Andrew S. Tanenbaum
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Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum

Nacimiento 16 de marzo de 1944, 65 años
Estados Unidos, Nueva York
Nacionalidad estadounidense
Ocupación Catedrático, Científico de la computación
Andrew Stuart “Andy” Tanenbaum (nacido el 16 de marzo de 1944), también conocido como ast,[1] es profesor de ciencias de la computación de la Universidad Libre de Ámsterdam, Países Bajos.

Tanenbaum es más conocido por ser el creador de Minix, una réplica gratuita del sistema operativo UNIX con propósitos educativos, y por sus libros sobre ciencias de la computación.

Contenido [ocultar]
1 Educación
2 Sistemas operativos
3 Libros
4 Electoral-vote.com
5 Premios
6 Referencias
7 Enlaces externos

Educación [editar]Tanenbaum nace en la ciudad de Nueva York (Estados Unidos) aunque creció en White Plains. Se licencia en física en el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (más conocido como MIT), en 1965.

En 1971 consigue el doctorado en física en la Universidad de California, Berkeley. Posteriormente se traslada a los Países Bajos para vivir con su esposa, pero aún conserva la ciudadanía estadounidense.

Desde 2004 es profesor de Arquitectura de ordenadores y sistemas operativos en la Universidad Libre de Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) donde lidera un grupo de sistemas de computación.

Sistemas operativos [editar]En 1987 crea el sistema operativo Minix, una réplica gratuita de UNIX con propósitos educativos, que posteriormente fue la base de Linux.

En 1992 participó en Usenet en un encendido debate con Linus Torvalds, el creador de Linux, sobre los méritos de la idea de Linus de utilizar un núcleo monolítico en vez de los diseños basados en un micronúcleo que Tanenbaum creía que serían la base de los sistemas operativos futuros.

Tanenbaum es el autor, junto a otros miembros de la Universidad Libre de Amsterdam, del sistema operativo distribuido de investigación Amoeba, basado en una arquitectura de micronúcleo. Tanenbaum también es el creador de Globe, un software que provee una infraestructura para un sistema distribuido a nivel mundial.

Libros [editar]Tanenbaum es ampliamente conocido por sus libros sobre materia informática, muy utilizados en centros de enseñanza superior, destacando, entre otros:

Redes de computadores (Computer Networks), ISBN 0-13-066102-3
Sistemas operativos: diseño e implementación (Operating Systems: Design and Implementation), ISBN 0-13-638677-6
Sistemas operativos modernos (Modern Operating Systems), ISBN 0-13-031358-0
Structured Computer Organization, ISBN 0-13-148521-0
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, ISBN 0-13-088893-1
En los siguientes enlaces se puede encontrar una lista exhaustiva de los libros y publicaciones realizados por Tanenbaum:

Libros publicados por Andrew S. Tanenbaum publicado por Prentice Hall
Publicaciones académicas de Andrew S. Tanenbaum de DBLP

Electoral-vote.com [editar]En 2004 crea Electoral-vote.com, un sitio web donde se analizaban los sondeos de opinión para las elecciones presidenciales de Estados Unidos de 2004 para prever cual sería la composición del Colegio Electoral.

Durante la mayor parte de campaña, Tanenbaum oculta su identidad bajo el seudónimo de «Votemaster», aunque reconociendo que tiene una preferencia personal por el candidato John Kerry. El 1 de noviembre de 2004, el día anterior a las elecciones, Tanenbaum revela su identidad y las razones por las que creó la página web.

En 2006, la web Electoral-vote.com es nuevamente utilizada para analizar los sondeos de las elecciones para el Congreso de Estados Unidos de 2006.

Premios [editar]Tanembaum ha recibido diversos premios por su trabajo:

En 2007 recibe la IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal.[2]
En 2004 miembro de la Real Academia Holandesa de Artes y Ciencias.[3]
En 2003 ganador del premio de TAA McGuffey
En 2002 ganador del premio de Excelencia de Libro de texto Texty
En 1997 ganador de ACM CSE Contribuciones Excepcionales a Premio de Educación de Ciencias Informáticas
En 1994 ganador de Karl V. Karlstrom ACM Premio de Educador Excepcional
Premio al trabajo distinguido, 10º Simposio ACM a Principios de Sistema Operativo
Puesto en una lista en Quién es Quien en el Mundo

Referencias [editar]↑ Plantilla:Cita noticiagroup
↑ Noticia de la concesión del premio IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal a Tanembaum
↑ Lista de miembros de la Real Academia Holandesa de Artes y Ciencias

Yesterday I attended to an event at a local University where my friends from the Ubuntu Loco Team did some talks on Free Software. One of the talks, the one I considered the most intersting of them all was about Free Software in Education. My friend Eivar Montenegro talked about the importance of Free Software when it comes to Schools and Universities and how it would benefit the current educational system. One of the benefits he mentioned was the fact that it would be cheaper, something I strongly disagree with, not because it’s false, but because it would mean that teaching using freeware is also as valid as using Free Software, and that’s clearly against the position of our Community.

Yet this post is not about a reflexion on tha matter, but about a reflexion on a question someone asked after the talk: Some random guy asked what was the validity of teaching Free Software in modern days when all of the IT business is ruled by one company (I assume he was talking about Microsoft) and it’s Propietary Software.  My friend answered that business was not exactly ruled by one Propietary Software company and cited some succesful Free Software projects like Apache and MySQL as examples of mainstream projects actively used in business.

Although it might be true, I still consider that answer as a weak answer to a very misleaded question, because we are talking about Education, not about the hottest trends in IT. But it’s a very common mistake from the Universities in Panama to confuse phrases like “Prepared for the Future” and “Ready for Business Challenges” with “Cisco Certified” or “Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Ready”. But the truth is, my friends, that these are not equivalent concepts. Teaching someone about a particular tool or set of tools, no matter how big that set of tools is, is nothing close to educating. There’s no point on teaching a student how to create a database schema under Oracle DB when that student is not capable of analyzing a real life problem and coming up with a well-designed database-driven solution for it, or teaching a student all of the new features of the latest Visual C++ implementation when that student can’t apply that programming knowledge to optimize an existing algorithm.

Having students prepared for the latest tools available in the market is just an absurd race against trends which change rapidly every year. Considering that an average major in Panama is obtained after 3 or 5 years of studies, it’s just plainly stupid to think you can develop carreer plans based on tools and not on concepts. Furthermore, whatever tool a student learns during his career is surely going to do one of two things in the near future: evolve or dissappear and when that happens, everything he knew about that tool will render unuseful on the Market some University once told him he was prepared for. Since it’s a very well know fact that people’s ability to learn is degraded with the past of the years, it will be a lot more difficult for that “professional” to learn something new and he will probably be replaced by newly graduated students that will start the process all over again. And even if that sounds comfortable enough to some old professors that know they can always accomodate to such a system as they can’t actually be fired from the University because of all the years they have been in it (at least that happens in my University), well, the concept of metaprogramming is going to catch you all: We will eventually be able to make programs that are capable of doing general purpose programming, and once we get to that point (and we are not far from it, judging by the complexity of parsers and compilers) there won’t be a need to hire people to do that.

So how can Free Software help the Educational System prepare real-valued students? This question has been answered previously: consider Andrew Tanenbaum’s classic book “Operating Systems Design and Implementation”. What was it that made that book such a bestseller? Besides the great expertise from such a master of Operating Systems, the book came with the world famous MINIX. Why was that? Because Dr. Tanenbaum knew that there’s no way to learn as an expectator. The students needed to test and think out of the box and you can see that approach throughout the problems at the end of each chapter: most of them ask students to modify the MINIX so that it could do something that the distributed version wasn’t capable of doing yet. Couldn’t the author simply write a big book on UNIX commands? Yes he could, but he knew that was NOT teaching. He probably knew that there was great chance that in the near future UNIX wouldn’t be mainstream in the market, but even if that happened, he knew that the concpets that built UNIX will still be useful, maybe not as breakthrough ideas anymore, but at least as bases for new features to be added on modern operating systems.

Free Software gives students the power to think beyond the capabilities of the existing tools, and at the same time teaches methods and values that cannot be taught in the regular IT curriculum, like sharing the modified concepts and world-wide team-based projects. Students would no longer worry about learning what command creates a thread on a specific languge, and instead use that time to think on better ways to implement any single threaded existing library in modern multicore CPUs using any given open language like Java. This kind of Educational System frees the professor from the burden of teaching language-specific material (we have the Web to do so) and empowers them with the ability to teach models  and concepts that will endure as languages and platforms change (after all, Object Oriented Programming is close to 50 years of existance, but most of the students in my University are still not sure of where to put the class keyword on a C++ program).

Are you not convinced on my argument? Well, try searching for these two phrases: ‘SQL Server Tutorial’ and ‘Sharing Tutorial’. The first one is searching for a tutorial on how to use MS SQL Server, did you find any? The second one was searching for a tutorial on how to share valuable information and knowledge in a community and the importance of it, did you find any results regarding that concept? Well, it looks like its a lot more difficult to teach students a single value like sharing, than to teach them many of the latest tools.

But then it looks like Free Software solved the problem for the IT Educational world, didn’t it? Well it didn’t. It actually did more than that. It solved many other aspects of Education on many other areas. That’s because Free Software stands not for Software Freedom, but for Human Freedom. The legal aspects of Free Software are still challenging topics on modern discussions on Copyright laws. Social Sciences are also backing up the Free Software movement as the only alternative to modern monopoly trends that have turned our society into a marketplace of possible buyers. So Free Software is not just about a hacker’s right to see the code, it’s about a society’s right to grab the future with its own hands.

C’est avec délectation que j’ai lu un article sur le MondeInformatique.fr selon lequel le professeur Andrew Tanenbaum (appelé affectueusement Andy dans l’article) aurait reçu une subvention de l’Union Européenne pour le développement de MINIX, un système d’exploitation qu’il a développé et qu’il veut stable et sans plantage.

Le professeur Andrew Tanenbaum, (selon Wikipedia), est né à New York, en 1944. Il réside au Pays-Bas. C’est un chercheur et enseignant en Informatique. Actuellement, il dirige le département des Systèmes informatiques à l’université libre d’Amsterdam où ses enseignements sont très axé sur les systèmes d’exploitations.

Il est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages dont “Modern Operating systems (Systèmes d’exploitations)”.

Hormis ses publications d’excellente qualité scientifique, il est aussi l’auteur de MINIX, un clône libre d’UNIX. Au début, Andrew avait voulu MINIX un simple outil didactique pour lequel il avait imposé des limitations techniques qui ont frustré pas mal d’utilisateurs, dont Linus Torvalds, qui initia alors le développement du noyau Linux, aujourd’hui largement utilisé sur les systèmes d’exploitations libres.

Andrew Tanenbaum est très connu pour sa prise de position pour l’architecture micro-noyau pour un système d’exploitation moderne. L’avantage, selon le professeur, c’est que le système devient ainsi très stable, et peut ne jamais se planter. Une partie du noyau qui ne répond plus pourra être déchargée de la mémoire sans arrêter, dans la plupart des cas, l’ensemble du système. MINIX est un exemple de système d’exploitation à architecture de micro-noyau. Hurd, en cours de développement par la Free Software Fondation en est un autre.

A l’opposé, il y a les systèmes d’exploitations monolithiques (à base d’un noyau monolithique comme Linux) qu’Andrew Tanenbaum dans son livre “les Systèmes d’exploitations” dit être sans structure; un ensemble des fonctions pouvant être appelées depuis n’importe quelle autre.

Néanmoins, après avoir craché sur Linux, qui est monolithique, il a fini par reconnaître ses performances et semble en être fier, puisqu’il dit de son propre système MINIX qu’il est le précurseur de Linux.

MINIX sera désormais orienté vers le grand public. Avec une subvention d’ordre de 2,4 M€, Andrew Tanenbaum compte faire de l’ordinateur un outil aussi stable qu’une télévision ou un téléphone. Afin que “l’utilisateur moyen ne connaisse aucun plantage dans sa vie”. MINIX est sous licence libre BSD.

Richard Stallman, est un autre partisan des systèmes d’exploitation à base de micro-noyau. Et il participe au sein de la Free Software Fundation au développement de Hurd qui utlise l’artitecture micro-noyau. On peut expérimenter Hurd avec la distribution Debian/Hurd, en cours de développement.

Note to computer engineers: Go out and beat those communication engineers! We are counting on you.

This isn’t mine (I swear it!). Its an extract of what we can found in the book Computer Networks (p. 570), written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

Anyway, would anyone like to join me?

Eben bin ich auf einen mittlerweile schon gut 16 Jahre alten Thread gestoßen. Darin debattieren unter anderem Andrew Tanenbaum und Linus Torvalds über Linux und dessen Architektur. Das nenne ich mal einen guten Geschichtsunterricht in Sachen Betriebssysteme! Ein bisschen Zeit sollte man sich zum lesen nehmen, da die Postings recht ausführlich sind. Das Tolle: Das Niveau dieser Flamewars ist wesentlich höher als das heutiger, da die beteiligten Leute wissen wovon sie reden.

LINUX is obsolete

Unhappy campers