It's sickening actually. They actually use the Windows machines in ECF to teach the non-ECE and non-EngSci students C programming. With Visual Studio. On top of that, our fantastic new (3 year old) Bahen Centre for Information Technology is almost completely void of Linux, Solaris or just about anything non-Windows. I sit here studying for Computer Networks on a Win2000 machine in one of the ECE-only labs.
Here at the University of Toronto we have a fantastically (un)healthy mix of systems for public use. The general student population has consistent access to (if I'm not mistaken mostly Dell) machines running Windows on mostly NetWare, I believe.
Students in Computer Science have access to a network of UNIX machines, though I have no idea what their flavour of choice is.
Here in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering we have more than our share of networks. The central Engineering Computing Facility provides several hundred Windows boxes and several hundred RedHat machines (mostly Dell again, I'm pretty sure).
Specifically within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the division of Engineering Science, we have the use of a whole bunch of Sun Solaris machines (aged, and not terribly well-maintained) specifically required for use in some courses.
Getting between everything isn't really the cheeriest part of my day, though I tend to avoid the campus-wide networks (unless I'm wirelessly connected), and tend to stick to the RedHat boxes, though I'll be SSHing between networks for more than my share of time.
there are thousands of people that really DO have the time to scan through every single crappy show ever made on such a system to rate them.
The only problem with that is... I really don't think I'd fully trust ratings made by people who have nothing better to do all day long but sift through the inane drivel that our society would produce if given free rein.
I don't think one could live through it with a sense of taste (among other things) intact.
I can see the benefits possible with on-demand television. Downloading what you want to watch and watching it. The idea has been proposed before and is not really new.
What seems to be new here is the local production and upload of television programmes. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I don't see this being adopted worldwide. Consider something like this being implemented in a large city. Not only would you possibly now have thousands of options to download in varying degrees of insanely crappy quality, but I'm sure you'd also fill up these "portals" with tons of crap uploaded by people thinking they are doing a public service.
Unfortunately, if this kind of idea takes off, we wouldn't be able to just limit it to places that need it, like rural areas that otherwise don't have their own coverage. I'm no fan of the news media industry, but there is a reason people go to school for journalism and don't become newscasters simply by living in an area where news is made.
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It's sickening actually. They actually use the Windows machines in ECF to teach the non-ECE and non-EngSci students C programming. With Visual Studio. On top of that, our fantastic new (3 year old) Bahen Centre for Information Technology is almost completely void of Linux, Solaris or just about anything non-Windows. I sit here studying for Computer Networks on a Win2000 machine in one of the ECE-only labs.
Here at the University of Toronto we have a fantastically (un)healthy mix of systems for public use. The general student population has consistent access to (if I'm not mistaken mostly Dell) machines running Windows on mostly NetWare, I believe.
Students in Computer Science have access to a network of UNIX machines, though I have no idea what their flavour of choice is.
Here in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering we have more than our share of networks. The central Engineering Computing Facility provides several hundred Windows boxes and several hundred RedHat machines (mostly Dell again, I'm pretty sure).
Specifically within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the division of Engineering Science, we have the use of a whole bunch of Sun Solaris machines (aged, and not terribly well-maintained) specifically required for use in some courses.
Getting between everything isn't really the cheeriest part of my day, though I tend to avoid the campus-wide networks (unless I'm wirelessly connected), and tend to stick to the RedHat boxes, though I'll be SSHing between networks for more than my share of time.
there are thousands of people that really DO have the time to scan through every single crappy show ever made on such a system to rate them.
The only problem with that is... I really don't think I'd fully trust ratings made by people who have nothing better to do all day long but sift through the inane drivel that our society would produce if given free rein.
I don't think one could live through it with a sense of taste (among other things) intact.
No, no, no... not programmers... They said "ENGLISH" to code converter...
I can see the benefits possible with on-demand television. Downloading what you want to watch and watching it. The idea has been proposed before and is not really new.
What seems to be new here is the local production and upload of television programmes. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but I don't see this being adopted worldwide. Consider something like this being implemented in a large city. Not only would you possibly now have thousands of options to download in varying degrees of insanely crappy quality, but I'm sure you'd also fill up these "portals" with tons of crap uploaded by people thinking they are doing a public service.
Unfortunately, if this kind of idea takes off, we wouldn't be able to just limit it to places that need it, like rural areas that otherwise don't have their own coverage. I'm no fan of the news media industry, but there is a reason people go to school for journalism and don't become newscasters simply by living in an area where news is made.