well as help you earn credit towards your degree?
Co-ops - Although it's not really something I'm looking for because I'm up to my neck in earned credits (pre-high school community college program - Running Start for anyone that knows..), it is another available alternative to internships. Sure, you might have to pay some money and write a paper, but you get paid in return most of the time and get credit for your work.
Just a thought. But yeah.. doing either an internship, co-op, or participating in a research project is important in order to advance in many business pertinent fields nowadays. Employers want to see someone who got more than their cap and gown.. they want to see potential, interest and experience.
Personally, I find this an interesting debate because this is a very important issue with planning out IT infrastructures within a business community.
I personally think-as I wrote in my title-that the right tool should be used for the right job.
I will not do a my distro is better than your distro response, but rather give my opinions on a series of distros that I have come across.
Debian: Most likely the best system for hardcore admins out there. The packages and software are stable, and even the "unstable versions" of programs have been available for a great deal of time. The only issue is that finding software and getting support for newer hardware can be a bit of an issue since Debian is so stable that many packages are outdated.
Gentoo: Best server package if you intend on staying on the bleeding edge in terms of software and hardware support, and a very simple package installation system with stability kept in mind. Great support because many people in the forums are available to answer questions related to software and hardware issues, and just for general how-to-solve-this-problem type of issues. The bad thing about Gentoo is that in some cases there are issues with package maintainence, support, and the compile times for source are an issue.
Redhat: Wonderful out of the box system with simple setup. The horrible part about Redhat though is that it's terribly inefficient and the packages are old sometimes and deprecated. This is wonderful for stable systems, so maybe in fact this is the ideal system for a beginning admin and for a group of people who need support from a third party (in this case Redhat), since that is ultimately your only option for support really other than user groups, etc. Many server makers such as Dell and IBM provide server support through Redhat as well because they provide (IMO) the best enterprise support for people without admins. It's package system is RPMs though, which is notorious for having dependency and installation issues due to the way it's setup.
Slackware: Great for minimalist servers that need as many services as possible without the bloat that Redhat and-sometimes-Debian have. Supposedly the install system has improved since I last used Slackware (a package management tool called slapt-get, similar to apt-get, was made), but support is sometimes limited and many of the packages that aren't available on the CD or via slapt-get need to be compiled/installed manually.