[Rummyfan]

Many students won't have the math background for a skilled trade, and certainly will not have the skills to enter a computer science or engineering program.

I recently finished an on-line intro course for cybersecurity (I took it mainly out of boredom, the lockdown and all...). it was eight sessions of three-and-a-half-hours each. The ninth and last session there was a final exam. Just prior to the exam, one of the students asked 'what is the network card?'. This after over twenty-four hours of class sessions. I was astounded.

[Paladin2]

“...what is the network card?’...”

I have a crate of those.

Pretty useless these daze as comms are just a chip or two going to an internal antenna. MAYBE a chip going to an external connector also on the m/b.

[RetiredScientist]

I feel your pain. When I was still gainfully employed, I needed systems that had image analysis and processing capabilities. We had limited budgets, so I convinced my management to let me use open source software. I used ImageJ/Fiji and wrote custom code to process my images. The advantage of open source code was that I could work on some issues at home where I fewer interruptions.

The advantage of open source software was that there is a community of users who help one another. To succeed at this one need both curiosity and patience to do the required debugging. The academic users often had online workshops and shared the code. For me, this was better than closed source software where a user had to wait until a developer implemented the required algorithms. I would test releases and write and share code to analyze problems that interested both my clients and me.

[KarlInOhio]

'what is the network card?'

Was he confused by the network part or the card part? When was the last time you messed with a network card? Other than video cards, does anyone even plug anything into the bus anymore? The last card I bought was a USB 3.0 card for an older computer that only had USB 2.0, and that was a few years ago.

[VeniVidiVici]

Just prior to the exam, one of the students asked 'what is the network card?'

It's like the Joker. However, in the IT world it's called the Network Card.