[ILUG] Linux @ college (subtopic: Let's bash TCD)

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Colm Buckley wrote:

> On Wed 03 Oct 2001 00:19, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> > The Trinity Computer Science Department Officially sucks ass, about
> > 200 windows 2000 machines and about 10 Sun machines running Solaris
> > and KDE which most CS students dont know exist or simply ignore.
> 
> I've been worried about this for at least the last five years; since
> before I was a sysadmin there.  When I was an undergrad in CS
> (1989-1993), almost all of our courses were founded on Unix and VMS;
> with the workstation/PC end of things being introduced in the latter
> half of the course; in first year we wrote stuff in Modula-2 on VMS
> and in 68k assembler on those peculiar custom boxes that used to be
> upstairs in the Pearse Street block.

Ah yes, the old Waterloo pizza boxes..... I've got one of them!
(Practically using it as a footrest as we speak!)

> With the introduction of more "focussed" courses, especially the
> various night diploma and degree courses, and the ICT undergrad day
> course; the department necessarily shifted away from pure theory
> towards "training" in particular environments.
> 
> > The Maths Department are gods gift to students, if you are a science
> > student you will be given a *nix (BSD and RHAT linux) account and
> > probably end up knowing more about *nix than most of the CS Dept (read
> > the previous paragraph again).
> 
> While I totally agree that the "attitude" of the School of Maths with
> respect to "real" operating systems is preferable to that of the
> Department of Computer Science, I'd like to point out a couple of
> things:
> 
> (a) The DoCS has twenty times as many students as the SoM.  Some
>     policies regarding access and environmental diversity scale well,
>     others don't.

Particularly co-opting undergrads (one David W. Malone comes to mind...)
as sysadmins.  Absolutely impossible to do similar in the CS Dept.

 
> > The admins dont hate students (unlike the CS dept)
> 
> Excuse me, point of information; we didn't hate students; we merely
> hated *you*.
> 
> (Insert smileys for the sarcasm-impaired.)
>

And we hated you, Colm.  At least, we hated your username.  Which we saw
regularly.  In a list of running processes, next to the process name
"setiathome" on all the Suns in Westland Row.  You bastard.  You're why
Netscape Nastyigator took twelve seconds to load, and thereafter ran above
a flashing disk light.  I shudder at the recollections of Mentor
Graphics...

I've just re-read that last paragraph.  I'm more bitter than I thought!

;-)

Ronan C.