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Peter Butterfield wrote: | | From an ICT teacher, I got the classic "we have to teach using the software | students will use when they leave school" (ie. Windows, Word, etc..). | Annoying isn't it. I "put him right", of course. Interesting, especially as | the local council, Penwith, uses SunOS and Star Office!
For my job the Desktop I inherited was an old Redhat install, and I guarantee anyone replacing me will not be using that, as the first job on the list will be get to something better (FC or Debian Sarge). It is unlikely to be Windows, but they'll probably have a choice.
Okay I have a Windows box as well, but that is for testing stuff in IE, which at an ISP is still kind of essential. Today I moved to doing even more "Windows" stuff on RH9, because it had the tools I needed sed (okay sed isn't my every day tool of choice), middle mouse button paste (you've no idea how much time this saved today), GNU find etc.
At the Met Office I had various different desktops but the most useful and longest lived was HP-VUE. So probably less than a third my working life has been on Microsoft desktops, during which time they allegedly claim ~95% share.
The main reason it wasn't even less was that Unix (and Unix like) desktops were relatively expensive, that has altered somewhat.
The "learn what they'll use in business" is fine, but when I left school Microsoft were still mostly known for writing Basic interpreters, and "real businesses" used COBOL (which I've seen once in my entire business career, desite teaching it to myself as a kid). I did learn to punch my own punch cards at school, and despite what Matt thinks, I'm less than half way through my working life (assuming Dr Midgley can keep patching me back together).
The only thing to teach is universals/basic, and some experience of variety, because these are two areas we know will be applicable. The universals include things like binary, logic, some conceptions of what a computer is (including types that haven't made it yet, and minority items like neural networks), programming, bandwidth and networking physics (speed of light, latency etc), public key (yes this is a basic now) and other forms of cryptography, authentication and related concepts.
There is nothing like knowing how programmers think, and computers work, for solving a problem with computers be it ever so trivial. And this knowledge sets you up with the confidence to sit down and learn whatever is current in the future.
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