[SLUG] Wild idea

[john at johnallsopp.co.uk]

> I would be interested in that.  I feel the need to be certified at
> something.

Excellent. Having just recently come through a degree, I was thinking
of treating this like a university module. They required 200 hours of
study. Over a year, that's about 4 hours a week.

Similarly, I was thinking that we'd have to learn from books, the
Internet, and man pages, etc. So perhaps we'd spend a hundred pounds
or so on books.

Did you notice on the objectives that the subjects are given a weight
.. 10 points being more important than 1.

I think it adds up to 105 points in total, although I think you get a
choice between the Red Hat and the Debian package manager (8 points),
so the total might be 97. Anyway, it's around 100, so I was thinking
it's 2 hours per point. So you'd spend 2 hours learning and revising
"Configure fundamental BIOS settings", but 16 hours learning and
revising how to process text streams using filters.

The only thing that occurs to me as being a problem with that, besides
actually committing four hours a week for two years (one exam each
year), is that at uni the answers were given to us. Here, we're going
to have to find out ourselves. Firstly, that might take more time, so
perhaps we should be thinking 6 hours a week (getting a bit much). The
other danger is that uni was easy because we learned what we were told
and that's what was examined. Working from the Objectives alone, we
might learn too little and miss points, or too much and dissipate our
effort.

The alternative would be to find a 'proper' course, perhaps a distance
one, but that, I'm sure, would cost money. If anyone wants to go
looking for one of those that's cool .. personally I'm OK with the
idea of going it alone.

> Just checked the web page...  Am I being a bit thick here ?   How do
> you configure the BIOS without a keyboard ?

Now, you see, if you had the exam under your belt you'd know the
answer (I've no idea).

J