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Hi.
What I'm trying to do here at the University is 'unify' Operating Systems, Computer Architecture and Real Time Operating Systems courses as much as possible. In the past, these were too far apart, yet in reality complement each other.
The idea is to build up a lab where different computer architectures and operating systems can be 'dissected'. I'm currently trying to get some SUN hardware (T1000 - really cool thing for multithreading), Power, etc. architectures into the mix.
Also, my assembly part of the course has been focussing on MIPS (Due to there being a nice emulator for this in the form of SPIM). 68K architecture is also very nice.
The problem, as usual in the education sphere is funding. It is difficult to convince some of my collegues that the SUN hardware for instance would be a good investment. Let alone Power, as the majority of the guys here believe it died when Apple switched. The standard reply I get from management is that the entire world is running on Intel and AMD, so that is where we should focus on. I'm of the opinion however that our students have to have at least a basic understanding of different ways of doing things, different concepts, different architectures.
Johan
This is what I tried to explain to my teachers and the school headmaster while in upper primary school. (7th - 9th grade) During that time, the whole schools computer systems were completely dependent upon voluntary student administration, maintenance and also some times, we were responsible for building the network in the school, i.e. we drilled the holes, pulled the cables and made the RJ45 connectors at the end of the lines.
The thing is, we were good. Damn good. So good that we saved the school, and the local municipality a huge amount of money. In the end however, things took a somewhat dramatic turn when a city architect responsible for the school's renovation happened to walk by when I was drilling a hole into a brick wall to pull FTP line into a new class room. Nevertheless _nothing_ was done to address the problem of maintaining and administrating a fleet of about 80 Windows PC's, which were on 24/7, of course and the related user database of around 350 students in the servers, which we refused to run with windows, naturally. When the school got a lot of money to renew it's computer system's we, me and the other voluntary little sysadmins tried to market the idea of buying the required Sun servers, I can't remember what the requirements then were, and the needed 80 Sun Ray thin-clients to replace the old system so the workload involved in the system's maintenance and administration would be minimized. We were faced with the same counter arguments and the school bought a boat load of crappy beige boxes it got at a low price. Naturally we were replacing crappy fans, burned out PSU's and CPUs all day long and eventually got tired of it all stopped working for no money.
Not suprisingly the whole system broke down. After which the other student's asked why wasn't I spending all my spare time in the "server room". Well, the look on their faces was worth it for all the shouting on in the hallways :)
So, could you please market your idea to the school and municipal administration of Oulu? These people need a damn reality check, and fast.
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