There is a difference in the situations we are talking about here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with community colleges, but at least where i live, they usually serve as technical institutes... teaching specific skills and equipping people with a base to move on towards more education or to go do a specific type of job.
It is unrealistic to think that a large governmental organization such as a university is going to be able to diversify and teach all the different flavors of Nix to it's students. Having said that, my unversity (The University of Louisiana at Lafayette) actually focuses on theory in it's Comp Sci Curriculum and uses Nix as the platform to develop upon.. I don't know of any class that we offer that uses Windows as it's primary development environment. We have a larg Sun lab running Solaris and a dedicated Comp Sci lab dual booting between Windows 2000 and Fedora Core. The reasoning for this is simply that for administering a large environment, Red Hat is easier on the sysadmin (at least according to our sysadmin).
Now to move to the real issue, does this beratement with RedHat and Solaris and Windows prevent me from using any other Nix flavors? No! Our program teaches the building blocks for Operating Systems and Programming and Compilers and all the other main topics in Comp Sci, but at the undergraduate level they can't be expected to teach you everything about even one subject in the vast field of computing. By learning the theory you can then sit down with a manual or man page or set of documentation and then apply what you have learned to the real world.
My basic point is that you should not expect to learn everything, especially in our ever changing field, in school... but a good school will prepare you to learn for yourself once you have left the academic world and are out in the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
what if you make a CS map at the blessing of my professors and got a B on a senior project because of it. gotta love game design curricula
There is a difference in the situations we are talking about here. There is absolutely nothing wrong with community colleges, but at least where i live, they usually serve as technical institutes... teaching specific skills and equipping people with a base to move on towards more education or to go do a specific type of job.
It is unrealistic to think that a large governmental organization such as a university is going to be able to diversify and teach all the different flavors of Nix to it's students. Having said that, my unversity (The University of Louisiana at Lafayette) actually focuses on theory in it's Comp Sci Curriculum and uses Nix as the platform to develop upon.. I don't know of any class that we offer that uses Windows as it's primary development environment. We have a larg Sun lab running Solaris and a dedicated Comp Sci lab dual booting between Windows 2000 and Fedora Core. The reasoning for this is simply that for administering a large environment, Red Hat is easier on the sysadmin (at least according to our sysadmin).
Now to move to the real issue, does this beratement with RedHat and Solaris and Windows prevent me from using any other Nix flavors? No! Our program teaches the building blocks for Operating Systems and Programming and Compilers and all the other main topics in Comp Sci, but at the undergraduate level they can't be expected to teach you everything about even one subject in the vast field of computing. By learning the theory you can then sit down with a manual or man page or set of documentation and then apply what you have learned to the real world.
My basic point is that you should not expect to learn everything, especially in our ever changing field, in school... but a good school will prepare you to learn for yourself once you have left the academic world and are out in the real world.