Computers at Landers

On the up side, there are two well equipped computer labs, each with 20 or so up to date computers. They are open from noon until midnight, except sunday, tuesday, and thursday, when they are closed during night seder. The schedule makes sense in conjunction with our daily schedule - we are in morning seder until noon. Of course, it means that email cannot be checked during breakfast unless a person owns their own laptop, or can borrow a friend's. The labs are also open on friday afternoon after seder, and motzei shabbos.

The network itself, however, is set up, well, badly. There is a fast internet connection through the main Touro University, but the college has decided, for whatever reasons, to limit the bandwidth*, so pages sometimes take a minute or two to load. Of course, this means that broadband applications, like Google Video, are very slow. We are given 10 megabytes of space on the network, so unless you have a USB memory key, you can't store anything other than word documents. This may prevent storage of illegal material on the network, but it also means that I cannot do any image editing, not that they have any real software other than Microsoft Office, accounting software, and programming software. There is also a Unix shell that is availible if you are taking the Unix class, but otherwise it is unavailible.

There is also a wireless network in the dorms, which anyone who wishes to register their computer with the tech support staff can use. This network is a different matter - it is heavily filtered, so as not to allow access to inappropriate materials. The reaction here is mixed, with some people simply upset they are not given whatever they want, but others have valid criticisms of the system. Search engines are off-limits, due to the fact that they cache pages. This would be mildly annoying, but in addition, any time a page that is blocked, such as Google, is requested by a computer then that computer is blocked from wireless network for 24 hours.

The systems in palce certainly prevent abuse of any holes that may exist in the filtering, and make the administration of the system simple enough that the four person staff at our campus seems ridiculous - My high school had a larger network, with more computers, and was run by one full time employee - and many students feel the restrictions are significantly too draconian, and impairs regular use of the network. Basically, the system as a whole is well funded, but full of red tape. Some of the annoyance is there for good reason, but all of which make the computer system less than fun to use.

PS. I asked about installing an image editing program, and was told that while I couldn't do it as the computers are locked down, it is possible to submit a request to add a program, and if it did not cost touro money, such as in this instance, GIMP, it was likely to be approved. I asked them to request this, and they said that they would not get a response for two weeks, and that it might be added to the hard drive images when they were updated, for next semester. This tells me two things; the first is that the people here are not simply being jerks, nor unwilling to accept any changes, but that second, the IT overhead they have for this place is really ridiculous, for a school with less than 200 students on this campus.

*) This was fixed in the weeks after I published this, and has been teriffic since. Considering what people here say about the impossiblity of changing anything here, I was impressed with their speed of response to this problem.