[Wowfunhappy]

> I know CompSci majors who graduated only knowing Java and who were totally lost if they had to replace a ram chip in a computer.

The rest of your post notwithstanding, I don't see why a CompSci major should need to know how to replace a stick of ram.

[cosmodisk]

They should know it all: where the cpu and ram is, how the motherboard look like and etc. Nobody expects them to go out there and start fixing computers, however if someone spends 4 years studying the subject and can't even be asked to look inside the box,well then there's not much hope... A couple of weeks ago I was on the sales floor and was about to change RAM on a couple of PCs( it's not my job,just wanted to do it). The sales rep pulled the PC from underneath the desk, took the side cover off,removed the old ram and put the new one in.If sales can do it, I'm confident anyone in CompSci should be able to do so as well.

[dragonwriter]

> They should know it all: where the cpu and ram is, how the motherboard look like and etc.

Why? That's not Computer Science. Computer science is the science of computation, not the science of computers.

> Nobody expects them to go out there and start fixing computers, however if someone spends 4 years studying the subject and can't even be asked to look inside the box,well then there's not much hope...

Hope for what?

> A couple of weeks ago I was on the sales floor and was about to change RAM on a couple of PCs( it's not my job,just wanted to do it). The sales rep pulled the PC from underneath the desk, took the side cover off, removed the old ram and put the new one in.If sales can do it, I'm confident anyone in CompSci should be able to do so as well.

Why? It's about as related to CompSci as doing field-expedient surgery is to Psychology.

[edflsafoiewq]

> In the seven decades he was at M.I.T., Professor Forrester retained an engineer’s curiosity about how things work, and occasionally voiced dismay that his students were not always so inclined.

> He recalled in 2011 that he once asked students in an engineering class if they understood how the feedback mechanism in a toilet’s water tank maintained the water level.

> “I asked them, ‘How many of you have ever taken the lid off a toilet tank to see how it works?’” he recalled. “None of them had. How do you get to M.I.T. without having ever looked inside a toilet tank?”

[heisenbit]

Would you hire such a person for embedded software work? Also having a feel for what can go wrong with RAM can be useful in case a computer acts up. Then there are details like price, speed and parity which may or may not play a role when it comes to hardware selection. And last but not least software security researchers have been seen using cooling sprays and taking out RAM bars to extract information from systems.

[djsumdog]

They don't need to. As astronomer doesn't need to know how to repair his or her own personal telescope either. But if you're into the field, it's nice to know how your tools work.

[cosmodisk]

You may not know how to fix it but surely you'd know they have lenses inside,right?