The Children of Linux

Unixmen ^ | 18 March 2012 | Chris Jones

[discostu]

Windows is taught in schools because it IS the only OS you NEED to learn and use. Sure if you get into the business you MIGHT wind up in front of a different OS, but only a small percentage of the kids will wind up in the business, and thanks to Windows’ dominance most of the jobs in the business are on Windows, if they go to a non-Windows shop they can learn it there (really once you’ve been around a while you learn an OS is an OS is an OS, specific commands might change but the core concepts have remained the same for a long time on many platforms). Kind of like how they don’t teach kids how to drive in right hand cars, because in America they don’t need to know unless they get a job with the Post Office or travel to a handful of countries, in which case they can figure it out there.

[Dead Corpse]

Unity is t3h sux... Gnome3 on other distros is a huge step in the right direction IMO.

[BlueLancer]

"If you want an everyday driver, don't care about maintenance, and will take it to an "expert" when things break, Widn0ze is for you."

Oh, man, I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work.

[ct_libertarian]

Oh, man, I just ride in 'em. I don't know what makes 'em work.


WOOF-WOOF-WOOF!. . .
That's my other dog imitation.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

It’s probably the rare high school teacher that is marginally clued in about Linux - not to mention principals, school boards and the like. If I were teaching a class, I’d give the kids computers with unformatted hard drives, a Fedora Live CD, and a network connection and tell them that by the end of the semester they need to have a fully functional server, a fully functional client (you name the service) and a bunch of C programs and shell scripts that they would write themselves (not to mention Python, Perl, Ruby and on and on and on).

Tell me those kids wouldn’t come out of that class knowing a thing or two LOL.

[douginthearmy]

This is some hilarious stuff.

1. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn.
2. Linux is a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around.

There were two sentences between lines 1 and 2. Two little sentences separating two absolutely contradictory thoughts.

"It's very simple you see... you just have to actuate the fluxcapicitor with the turboencabulator and presto changeo, internets!

Yet another article by a linux fan explaining exactly why linux should have become more popular and ironically although unintentionally illustrating clearly to those gifted with sight exactly why linux never made it mainstream.

[Pecos]

Bell 103 mag-amp modem culled from the dumpster.

[ct_libertarian]

There was a school in my town which was given a VAX in the early 1980s.
It was set up and administered by the students.
The majority of the students which did the administration went on to very good careers in IT.

[Yossarian]

When I learned LISP (does that even still exist?) in college (...)

Yes, it still exists in commercial use. Cadence, who makes programs for electronics design automation (EDA), uses it in the control and GUI layer on top of (some of) their C/C++/Fortran core programs.

That's on programs based on their long-term legacy database, at least. Newer EDA programs - from Cadence and others - tend to use tcl, which I hate.

[Yossarian]

Too bad Mac's idiotic EFI won't let me drop Linux on those old Intel XServs.

Have you seen this?

[BuckeyeTexan]

yy
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[HangnJudge]

N00b.

Agreed, unless you have used a 150 baud acoustic modem and have had to play with stop bits and parity settings, you can't really appreciate what we have today.

N00bs - all of you
110 Baud Teletype

[MIchaelTArchangel]

Perhaps Mr. Jones needs to put some of his energy into mastering grade school English topics such as subject-verb agreements, what constitutes as sentence, and punctuation. Oh, but those are soft skills that technies are not required to master.

[AFPhys]

Though I have not been involved with it, I understand that LISP is the preferred language for neural network researchers, and that they have come a long long way in the last years. I am surprised none of the super-IT guys here on the thread didn’t reply to you.

[Yossarian]

Windows is taught in schools because it IS the only OS you NEED to learn and use.

Engineers and scientists must learn and use UNIX. Its operation, at its heart command-line based, is very different from Windows.

[hosepipe]

Wold Class Software(&hardware) = when it has both Windows and Linux drivers..

Note: Most Linux software is FREE... as is the version of Linux OS..

[Dead Corpse]

Yep. My spare XServ is a 1,1. I’ve already tried rEFIt on it.

[andyk]

Agreed, unless you have used a 150 baud acoustic modem and have had to play with stop bits and parity settings, you can't really appreciate what we have today.

Not to mention selecting your transfer protocol. ZMODEM changed my life. :)

[JaguarXKE]

My first computer was a complete building - a BIG building! The IBM Q7 Computer used for the Norad SAGE Air Defense System. I was a maintenance man for this beast for 7 years. You actually had to know how a computer worked - down to the and-gate level - in order to troubleshoot and repair this monstrocity. Today, when there is a display problem, a kid can just change the entire display system with the swap of a card. Back then, you had to troubleshoot it down to which flip-flop or which leg of a specific and/OR gate was failing. Those were the days my friend!

[Dead Corpse]

900 baud cradle was the first one I had a chance to play with.

Good times.