On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Michael Torrie <torr...@gmail.com> wrote: > Could be. I also had a hard time finding Windows admin help as well as > Linux. > > As for Linux, I found that the only real experience BYU students seemed > to have was what they were forced to do for classes. Whether that be > just programming in CS 240 or an IT class where they set up a LAMP > server. But very few of them did anything with Linux outside of class. > Even students who were experienced with Windows didn't seem to really > have explored the OS at all. Few knew what regedit was.
When I first started using Linux, in 2004, the only programming experience I had was in CS 142 the previous semester. But I couldn't get a bunch of stuff working on my laptop that I was trying to install Linux on. Along the way I learned how to read (inasmuch as it's possible) and edit Perl and Python scripts enough to get things to work. About a billion Google searches and broken installs later I discovered that the tinkering I had to do to get things to work was fun. Now that things work in Linux without quite as much tinkering, I get the feeling that there are many fewer people who discover that tinkering is fun. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. But I think a little bit of it was some "constructive criticism" in the form of a couple RTFM replies to lazy questions I asked early on (both on this list and on the UUG), which I somehow managed to turn into positive learning experiences, and having people that I looked up to in a technological sense who were old-school hackers. I get the sense that although Stack Overflow answers can provide that constructive criticism, it's more filtered by anonymity, and even when somebody says "RTM" to a lazy question, someone else will come along and post an answer in the hopes of an easy reputation boost. I don't think that gamification has been entirely good for "teaching a man to fish". I've never actually been to a PLUG meeting, and only a few UUG meetings, but I still read the lists regularly and consider many of you to have been good influences in starting me out on a hacking career. -- Alex Esplin /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
