Alright, nothing specific to cite here, but I have some comments. I'm at USC, and here we use a program called nachos for our OS class. I haven't taken the class, but I can tell you its the hardest class in CS if not the entire university. But everyone knows this, its a grad requirement, and they just accept it, and sit in the computer lab for 10-20 hours a week working in groups on the sun machines. As I understand it, Nachos is a piecework OS, with parts cut out, so that you can learn on it. I think it comes with the basic I/O kernel already. Students need to make a shell, handle files, make process scheduling, and other things like that.
I think what was said about UH being a weekday university is probably true. Here if you're a CS or CECS major, you can always find a friend in the computer lab. Here at USC, doing programs on Unix is no big deal, since starting at 101, about half of the programs are done on solaris, and half are done in MS VS. One thing I wanted to point out that no one mentioned is that students always seem to love the paradigm they start with. At USC, everyone starts in C. We eventually move up to C++ and Java. When they move back to C for the OS class, its no big deal. It took me a very long time to be comfortable with object oriented stuff, and I still hate it for the most part. Part of this is because I had to use MFC, which is so convoluted with objects, you wouldn't believe it. But I love procedural programing and C/non-OO-C++, and I really don't like object oriented stuff. It kind of bothers me when I look at linux code and see extensive use of giant structs used like classes in C. A lot of other universities have taken Java and objects as the greatest new thing ever. They preach these, and consider C to be old and obsolete. And to some extent, this will be true for a lot of people. A lot of them are going to do web stuff and database stuff, and things that are ultra-high level language with objects. People love their objects, then when the university later shows them C, they freak out. They miss their beautiful objects, and think this style is old and confusing. I have lots of friends who are CS majors at USC and elsewhere. A lot of my USC friends aren't big fans of OOP, and a lot of my non-USC friends aren't fans of procedural. I think I had some more to talk about, but I have quite a few midterms this week, so maybe I'll get back to you folks later. -Eric Hattemer
