Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Manuel" == Manuel Chakravarty <chak@example.com> writes:

    Manuel> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote

    >> No, I think there is little hope for progressive behavior from
    >> Tsukuba-Dai.

    Manuel> Tsukuba-dai is not all that bad.  In my group, we have two
    Manuel> Win95 boxes plus one NT server opposed by a dozen PCs
    Manuel> running Linux plus a handful of SPARCs running Solaris.

My department (gakurui in Tsukuba-dai lingo) has the same arrangement
for the undergrads (except that we have DECs rather than Sparcs for
the core hosts), but we have a very special situation within the
University.  We certainly get little support from the computing
center, who rather resent (and to some extent, justifiably) our ample
computer budget.

The point is not "what can you find around campus" (money definitely
talks, and even undergrad students' quality of facilities depends
greatly on the research grants amassed by their zemi advisors) but
rather
    (1) what is university computation policy?
    (2) what educational opportunities are available to all members of 
        the university community?

At Tsukuba-dai, the answer to (1) is "them what has, gets" and to (2)
"minimal opportunities for very basic Unix, Windows, Max, and FMV
classes", plus some very specialized stuff like how to port your
FORTRAN programs to the Fujitsu supercomputer.

    Manuel> (And by the way, our students also got rather powerful
    Manuel> machines, but that depends of course on the funding of
    Manuel> each individual group.)

I'm talking about the notebooks that it is my undergraduate department
policy to recommend that the freshman buy, not the workstations that
juniors and seniors who join computing-oriented zemis are provided.

I certainly don't disagree with your characterization of the usual
departmental preferences.

However, the three American universities I know best (Ohio University
(Athens), Stanford University, and the Ohio State University
(Columbus)) all provide extremely strong non-credit, free curricula in
computer usage at their computing centers.  These curricula rival most
academic departments for breadth and depth.  I know that OSU provided
a course on Linux (using Welsh's Running Linux as the text), as well
as regexp and Excel classes.

That kind of support is completely absent at Tsukuba-dai.  This means
that even now most students in humanities don't use computers.

And you can't say that those three are unfair competition for "the MIT 
of Japan".  Not without a very strong unfavorable implication.

The thing is, with a moderate quality Japanese-localized Linux
distribution and maybe two undergrad sysad/advisors, I think it would
be quite possible to provide undergrads with quite powerful systems at
rather low cost.  They would lose on MS-Office type applications, but
(at least in my experience) the power provided by those applications
is invariably abused by undergrads to create inappropriate or even
misleading graphic displays and the like.

And we could probably get a site-license for Applixware reasonably
cheaply; we don't have one for MS-Awfullest AFAIK (many zemis permit
their students to pirate their advisor's copies---gag, retch, and of
course it's easy enough to copy the installations en masse from the
department workstations).

But nobody is interested in providing a decent curriculum---and we
have lots of resources allegedly intended for that purpose.  We (my
well-endowed department) don't teach the students how to use any
software except Netscape and mnews as a matter of policy.  Students do 
learn how to use very specialized research tools (eg, statistical
software or Mathematica) that will almost surely be irrelevant in
their careers as salarymen.

I'm thinking about trying to do sumething about this in my own zemi,
but it'll have to wait until our budgets get activated....

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