At 7:22 PM -0500 7/11/08, Shawn McKenzie wrote:
Jim Lucas wrote:
tedd wrote:
The only downside of the classroom environment is that I can
honestly learn more from this group et al than I can in a
classroom. I just don't see academia keeping up with technology.
By time the instructors prepare their class-notes, their
class-notes are outdated -- or so is my perspective.
This is so true. Our Community College here in Central Oregon has
a Cisco class that is based on the IOS from about 8 years ago.
Some of the things that the guy teaches are not even in the current
ISO. Or the work-a-rounds he talks about for problems in that ISO
have already been fixed in the current releases.
...and he even calls the IOS an ISO sometimes ;-)
He just proved his point, right?
I deal with local colleges a bit -- taught a few classes.
Recently our local Community College (LCC) decided to return to their
previous database. They tried using Oracle for about six years, but
they could never get it to work and finally gave up.
Unfortunately in the process, they spent over $20 million dollars,
which included a help desk that cost over $650,000 per year, and
everything failed miserably. They simply didn't have the experience
and no one would admit that they didn't.
Instead of hiring local talent, the board of trustees sought out
"experts" from NYC who encouraged them to throw even more money at
the problem.
You see, NYC has all their colleges running on Oracle, but they also
have over 200 full-time Oracle programmers working on it.
It wasn't until the Federal government threaten to hold up government
money (because the college wasn't paying students their grant and
other monies) that the college wised up and retreated from their
"We're just like NYC" attitude.
Sometimes, these "smart" people aren't as smart as they think they are.
Cheers,
tedd
PS: BTW -- I offered my talents but they didn't have the professional
curiosity to even reply. I'm afraid that the bad news isn't over for
the local taxpayer just yet.
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