[ILUG] It's illegal, according to the barrister in PC World

[Hunt, Bryan]

Look nick I dont want anyone to get emotional here and piss their pants
or anything but Trinity has got less than 20 ancient Sun boxes and several 
hundred Windows boxes. I think that appart from the snob value of attending 
the closest college in Ireland to Britain if someone wanted to do a quality 
IT course they would be better off in UL or DCU. By the way I'm not knocking

you and I know that you do great work there with the DUCSS but Trinity is
not 
a great place for computing and there are better places to go ... like DCU
or 
UL for example. 

--B

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Murtagh [mailto:murtaghn at tcd.ie]
Sent: Friday, May 03, 2002 2:48 PM
To: ilug at linux.ie
Subject: Re: [ILUG] It's illegal, according to the barrister in PC World


On Friday 03 May 2002 12:48, Hunt, Bryan wrote:
> I couldn't agree with you more ... trinity is on the verge of giving out
> MCSE's
> rather than degrees.

Ok, I think I'm partly responsible for starting this thread, but I have
to say that's just bullshit. I was referring to a lack of interest among
students and some lecturers in OSes other than windows. I did not say
that this was necessarily the fault of the course. For instance, the OS
course in third year covers OSes from a generic point of view, with 
reference to Solaris and NT. Mach is mentioned. Unfortunately the course
never gets into the low-level details of implementation - but that's not 
really the point. The TCD course is fairly theoretical in some respects - 
the details of how things are actually implemented is not regarded as being
as important as understanding things at a higher level. So your average
graduate will not have written a scheduler or a filesystem or whatever,
but should have the skills to figure out how...

The reason for the aforementioned lack of interest is more easily explained
by economic reasons. Before the dot.com crash, everyone wanted to do CS
because it seemed to guarantee a job and lots of money. Hence a large 
proportion of students have no interest in computing outside of the course.

<blatant plug>
If people are going to start badmouthing college courses, perhaps they or
the companies they work for should help sponsor college societies such as 
DUCSS who are trying to promote the use of *NIX and free or opensource
software inside colleges in Ireland.
</blatant plug>

Nick

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