Down With Numbers

That’s the kind of degree we’ll be seeing people getting soon if we’re not careful. It’s all thanks to this wonderful government thinking it knows what’s best for 18 year old school-leavers. Or, at least, thinking it knows what’s best for its figures compared to the rest of Europe.

For those unaware of Labour’s policy on 18-year-old school leavers, it is to get 50% of them into university. That’s right, one in every two of those finishing sixth form should be enrolling on a university course, according to the government. If you consider the amount of people we’re dealing with here, that’s a gross quantity of people flowing into the higher education system.

During the course of Labour’s government, we’ve seen new courses created at many universities precisely for the purpose of getting more people into university. Even the last education secretary, Estelle Morris, described things like media studies as being “Mickey Mouse” courses, and I agree. They’re simply there to bolster the government’s figures - the people coming out of them have wasted 3 years of the lives of both the university’s staff and themselves, along with huge quantities of the tax payers’ money, without gaining a single bit of truly useful, applicable skills and knowledge.

Some may argue that university isn’t about learning specific things, it’s about learning how to guide your own education, and I agree that it is a large part of it. However, why spend 3 years somewhere just learning how to guide your own education and getting nothing else out of it when you could be doing an appreticeship, learning useful skills that will help you to become a valuable member of society in the future. Many of the people on these created-for-figures courses are simply not suited for university, and nor is university suited for them, and that helps no-one at all. However, there are other options that ARE more suitable for them, such as the aforementioned apprenticeships.

The government tries to shepherd 50% of school-leavers into university, and then they wonder why it is that universities are running out of money. If governments didn’t keep trying to shove more and more people into university just for the sake of getting higher numbers on their data sheets, then they wouldn’t have the fiasco with tuition fees that they’re having at the moment. Hell, the student grant would probably still exist, and there wouldn’t be the ridiculous ratios of applicants to places that there are now.

Frankly, the higher education system is a mess. If the government would stop messing around with it then perhaps it would stabilise and actually gain a bit of credibility. As it is, it’s just a giant machine for churning out people with strings of letters after their name but missing the skills necessary to be useful to society.

Well, I already did a first impressions entry for Doom 3, so now that I’ve completed it I think it’s fitting that I do a last impressions entry too. If you haven’t played Doom 3 yet, or haven’t finished it, and you don’t want any spoilers as to what’s up ahead, then it’s probably wise not to read this.

I’m still overwhelmingly impressed with the whole thing. You can certainly see where the four years of development went, not just in the game’s size (it took me nearly two weeks of playing it for a couple of hours a day) but in the level of detail maintained right to the end.

You do start to find the endless lab-esque environments getting a little bit repetetive, and you start to wonder if it really is just becoming a run-and-gun. But then you enter Hell. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to make it compared to the way that id have done it in Doom 3 - it’s simply everything that you would expect from Hell. Super-terrifying, super-detailed, super-amazing.

Hell only lasts for one level, unfortunately, although that’s probably a good thing seeing as how scary it was. Once you get thrown back onto Mars, it’s no longer the standard messed-up-lab look - it’s a demonic, hell-riddled lab nightmare. They start to ramp up the difficulty, too; one battle that springs to mind was an Arch Vile and two Hellknights. They even move away from standard lab fare, having you crawling about in caverns trying to descend deeper into Mars.

The only real disappointment in Doom 3 was the final boss. While the other bosses weren’t difficult in comparison to some other games, the Cyberdemon was just obscenely easy. If you can’t do it without getting attacked a maximum of three times by an Imp or that other enemy whose name I forget, then you should seriously re-evaluate your games playing ability. However, it was sort of made up for by discovering the ‘id brick’, behind which was a PDA containing notes of thanks from all the Doom 3 developers. Gotta love Easter Eggs.

Herf is now at version 0.2. At last. I’ll update the page about it sometime soon, along with the changelog.

I won’t be upgrading this site to be powered by 0.2 rather than 0.1.1, since there’s no additional functionality in it that I need at the moment. I’ll just crack on with 0.3, so hopefully Graham will get off my back sometime in the next few centuries.

I made a new tech demo, showing how to do hardware accelerated z-buffer shadow mapping with HLSL, in D3D9. It doesn’t work on ATi hardware, since ATi are rubbish and haven’t implemented the hardware support for them that nVidia have. You’ll find it on the projects page.

I’ve dabbled on and off with Linux many times in the last few years. The first distribution I tried was Red Hat 7 (boxed retail version, no less), whose installer wouldn’t even run - its kernel panicked before it could start up the installation program. However, I was not deterred, and various other distributions followed.

The one I tried after RH7 was Mandrake 8.0, which did the same as RH7. The installer for 8.2, however, decided to work, but I think there was something critically wrong with the system which made it pretty much unusable (I can’t remember much of Mdk 8.2). I also tried Mandrake 9, which did install and did run fine, but I just didn’t like. Mandrake 10 was only marginally better than 8.0, in that the installer ran (but only if I used a PS/2 mouse, not a USB one), but when I booted I discovered that a bunch of stuff wasn’t available, including networking and FAT32 support.

Other than Mandrake, I have also tried Fedora Core 1, which installed beautifully but then opened up applications painfully slowly to the point of being stupid (2+ minutes for anything, even Konsole).

The common factor through all of this is that I was doing it dual-boot with Windows, so I didn’t dare to fiddle about too much in case I accidentally wiped Windows or something, which would be a bit annoying. (Mandrake 10 came close, by messing up the NT bootloader, but that’s easily restored if you have a DOS boot disk.) So, when I recently obtained the necessary parts to have a complete second computer, my immediate thought was “Let’s sort out Linux once and for all.”

The system’s a Celeron 2.4 GHz with 256 MB of RAM, a 20 GB hard disk and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 for the graphics card - more than ample for running any modern distribution of Linux. To cut a long story short, I encountered yet more problems along the way, but I cut them down. Getting my wireless NIC working took me two days; getting them to load applications in a reasonable amount of time took a few hours of Googling. And the distribution I settled with? Fedora Core 1.

The wireless NIC was a nightmare. In actual fact, I haven’t tried getting it working on this exact system, but I did get it working under FC1 on an old P3 450 MHz, and so I’m hoping that there’ll be no change when I get it working on this new system. The NIC I use is a Netgear WG311 v2, which is based on some obscure Texas Instruments chipset (the ACX111) which only a few other cards use. Instead of using the native drivers (which I couldn’t get working), I instead used ndiswrapper along with the firmware for a D-Link wireless NIC that uses the ACX111, since the Netgear firmware for my card doesn’t work properly with ndiswrapper. (Don’t ask…)

Applications loading slowly turned out to be because my system’s hostname was mal-formed, not being of the form “something.localhost”. Changing this fixed it instantly, although it took me some time to find the solution. This problem is not a Fedora Core 1 problem, as I experienced it when I installed Mandrake 10 and SuSE 9.1 on the new system too (although if I had a more thorough knowledge of networking, it may have been easier to fix). Had I found this solution back when I tried FC1 in dual-boot with Windows, I might not have given up with Linux at that point in time.

After the last few years of relentless Linux pain, I think Tux must have decided to cut me some slack in the last couple of days, as I got Samba (NFS and SMB file sharing support in Linux) working without any hassle at all - just edited smb.conf and bingo, my machine turned up in the network places on my Windows box. Apache 2 also worked without a hitch (even across the network), and there was very little hitching with MySQL, so I’m expecting some huge show-stopper of a problem to rear its ugly head in the next few days.

To celebrate this sudden spate of Linux success, I’ve decided to change the boring naming convention across the network (wireless access point was WDHSWLAN, my Windows box was Francis-1, etc.) and re-name everything after enemies in Doom. My wireless access point is now Arachnotron and my Linux box is PainElemental. My Windows box?

Mancubus.

Arachnotron	Pain Elemental	Mancubus