[luau] ics412: operating systems

[Jimen Ching]

On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Charles Lockhart wrote:
>From reading his email to the class it looks like the problems (excuses?)
>people had were that they weren't good enough C programmers, Linux isn't
>documented well enough, and os stuff is hard.  All of these answers kind
>of blow me away.

If the goal was to implement a shell, did anyone point out that Linux is
conformant to POSIX?  Shouldn't the students be taught POSIX instead of
"Linux"?  If so, I believe POSIX is very well documented.  As far as I
know, bash runs on Linux, HPUX, SunOS, Solaris, and any other Unix system
you can name, as long as they conform to POSIX.  I believe bash runs even
on Minix386.

>This is a senior level computer science course, and none of the C
>programming for the projects is very difficult.  Shouldn't comp-sci grads
>be able to program?

If they can't, I think you are blaming the wrong people.  There are
certainly great professors at UH.  But I had a few poor ones as well.
Perhaps programming wasn't the problem.  Most often, it is the design that
is the hardest to perform.  Are students taught how to design a piece of
software before they program/implement/write it?  I would imagine these
would be pre-requesites for the course.  If they are not, then the faculty
needs to get their act together.

>As for Linux documentation, there's tutorials all over the net, there's
>tons of books, there's news groups, user groups (LUAU for instance...),
>the man pages, etc.  And then there's the source, dammit, use the source.
>If I remember correctly, they used to use UNIX for os courses because
>they had the source, and when the source was closed(?) Tanenbaum wrote
>minix to replace it.

I agree newsgroups and mailing lists (like LUAU) are great sources of
information and assistance.  But, why should I pay tuition if I have to go
to a newsgroup for answers?  Isn't this exactly what professors and TA's
are paid for?  They are there to answer questions and help students.
Also, perhaps the ICS department is lacking in this area, but in the
engineering department, there are tutoring groups that help students.
You don't need to go far to find help in a university.  If you do, then
there is something wrong with the university.  Don't get me wrong, I am
willing to help any student with a question that a professor can't answer.
But I expect the question to pass a few university ears first.

The only reason I ever went to a newsgroup is because I wanted to learn
more about a subject matter.  I don't want to waste the professor's time
in the classroom on things that are outside of the course material.

--jc
-- 
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org