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Question: My students are learning to use UNIX,
but I'm more comfortable on CMS. Is there any good way to share files
with my students? Should I make the switch from CMS to UNIX too?
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Answer: Let me put it this way: Yes and yes, for lots of reasons.
Probably the best way to share your files is to put them on a Web server. You
can do this from a UNIX account quite easily, and can obtain extra disk space
for class purposes, should you need it.
The ability to serve files on the Web is only one reason to use a UNIX
account. Perhaps the most important reason for a teacher is that that is
where the students will, increasingly, be doing their work. You need to
know what their environment feels like in order to teach it properly.
But there are many other reasons why you might want to switch to UNIX,
for your own benefit. The mail system on UNIX is much richer. UNIX's pine
email and news reading system is one of the simplest and most flexible
mail systems ever, not to mention procmail and the other UNIX email utilities.
UNIX's newsreaders (and there's a choice) are threaded and carry significantly
more news groups (specifically, the alt. groups) than CMS's. The
response time on the ADN UNIX systems is much better than on CMS, and we
can upgrade our UNIX boxes as needed to keep it that way. And UNIX does
X windows too.
On the other hand, do you think you'll miss CMS's excellent full screen editor,
XEDIT? Not to worry. The ADN UNIX machines have the, a shareware XEDIT
clone with most of XEDIT's features. (See the Inform Text
Editors menu.)
And keep in mind that our new Convex is a UNIX machine; it runs a version of
Hewlett Packard's HPUX. So if you like the idea of having a small supercomputer
on campus that you can use, go out and open your UNIX account today!
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