Georgia Tech's CS department seems to be about equally divided into two camps, MS and *NIX, with a small fringe element going to Macs. Now, most of the students I deal with seem to love using the *NIX systems, and the main undergrad CS cluster dual boots RH7.3 and Win2k, each box spending most of its time in RH. The ultrasparc solaris workstations see a lot of use, too. Some of the early-on required CS courses teach the use of gcc, lint (proprietary but TASTY!), dbx (I like it better than gdb simply because gdb doesn't handle threads very well), and some other linux/solaris tools.
However, the curriculum for some required courses still focuses or uses in some integral manner proprietary utilities from Microsoft. Additionally, MS has launched this MSDN:Academic Alliance program, whereby CS students at GT (and presumably at other schools) can download and use for free just about any MS recent software that exists, be it application, development tool, or operating system altogether. Are these MS tools better or easier to use than their free counterparts? Not in my experience. gcc is still the best compiler out there, IMHO, and nothing beats eclipse for java. poseidon/dia make great visio replacements (for UML purposes at least), OpenOffice does everything I need for office functionality. Savvy students have no problem doing without a windows-based environment/curriculum at GT.
The problem is when you bring non-CS students into the picture:) Most of them panic the moment they see a non-windows machine they're forced to use. Maybe they'll like OS X.
I spent around 30 minutes poking through this book last weekend at B&N, and my opinion of it is that it is yet another hastily thrown together book attempting to capitalize on the fact that the market is buzzing for more books on Linux at the moment. The topic of games programming under Linux does need to be worked on more, granted, but I think readers are best waiting until there's an O'Reilly book on the subject, honestly.
The programming projects I enjoyed the most during my days of high school and collegiate computer science classes were making games and artificial intelligence (minimax, basic heuristics, etc...) programs. I've also noticed that high school CS courses seem to dwell on iteration and rarely ever mention recursion. Recursion is one of the most graceful and fun aspects of programming! Why must high school courses leave that out? Do they think its too advanced of a topic for intro-level courses?
First off, I want to say I've been using Slackware since 3.2 and I'm thrilled with it. Keep up the great coding!
My first question is deals with marketing and competition. When the average joe computer user is asked about Linux, usually he/she thinks of Red Hat, possibly Caldera or Corel Linux. Rarely does anyone think first of Slackware, yet Slackware has been around longer than any other Linux distribution still in circulation today. How do you intend to address this now that Linux has become mainstream?
My second question deals with package management. My main complaint with the Slackware is its weakness in the package management area. It gets annoying having some packages installed from *.tgz format and other installed as *.rpm files. It becomes difficult to keep track of what's installed, how it's installed, and where it needs to be upgraded. Do you intend on changing Slackware's package system to something like or compatibile with RPM?
Re:does anyone know where I can...?
on
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I don't believe there IS an.iso image for slackware-current. I believe the guys at slackware only release.iso images for full CD releases. The latest.iso would be the one for Slackware-7.0.
Take a look at ELKS, the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, aka Linux-8086. Its an attempt to port a subset of linux to the 16-bit processors of the 8086 family. The kernel is small enough to be understandable by developers who haven't been with the project since day 1.
Take a look at gnatlab, available through freshmeat. I played around with it some on my Slack 7.0 box, it ran fine and provided most of the functionality I was looking for. Also, I believe there is a version of Matlab for Linux available free of charge to students. When I was a CS major at Georgia Tech, we had access to copies of Matlab, at least.
I can't speak for all geeks, but I myself rather enjoy good horror films. However, I do not consider the Scream series to be good horror films. They are nothing more than big-hype, big-name-actor, junior-high movies. There is no real thought put into making them. What is a good horror film? Sixth Sense was awesome. Very few movies actually cause my jaw to drop. Jacob's Ladder is an oldie but a goodie. Poltergeist is a classic. Evil Dead 1, 2, and 3 are classic (if somewhat cheesy, but that's part of the appeal). Hellraiser 1 and 2 were excellent. All of the movies I've just listed required actual thought on the part of the directors and script writers and actual ACTING on the part of the actors. Several were low-budget, but so what? The quality of a movie has nothing to do with its budget.
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Georgia Tech's CS department seems to be about equally divided into two camps, MS and *NIX, with a small fringe element going to Macs. Now, most of the students I deal with seem to love using the *NIX systems, and the main undergrad CS cluster dual boots RH7.3 and Win2k, each box spending most of its time in RH. The ultrasparc solaris workstations see a lot of use, too. Some of the early-on required CS courses teach the use of gcc, lint (proprietary but TASTY!), dbx (I like it better than gdb simply because gdb doesn't handle threads very well), and some other linux/solaris tools.
:) Most of them panic the moment they see a non-windows machine they're forced to use. Maybe they'll like OS X.
However, the curriculum for some required courses still focuses or uses in some integral manner proprietary utilities from Microsoft. Additionally, MS has launched this MSDN:Academic Alliance program, whereby CS students at GT (and presumably at other schools) can download and use for free just about any MS recent software that exists, be it application, development tool, or operating system altogether. Are these MS tools better or easier to use than their free counterparts? Not in my experience. gcc is still the best compiler out there, IMHO, and nothing beats eclipse for java. poseidon/dia make great visio replacements (for UML purposes at least), OpenOffice does everything I need for office functionality. Savvy students have no problem doing without a windows-based environment/curriculum at GT.
The problem is when you bring non-CS students into the picture
...my mind read this as "Warming Battle Over Online Texas"
;>
I don't want them online, hell no. The Internet might catch something from them.
I spent around 30 minutes poking through this book last weekend at B&N, and my opinion of it is that it is yet another hastily thrown together book attempting to capitalize on the fact that the market is buzzing for more books on Linux at the moment. The topic of games programming under Linux does need to be worked on more, granted, but I think readers are best waiting until there's an O'Reilly book on the subject, honestly.
The programming projects I enjoyed the most during my days of high school and collegiate computer science classes were making games and artificial intelligence (minimax, basic heuristics, etc...) programs. I've also noticed that high school CS courses seem to dwell on iteration and rarely ever mention recursion. Recursion is one of the most graceful and fun aspects of programming! Why must high school courses leave that out? Do they think its too advanced of a topic for intro-level courses?
First off, I want to say I've been using Slackware since 3.2 and I'm thrilled with it. Keep up the great coding!
My first question is deals with marketing and competition. When the average joe computer user is asked about Linux, usually he/she thinks of Red Hat, possibly Caldera or Corel Linux. Rarely does anyone think first of Slackware, yet Slackware has been around longer than any other Linux distribution still in circulation today. How do you intend to address this now that Linux has become mainstream?
My second question deals with package management. My main complaint with the Slackware is its weakness in the package management area. It gets annoying having some packages installed from *.tgz format and other installed as *.rpm files. It becomes difficult to keep track of what's installed, how it's installed, and where it needs to be upgraded. Do you intend on changing Slackware's package system to something like or compatibile with RPM?
I don't believe there IS an .iso image for slackware-current. I believe the guys at slackware only release .iso images for full CD releases. The latest .iso would be the one for Slackware-7.0.
Take a look at ELKS, the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset, aka Linux-8086. Its an attempt to port a subset of linux to the 16-bit processors of the 8086 family. The kernel is small enough to be understandable by developers who haven't been with the project since day 1.
Take a look at gnatlab, available through freshmeat. I played around with it some on my Slack 7.0 box, it ran fine and provided most of the functionality I was looking for. Also, I believe there is a version of Matlab for Linux available free of charge to students. When I was a CS major at Georgia Tech, we had access to copies of Matlab, at least.
I can't speak for all geeks, but I myself rather enjoy good horror films. However, I do not consider the Scream series to be good horror films. They are nothing more than big-hype, big-name-actor, junior-high movies. There is no real thought put into making them. What is a good horror film? Sixth Sense was awesome. Very few movies actually cause my jaw to drop. Jacob's Ladder is an oldie but a goodie. Poltergeist is a classic. Evil Dead 1, 2, and 3 are classic (if somewhat cheesy, but that's part of the appeal). Hellraiser 1 and 2 were excellent. All of the movies I've just listed required actual thought on the part of the directors and script writers and actual ACTING on the part of the actors. Several were low-budget, but so what? The quality of a movie has nothing to do with its budget.