Dennis Dryden ddryden@ntlworld.com wrote:
Its a bit sad when a University computer science department does not even have any Tux'en (GNU/Linux Box's) when some high schools are giving Linux it a try. Well for now i have Mingw(win32 gcc) and Scite on a zip disk its slow but i can still mess around with my code. Before i started at the UEA i was under the belief that there were some Sun Solaris box'en in one of the lower floors of CMP(the department formerly known as SYS) but if there are i can't find them and there is no mention of them =(.
They killed the linux lab just before I got there, in '99, just before I left (2001, ish) they'd threatened to kill the SGI lab, and promptly did as soon as I left. They've gone all winshite on everyone, and most of the lecturers are still clueless (one or two know what they're doing, but even then, stick 'em infront of a machine that's not redhat and tell them to configure anything and I reckon they'd struggle ;). Oxygen and Radon are apparently still laying about, only for remote access though, apparently they don't believe in desktop unix, which is annoying. Wouldn't it be a good plan for them to, at least in sys, make the labs dual boot, debian/NT. That way they could also schedule updates, etc, etc and keep the majority happy, while keeping configs in sync and generally running a reasonably tight ship. Ho hum, it just appears that sys (sorry, cmp) are either too lazy or too incompetant, or maybe a mixture of both. Never mind, if M$ is what your taught, M$ is what you'll use, which is a damned shame really, computing graduates coming out with nothing more than a course in copy paste code, and M$ practice.
Erm, OK, I wasn't planning on ranting that much :) Time to get ready to go to 80s night ;) see some of you 'orrible lot tommorow at the ol' narch meeting.
Just my 2p worth, feel free to ignore :)
Brett.