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NCSU/Red Hat "Open Source University"
Aithlin writes "According to this story at Business Wire, Red Hat and North Carolina State University are partnering to open an "Open Source-based university". This means that students at NCSU's engineering school will standardize on RH." Basically, it means that the School of Engineering will standardize on "Open Source" technologies.
Well, being an NCSU student I'd like to point out a few things. Sometimes what you are forced to take is helpful...wether YOU LIKE IT OR NOT! I didn't like taking a presentation speaking class, but it has been helpful. I would have never taken this class and instead pursued a degree purely in technical work.
Engineering in never purely technical. There is communication, organization, and so on. I would agree on a ever-growing university, changing to the needs of the students at a much faster pace. Better tools, better labs, but many of these problems boil down to the Professor, not the department.
Just for the record, I think the Engineering School fell in love with Redhat over the summer when they installed their first few linux machines...much much cheaper than the Ultrasparcs that we've been using lately. But will it ever be completely open source? No, there are too many EE/CPE/CSC tools that are not open source. I'd like to see Cadence open sourced personally.
But its good that there are some smart decisions being made. They first tried to go with NT, and now they are on the right track.
simon.
EOS? It was Dec 2100's runing Ultrix... then there were some PAMs (math school) machines that were RS6000's and the Sun IPX's... then there were the HP's... oh.. then the Dec 5000's that showed up with color... oh... then the first EOS Sun's showed up... oh then the NT showed up... all of this stuff was connected via AFS and the file servers were Dec 3100's or better boxes... oh and then there was the smattering of Alphas around campus. Dialup was always interesting... eventually you could even ssh into campus vs. telnet...
But now there will be Red Hat. Hmm. RH was already connected via resnet. Also, when the PC price drops happened you could have more firepower in your room connected than by going to the uni computer rooms.
I still think that uni's will always have a hard time maintaining a bleeding edge on the hardware side of things. *shrug*
Eventually having a computer when you come to school will be like having a phone was when I went there. The uni will provide a phone jack and a data jack (or maybe the same thing). However, I remember how much trouble it was just to bring cable tv into dorms let alone data access.
Red Hat, Solaris, HPUX, AIX, MacOS, NT... whatever...
Now, if there is something that gives back perks to the university like being able to have grad students working at Red Hat and on projects that have real world value that would be even better. Let's see if that happens.
Oh, and if RH can spring for some rug cleaner to get the smell out of lez100 that would be really cool too.
http://fudge.org
Most mechanical/aerospace and electrical/computer design firms are heavily rooted in UNIX. I work for a semiconductor design and technology firm and all our EDA (electronic design automation) tools not only run on UNIX, but 75% of them either don't have Windows ports or are "crippled" on Windows (because of issues with multiuser, remote display, etc...).
About half of those tools now have full, native ports on Linux. Specifically you ask? Try Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, ModelTech, etc... Although Sun just came out with a powerful new UltraSPARC III chip (powerful from an FPU, and therefore engineering, standpoint against x86), Linux gives you much more "bang for the buck" on single/dual processor x86 hardware than SPARC.
Furthermore, many of the preceding companies have been touting the price vs. performance ratio of Linux clusters versus traditional shared memory Sun systems (in favor of Linux, of course ;-) and have modified their Linux ports just for such implementations.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
What? How can you donate $350,000 worth of free software? That must be a LOT of software...
Red Hat, being an open source software company, needs to rely on support revenue to make a buck. If they want to remain a viable company, they have to sell a lot of service contracts.
Large companies are risk averse. Selecting popular technologies / vendors is percieved as safe e.g. no on gets fired for buying microsoft, ibm, etc.
*Thinking out loud* Why do so many /.'s bash RedHat? Yet no one bitches about Mandrake who've released 12 security/functionality fixes for 7.1 since RedHat 7.0 was released. Is it b/c they have become a mainstream representitive of Linux, thus it is no longer 31337. Most /.'s want to see Micro$oft replaced with Linux. 31337 distros like 'Mike rolled a distro while rolling a fatty' aren't going to achieve the mainstream recognition that will be required to supplant MS
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
everyone bash it!!! Red Hat could donate all of their equipment and facilities to the FSF, donate all of their coders to Debian, and hand out free copies of their OS at the airport, and still someone here would have to complain Red Hat is evil. Strange things are afoot at the peoples republic of slashdot? Could it be anti-RedHat bias from our parent sponsor? Noooo, this is an unbiased web site. I read almost every other day here how Red Hat sucks, maybe one day one of my Red Hat machines will crash so I can join in on the bashing? I patiently await your downward moderation=P
To fail is human, to blue screen MS!
err. as the guy who started sunsite^Wmetalab^Wibiblio, I should pipe up. the project which preceded sunsite was an internet bulletin board server called laUNChpad. it was our goal, as it is now, to help make information sharing possible world-wide. Sun was nice enough to help foster that project for a number of years as was Cisco, Real, and others. Red Hat was a sponsor to some extent from early in that company's life. And we will be announcing some other sponsors soon.
UNC has one of the best CS departments in the country, but it is a very research focused department. NCSU, where i went to school in the late 60s, has a different focus for their department of CS which is also a fine program. But the information sharing work is not in CS but at UNC in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and in the School of Information and Library Science where I hold joint appointments.
The UNC computer support folks, called ATN, run AIX, Solaris, Linux and other OSs as they feel is appropriate.
ibiblio is most certainly a part of UNC
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
It's kinda funny that Bob Young donated alot of money to UNC to change the name of Sunsite^H^H^H^H^H^HMetalab^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIbiblio, but never tried to push Red Hat down UNC's throat (AFAIK, UNC still uses AIX for their main student mail/shell server).
Oh yeah. Maybe it's because there's no engineering department at UNC. Or undergrad CS department. Makes you wonder how Sunsite ended up there in the first place.....
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
We want linux to be popular so vendors will support applications...but only in the right venue do we want this distro or that distro. I'm all for this type of integration. Many people will be converted to linux and thus create that broad user base we need for vendors to start supporting the applications we all want. One way or another it's _still_ linux, support it in whatever form because it's making camputing experiences better for all of us.
It doesn't suprise me at all that the first post in this topic is a redhat-bashing post. Yet, Redhat is again taking some really positive steps to promote linux, and help bring it to the next level.
Sure, they slap the Redhat name on it, but you know it's gonna be some highly customized installation set up by the school that has little if anything to do with the regular retail install.
But, they are again putting a lot of effort, dedicating people to promote linux in areas where it needs it most, and again, they seem to get nothing but contempt in return.
"why not debian" "why not slackware" I'm sure we'll see dozens of times in this thread. The facts are that noone connected with those distributions are doing anything along these lines to promote Linux.
You may not like Redhat as a company. You may not like Redhat linux as a distribution. But you should recognize, and give them credit for at least some of the efforts they are making, because we all benefit in the long run.
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