C/C++

[Allan Bowhill]

> "abowhill" <abowhill at blarg.net> writes:
>
> > I love FreeBSD, I have followed it for years. But frankly, it's
> > grown a bit stale, from a spectator's viewpoint. The more I
> > learn about progamming the less I seem to respect the crufty
> > old Unix traditions that nobody wants to break.
> >
> > Within the past couple of years, I have returned to school
> > and am finishing prereq's to get into a CS program at the
> > University of Washington.
>
> You'll find plenty of people that want to break UNIX traditions while
> you're studying there in the Paul Allen Center, the large new CS
> building mostly funded by him and the Gates and MSFT.  You'll probably
> even see many of them write "Unix" instead of the traditional "UNIX".

Well, I won't exactly be going to the main campus, but a UW extension in
Bothell, if I get accepted. They don't have a Paul Allen center for anything
there, but
they do have a fully-equipped LINUX lab :)

The program is designed for returning students who want to prepare
themselves
professionally for CS based jobs.

> http://students.washington.edu/linuxug/meetings.html still has an
> announcement for a 23 May 2002 Linux User Group meeting, so if you
> still have any desire to rub shoulders with non-MSFT folk, I suggest
> that you check out http://www.seabug.org and http://www.gslug.org .

Yeah, I was on the seabug list for awhile. I will probably resubscribe
eventually.

Speaking of rubbing shoulders, I ran into this guy a couple of years
ago in the midst of all the layoffs, who noticed the FreeBSD bumpersticker
on my car in the parking lot of a Circle-K near where I live.

He got out of his car, knocked on my window, and asked me to get out
of mine. He was kind of a big guy, so this made me a little nervous. Then
he took off his shirt, and exposed two huge tattoos of Chuck on both
shoulders.
One shoulder had FreeBSD Chuck, and the other had an OpenBSD Chuck.

I wonder if  this is a metaphor for secret enthusiasm...

> (I know that the UW does use UNIX (one sys admin frequents
> comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc), but I suspect that it's mostly down in
> the huge medical school facilities where reliability is still
> respected by some.)
>

Nobody that  knows FreeBSD is blind to its stability.
Even C++ obsessives will attest to this.

As for Unix at the UW, AFIK, there used to be a lot of Unix
job postings at there, so there must have been be a lot of Unix activity.
I don't know what the status is now with all the budget cuts. The UW
is deferring a lot of things, until the funding can be sorted out.

--Allan