Hey Hey,
Everyone knows the teachers and students are all stupid... that's why even in college's with large IT faculties an IT Dept. is required.
I support IT students and non-IT students and sadly enough the really dumb questions always come from the IT students.
Conversation with a non-IT student
Student: So why wasn't my computer going on the net
Me: You had a bunch of malware... you know spyware, adware and crap like that.
S: How do you get that stuff?
M: Surfing the net, downloading over P2P software, there's several ways to get it.
S: How did you get rid of it... can I get rid of it on my own?
M: I used a few programs (list of programs like Spybot, AdAware, HJT and others and how to install them)
S: Great and thanks again.
Same conversation with an IT student
Student: So why wasn't my computer conneting to the network
Me: It was, you had a bunch of malware so you couldn't load websites.
S: That's not possible I have four firewalls, three AVs and I personally inspect every 1 & 0 before it enters my computer.
M: Well I'm just telling you what's on there..
S: I was obviously hacked... Someone hacked me and put this on there... You should really do something about this if they were good enough to hack me they're prolly hacking everything.
M (Rolling eyes): Sure... whatever you say... have a good day.
S: Btw I'm having problems with Visual Studio can you fix that while I'm here
M: I'm not really a programmer I don't deal with that software.
S: Please.. I have a project due in 10 minutes and I really need this to work.
M (After double clicking the link to load the software): There you go... it works fine
S: Sure everything works in here, you guys have something special that makes computers work
M (Booting the student out the door): have a good day.
I have to say I've found programming students to be the worst... Compare them with a Networking or Internet Technologist or plain old technologist and the programmers are definately the worst.... I've never met a less intelligent group of people (other than... insert some anti-american comment here just so people know it's me :P j/k )...
However we also have profs who are the same.... The guy I work with supports faculty... He get's calls because accounts on AD are locked out regulary (this shouldn't be that difficult)... Faculty that want to use their laptop but can't connect it to the VGA connection for the projector (Yes it's all hooked up... they simply have to plug it in).. Faculty that can't operate remotes and VCRs... Although some of the IT Faculty are something else also... The programming profs send students with VS .Net problems to us because they don't know how to solve them... (even though they teach in that environment). We have networking profs that tell us it's impossible to sniff through a switch one class and then the next tell us that sniffing a switch is the exact same as sniffing a hub (using something like ethereal with no arp poisoning or anything of the sort). We had a prof tell us once that IPv4 and IPv6 cannot connect to each other in any way... Yet I was sitting on Efnet at the time which has both IPv4 and IPv6 servers... I used to paste some of the lectures onto IRC because the words that come out of their mouths are ridiculous...
In the end the only reliable people are the IT support staff... no one else has a clue :D
Peace,
HT
