That wasn't my experience of Stanford's EE or CS profs at all. They sometimes take a sabbatical for a year to work on a startup, but when they're on campus it a

That wasn't my experience of Stanford's EE or CS profs at all. They sometimes take a sabbatical for a year to work on a startup, but when they're on campus it always felt like they're fully engaged, and presenting up-to-date material. Cheriton in particular is more of an academic purist than anything. He probably just believes that the old material is the right way to learn distributed systems, and all these new things are "just a fad". I was part of Kealia as a chip designer, and I remember having a fight with Cheriton over buying a waveform viewer for RTL simulation. It's a basic tool that any chip person needs, but he felt it was just some fluffy GUI thing that real engineers wouldn't need. That argument was a bit nuts, but I came to really like him and appreciate the purity of his perspective, even when I disagreed with it.