Subject: RE: [hackers-il] Re: The Professor of Shoe-making Walks Bare-Foot ed

From: Chen Shapira <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 15:26:54 +0300

> I think there should be a dedicated course about working in 
> an integrated
> modern UNIX environment. Give the students a quota-free 
> account on a Linux
> farm with GNOME/KDE and all the latest tools and bells and 
> whistles. Let
> them download, compile and install programs. Have them 
> develop a software
> project together. Etc. Matam/Mamat is clearly not enough, and the
> C-Shell/Text-only Account combination can give some students a hatred
> toward everything UNIXish.

Don't you think there should also be a parallel windows course?

Thanks,
Chen.

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 14:41:54 +0300

> Don't you think there should also be a parallel windows course?

Yes, as soon as there's a parallel Windows implementation.

As long as Windows remains a commercial product for which there is no
other implementaton, I don't think it should be emphasized in a University.
A university isn't vocational school. It's not about making people
proficient in specific commercial tools or products.

Unix has many commercial versions, open standards, and even several free
versions, and it's changes much more slowly than Windows - all of which
make it a much better platform for teaching on in a University.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Thursday, May 9 2002, 27 Iyyar 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |If Windows is the answer, you didn't
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |understand the question.

---

From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 May 2002 14:39:09 +0300

> Don't you think there should also be a parallel windows course?

No.If Microsoft wants such a course, it can finanace it for all
interested. 

It's not even usefull for the students - everything they will learn will
be outdated and not relevant by the Microsoft ever increasing hunger for
new buzzwords to generate a constant cash flow.

Yes, I know now I'm a zealot. In fact, it says so on my home page ;-)

Gilad

-- 
Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Code mangler, senior coffee drinker and VP SIGSEGV
Qlusters ltd.

"To err is human. To realy fsck up you need a computer. For
 those really large scale disastears, an SSI cluster is a must."

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From: "Amir Abiri" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 18:20:27 +0200

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>

> On Thu, May 09, 2002, Chen Shapira wrote about "RE: [hackers-il] Re: The
Professor of Shoe-making Walks Bare-Foot >
> make it a much better platform for teaching on in a University.

Wasn't Unix developed in Universities, by an academic circle, for the
purpose of learning and teaching ?

--
http://abiri-e.com/
"God is a programmer".

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 00:39:08 +0300

> purpose of learning and teaching ?

Not exactly. Unix's original design and implementation wasn't in universities,
and its original purpose wasn't teaching.

Unix was originally developped in Bell Labs, then the research arm of AT&T.
They (Thompson and Ritchie, and their coworkers) wanted a practical OS for
their practical needs (e.g., typesetting, programming, etc.) - they weren't
"absent-minded professors" only out to do research. In fact, they were
displease with a huge OS research project going on in universities at the
time ("Multics"), and wanted to create something more practical and down-
to-earth (and that works!).

Universities (especially UC Berkeley, but also others, etc.) later helped to
develop various versions of Unix, but so did AT&T and other commercial
companies (Sun, an many more).

If you want to know more about UNIX's history (with a UC Berkeley focus),
see my post from January of this year, titled "A brief history of BSD UNIX".
Or maybe read the book "A Quarter Century of Unix" other people mentioned in
another thread (I haven't read that book, so I don't know how good it is).

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Friday, May 10 2002, 28 Iyyar 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |He who dies with the most toys is still
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |dead -- Citibank billboard, Manhattan 2001