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Comment by spiritplumber | Hacker News Reader

I helped write parallelknoppix when I was an undergrad - our university's 2nd cluster ended up being a bunch of laptops with broken displays running it. Took me a whole summer.

Then the next semester I am denied the ability to take a parallel computing class because it was for graduate students only and the prof. would not accept a waiver even though the class was being taught on the cluster me and a buddy built.

That I still had root on.

So I added a script that would renice the prof.'s jobs to be as slow as possible.

BOFH moment :)

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The school I went to had similar but more insane policies

* I frequently took computer science graduate courses and received only undergrad. credit because they could not offer the undergrad course

* Other majors were default prohibited from taking computer science courses under the guise of a shortage of places in classes. Even when those majors required a computer science course to graduate

I would like to point out that 300 and 400 level courses in the CS program usually had no more than 8 students. I distinctly remember meeting in a closet for one of my classes, because we had so few students they couldn't justify giving us a classroom.

Contrast that with the math department where I wanted to take some courses in parallel rather than serial. After a short conversation with the professor he said "ok sure, seems alright to me".

Why do you guys think such things happen ?

Academia being inelastic and refusing to adapt in the face of market forces.

Students aren't the business most universities think they are in.

My guess is they wanted you to pay the higher CS tuition to take the CS classes.

Math departments also tend to be a lot more lax in my experience. Case in point: I got sign-off to take a 300-level pure math class without its 300-level prereq. As well as just replace one required course for another to graduate.

    Other majors were default prohibited from taking computer science courses under the guise of a shortage of places in classes. Even when those majors required a computer science course to graduate

I went to an institution that did the opposite; seats were reserved for non-cs majors despite a shortage of sections. This resulted in CS undergrads waiting for courses just so they could graduate. It was frustrating because it felt like the department was taking care of outsiders over its own.

I might be jumping to conclusions, but orgs which value revenue often prioritize new customers over existing (perhaps captive) customers.

Part of that is because “average class size” is used in metrics for the university ranking systems and every university out there wants to game those rankings.

i think i've read this kind of reply before. and i was not wrong [1]. nice story to tell. too bad my uni. didn't have that kind of facilities and opportunities.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197024

Parallel knoppix sounds cool. Did the os's on each machine coordinate in any way at the kernel level? Or was it all user level libs/apps/services?

Almost certainly user level libraries. Coordinating at the kernel level is either a single system image[1] or a distributed operating system[2], which are very uncommon in scientific computing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_operating_system

user level... tbh I'm surprised the whole thing worked at all!

Prof might’ve done you a favor. Seems like you didn’t need that class anyway.

I wanted the credit hours though :)

A “Snoop on to them, as they snoop on to us” moment. Good for you

That was nice of you!

One might even say that it had a very high nice value;)

Abusing admin priviledges like this confirms that it was probably a good idea to deny you access to the course, you were obviously too young.

Interesting. It's likely the point of constraining the graduate course to grad students had nothing to do with their maturity. But you see what you think is a sign of immaturity, and turn the constraint into a maturity filter.

I'm quite grown, and I wonder about the ownership/control of the cluster and why he didn't simply lock the professor out entirely, contingent on the approval of his waiver.

If anything, doing something as small as lowering the priority of his jobs instead of brazenly stonewalling him might be the sign of immaturity.

The computers were mostly the school's, the carpentry was ours (mine and a friend's), the cabling and network switches were ours (scavenged, eventually they bought a nice big switch), the labor was ours.

It's not really much of a prank war if you do a small prank and the other guy tries like hell to pretend he didn't notice and also tries like hell to pretend he didn't see you derping around in the building... escalating would have been evil on my part :)

Machiavellian... evil... semantics.

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