Today, and this time of day particularly, is one of those special moments in time where the day, month, year, hour and minute are all the same. It seems like a good time to post some rant at this auspicious minute. Yeah, I missed 08/08/08 08:08, but I’m sure this will do just as well. It will be a busy day (like any other day of course), but I’m sure I can find a few minutes to gripe about something.
First off, it is PMS time again. PMS is Performance Management System. It is time to do year-end review. I’ve always thought the timing of such reviews are very strange. It’s only early September. There are a good 3 months more to go before the end of year, and we’re doing a year-end review now. It’s even more strange when you consider that the mid-year review wasn’t too long ago. The timing wasn’t so “off” when PMS was first introduced, but over the years, it seems upper management’s clock started to skew.
Let’s gripe about students for a moment. Specifically, our computer science students. I feel “old” complaining about the younger generation, but the truth is I think year after year, our computer science students are getting more and more hopelessly clueless about computers. How many times have I seen our dear students behaving as if they were top-level corporate executive, asking for help to setup or fix simple things, for which there is good accurate documentation, but they don’t care about it, just want someone to do it for them, they don’t care how it is done, just make it work.
I was rather surprised, a few years ago when I attended a seminar by APC (the UPS company), to find an Arts and Social Science undergraduate part-timing as product pre-sales. I wondered where had our computer science students gone to. Probably struggling with installing Java in their notebook.
Time and again, I “spy” to see what sort of complicated technical problems they run into. A student claims to have followed a simple step-by-step instruction to the dot. There’s just like 5 steps. One of those steps said to copy 2 files to a specific directory. She says yes she’s done it. You look in the directory. The files are not there. Oh dear, she’s totally stumped. Probably she didn’t know how to copy files. Sometimes I think anything beyond double-clicking an icon is too complicated for our students.
Later today I’m planning to pop by to see what the Linux NUS user group is up to. They have been awfully quiet imho. I seem to think the OS/2 user group I was involved in made a lot more impact, even though our “user base” is significantly smaller. OS/2 is now extinct, but remnants of our history remain embedded in the Internet history. The Linux community has struggled for years, sometimes I wonder what real progress have they made. I’ve too many things to rant about Linux, I shall save it for another day.
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