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Comment by javanix | Hacker News Reader

Its hard to imagine a large group of CS majors managing to maintain a Unix desktop suitable for development when pre-class discussions in senior-level classes involve people complaining about the difficulties involved in compiling from source.

I'm pretty sure most of the money saved by ditching the CS labs would go towards Unix classes and a 24/7 support hotline.

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In my experience, the hacker qualities of CS undergrads fall on a pretty broad spectrum. Even if the majority of students have trouble with basic Unix tasks, I'm sure there will be 5% of them who will make excellent admins. And that's more than you need.

So how do you propose we set things up? Most of the need for CS labs is conformity in grading/teaching. I see the appeal - both fiscal and hacker-practical - for dropping the Uni labs, but I think that forcing 95% of CS majors to rely on 5% of their peers for support would cause enough grading and deadline ("I couldn't get the package to compile in time!") arguments that both faculty and undergrads would come to hate things even more.

Granted, there are obvious upsides to forcing people to learn systems other than Windows for their own use, and I think enough people would eventually adapt, but I think the initial hurdle would just be too much to overcome in a decently sized department.

In college I often sshed from my computer into a lab computer, so I didn't really need the physical lab. Of course, maintaining servers may cost almost as much as maintaining a lab. Maybe preconfigured VM images are the answer.

People ssh'd into a computer are seldom using all of its power. A big multicore server with plenty of RAM can support quite a few users more economically than individual computers. This is part of the reason why people invented timesharing OSes in the first place.

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