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Will CS Students Switch From Microsoft?
spotter writes: "There's an article in Newsweek International that talks about how Microsoft's tactics are turning off an entire generation of CS students from their products and increasing the fortunes of Linux." The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
Some of them will. Some of them won't
nurture.
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
I started to read it, really I did, but when I got to "Microsoft's selling point has been its universe of tightly designed software that fits together like a puzzle" I had to stop.
I wanted an article on programming choices, not MS FUD.
I don't know how it is at most other places, but at the University I attend the labs run NetBSD and KDE2.
I know a few people have copies of MS Visual Studio at home, but why bother, when gcc + emacs is in the labs and you can get it free at home?
Cheers Koz
While the article brings up an interesting point, most of my friends who are still in college actually aren't interested in Microsoft for a different reason. As bright, motivated, hard working people, they see Microsoft as a place that has had its moment of glory in the sun; true growth will spring from other, more innovative companies with new ideas. While Microsoft guarentees plenty of money, I see CS people as wanting to be with the next big thing, not the last big thing. I'm not in CS, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be a Microserf either.
Wow! Programmers are working on a new program called KDE which will be released this spring! That's what the article says. I can't wait to try it out.
Maybe by next year they'll report on the 2000 USA elections.
I just reloaded my home PC this weekend. Replaced a slowly dying Pentium II with a newer AMD box, which required reinstalling everything on the new box.
Everything went fine until I got to Outlook 2002, which won't accept my serial number (since it's "registered to another computer" - no kidding. That box is headed towards the dumpster).
Apparently my only choice (besides tossing the piece of junk software out with the old PC) is to call microsoft and try to get it re-registered through that process. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to get me to buy a new copy since the old one was tied to that processor.
Microsoft, you sure are making it easy to break up with you...
*scoove*
An entire generation of CS students,
.NET out there,
.NET are different animals..
(and lots of non-CS students) are learning Java.
MS is going to need to do some serious marketing
towards universites to get
and personally, I doubt it'll ever reach the level of adoption that Java as achived.
(Yeah, before you start flaming me, I KNOW Java and
but they ARE competing technologies in some senses.)
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
I'm not at all convinced this is true. A good counter-example is Apple, who for years owned the educational market both in high schools and universities in the US. It didn't lead (as Apple had hoped it would) to widespread use of Macs in the commercial world.
A good Computer Science school teaches the principles of computing. These are abstract ideas that can be applied to any hardware or software platform. The OS you use at university should not impact the OSes you are able or interested to use later. I learnt on Unix and VMS systems, neither of which I use in my professional or hobbyist life now.
Sailing over the event horizon
>Linux hackers from Germany and elsewhere are working on a Windows-like graphical interface for Linux PCs called KDE (for K Desktop Environment). They expect to release it this spring--free of charge.
Let me know when this KDE thing gets released! hahahahahah
1st-As much fun as it is paying a few hundred dollars (including student discount) for a 'stable 'operation system, let alone development tools, its better, and cheaper, to get them for free.
2nd- As a student, it is better to open up some code under the GPL and see how you can implement things, rather than see the application run. Linux apps are a great place to see howto write things, and what good coding style looks like.
3rd- The university that I goto only uses windows for the public labs, duh, and the first year CS labs. Second year uses a combination of NetBSD and solaris boxes.( Gnome and KDE are being looked at).
What I've never understood about Microsoft is why they don't have licenses that give people the opportunity to learn their product. In doing this they are shutting out a huge number of developers (not just students).
Whether you're in school or not, learning about developing in a Microsoft environment requires parting with some cash. Personally I'd love to have copies of Microsoft development tools just so I can learn about the technology, but I'm not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a product just to try it out.
I'll pay media cost, but nothing more. Until they offer that I continue to use other tools and environments for "recreational development". I'd like to learn more about their technology, but they apparently don't want that to happen.
But faculty and the IT department too. At my school many faculty are on an anti-microsoft campaign. Face it, funding in academia is usually not as lucrative as in the business world, so it's understandable that faculty will look for cheaper solutions.
And lets not forget the IT people that support the academic systems. Many of them are (inherently) i the anti-MS product camp. UNIX/LINUX (and in my day VAX) systems scale much better than MS Products.
But of course, then you also have a lot of nonmajor's coming in taking intro classes in CS, and expecting to be taught MS Office products, because thats what they are expected to know in the business world. So it becomes a question of pedagogy what to support. Sorry Linux fanatics, academia will still have to support MS products.
Of all the things I pick on my school for they do approach this debate a bit more maturely.
We start off learning Perl, C++, C, various data structures ideas, algorithms, etc..
All using MSVC. But they also dedicate portions of the course to learning Linux, QNX and how to develop applications on those platforms.
The goal is to appreciate both sides of the OS wars.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Since then, I have learned patience, and am getting increasingly fed-up with MS.
This is why I think the baby-CS folks will go with open source: MS doesn't document well, and they don't follow guidelines.
I thought VB was pretty OK, till I started developing with PHP and realized that a language (even though it is just a scripting language) can actually work exactly how the documenatation says it should. And besides that, the documentation is searchable, and organized gasp.
I am about ready to dump Windows for good, just because I like PHP/mySQL way better than anything MS can throw together (read: ASP).
To summarize, I think CS folks goto Linux 'cause it is written with functionality, not profitability, in mind.
I'm a freshman at a major Virginia university and have taken Computer Science I, aka the CS class for people who are computer science or computer engineers. in it, you're basically taught straight C++ programming.
anyway, the professors, on the whole, strongly dislike Microsoft Visual C++ and let that be known...it's not as standard as other compilers on basic issues that get beginning C++ students and that can cause a lot of problems/frustration. we're encouraged instead to use the cxx or g++ compliers on the school's computer system, g++ if we have Linux, or another freeware compiler for those with Windows.
among the students though, a lot of them use Visual C++...they either have it because they got it free (pirated or their work has it), cheap (student discounts) or just went out and bought it because they thought they'd need a complier, knew nothing about compilers, and recognized the name Microsoft. And a lot of them continue using it, even on projects where the professors *strongly* encourage other compilers and give instruction on how to use those compilers.
so, I don't know. at least at my college, just because the students are being taught one compiler in class, does not mean that that's what they're using outside of class, unless forced to...
Of course, having generations of CS students hating Microsoft will only help Linux. However, Microsoft will not topple automatically over time.
At Oberlin, I helped install Linux & BSD on all of our lab machines, and with a friend founded the our (still active) Oberlin Linux User's Group. But living in NY, I have seen the worth of C++, Linux System Administration and Perl skills go down while my friends who can hack Java and VB are always in demand. The moral - as harsh as it seems - is that students who learn Linux in college will probably just have to learn Microsoft later.
That MS has dumbed down their software to the point that you realy need very little learning to be able to be very effective with it. with Unix, you need to more time and resources. If you are able to learn how to admin using Unix, you can then pick up a book on win 2k and learn what you need from it to be able to admin a windows network. you make better use of your resources in the University if you spend it learning Unix than if you spent it learning somthing that a book and 3 months on the job caouls teach you.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
It depends very much on the student. Usually, when a student uses a different system at home than at a university, he will notice good things and bad things in both systems. This will direct the student into using the system that is best suited for him/her. Is the university uses Linux, it will only open more doors for the students, it won't take the students away from their Windows system at home (if that's what the students are using). Eventually, they will use the best system.
University CompSci programs have been turning out Unix people since Unix existed.
Just like has been happening for the last 20 years, some people will 'get' Unix, and find they can't work effectively without it. Some people won't.
*yawn*.
here at CWRU, microsoft showers us with donations of hardware for the labs, and software and books for the students. as well as contests, events, and has been incredibly helpful for our branch of the ACM. as for documentation, free copies of MSDN and all the microsoft press books you could ever want go a long way. A large chunk of the Comp Sci's even intern out there. myself included. I started out loving unix, but the dot-com crash and the shady recruiting of some more linuxy corps made me shift more toward MSFT.
you dont see redhat coming by and pitching woo.
What really matters, of course, isn't what they enjoy using at school, what their professors say is the best, what they have the greatest sympathy for ideologically...
...it's what they are provided with at work! Sure, at some point people have power over purchasing decisions, but rarely does a "new hire" come into a firm and tell the company what systems it is to use; if there is going to be a revolution moving away from Microsoft, it is indeed important that CS be exposed to the future, but respect that the real power, the real purchasing decisions, are made by those who are a long time out of school; whose ideological candles have long extinguished.
Ignorant people love them. Its all they know. That tells you a lot about them right there!
Any decent Computer Science student would bulk at their products. They never did appeal to CS students.
Rod.
....CS students will still need to know MS products and programs that are Windows based. Industry is what, 99%, Windows based? Funny you never hear of any 'Windows does good' posts on /.
I am a senior CS major, and I can tell you for sure that MS's high prices, "rights management" techniques, unethical business practices, and buggy ass software has hurt them. My senior seminar class has been talking about this phenomina. In my class there is a large 'anti-microsoft' sentiment not only among students, but among professors.
This is not only true for the seniors, but a majorirty of the students in my CS classes stay away from MS products as much as a matter of principle, but also because they are not nearly as secure as other alternatives. In an upper level adminstration course we are taught to never use IIS, or ASP on any part of a network that will touch the outside world in anyway. Most projects I'm hearing about are involving Linux, BeOS, Solaris, Java, and JSP.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but if my college is any indication of how things are, MS products may be on the way out in many academic circles, and losing ground in the commercial world as current CS majors graduate, and start getting into decision making areas.
here at Stanford, we have the GATES COMPUTER SCIENCE building. The rumor is he entered the discussion with "what isthe absolute minimum I have to give to get my name on the building" -- and proceeded to negotiate his donation down.
none of the people in the gates building use MS stuff, as far as I can tell.
they also seem to have some primitive screenshots of this here.
I mean really, what civilised person would have their desktop like this rather than this.
0xC3
So, they are releasing KDE this spring, eh? And some people use Windows NE on their servers?
What ends up making the big difference will be if CS students who love their Linux (bless em) get into senior management positions in fortune 500 companies....
Oh, and this "If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces," says Brett Slatkin, a student at Columbia University in New York. His colleagues roll their eyes and accuse him of being stuck at the "hippy stage."
Can anyone honestly say that if M$ offered them financial security for your work, you would really turn them down? Just think of all the good you could do with that money. That good is worth more than your silly M$ hate...
riight. i'm sure you want your business's important stuff on a network admin'ed by a guy who read a 'learn FOO in 1 week' book . . .
When I was a CS student back at college, I found that within the major, there was a small subset for which computers and programming were more than just a way to make money, and that these individuals were more knowledgeable of what was actually going on in the forefront of technology, not to mention the politics, news and "in" things of the computer field.
Whether or not they agreed with Microsoft, they at least were pretty up on the state of the industry.
The majority of students there, however, were only there because they'd heard that programming was a quick way to get a good paying job, and really were only "9 to 5" students in the field. They didn't care who or what license anything was written in, couldn't care less about what loss of rights were being discussed on Slashdot, nor even with anything other than getting drunk, and that fat paycheck they figured on when they got out.
Add to this the fact that, while expensive software on the outside world, Microsoft will give you their operating system, programming tools and office products for close to a song if you're a college student, and I'd say that the vast majority of the "average" CS student isn't any more clued in than the average home computer user.
"What students learn in school is key to what they go on to do."
I hate to break a bad bubble, but this isn't really true. This is more true of engineers than it is Liberal Arts majors, but even so, it isn't a great rule of thumb. Most kids go to college and get "educated", not neccessary trained to participate in a trade.
That's a big misconception. People view college as trade school, and it isn't. Most International Relations Majors don't go on to do things involving international relations; most history majors don't go on to do things involving history.
Granted, a lot of Computer Science majors go on to do computer science stuff, but tons of them go on to the business world as well.
A good computer science program will teach the student how to program, how to do things, but not just with a specific language or operating system. A good computer science program will teach the student how to learn, how to learn from books, how to use algorythms, not just how to use a specific programming language.
Where I went to college, it was primarilly taught in C++, but I went on to work with powerbuilder, and I was quite happy that what I was taught was not just one specific thing.
I think computer science students will end up using the language that is used by their employer with very few exceptions. Sure if they learn C++ or Java in college they may try for that kind of job but if the school is good then they should be able to quickly pick up any language out there.
My $.02 at least.
Sure students are going to be turned off by M$ actions. I'll bet a high percentage of them are turned off already just because M$ has already happened. Why work on the established order when you can be working on something new?
Getting back to the schools, I see a different problem. Working on M$ stuff brings dollars to the school. OSS projects don't.
So I say the students will become interested only to find that the school is not...
Blogging because I can...
and here I am, working as a computer technician.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I grew up as a Amiga user (and proud i still am a Amigan!)... used it for almost anythin: games, wordprocessing, programming, etc... sometimes i even used the Atari... i hardly used a pc (was during the msdos period)... i only started using it, when they released win95 for that computer... i had to work with it for school, but didn't like it... during that period i already installed and used linux (and a sco release it got from a friend)... i preferend unix over windows...
but some of the guys in my class grew up with playing monochrome pacman... they are now addicted to the terminal server... windows 2000... and the electronic colouring book windows xp... they never used linux... heard from it, but never tried it... why? they rather play games!
he even seems to condense ``go to'' into ``goto''
At least he doesnt write it GOTO!
Yea, fine, mod me down, they're your mod points not mine.
Ya, well that's why Microsoft gives schools, like Columbia, like 300 free copies of Visual Studio to give out to students.
Get them using it now!
That's where I gained my frustration with the lack of abilities of the MacIntosh, and where I can see similar frustration with the weakness of the *nix platform into the forseeable future.
Of course, if all of my beloved applications are rendered unusable by an increasing draconian OS (I'm still back at 98), then I guess it's a moot point and may as well go to the superior system.
Oh, and work is where I learned that AutoCAD sucks. If my boss can model whatever bizarre mechanism is in his mad inventor's mind, then that CAD package must be good (SolidWorks, not ACAD).
in a major Canadian university. With our textbooks, there is some version of Visual Studio included so that kids can do their labs at home on it. However, all of our teachers frown upon using it, so almost every CS student in our university ends up using GCC. On top of that, there is a growing fascination with linux. Most people here have tried it at some point a few years ago. Most likely they tried redhat 5.something, didn't understand how to use it, and have moved on.
.doc format is. (probably because I haven't dealt with business before). I can write whatever I want on AbiWord, KWord, or StarOffice.. I can send it to other people on .rtf, or another format, and they can open it. No biggie. Anyways, I'll end my incoherant rant here. Linux is pretty much there, people just have to realize it.
Lately, however, people have been slowly getting back into it. I've brought a lot of friends over to show them my linux box, and they've been simply amazed by how far it has come, and have begun to consider dual booting or switching over.
Personally, I think that if Wine 1.0 can really run any windows98 application, most people could easily convert over to linux. The only thing left for linux to being highly accepted in academic institutions is the ability to run as many games as windows. As for word processing, I seriously don't see what the big deal about the
Maybe it will influence people to use what the learned on, maybe not. My university environment was Solaris. I use linux/solaris at work - but that's just because i'm in server development. Many of the developers at my company use windows to develop their software, only because they do particular application development (i can't say what), and the tools in that environment make it easier for them to do their work. But they don't use any ms development tools - they use freely available alternative development tools that quite frankly are more robust than the ms tools.
I'm not sure i buy the argument that what you're taught to use you will use later on. I think most CS people are above that. We learn, we adapt, we use the best tools for the current task at hand. If we don't like the tools we are given, we go get better ones. Why? Cause they are there, we can, we know how, and we've all wasted too much time dealing with crappy dev tools and environments that we know that good development starts with a good working environment. I have enough trouble fighting to integrate other peoples' code. I don't want to fight with my environment or have to say "i wish i could do *this*, it would make my life so much easier"..
Er... I've been using KDE for years now.
I think the coding platform that real CS students use is largely irrelevant to what they go on to use in their jobs. If you are actually in a university (not a community college) learning computer science, chances are that you're learning mostly about algorithms, data structures and information theory, rather than memorizing how to use a specific language or environment.
True computer scientists have no trouble learning most new languages because the underlying fundamentals are the same. An algorithm is an algorithm is an algorithm, be it in C#, VB, Java or Perl.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush
fool, I am talking about people who are in collage. they know that after, if they have the skills to admin Unix, it will be trivial for them to learn to admin windows.
In collage? What, they're glued to a piece of paper?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[Microsoft's software] has some advantages: it is generally more consistent in quality ..
Yes, I suppose if there is one thing you can say about Microsoft's software, it's that the level of quality has been quite consistent.
In my experience most CS students tend to drift towards whatever is open source... being that we aren't the most experienced programmers in the world, but possibly have the potential to be in the future, how can you gain more experience than looking at the beautiful code of Larry Wall, Linus, or Kerrigan etc... Here at the college of NJ, the dept is very anti-microsoft. The students first start using Unix then migrate towards linux.
OK, what exactly does the future <cough!> release of KDE have to do with the "tedious process of installing linux"? And if consumers "merely want their computers to work", how about mentioning Apple? Plus, the article is horribly written. I'm not talking so much about the technical defects, either...it seems as though the authors just got out of high school. There's no eloquence at all. Feh.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
When Linux, or anybody else, can come out with something even close to Visual Studio, then maybe I'll think about it. But that is considerably further away than most people would think. Emacs+gcc has nothing on VS, nor does KDevelop.
Students will pretty much do what their teachers tell them. I don't know about your side of the atlantic, but over here that is mostly Java these days - though I heard that the EE department at my university collectivly switched to .NET already.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Just announced Friday; I submitted it as a story, but I guess the moderator wasn't interested. Single user student licenses will be $99; department-wide licenses will be $799 per year. The fact that these two stories appeared so close together suggests to me that Bill G. is rather concerned about the problem.
That MS has dumbed down their software to the point that you realy need very little learning to be able to be very effective with it
We are talking about Computer Science students. These are people who are learning programming, not system administration or use of business applications. So your point doesn't really apply. Programming on the Windows platform is different in the details to programming on other platforms but is not significantly easier.
Using (for example) Visual Studio as your IDE is just as challenging as using development tools on Linux/Mac OS/whatever and you will learn just as much about programming principles.
Sailing over the event horizon
That's one of the reasons they've introduced their 'Student Consultant' program in Europe (and I believe in the States). Microsoft are aware that students often have very strong opinions about Linux and Microsoft, and have been trying to forge a relationship with students to improve matters.
:)
:)
So two years ago a lecturer I knew at my university in England put me forward for a student consultantship. Microsoft were taking between one and four students from the best Comp. Sci. universities in Britain. I got a reasonable sum of (tax-free) money, a laptop, an Aero PocketPC (the precursor to the Ipaq, which I have also received), a couple year's MSDN subscription, and trips to TechEd '00 and '01 in Amsterdam and Barcelona. In return I was to do some research vaguely involving Microsoft technologies over my summer break. It was a pretty sweet deal, and I'm typing this from my free laptop
Microsoft have also pushed the 'Academic Alliance', which serves to give Comp. Sci. students at various universities free copies of practically every bit of Microsoft software (they exclude Office) in return for the University handing over a nominal fee. There have also been various deals regarding free games for completed Web Services, and such like.
Of course, in an ideal world, students will leave university with a completely objective viewpoint, ready to pick the software that best fits their (and their company's) needs with respect to price, performance, stability, features etc. Most CS students I know don't really care about the software they use - this reflects the fact that CS degrees should have very little software-specific content. However, there are always a vocal few who are pro- or anti- this or that. They're kinda boring
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
What most CS students learn in school.. They'll never use in the field. They'll end up in remedial on-the-job training until they do learn what they *should* have learned in school.
The average computer-related curriculum hasn't a clue. Many institutions still run them as if the technology we have no is that of fourty years ago.
I've had friends have to learn how to use *punch cards* for Christ's sake.
Anyway, what's likely is the replacement of other *ix-like systems with Linux. The end of Microsoft?
Hardly - not when MS is pumping tons of cash into schools.
Windows-like graphical interface for Linux PCs called KDE (for K Desktop Environment). They expect to release it this spring--free of charge.
Redhat has been shipping kde with it's distribution for free(speech) since redhat 5.x?! right?
Ummm... I thought KDE was already released?
Uh, how is that FUD? It's certainly true that a consistent and interoperable interface is one of Microsoft's main selling points [one of the few things the article got right]. I'm not sure what you're talking about here. And if you were looking for actual content on an msnbc.com article, well, I have to wonder...are you one of those clueless kids that bashes 'Micro$oft' and wears shirts from ThinkGeek[tm] every day [then gets piss-scared when someone who actually knows what Linus is walks by]? "Dude, my default install of Mandrake 8.1 is so cool! It never crashes like windows does!"
--Mark
A few choice samples:
Linux hackers from Germany and elsewhere are working on a Windows-like graphical interface for Linux PCs called KDE (for K Desktop Environment). They expect to release it this spring--free of charge.
I'm a Microsoft guy, but I distinctly remember running KDE on Slackware 3.x back in the old-skool days ('99 maybe?)
In the end, Microsoft persuaded the Parliament to continue using Windows NE for 5,000 new PCs. But the servers are already in the hands of the enemy.
I thought the NT + ME hybrid was to be called XP, not NE! As far as being "in the hands of the enemy," hey, use whatever OS fits your needs, damnit! I think whoever wrote this article (Newsweek) has some serious issues to clear up. It sounds like one of those people that "Outlook mysteriously gives them viruses."
"But they sent me the file to have my advice!!"
Thanks to the incredible blunder of licensing the source code from Sun, Microsoft can never make a compatible version of Java 1.2 or higher. I predict that C# will never be able to overcome Java's head start as far as being the common programming language for CS. Java will dominate the CS curriculum for at least two decades--possibly forever.
It is not Linux that will contain MS's expansion to the enterprise, it is Java. Java is the language of interconnection, and it is interconnection that is the major computer project of our time. Sun's firm grip on its copyrights and trademarks for Java are a far more effective barrier against Microsoft than any antitrust judgment could have been. It is Java that has united everyone from Oracle to IBM to Sun against Microsoft. The line has been held. With everyone against them I see Microsoft making little further headway despite .Net.
KDE 3 will be out this spring! Although KDE 1 and 2 are out, they should probably be ignored just like Windows before version 3, Internet Explorer before version 4, and so on. Hasn't Microsoft taught us that the first versions of any software are completely useless? That people who try them are just dooming themselves to expensive retraining and conversions when the interfaces and file formats all get switched around? Clearly this "KDE" thing must just be starting to work out the bugs, if they're not even at version 3 yet.
I'm a firm believer in that your vocation and your advocation can be two separate things. You might slave away in the coal mines during the day, but then you can come home and do what you really love. While it's always nice to get paid to do what you enjoy doing, a certain amount of happiness can be bought with cold hard cash.
WPA is there to make it impossible to keep using an OEM-version on a new computer and really forcing to upgrade.
And if somebody sais: "Yes, but the switching costs!" I reply: "... are the best reason to switch now, not later when switching costs are even higher"
If you ask me GNU Applications and a few other programs are the killer apps for GNU/Linux as a CS student.
1. GCC, Binutils, Emacs/Vim (General Hacking)
2. Mesa (Graphics)
3. Bison/Flex (Compilers)
4. Linux (Operating Systems)
5. Various Packet Analyizers (Networking/Security)
5. MySQL/Postgres (Databases)
The only non opensource application I use is Mathematica, but Wolfram provides student discouts and packages such as Combinatorica are opensource.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
The part of the article that I find most insteresting is the discussion on Linux in Europe. I am sure that most of us have read some of the articles where Germany and other countries have openly denouced MS, and Sun for that matter, for the backdoors that are [most likely] in it, but that they actually followed through is interesting. With Germany being the economic powerhouse of the EU this trend will only spread to the other member countries.
Why I find this interesting is the potential shift in the computer world. The US may not see Linux on the desktop in the near future but perhaps in Europe, Russia, and China we may. With strong economic powers outside the US using operating systems that are MS incompatable this may force a change in MS practices with regard to other products, perhaps the selling of compatable versions of MS products within those countries (and making it illigal to use such copies in the US, ahh locale).
As for the CS students in the Colleges in the US not wanting to use MS products. Something tells me that economics will win in the end.
Disclamer-Opinion of Person
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
MS is hosting an event here at Miami University (Ohio) in conjucntion with the CS department to celebrate the rollout of Visual Studio .NET tomorrow. "All attendees will receive the full version of Visual Studio .NET Academic, a full version of Windows XP Professional, and other valuable items. Join us for an overview of the .NET Framework and a live demonstration of Visual Studio .NET." That's about $1700 (retail) of software that they're giving away. My suitemate and I are both Linux junkies, but we're both going for the software and out of curiosity. They giving out free food & even have a band scheduled to play. The notice is on MS's website here. They're also giving away an Xbox, Microsoft Press Books, $500 American Express Gift Certificates, MP3 Players, "and more!" MS is definetly pulling out all of the stops to try and hook the next generation (big surprise). I'm interested to see how it will go...
The Linux vs. Microsoft debate is far from over. As a student in England, I have noticed that the current batch of University students who do CS, are split into two camps. As mentioned in the article, many programmers and those who wish to become serious computer professionals, are horrified with current events surrounding the Beast at Redmond. Not only do they recognise the disadvantages of MS products and ethos, they see how linux can be useful to all kinds of users, due to its highy configurable and open nature, as well as its free cost and massive support network.
But the honest truth is that this is only a small proportion of the Computer Science population. Many more casual students: the type of students more suited to simple application programming as well as web design, hate Linux with a passion. Any truly honest computer enthusiast or porfessional knows that for simple functionality, MS Windows cannot be beat. No matter how much we hark on about Bill Gates being the anti-christ and Microsoft as some form of cult, ordinairy users find using Windows relatively painless. [Excluding crashes, inefficiencies, dubious business tactics and annoying paper clips] This goes for students who simply don't care that much about programming and the basics behind computing theory, but are more interested in application of knowledge gained, in the real world.
The whole IT market has grown so large, that many people who come into it looking for work, merely do so for the money. There are many students on my course with a shockingly low level of computer knowledge. These students have no deep interest in computing. They want quick, simple and easy tools computing tools that will allow them to get good jobs doing precious little. These people do not want to be on the forfront of technology, they merely want to ride the wave and let it take them wherever. These people may keep Microsoft alive because they don't care enough about the direction the IT industry is heading to realise what is happening. Until the Linux community tries to beat Microsoft at its own game by making a simple and easy packaging of the OS, that requires little computer knowledge to setup and maintain as well as having the kind of applications that they are used to, Microsoft will maintain its monopoly in the home, workplace and to some extents, academia.
MS is going to start pusing .NET tomorrow - BIG TIME.
Sure CS students aren't going to use MS stuff, but every other major will. Why? Well at my university Microsoft has a deal where they sell any of their products to students for $5. Is MS being generous? No! They realize that if you use their stuff now you'll continue to use it. And furthermore, as hard as it is to believe, non-CS students don't CARE about issues past "it doesn't work" or "why use ssh when I've got telnet".
I don't see all the com majors running out to use open office instead of Word anytime soon, chemistry students are using excell for lab data, and every professor has PowerPoint presentations for lectures.
If all the most creative developers are behind Linux, it cannot fail - it's just a matter of time.
I could be wrong, but I begin to see some irony when I see a story like this published on MSNBC. Am I the only one laughing?
Apple's a perfect example of this. Just because they got University's to buy a lot of boxes didn't make it ripe for students to learn on them.
I was starting college in 1985 and these hot new Macintoshs had just hit the computer lab. They were a dream compared to hacking away on the mainframe with it's handout's of push the PF75 key, blah blah blah. So as a budding young programmer I thought the Mac was the future. I wanted to learn to program it. They had an interpreted C on them that I used, but you really couldn't do much fancy with it. I wanted to go deeper. Turned out you had to buy about $1500 bucks worth of books, compilers and official Mac developer license to really get into the nuts and bolts.
I found a PC in the EE lab. It was wide open. Didn't really have windows, but a C compiler was cheap and the specifications for it were lying around all over the place. I could easily solder something together and have it communicate on the main bus. It didn't have all the expense and proprietary restrictions of the Mac. Had a built in assembly level debugger even. It was a hackers dream-- wide open and pokeable. It was not a great box, but it was cheap and available and easy to get internal information about.
Guess what I learned and pursued on into my career. Guess what type of hardware I'm typing from now. An Intel box that gained popularity along with Microsoft.
The tighter Bill squeezes his claws the more systems that will slip through his fingers. (to paraphrase the wisdom of Star Wars). He will fall the way of Apple.
You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end.
Shawn
P.S. I quickly got sick of MS boxes and went to work in UNIX. At least UNIX/Linux doesn't crash all the time.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
MS realizes that CS students are important to their future. At my university, and I know at many others around the US, they have a program to give CS students free copies of XP and VS .NET and other MS software. They also have Student Consultants at these universities who's sole job is to spread MS gospel among students. They do presentations on things .NET and C# and hold contests and various other things to show off MS technology and in general try and rebuild the MS name.
It seems to me a lot of people who complain about everything MS does are just griping. Many people at my university would like to get a job with MS, myself included. .NET is something technologically interesting and challenging, and that's what draws me to it. I have no interest in making the next version of word or excel, but the .NET, the CLR and C# are products with technological merit.
In my quest to find a job, I find that lots of companies are looking for .NET developers. It ranges from hardware companies to oil exploration to financial companies. Everyone recognizes that .NET is something worth investing in. I'll admit that MS has some catching up to do with Java, but college students aren't dumb and will start to realize that .NET and C# are worth taking a look at.
Even if CS students switch from Microsoft, they'll learn that there's more money to be made by selling stuff for Windows rather than OSX or Linux, and the majority of people without CS degrees will stick with windows.
shh... don't tell anyone,
don't wanna be bothered with his folks coming around again.
..from a language research perspective for three reasons:
.NET gives you more newe cool toys in the object oriented world. Java was never a very serious language when it came to serious langague features.
.NET will work with your new coll research langague, ala Haskell.
.NET. The only real question is, can Gnome keep up.
a)
b)
c) Microsoft is paying you to developee your new cool research langague, ala Haskell.
Ultimatly, all computer science educations is trickle down from the research langauge world, so I expect that MS has finally won the battle of the API with
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
But I digress.
My nephew is at that stellar CS institution in the middle of cornfields, the University of Illinois. And he's still a Microsoft zealot, and no amount of articles that I send him about MS shenanigans can dissuade him from the ideal that MS is the way to go professionally. No matter that it crashes on his computer -- that's supposed to happen, right? -- or that there's all sorts of ways (and more daily) to compromise a MS system.
But a little perserverence is starting to wear him down. He's actually thinking of putting a distro on another partition to see what all the fuss is about. There's hope yet.
On the other hand, with the market the way it is, especially in Austin, perhaps I should tell him to stick with MS so he won't be competition when he gets out of college. It's pretty bad here when a buddy of mine with 20+ years has to settle for entry-level wages in a contract job after getting laid off.
So, uh, yeah, Microsoft is a good thing to have on your resume, college kids.
Is this thing on? Hello?
Mediocre college students become mediocre workers.
Java sucks, Sun is dying, Linux rules.
that this story was on msnbc.com?
Actually many Microsoft development tools are available for free download or can be shipped on CD for the little more than the price of shipping and handling. These include
- Microsoft
.NET Framework SDK
- Handheld PC SDK
- Direct X 8.1 SDK
- Microsoft Passport SDK
- Microsoft Speech SDK
- Windows Media Player 7.1 SDK
- Microsoft Agent SDK
I also know that one can download the data access SDK to allow development of ODBC and ADO apps but don't have a link handy. Anyway my point is that Microsoft does allow developer's to learn about their platform without requiring them to part with some cash. However some of these SDKs do require Visual C++ which is priced academically starting at $44.95Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft employee but this post is not being made in any official capacity nor does it reflect the wishes, intentions, strategies or opinions of my employer.
Its for this reason that M$ has "buddied" with some universities (like UT Austin), where they sell full blown professional copies (not educational or home versions) of their software at $5 a cd...
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
It may be somewhat true that CS students are being turned off by MS, but so what? For years, most CS programs have been teaching LISP and look how far that has made it in the commercial world. What really matters is what the MIS students are learning. Most of the MIS students I know at my school think Visual Basic rocks and barely know what Linux is. They think free software is the cracked software they can download off the dorm network for free. These are the people that are going to be put into positions to buy software for large companies in the future, and I don't see most of them adopting Linux anytime soon.
OUr CS department is kind of weird. We have not yet given up teaching COBOL and mainframe assembler, but yet we have almost no UNIX. It's MENTIONED in the OS classes, but no where have I seen a faculty member either use or talk about Linux. They are all Vis Studio stuff when they talk about PC stuff. They have nothing on PERL, Tcl/Tk or anything else. My hope is that will soon change as we are part way thru a conversion to AIX and ORACLE for the RDBMS(yeah not Linux, but at least it isn't Microsoft and SQL server.) Our first live module will go online in July and April 29th is when I start my training on AIX System Administration. Being we still have the mainframe, I am going to try to talk them into doing something with Linux on it. My imagination is we could make it possible to host student web servers (with full root access possible...if yer server get's rooted, then we pull the account or control it with VM! :) ). I dunno. Seems to me we can do something with that box since we do own it (so long as IBM service agreement does not go up alot). Anyway, what scares me is that I don't really want to reccomend our program as of yet because I am not sure in what direction it is going.
Gorkman
They want quick, simple and easy tools computing tools that will allow them to get good jobs doing precious little.
And they should prefer sophisticated but abstruse hindrances that force them to take bad jobs in which they are worked like slaves?
This is what adults call the free market: Some people prefer quick, simple and easy tools that will allow them to get good jobs doing precious little, and, as a result, companies like Microsoft produce products to satisfy that demand. Other people prefer sophisticated but abstruse hindrances that force them to take bad jobs in which they are worked like slaves, and, believe it or not, there are even companies willing to produce products to satisfy that demand as well.
...or, more specifically, my roommate's burned copies of MS software. ;)
I've always loved computers, and know that programming and working with them is what I'd like to do. But as this has come closer to being true (because I'm in college now, as opposed to the 7th grade), I have become extreemly disenfranchised with MS. MS was a company that I had always wanted to work for, (or Nintendo) because they make computer products, they do all sorts of cool stuff, and they are based in Seattle, Washington (MAJOR plus for me, used to live there, loved it).
But as I've gotten older, my oppinion has changed. I'm not sure if this is mostly my maturing, reading more news about the computer industry, or a multi-fold increase in the evilness of Microsoft. At this point in my life, I really don't want to work for Microsoft. As it stands (at least from my point of view) is that their products are getting bigger (bloated), buggier, slower, and more expensive. The biggest problem for me is the new features. They seem to keep adding this that are either useless or worse.
Let's review a quick list of "features" as I see them in recent products:
Now don't get me wrong, MS has done some great things too. DirectX started out life very patheticaly, but has really become an excelent API. MS made it so my soundcard doesn't have to be a Sound Blaster, become we all know that in the dos days "compatible" meant "good luck getting your games to work". The only mice and keyboards I have are ALL made by Microsoft, becase they are the most comfortable, and I know there will not be any compatibility problems (although I'm sure that that is rare with keyboards and mice).
The other big thing that has happened to me to change my oppion is Linux. I'm sorry but I just don't see how anyone who is in the CS field can look at Linux and not be inspired. Linus wanted to make his own operating system, and he wanted to it be good. He wanted it free, and now we have Linux. It's free, you can see how it works, and it runs great on hardware that's more than 6 months old. Yes, Linux has some serious problems from the desktop standpoint (we can argue this later), but it's getting there. This has made Linux VERY attractive to me, while MS just seems to sit there saying "I know what you need, it's my newest $100 upgrade that won't change a thing." Of course, what this really means is "don't like the bugs? Too bad! Pony up or suffer!"
It is for these reasons and many more that I have begun to dislike MS. They hold the computer world in the palm of their hands, and so they are squeezing money out of us. Yes, Office is a great program and they should charge a premium for it, but $600 for a full version? $250 for an upgrade? $100 for a full copy of Word? That's ludicrous.
In summation, I don't really want to work for MS anymore. I still like Nintendo, but I think it would also be fun to be at iD and some other companies. I can't think of anyone I've met at my school who don't use Linux, or at least have a grudge against MS. With Microsoft going the way it is, I really don't see how CS students could see them any other way. At this point I'd like to say thanks for listening to my rantings. They are my opinions and once again, I know that I can't spell. I'd copy and paste this into Word to be spell checked, but I don't feel like waiting a full minute for it to open on my 1 ghz laptop that has 512mb of RAM. Also, in reality I'm a CoE student, because I like the harware side too. I used to want to be CS, and I can't help but wonder if I've moved towards CoE in part because of how my feelings of MS have changed.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I like the ending:
But the servers are already in the hands of the enemy.
Really, there should be some kind of -5, spell_nitpicking, and it should be used on people who post trite comments like the above. It goes without saying that collage really meant college, so why waste the effort pointing it out?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Im one of only two Linux users in my high school class, where we run Windows w/ Borland Delphi, but the rest of the class has learnt though whatever medium that when they go to university they will be a) Using Linux/Unix/BSD b) Be using java, and all of them have developed anti-MS inclinations of both the technical and political nature since the course started 1.5 years ago.
All CS majors at my university worked on a Mac II's running A/UX. We also worked under MacOS (version 6.something at the time). Later classes worked with Amigas, the NT, then PCs running both NT and FreeBSD then PCs running Win2K and various flavors of Linux.
I've not used A/UX since I graduated and moved on from MacOS a few years later.
What did this teach me and all those in the program since then? Use the right OS for the job. Maybe it's commercial maybe not, maybe it's made by Microsoft, maybe not.
Windows NE, eh? What's that stand for, "Not Evil"? Or perhaps "Not Enough". :-)
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
You know what? I agree with this. I know many protest this fact, but I LIKE messing with the metal. I liked the DOS days when I could change just about everything and had to mess with obscure and confusing config files. But also, to me seeing AOL commercials on TV just reminds me of what I see happening to the Wintel market: it's getting dumbed down to the point where any IDIOT gets a computer, uses it wrong, and then complains to me to fix their computer because pressing "print" doesn't print when then don't have a printer. What we need are computer licenses, sorta like amature radio has.
Michael Cook (MBCOOK) - Going AC to save my Karma
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Last time i checked all the MBA's and "execs" running the show are in lub with microsoft or sun.
Heck, linux doesn't offer free coffee cups, shirts or calling cards, so bosses don't want to bother.
Always that darn "Partner" thing.. Maybe if RedHat's bottom line grows a bit people want to say "In partnership with RedHat we have implemented Redhat linux 7.2 on two zillion pc's across the world".
It will take more then 2-3 companies to do this as well, but hopefully stuff like that will happen.
Maybe Suse and AMD's Hammer processor will do what "wintel" did 10 years ago.. that would be shweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet
Those 6 little letters (which stands for MS Development Network Academic Alliance) have become quite popular in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at my school. They offer: - Visual Studio - .NET Enterprise Servers
- All Microsoft operating systems, SDKs, DDKs
- Betas, new releases, updates
- Visio Professional
- MSDN Library (Documentation, technical articles, code samples)
etc. etc.
It's a lot of software, and it's all free. This just happened maybe a month ago, and the software "library" has been close to checked out of the popular software ever since. Everyone knows it's an obvious ploy to get students dependent on MS software, but a good majority don't care - we're going to need to know it for industry, we can use Linux in our spare time. But it's expensive in the real world, we get it for free, why not?
Yes, Microsoft is evil. But free. That's life, eh?
None of this matters anyway. WHEN (notice I didn't say if) the SSSCA passes, all Operating Systems besides Windows XP and Apples OS X (MS will give them a license so as not to appear as a monopoly) will be illegal, because Microsoft owns the patent on the idea of a DRM Operating Systsem, the government mandated anti-copying technology will be a closed standard and reverse engineering it will be illegal under the DMCA.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
MSDE is basically SQL 7.0 with a few switches thrown so that it can't have DB's bigger than 2 Gig or more than 5 Concurrent users. Even installs on 98.
i ns /msde/
It's completely free and all of the SQL Server management tools (Enterprise Manager) work with it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/add
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
Hey, I got a free copy of VS while I was in school too. Except... I don't think it was a hand-out.
Most universities have a long tradition of
running true blue BSD Unix(tm) on their time-
sharing computers, dating back to the 80's.
Now that true blue BSD is available on the x86
PC, many universities have switched to running
Unix(tm) using FreeBSD, a descendant of the
original CSRG 4.2BSD that popularized the TCP/IP
protocols used in the Internet as we know it
today.
"Will CS students switch from Microsoft???"
That would somehow suggest CS students currently use microsoft stuff.
I've never seen a CS student doing that, despite Microsoft giving silly amounts of their crap away to students...
Sure, there may be people doing "programming" courses and whatnot, but that's not Computer Science.
Rule of thumb: If your course's main purpose is "teaches you Java" or "teaches you VB" or "teaches you C++", then it's not Computer Science.
If your course talks about "lambda calculus, pi calculus, O(N) algorithms" and so on, then it probably is Computer Science.
Oops, that wasn't AC. He he he. Be nice guys.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's funny to see how many people believe in the "get them hooked while they're young" principle.
The main difference I think, is when we're "young", we can experiment with all kinds of "software", and feel free to expand our minds, not just use what we're supposed to.
I know a lot of people who hate Solaris because we're forced to use it at the U of I. Java too...
"In the end, Microsoft persuaded the Parliament to continue using Windows NE for 5,000 new PCs."
I thought the bastard child of NT, ME, and AOL was XP, not NE. Has anybody heard of windows NE? Windows New Edition?
I'm currently working as a PhD student at my university. We are doing parallel computation projects inside the BioMedical Engineering faculty (involves simulations of heart, bone, molecular simulations and gene analysis). All of our students (we attract CS and BioMedical Engineering students) have to use (mostly) Linux on their projects, since, in our opinion, *n?x platforms offer the best opportunities for scientific work.
This involves experimentation (especially in our case, since we are doing parallel computations on beowulf clusters), result analysis and report/paper writing.
But the student's work is not only limited to working in a *n?x environment, we also ask them to write clean code, so we can bring their code and work back into the open source community, giving their projects an even better boost.
I couldn't imagine students working on scientific projects in our department without *n?x based platforms.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Yep, getting students in school worked so gosh-darned well for Apple. IBM's strategy of getting people at work was such a disaster, how stupid of MicroSoft to go that route.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
But now Apple seems to have learned their lesson.
All of the dev tools for OS X are free for the asking, as is the documentation. And ProjectBuilder and Interface builder are good tools, too.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has gotten greeder, charging upwards of $1500 for Visual Studio, which is your only choice now. That's a far cry from $99 for Visual Basic 1.0 or Visual C++ 1.0.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Who's he, a Korean baseball player?
:-)
MASH was a great tv show
That is crap - I remember when "WORDPERFECT" was going to dominate the world... they said this because every school was given copies of Wordperfect (well in Australia at least) for nothing. All the students learnt and used it.... now someone tell me what the dominating word process is out there.
/. about what colour "blueSky" is, you would all come back with... "umm.. actually it looks a lot like the colour of my arse!"
Then we move on to the Novell Story (surpised at the link here?) - every school was given a copy of Novell for nothing and told they could use/teach it.... umm... any guesses who dominates?
We move on again.. OS/2 was distributed to schools as being the replacement OS for workstations... Anyone hazard to guess what happened...
Maybe if we did an "ASK" vote on
I am surprised - the mere fact that this article appears on MSNBC.com (*) at all seems to lend weight to the idea that MSNBC isn't a Microsoft propaganda machine. Maybe now, years after their debut, I will begin to take their news seriously - which I can't quite say for either parent company.
Kudos.
(*) Yes, I realize that this article is from Newsweek, but MSNBC could have chosen not to reprint it.
If you follow an aggressive marketing strategy similar to Microsoft and wish to produce comercial software, you will find that Microsoft is your competitor.
As soon as you produce a killer app, Microsoft will put you out of business. So why support them in any way by using their tools?
I am a CS student. I think these are the best apps ever!!!
/usr/local/bin/g*
l ocal/bin/gcov@i n/genclass*b in/gftopk@n /ghostview*b in/glimpseindex@
/ usr/local/bin/gm4@o cal/bin/gnuplot@/ local/bin/gs@i n/gunzip*g vim@c at*
[cscx@whowhodilly:~]% ls
/usr/local/bin/g++@
/usr/local/bin/gcc@
/usr/
/usr/local/bin/gdb*
/usr/local/b
/usr/local/bin/gftodvi@
/usr/local/
/usr/local/bin/gftype@
/usr/local/bi
/usr/local/bin/glimpse@
/usr/local/
/usr/local/bin/glimpseserver@
/usr/local/bin/gmake@
/usr/l
/usr/local/bin/gnuplot_x11@
/usr/local/bin/gperf*
/usr/local/bin/gr*
/usr
/usr/local/bin/gtar@
/usr/local/b
/usr/local/bin/gview@
/usr/local/bin/
/usr/local/bin/gvimdiff@
/usr/local/bin/gz
/usr/local/bin/gzip*
Did I mention that RMS is GOD??
News organizations, magazines, etc. shamelessly suck up to their readers, even more than they do their advertisers or owners. If MS-bashing is selling, that's what they produce. The bottom line is the bottom line. The big boss doesn't care what the little guy says about him, as long as he brings home the bacon.
A good analogy would be musicians and bands who have made careers out of being anti-corporate and anti-industry, while being backed by that same industry. Whatever sells...
We shouldn't spend so much energy vilifying Microsoft and more energy understanding the new economy. One where startups with the next new hot idea WANT to be aquired by one of the big boys, maybe even microsoft. Dont pine for the little guys with the killer app who get eaten up by the big boys, it's probably what they wanted all along
C# throws Java's security model out the door by having backwards compatibility to C++ and C where you do manual memory allocation also.
Got friends?
...Java.NET ?
I attend one of the largest universities in the U.S. (and indeed the world) and over the past three years or so, Microsoft has been very busy blitzing our entire school and IEEE and ACM organizations with advertisements, promotions, donations, ... the whole hundred yards. So much of our computing tools (both software and *hardware*) are provided by them. ISOs for XP, Visual Studio, etc. are provided to all of our CS faculty and students freely. On the surface, this seems very good and positive, except that they have an ulterior and very selfish motive - to get the entire next generation our CS students hooked on their proprietary and frequently restrictive and intrusive products, and start developing for their platform thereby strenthening their stranglehold on the industry. Instead of these students to first be exposed and learn to use the openly specified, standardized and frequently free tools, and then later on moving onto any platforms they prefer, all they hear and learn about now is Microsoft (which was never the case until Microsoft became this rich and powerful). I hate to say it, but Microsoft sure knows what they need to do to maintain their monopoly, and they are doing it to the fullest. And the scheme is proving to be fruitful. Over the years (as those "donations" have come), I have seen our CS department in particular and our entire engineering college in general switch slowly but steadily from Unix boxes to PCs (even where we needed the power of the Unix workstations), from Unix to Windows (even where development was traditionally taught in Unix first, everything else later), from Linux PCs to Windows PCs (even though the former were free and simpler to implement and maintain in a multi-user development environment), from gcc to Visual C++ (simply because it has a nice interface and debugger, and MS provided it ->f-reely, the Freedom of gcc notwithstanding)... The list goes on and on. The prognosis, for my school anyway, seems bleak as we move more and more to "the dark side" and increasingly trap ourselves into a world where everything is proprietary, and we only promote the power of the most powerful global corporations at the expense of open, collaborative, community development.
Don't know if this will change, but the .NET SDK with a command-line C# compiler is part of the Beta (free) .NET runtime, and I have written "Hello world" programs in both console and GUI mode.
I'm not a CS major, but a EE major who has a work-study job with the computer center. Here are some of my observations:
1. Many students prefer the Sun boxes to the NT boxes, especially in the ME program. The CAD software they use is availible both on the NT machines and on the Sun machines. The main reason for the Sun preferece is that the software (and underlying OS) is much more stable. It was not uncommon in my ME-101 CAD class to lose hours of work when the software crashed and corrupted the file.
2. There are two things that keep a windows partition on my machine: Games and the ability to open word/excel/matlab documents distributed by professors and project groups. (I won't touch AIM with a 10 foot pole, but the lack of a decent AIM client has been mentioned by some other students as a reason why they keep windows around.
3. Some of the techinical staff seem to have become very frusterated with Microsoft's tatics, licensing, and upgrade cycle. When asked a while ago why we didn't have Office 2000 in the labs, one administrator clearly stated that they would not pay Microsoft repeatedly for the same product; without any new and useful features in the latest MS offerings, there is no reason to upgrade.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
I am not a developer, but I do get lost when it comes to the windows registry... seems like there's stuff in there you're not supposed to know about.
/etc directory, seems to spell everything out in plain text.
Linux, however, with the
Given nothing but a Copy of WindowsXP ($200) and a copy of Mandrake Linux(Free, or $30 with a nice book), it would seem to me that the ability to "look under the hood" on the Linux box would win lots of curious students over.
Add to that the lack of License restrictions, and the multiplatform nature of Linux, (MAC X86..and almost everything else) and MS Windows starts to look like a ball and chain.
MS does have the installed user base, but I'm confident that will not be an advantage for much longer.
and after all that _THEN_ there is the cost, before I found Linux I thought I wanted to be a MCSE, I got some books, and quickly learned that I'd need to purchase several different MS operating systems in order to follow the labs in the book. By contrast, I can learn how to administer Apache servers for FREE. I've not run an MS OS since, What a RipOff.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Windows NE must be their new way to rip us off
With regard to the compatability of microsoft brand hardware, I rescently had a small problem with my game controllers. I have a USB racing wheel, and joystick that are MS branded. unfrotunatly, The do not work on windows XP or 2000. These being windows 98 only. It is stated on the MS hardware web site that the will be no drivers made for these products. Given that all were purchased within the last year. I no longer have any trust in harware compatability from microsoft. Once the producers of the best input divices.
I attend Texas A&M University and in our courses that use C/++, we use Visual C++. The lab machines have Borland and the Unix machines have gcc, but the reason VC++ is used is the professors can get copies of Visual Studio for free for every student.
In addition to this, our school is in negotiations w/ MS to bring a licenseing plan to A&M to make copies of all MS OS's and Office to students for about $5 per copy. A plan like this is already in the works at U of Texas.
It's hard to get away from it when its getting shoved down your throat...
------
zap.....
The article tried to be non biased and it succeeded (despite the fact msnbc is behind it). But it was badly researched.
I wonder what I'm working with now since KDE will be released next spring *cough*
Second the whole statement about european IT infrastructure simply is wrong, it is not that much different than the US one, but maybe the fact the Linux originated from Europe and always was strong in countries like germany helped it more than in the states(the first serious article I read about Linux was in 94 in the german Ct magazine)
Anyway now something happens which I mentally predicted once I read about the new M$ licensing scheme. Microsoft shoots itself slowly out of the market (not totally but MSFT definitely helped Linux and other *Nixes to make inroads)
And yes many of our Universities never were particularily M$ biased. When I studied, about one departement was heavily M$ biased all others were running Unix machines-a mixture of Linux and Solaris- that was in the mid nineties already.
And in Win32, you constantly have to deal with bugs, inconsistent behaviour, GUI bug workarounds, and so on and so forth. I think Unix is a far better learning (and production) environment.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The article is taking about how current Computer Science students are starting to dislike Microsoft. My question is, when did they start to like/use Microsoft? How many (good) CS Schools have labs of windows workstations and teach using MS tools? Most schools take pride in their facilities that are full of Suns or SGIs.
Does or does not Microsoft have a monopoly?
If they do have a monopoly then there are no viable alternatives to Microsoft software.
If there are viable alternatives, Microsoft does not have a monopoly.
I am, however, happily using the GNU/Linux OS and have decided that there is no monopoly.
You REALLY don't want any of that Big Brother spyware.
Similar here at Calvin, any CS student can get any MS software for free (apparently Calvin's subscribed to the MSDN or similar). Yet the programming labs and classes use Solaris/GCC
"a quote" -me
We here at Clarkson University, the place where two of the students won the recent linux challenge, there's a huge linux following. There's even a professor here whose sole job is basically heading the COSI (scroll down a ways)(clarkson open source institution).
I also remember talking to a grad student whose experience after an internship with microsoft was nothing less than "I would never work for them, and I will never again use their software" Now them's fightin' words, and the general feeling isn't quite that harsh, and windows still gets used to a large degree here, but that's mainly because there's nothing much to do at Clarkson other than play games.
So yes, the educated will turn to linux, that's really not that big a discovery. It's really always been this way. Just don't think for a second that Micro$oft will be going out of business just yet. Not until a truly idiot-user friendly Linux version comes out will a conversion of the home PC market come about. Granted, that's not a very large discovery itself, but that's the whole point. This article isn't that groundbreaking.
Hi, I'm looking for Linux release of the Windows XP GUI. I'm willing to pay for it the price of full XP.
N.E.=New Excrement.
(dice.com, yahoo.com, you name it).
Do a search for UNIX and see how many hits you get. Then do a search for Windows, and compare the results.
What you're spouting off there is just myth.
There are more UNIX jobs out there than Windows.
Gee. I can hardly wait for the release of this thing they called KDE. I wonder if it will work with my 2.4.9-31 kernel?
But seriously, while teaching MCSE prep courses last year, I always tried to balance the official Micrsoft line with alternatives. This sort of discussion was so popular that I put together a Linux+ course. The interest in any viable alternative OS was there. I noticed that most students were not, per se, anti-Microsoft, but, in line with the article, they were more prone to be anti-totalitarian; they wanted alternatives. Many of my students are still using Linux and at least one of them was responsible for moving a small manufacturing operation away from NT and into the Linux fold. Mostly the movement was a result of angst caused by Microsoft's new license policy, coincidental with this student's new skills and confidence with Open Source software.
Besides, penguins are way more cool than the microsoft mascot (which is what, Bill?)...
True that MSNBC is not exactly the greatest of news sites, but, it is the default homepage for new installations of internet explorer. A lot of users do not ever change the homepage and therefore read it.
thanks 4 the info man!
Piracy is not allowed and is particularly unpatriotic following 9/11.
this is great news for me. fewer CS geeks wanting to work for MS means more money in it for me, since i'm strongly considering taking my CIT Ph.D and selling out to MS. for the money, but even more because i think the concentration of smart people is rivaled only by a few universities and even fewer research institutions in the world.
(moderators, it's "flaimbait" not "troll" since i am quite sincere, i assure you)
Interested in learning Chinese or Japanese? check out Chinese/Japanese-English Dictiona
What a laugh. I can't say what things are like anywhere else, but at here at Case Western Reserve University, there are plenty of CS students who are big Microsoft fans. Many of them are very smart people. Microsoft hires a lot of interns from here and is very active in gaining student mindshare. All the Windows boxes in the CS labs are from Microsoft Research. Entire classes get boxed copies of Visual Studio .NET. The Windows Users Group is one year old and well attended.
Sure, there are still a good number of students who do everything in gcc (we've also got a bunch of sun boxes in the lab) and CWRULUG continues to prosper, but to say an _entire generation_ of CS students are anti-microsoft is absurd.
Microsoft isn't student. They invest a lot of attention (and money) in colleges There are many students who have known only the Microsoft way and are perfectly happy with it.
That's all good. You still have to have a legal copy of Windows XX to test your product. Money is still changed hands, just at different points in time.
No money is required to develop for the open community. Period. That difference is important.
Crystal Meth: Would you ingest somthing made from a poisonous gas and an explosive metal? You do it every day -- Salt!
Isn't your .sig from SQ4? As I read it I experienced deeply pleasant visions of playing too much Ms. Astro Chicken...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
If you weren't AC you would soon be posting at +1.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
I attend a University with an exceptionally good software engineering program. By the curriculum, we are REQUIRED to learn how to develope for both Windows and UNIX systems, along with the cross-platform Java. Approximately equal amounts of time are spent on each, using C, C++, Java, some Asm and even some Maple, along with the standard web languages. Any school that tries to teach development for only one platform (that includes a Linux-only curriculum) or language is shortchanging the students. In the ever-changing world of technology, you can't afford to be a stickler about what platforms you will or can program on. The vast majority of CS students will be employed by a company when they graduate -- not doing self-employed work. This means that you program on whatever platform your employer tells you to program on, and if you can't or won't, you won't be able to keep your job for very long.
-James
All these open-source advocates/anti-MS people will enter a job market where their skills will get them a night manager position at McDonalds. Good luck chumps, your statements show your ignorance. Your need client focus to survive in the business world. That means you provide the best solution for the problem based on many factors, not just your ignorant anti-MS BS.
If i were a student and wanted to learn about operating systems, what does M$ have to offer me. Instead i'd get the Linux kernel and play. Who knows, a smart student that figures out a better way to do something, has an excellent shot at having it incorporated into the real thing.
Same goes for device drivers, if you are a student playing with a piece of hardware, are you going to create a device driver for nt? Not likely, linux, sure there is no barrier to entry.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Dude,
.95seconds for a Word load. And if it matters to you, Windows is not my primary desktop environment; this is being written on a FreeBSD machine.
1. Learn how to spell. It'll get you farther in life. Besides, if you do migrate away from Microsoft, emacs doesn't have a built-in spell checker, AFAIK.
2. I don't know how you ever felt enfranchised with Microsoft; maybe you held their stock and could vote by proxy? Or maybe Microsoft has now put shackles on your feet and made you their slave...
3. I worked inside MS, so I feel obligated to say that I think the code reviews done inside my unit (ISBU = Internet Services Business Unit) were pretty darn good. It's hard to catch every bug, and people like features. If you don't like the feature creep, use Windows 95 or 3.1. Sure, you can't use brand-spanking new hardware, but often you can't with Linux anyways, plus the lack of bloat will make up your speed difference. Better yet, run Win95 on VMware atop Linux.
4. Product activation is bad. Would you rather have a dongle?
5. Frankly, to anyone in the Real World, $600 for Office is _nothing_ compared to the productivity you get out of it. Sure, I enjoy tweaking every last parameter in LaTeX, but give LaTeX to the average secretary, and you'll be spending over 100 hours of their time with training and support and looking stupid things up in the manual. (Don't believe me? Tell me where TeX keeps all its hidden math font metrics... I spent a day looking. Not that MS gives you the control; it just lets you know that it's in control and there's nothing you can do about it) That'll make up your $600, even at salary alone, let alone fringe, office space, etc.
Life's too short to worry about cost for products like Windows and Office. The obnoxious thing about MS is how they implicitly encourage people to upgrade, then send non-backwards-compatible file formats around, so you pretty much _have_ to upgrade. Not to mention their wonderful security.
BTW You should consider reinstalling Windows and Office if your Word loads are taking 1 minute. I just timed my P3-850 at
I really don't see how dissing passport and suggesting libery is any sort of a contradiction. The reason people distrust passport is because they distrust you, your bosses, and the rest of your company. It has nothing to do with technology or methods just with the ethics of the people who will hold your data.
This is not to say that SUN is a more ethical company then MS (although relatively speaking they probably are). The truth of the matter is that a consortium of companies is more likely to have an neutral outcome. Usually the contradicting wishes of a couple of dozen corporations is more likely to favor the consumer then the monolithic wishes of one monopoly. This is afterall the underlying premise of capitalism.
Ideally of course there would be an open source, distributed authentication mechanism and it would be out of the control of all corporations. Perhaps being overseen by a non profit privacy coalition but we know such a entity could never survive an assault by MS let alone the likes of Visa etc.
In the end the point is mute. Like all other things in the computing world it will be MS vs the World. Everybody in MS feels that everybody else in the world are idiots and the feeling is recipricated. Without the backing of Visa and the mjor banks passport will die a slow death. Unfortunately MS has made too enemies in their run to the top.
War is necrophilia.
If a software vendor really wants developers to adopt their integrated development tools in these times of reduced IT budgets, they better make enterprise editions of these tools available for very low cost or freely downloadable as a loss leader. The business requirement to use proprietary and expensive software has been become precluded by tightened budgets or eliminated by the availability of pretty darn good freely available software. Our IT is having to reduce $25M this year from it's budget, and eliminate 40 staff. We dropped from a dozen plus managers to less than half a dozen. Our CIO who was very Microsoft-centric was fired for constantly running over budget. We simply cannot consider any $1000+ per seat packages or upgrades, period. If we do pay for a package we expect good manuals and a few months of support, or we will reject it in favor of free with online documentation. Our developers are shifting to the freely downloadable but high powered IDEs and web service environments. We are not buying new PCs with XP-anything due to both software and RAM costs this would incur on updating installed base of thousands of PCs. Microsoft's newest licensing programs are too expensive and restrictive and also the new XP software is way too CPU and RAM intensive to make retrofitting our installed base of PCs reasonable. We are prefering server software that does not have CAL licensing. We've also dropped maintenance on most packages where it exceeded 20% of application cost. We will pay it for a few business critical applications.
This sig is a virus, take it and use it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
it was a Newsweek article. Newsweek is owned by The Washington Post. MSNBC simply syndicated it.
I think Microsoft is aware of this, and they are trying their hardest to avoid it. Consider the following. I attend a medium sized (16,000 students) Midwestern University. While our CS department isn't world-renowned, there are about 400 people majoring in it. Tomorrow (The 4th) we've got Microsoft coming to town for the VS .NET "launch party"
.NET Academic, plus who knows how much other Microsoft "Stuff" (Lots of Xboxes floating around)
No big deal you'd say...Here's what they're ponying up:
* Up to 700 people can attend, Students, Faculty, Staff
* Everyone who goes gets a full version of XP professional, full version of VS
Here's the kicker. I was talking to our secretary the other day and she said the whole thing basically went like this: Microsoft calls and says they want to have a launch party, we get $50,000 to spend for $700 people, plus the department gets $10,000 in discretionary "thanks" cash.
We're having a hard time racking up over $15,000 in expenses for this three hour event. We simply can't find $35,000 in other things to buy for this room! I might add also, all 700 slots were filled in less than a day.
Is it just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really, wants to protect its future interests?
Meanwhile, Microsoft has gotten greeder, charging upwards of $1500 for Visual Studio, which is your only choice now. That's a far cry from $99 for Visual Basic 1.0 or Visual C++ 1.0.
.NET and C# .NET. So VS.NET may cost a bunch, but the individiual pieces don't. I'm not sure what VS.NET has which sets it apart (other than all the languages)...
The funny thing is that VB.NET is only $109. As are both VC++
Microsoft isn't student.
Whoops, that should be "Microsoft isn't stupid." Erp.
The interesting part is how preachy some of the profs get. The prof for my programming (C) class this semester went into a little speech on the first day about how Linux was far more technically advanced than windows and most anyone (except perhaps BSD fanatics ;-) would agree that linux is what should be used if you're doing something important.
Furthermore, one of the engineering profs one day got into a talk about how he runs VMWare in his machine which allows him to run linux, because linux is 'good.' (This was in a mathematical, not computers course, btw.) If we (students) tried to do some sort of major design project at my school using windows as the platform to run it, we would be fried to a crisp by the profs for it. This prof often talked about how he avoids MS products like the plague because of unreliability and bugs.
Yes, the conversion away from Microsoft has started, and the people to thank are the folks with the Ph.D's who get the idea that linux is better into students' heads, and choose linux as the platform for the course, thereby causing many students to install it on their own machines so they don't have to use the public labs to do their work. Yes, where I come from, linux has become both cool and elite among undergrads while microsoft OSs have become connected with cluelessness and a lack of technical competence.
I am sure that Microsoft's SIT (slashdot infiltration team) will read this and immediately alert the top brass about this grassroots subversion away from MS software, and try to initiate a whole new marketing campaing aimed at college/university students and well as Profs. It's only a matter of time...
"You're right about a good CS department. A really good one doesn't even teach languages, it should stick to concepts. Languages are just a means to an end." Ah... but can one understand the concepts, without a lot of concret examples to build up the abstractions from?
When I was in college, MS gave out 500 free, full copies of Visual Studio 6, in an attempt to get the CS students hooked on it.
What happened?? The kids who really knew nothing about computers, and had never programmed before, they used it. But the kids who all knew programming, etc., before joining the CS program, which was about 65% or so, they all sold their copies on Ebay. (This was before MS started shutting down ebay auctions of their software) If they needed to use the software, they would just burn a copy of the lab's install discs. I mean, it was just C++ code, you don't need Visual Studio to compile that!
So, in the end, MS's plan didn't totally work. Hell, half the kids in the CS program weren't running Windows anyway.
Really? All I got in school was VD.
You give the fallacy the false dilemma, of either starving or working for MS. No body every had this choice nor will they likely ever have it. So you would not be just in saying, "I work for MS only b/c if I didn't I would starve." You all ready have to think that there is nothing wrong w/ MS. Maybe there isn't, but you never proved that, only assumed it.
Next time, better not to post if your post is only going to be a mass of fallacies and unstated (and unproven) assumptions.
Is it just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really, wants to protect its future interests?
It is just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really wants to buy its future customers?
Sure, on the surface it's a "nice thing to do", but doesn't it make you wonder where all of that money comes from? If MS wasn't interested in "world domination", how much cheaper would their software be for everyone, and not just students? It makes me a little sick to think about that.
----- rL
You sound somewhat like I did 3 years ago... At that point, there was good reason to dislike MS. Win98 had finally begun replacing Win95b, and while it was much better... it still sucked. We used to have competitions in the dorm as to how long a person could keep AIM connected (as both AIM and Windows were flaky). The longest ended up being over a month, mainly because the person left their machine on over break. Anytime you did any sort of multi-tasking, your computer would crash badly.
Win98SE fixed many of those problems. Fullscreen games ran properly, and you could actually break out of them, do something small, and go back into the game without any errors being thrown. So, reasons to dislike MS subsided somewhat...
At about the same time, our core CS classes switched to MS Visual Studio, since it had a complete version of STL implemented (I believe one of our profs did some extensive research in STL, and templating in general, so he wanted to teach using it). As a side note, here, I like STL as a teaching tool, and as a programming aide... Not wonderfully optimized yet, but still good. Anyway, the switch from the former UNIX-centric (AIX, I think) CS program to MS was odd, but turned out well enough...
The UNIX servers are still in place, and the CS servers are all runnning various BSD and Linux distros, so those professors who wanted to teach in the older style (or in non-MS languages) had the opportunity to do so. Those who wanted to tap in to MFC and STL could do so. After the first 2 years, I don't think I've had a language dictated to me by a professor. We're told to get the project running, use whatever we want (normally... on occasion, we'll be restricted to 3 or 4 languages so the TAs can be able to help if we have trouble).
So... All of that as background, freshman year I wanted to get away from MS as much as possible. It simply wasn't a decent work platform, but I didn't have much choice as the core classes were Visual Studio. I got used to the inconsitsencies of MSVC++ and did what I needed to pass... And I learned Perl and Java on the side.
Everything I learned about MS made me dislike it a bit more. Various attidues regarding Open-Source, predatory market practices, ridiculous naming conventions, buggy software. Trying to write code for windows was painful without the pre-generated code chunks from the wizards... and the wizard code was nearly impossible to read effectively (at the time).
As time went on, I learned a lot more about the whys of MS' practices, and I began to care less about it. The naming notation makes sense (eventually), the bugs have slowly been worked out... and in the end they produce good software. I suppose if I ever had to pay for it, I might think less of it... but the academic liscenses available through the school computer store make it cheap enough to be worth using.
That opinion might not have changed as much except for one release... Win2k. By this time I'd started getting Linux functioning on my computer, but I hadn't really had time to hack it or tweak it much... I still played too many games to make it a dedicated Linux box, and I didn't have the funding to get a second machine. About this time I was ready for my semi-annual Windows reformat and reload... So I figured I'd try the new version, and I ended up removing Linux entirely shortly thereafter. I think I've had Win2k crash once, mainly because I was tinkering in bad ways with DirectX and other things... Other than that, my (now 4 years old) machine has run perfectly well on Win2k with no problems.
I'm not going to defend any other MS OS, mainly from lack of interest in switching. XP sounded good, but I haven't heard the best things about it from other programmers (non-programmers seem to like it just fine). ME frankly sucked.
In the end, I use Visual C++ as my IDE for when I do C++, Eclipse for my Java and a generic text-editor for perl. I know several other languages, but generally don't bother using them. And so... I'd be perfectly happy coding in an MS environment or out. And, in fact, I wouldn't mind working for MS itself, albeit, in a game developer position rather than Apps.
To summarize my rambling... Frosh year, I ended up not liking MS. By around Junior, I realized that it really wasn't all that bad (from a CS standpoint). The legacy code support and addition of requested 'features' lends itself to bloated code. At the end of senior year, I'd be happy to work with MS, or without it. It really doesn't make a difference.
And, in more direct response to a few things...
Media player runs fine for me, though I generally use Zoom Player and Playa (for Divx) due to the additional features in them...
Product Activation is a stupid idea, IMHO, but... The price may not have gone down, but it also didn't go up.
I'm still running the same machine I entered college with using MS products, so I'm not feeling your pain in regards to needing the latest hardware to get reasonable speed.
If your machine requires a full minute for Word to load, then you have something very badly configured (Linux can take a half-hour to load, if you don't configure it right). Word loads in a few seconds for me, and I'm on a 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM machine... Your inability to tweak Windows is not MS' fault.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
You can get the educational visual studio really cheap at most Universities. Ohio State will give students a bundle with Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Visio and (I think) even Project for next to nothing. It's scary.
We simply can't find $35,000 in other things to buy for this room! I might add also, all 700 slots were filled in less than a day.
The obvious solution for any large party on a college campus:
Beer!
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Ever see Pinocchio (Disney version) when the fox and the cat convince Pinocchio to ditch school to play games, drink beer, and smoke cigars all day? Turns out there was a catch.
If you go after M$ free stuff and propoganda, garunteed they'll find a way to make an ass of you and extract their price in the end.
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Try logging on.
"a consortium of companies is more likely to have an neutral outcome."
The RIAA/MPAA must not have gotten that memo.
-9mm-
Solution: $35000 / 700 people = $50/person
;-)
Buy a boxed Linux/FreeBSD distribution for every person who attends.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
from my personal experience: probably not (even though i did). i go to a small private university with maybe 20 total CS majors and MAYBE 3 or 4 actually have ever run *nix or are interested in learning more about *nix. the others seem content running various windows (most i know run WinME). all of our labs on campus are moving to os x and win xp in the next year or so and there are only 3 total *nix boxes that students can sit down and log in at. as far as professors go, none of ours have enough experience with or know enough about anything but windows (and most not too much about that) to teach anything but windows related things. so, at my university i feel its more of a lack of exposure to anything but microsoft that makes the students not think about switching. if students were exposed to more than windows and windows software, im sure a few would switch but too many are content with what they view as easiest.
With the MSDNAA almost all colleges are prodiving MS products to their CS majors, we were granted 180 licenses for XP as well as VS. License agreements are fine, they just stipulate that we do not financially benefit from the software we were given, no biggy. If your school doesn't offer free MS products for CS majors have a faculty member take a look at MSDNAA.
scott
I went to a college which was a heavily-UNIX-centric college (thankfully!) All of the CS classes were run using the standard UNIX systems on campus. Then in Senior year, they added some classes which were MS-only, and a majority of students in the class I was in got in an uproar. The argument from the administration was that we needed hands-on experience with what we'll find in the marketplace, which is mostly Windows-based machines. We thought this was a reasonable argument, but figured that the situation was more about the new computer lab that MS donated to the college.
I do agree that CS people specifically will likely continue to work on things that they started working on in college. I had never heard of UNIX before going to college, and I wouldn't use anything else by choice now.
I prefer the "learn the theory and then learn the syntax to do what you want," method of programming. The majority of an application is going to be the same whether it's on a PlayStation, running on UNIX, running on Windows, etc. There'll be some syntactic differences between programming languages, APIs, etc. If you understand the theory, the syntax should be easy.
I guess my best response to this is to say how I lost faith in MS.
I started programming at an extremely young age. I was around 7 when I first started with LOGO and was programming for long periods of time in BASICA when I was around 12.
As I got older (and learned more math) I started getting very interested in more complex languages (namely C). This was before C++ was really out there. I was very lucky because I had a computer that ran Windows but Basic wouldn't let me take that next step to do real Windows programming.
I wasn't able to write C in Windows because at the time, the only option would have been to buy the MS compiler for like $500 ($200 for students though). Now, I had a hard enough time explaining to my parents why I was spending so much time on a computer without trying to explain why I needed $200 dollars for a 'compiler'.
So I started using Linux, and today, I have a deep hatred towards Microsoft. There is no reason why they have to charge $200 for a compiler for students. Had they been more open or offered reasonably priced products, I would be a Windows programmer today.
It's funny that Balmer screams 'Developers, Developers' because what he should be saying is 'Corporate developers, Corporate developers'. I truly believe MS has lost the CS youth with their expensive products and their predatory practices. That is why I believe in 10 years, MS will not hold the position they hold today.
I know I'm not about to forget why I left Windows and I'm sure most other folks out there aren't either.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do
I did a CS degree many years ago. At my school, Apple had a strangle-lock on on supplying all the general purpose computing labs with gear. There were a few IBMs, but lots of Pascal, C, and of course all spreadsheeting, word processing, and presentation preparations were done on Apple hardware. This near-monopoly went on for a very long time. Additionally, on the computing-specific side of campus, Sun had a monopoly on the programming lab hardware. Actually, there were a bunch of NeXT cubes there also. But absolutely NO Microsoft OSs. So I did a lot of Mac and Unix programming, and only touched a PC once for an OS course (ie, didn't even use DOS). Did it make me want to program Macs (or Unix) when I got out? No. I learned the concepts of software design, and if anything, I wanted to apply those principles to different hardware and OSs than I'd been exposed to thus far. So I went towards proprietary game consoles and PCs (DOS at the time, followed by all flavours of Windows). There was a little bit of Unix work in there, but I've never professionally created an app on Apple hardware. I had a huge grad class in CS and I'm not aware of anybody that went on to create Apple applications despite 4-5 years of exposure and programming on them.
Maybe the "what they learn at school is what they go on to do" theory works at community colleges or vocational schools where training is very specific and more resume-based rather than fundamental-based.
Is it just me, or hasen't anybody else started thinking about how Microsoft's customer's money is wasted on marketing and promotion that don't make the product any better?
Maybe, just maybe there is a much more efficient way to develop software.
I'm sure this will be lost in the shuffle and consumed by the abundance of posts - but here goes ...
There's a little thing called "Industry Standard". Whether it's the best way, the right way, the cheapest way, or the most effective way doesn't really mean dick when you hit the corporate level. They want the stuff that everybody else is using. Talking someone into using a new product that isn't very compatible with everyone else is rather difficult.
Example:
Quark Inc makes a layout program called QuarkXpress. It's the industry standard. It costs over $800. Adobe Systems Inc makes a competetive (some say better ) layout program called InDesign. It costs $700. The really big difference is that Adobe GIVES its software to design classes to be taught to the students, Quark requires the school to purchase their software.
This has been happening (PageMaker before InDesign) for about six years. Quark is still the industry standard and I don't see it changing for another year. Fortunately Quark screwed the pooch and didn't make Xpress native for OS X, and everyone is dumping them. It'll take time to filter through the entire graphic arts arena.
The same thing is going to happen with Microsoft. Their products are industry standard. They're going to have to make a MAJOR mistake before anyone else comes along to take the lead.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
... what a mess his ministers are making, HE would make it all right! The Tsar is wise beyond us all!
Students use the Microsoft tools and think that that's what software development is about. They end up being incapable of developing with anything else when they come out. In fact, they can barely develop with Microsoft's tools, but because Microsoft's tools make it easy to create lots of impressive looking windows, they think they are experienced. It takes a lot of work to bring those people up to speed, get them used to some professional tools, and fill in all the gaps and missing skills.
Besides, if you do migrate away from Microsoft, emacs doesn't have a built-in spell checker, AFAIK.
Not only does emacs have built-in spell checking, but it can use the spell checker to do word completion.
And what does LaTeX have to do with a secretary's ability to use staroffice/openoffice/koffice/abiword/etc.? The only semi-reasonable argument I've seen for using MSOffice, rather than the actual alternatives like this is that MS file formats are a sort of de-facto standard. And that argument is undermined by the incompatibilities MS introduces with each new release (as you mention).
What a crock. You do the work you're paid to do. If programming MS's crap puts food on the table and a roof over my head, then I'm all for MS. It really doesnt matter to me - programming is programming. Oh to be young, idealistic, and ignorant again!
I got tired of M$ about a year ago, well truthfully before that, but we'll call it a year.
The thing that kept me using it for as long as I did, was the support for my sound, the cs4281, which was finally handled last year in a kernel update. Quite frankly, I love the switch. All our lower division programming projects are done in java here at OSU, so linux works just as well as windows. If they tell me I have to have codewarrior, I use gvim, it's as simple as that.
There was one more thing that kept me on windows for so long, the game engine, Half-Life. I used transgamming's winex to get it to work on RH 7.2, and it runs better than in winbloze.
I look at it this way, when I get a job doing real programming, I'm going to be using Unix/Solaris. In fact, both my intern jobs, where I did things with computers, went to Linux/Solaris. The fact that I had as much experince, with not only windows, linux, but also Macintosh made my work that much better.
My Macintosh experince has shown me that user design can make or break a product.
My Windows experince has shown ease of use of databases through odbc, and the importance of flat files.
My Unix/Linux/Solaris experince has shown me the power of using small programs to take on a big problem, thus making each part work together to complete a common goal.
I think all three are needed by any cs student, but as long as schools continue to cater to M$ products, such as requiring you use code warrior, or visual c++, I think they will stiffle what most cs students really need.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
At UCSD we pretty much solely use, have for years.
"The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."
But this is what I said:
After much deliberation and consulting with peers, I have decided not to apply for any position with Microsoft. It seems as though my conscience has gotten the best of me. Having been exposed to many of Microsoft's exploits through slashdot.org, I find it very difficult for me to work for a company I so vehemently disagree with. Complete ignorance of personal security and privacy, overly monopolistic actions, and inferior products are just a few of the reasons why I have made this decision. It looks as though the only way I would work for Microsoft would be after a complete overhaul of the company structure - something I highly doubt a corporation of such magnitude would do for a single programmer.
And yes, that was a direct quote from my email to the recruiter. Talk about burning bridges.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Microsoft aren't trying to be efficient at making software. They're too busy making money.
Just a nitpick: the article was written by Newsweek. It gives credit at the top (just under the authors names) and has the copyright notice at the bottem.
Just my 4 pages.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I've had to call Microsoft a few times for Office re-installs because I had to reinstall my computer or because I changed the hardware enough to make it look like a new computer. In all cases, when they asked, I mentioned that I was reinstalling, and they gave me a new code without any grief.
In fact, I recently reinstalled Windows XP on a computer (same hardware) and it didn't even complain. Apparently, they now have things working such that you only have to call if you install on different hardware (reinstalling on the same hardware seems to automatically work).
I'm not a big fan of product activation, but it hasn't actually been much of a problem to this point.
I don't think the telephone operators will give you any problems unless your serial number has been used to "re-install" on dozens of computers...
-- Erv Walter
It's really hard to say how things will play out.. Most CS students here at UMN have programmed on Unix, Windows, and Mac (okay, the Mac was just m68k assembly, but whatever). I've done assembly, C, C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and Scheme (how could I forget Scheme!). I've avoided Windows systems personally, but most of my friends have at least done some Visual Basic work.
I definitely don't think it's appropriate to box students in and only let them use one platform, ever, though there is a strong push here that software must run on the Solaris systems. Of course, since the languages we use most of the time are cross-platform, it's usually possible to do most of your development on your favorite platform, then twiddle a few things to get it to work on the lab machines.
I personally wish that the labs used Linux machines, but that's just my own pet peeve. I figure in the grand scheme of things, this is probably the way to go..
Sorry, sarcasm doesn't translate well into text. My fault, I apologize.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I like this idea alot. In fact, I like it so much I have even decided to make it better:
:)
Spend $500 on burning ISOs of the latest Linux or BSD releases, and pocket the rest.
Immoral? Yes.
Evil? Maybe.
Entreprenuerial? Most definitely.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
When I was at Penn State I noticed that a lot of the CS and Math faculty (at least the ones who talked about MS) seemed to be more or less set against Microsoft. Whether their dislike of Microsoft is well founded or not, it rubs off on students. (Most of the tirades my profs went on about Microsoft software seemed to be more emotionally- than factually-based.)
I don't know how it is at other universities, but it's just a thought. Monkey see monkey do.
D
So when this new KDE thing comes out this spring to finaly give Linux a graphical interface, where will I be able to download it from?
;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I too attend a major VA university, I'm a CS major. In one of my CS classes this semester (2xxx level class) the department switched to requiring all the coding to be done under Linux, and everything has to compile and run on the Linux machines in one of the labs (Mandrake 8.1, gcc 3.0.3). In the hours before the due date, the class web discussion board was flooded with my classmates having trouble trying to port their code from MSVC++ to gcc. No matter how many times the professors tell them to develop in UNIX like they've been taught (the UNIX class is a prerequisite for this class) they refuse. It's kinda fun to watch, I will admit.
I think the fight between Microsoft and the Linux community is as much an ideological one as well as a practical one. From a computer programmer's perspective, the change is an evolutionary one where the profession gradually transforms from one which has more affinity to those of the novelist, and the playwright to ones like the doctor and the lawyer. In other words, under the Linux paradigm, programmers today will earn their livelihood not based on their past achievements in the form of intellectual property, but on their ability to continually provide up-to-date service in the improvement of certain corporate or organizational functions. The movement is a natural one since programming talent is no longer so rare in today's world. While the works of T.S. Eliot and Richard Wright are irreplaceable treasures of the history of mankind, the work of a computer programmer can be readily replaced with a fairly accurate estimate on cost by the work of another. Extrapolate this analogy to a larger extent, it simply means that the product of one software firm can be replaced by the product of another software firm. In this scenario, charging royalty for an entire software package instead of particular innovations becomes a very stupid proposition. Intelligent customers would simply switch over to cheaper alternatives given that they receive the same functionality. With this in mind, the current move by Microsoft to switch over to a subscription based system is not surprising. The model makes more sense in the modern development environment for the following reasons: 1. Periodic release of software packages provides the wrong incentives for software firms. In order to attract customers, the software package must provide a huge laundry list of "features", software developers come up with the most gratuitous and often counter-productive functions. Those so called features often do not cater to the needs of the customers, but rather hinder their productivity. The result is often a feature bloated software which only gets fatter rather than better as time goes by. The compounded result of this effect can be observed in many Microsoft products, such as MS-Office. 2. Cyclical development of shrink-wrap software is terribly stressing on developers. Traditional software firms such as Microsoft and Oracle are known to have "burned out" several generations of young, bright programmers. As the profession of programmers become a more formally established one, more people would treat it as a lifetime profession rather than a youthful stunt. It is imperative for software firms to recognize the need to make the life of a programmer not only a challenging one, but also a sustainable one. The retention of expertise of experienced programmers would mostly likely pay off in the long run not only in the personal lives of those programmers, but also on the bottom lines of the software firms. 3. A subscription service based software paradigm would generate immediate user feedback, both on the current feature-set, and on the future needs of customers. Traditional software firms spend millions of dollars on usability tests to determine a pre-set list of features in their products, and those lists often do not reflect the need of real customers. The process is both exponentially more expensive, and much less efficient than the Linux community model where a large vocal Linux advocates are actively involved in the maintainence of the current feature-set as well as the determination of future development directions. In the long run, the Linux community would be able to produce products that fit more closely with customer need. Microsoft must switch to a service model in order the compete. 4. The subscription model ultimately would give end-users more choices. After all, would one prefer to pay $300 every two years to purchase MS-Office or $15 per month? The financial cost is essentially the same (Given the inflation rate). The difference is that if the customer decides that the software is not worth his/her money, the person could simply choose to cancel the service. Given the above considerations, I think Microsoft's decision to switch to a subscription based service model is a sensible one. It would be the only way for Microsoft to compete with Linux in the long run.
Which side, pray tell, is your side?
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I have to agree among slashdot trolls that one has got to be some of the better reading.
Beside from Linux I use WindowsNT and Office 2000. I will never upgrade from there. I don't want to get caught in Microsoft's activation hell. It is only going to get worst.
Chris Southern
A CS student will probably be able to learn Java, and then easily pick up (alot) of C++'s format, and structure. He might miss some little details, as he has never really had to worry about pointers, etc, and will pick up these concepts much later.
But, if the Java student tries to say, program in lisp, he might have a much harder time. This is because these languages are so different abstractly. You have to think differently when you are in the planning stage of writing your program, and this abstract thinking can be quite hard to master.
What is my point? In the course of computer science history, some languages have been written that are completely different in their abstract basis. A computer science student truly needed to have worked with a language that is of the same abstraction as the language he is trying to learn, or it can be VERY difficult to pick up.
I know that I was personally very grateful for taking a course that taught many languages in one semester, where many of the languages are very different from each other. Though I may never want to program in a completely recursive language, for instance, it was still very good for me to have some experience with.
Just my thoughts,
Rofgile
I am currently in the middle of obtaining my CS degree. Our CS lab is mostly windows NT with the majority of classes dealing with that platform for the most part. This year they took out about 24 of the computers (out of say 130) and put in Linux boxes. I must say I am really appreciative of the change. There are several classes the _force_ students to use these machines. Its also a requirement at our university (for all students) to have at least some exposure to Solaris as we have a Sun lab as well (that lab isn't associated with CS).
;-)
The reaction of the students? I'd say most are at least being exposed to Linux but I'd say most prefer Visual Studio. It helps when everyone gets free copies (all CS majors do...). The Linux computers are among the last to fill up unless the class that forces you to use them has an assignment due
Brandon
brandon at datamoon net
I know that here at Michigan Tech our CS department is entirly *nix. Starting 3 years ago Java was the language taught to incoming freshman. Before that it was C++ on a compeltely SunOS Unix platform. I don't ever see Micrsoft taking over in good CS programs as a good learning platform. I know a bit of VB and have used .NET and it just doesn't seem to have the ease of use and methods for demonstrating the fundamentals of Computer Science that Java and C++ do. Learning to deal with pointers or memory or such it a development platform that abstracts you so far away from the system just doesn't work.
.NET is it's not free. gcc and the JDK are free. MS is never going to give .NET away. At least not while that have medium to large corporations and schools paying huge licence fees to use it in their IT departments.
Another big problem with
-Eric Dalquist
it would mean switching to Microsoft first. I'm within a handful of classes from graduating with a CS degree, and I've not used a Microsoft product for program development since 2000. (I have used MS Word a couple times when I had to write a paper and there weren't other options available. I still feel dirty)
Of course, the rest of the department has gone overboard implementing whatever they view as "currently being used by the marketplace" (note the awful flash animations on the page. Also note that many pictures of students hard at work are not students, but paid models at somewhere definitely not at our school. I don't know why the hell they went down that road), and for now, Microsoft and the marketplace are linked in many people's minds. The real trauma is that they keep getting rid of pure CS classes and replacing them with gimpy CIS classes (which is another program). The classes on AI and parallel processing haven't been held for years.(rumor has it the parallel processing class ceased after the hypercube had a meltdown) Of the new classes we've been offered in recent semesters, only one is what I'd call actual computer science (Quantum Computing. We've also received classes on J2EE and web-enabled databases. Yuck.)
But I digress. My point was that using unix or unix-like systems, even within a great sea of Microsoft, is not only possible but arguably preferable. I've had to jump through a few additional hoops, such as porting code provided by the instructor to be os-independent, having to arrange showing my projects during office hours in lieu of turning in a binary, having to persuade instructors that I'm not on crack....
So I've had to learn more on my own. Big deal. I'm still quite a bit more happy using joe and gcc to write code rather than the point-and-drool nature of MSVC. It's also worth noting that I'm starting out ahead of my peers in my compiler class this semester (where the instructor is requiring our projects to run on a solaris box)
-transiit
The article is drivel and a waste of time to read. The only new pieces of information presented were the errors.
I thought KDE is already available?
The article says it won't be released 'till the spring.
Do they mean release 3.0?
Also KDE is not the only desktop environment available. There is gnome, blackbox...etc.
No, you're just misinformed. First of all, it's already been released. Just goto www.kde.org, and you can SEE that it is already on version 2 of its release! the KDE project has been around for a couple of years now, and if you ever goto the store and look at the box of RedHat Linux, or rather, SuSE Linux, you can see on the features, it already boasts that its primary GUI is KDE. What I think they mean is that version THREE of KDE is going to go out this spring. If you don't believe me, just goto www.kde.org and you can even DOWNLOAD the entire thing for crying out loud, heck, I'm even using KDE right now to write this reply using their included web browser - Konqueror, because I think that Netscape is too slow, and I'm sick of ads dominating a huge chunk of the screen when I use Opera.
Much won't change at all. Why? Cookie cutter CS students are bred and trained to seek help in books and through support systems by the manufacturer... doesn't happen with GPL crap.
Second, MS has been offering at EVERY accredited university and college their products for nearly free. Top that off with 2 Billion dollars donated in software, equipment, and training last year along to universities and colleges and absolutely nothing by IBM or any other company touting *nix solutions and you get your answer.
This is something I have been thinking for a while, and is somewhat on-topic for this article, so here I am posting it.
When I started out with computers, it was an Apple IIE with DOS 3.3 or ProDOS (depending on how you booted the machine.) It had 128K of RAM (I said K -- not megs!) A single 5.25" floppy, etc. I then moved up to DOS a few years later (yes, this was a long time ago) and was running DOS 3.3 at that time. I learned DOS, and was one who you'd find tweaking his CONFIG.SYS or fossil drivers for his modem.
Then along came Win3.1, which I tried but didn't really care for. I also tried Linux about that time, liked Linux MUCH better, and that's what I have stuck with since.
That being said, I can give a viewpoint from "the other side of the fence." Usually, the case is Linux users trying to convert Microsoft users to Linux. We all know the viewpoints on that. But, I seriously have had several Windows users try to convert me from Linux over to Windows. Let me share my viewpoint here:
First off, to me Windows is harder to use than Linux. In Linux, I know exactly where I am going, how to get there, and what will happen once I am there. Under Windows, I feel like I am having to wade through links on web pages (that's the best term I can think of right now) to find what I need. It takes me 10 times longer to get a job done on a Windows box than on Linux. Mind you, Windows has a much prettier interface, but Linux is simpler. Sometimes simpler IS better.
But, I'm not just talking about UI here. I am the network admin for an ISP, and I handle both the public network plus our private internal LAN. Our internal LAN appears to be an NT network, although it is served from a Samba server. I've setup a DHCP server, allowing me to give different systems different parameters. It all works beautifuly, except sometimes a few of the Windows machines won't see Samba. (Yet my Linux workstation will.) Another interesting case is that one of our computers has a printer entry in Windows that points to the printer on my system (through Samba.) That is setup as the default printer AND captures the LPT port. Word still prints to the system's local printer, as do DOS applications -- even though the system has been set (and shows) mine over the network as the default! Same system also locks up when you try using its local driver as the default. Changing the default gateway on our DHCP server for that machine, then doing a release and renew seemed to corrupt a few files and the system could no longer get online.
In other words, a Linux user with people trying to convert me to Microsoft, I share the same thing a lot of Microsofters say about Linux: I'm not impressed.
On my workstation, I do a LOT of work, at any given time I'll have a web browser open (either several copies of one, or if I am using Mozilla it's the tabbed interface), along with some terminal windows (Eterm) with SSH to various systems on the network, an MP3 player (got to have music), plus all of KDE's stuff, plus Gnumeric and possibly a few other apps. It handles just fine, and I achieve uptimes of several months (usually killed by extended power outages that the UPS can't handle.) My workstation has *never* crashed in the past year. It does what I need it to, and it does it well. I've tried the same on a Windows box, and it starts to lag once I get my 6-8 apps running. Alot of times it crashes even.
So, as I said, as a Linux user who people are trying to convert to Microsoft: Microsoft doesn't impress me.
Another side note: A friend of mine was a die-hard Windows fan, who seemed to write me off when I said it was unstable. Funny part was, after he started working with a G4 running Mac OS 9 alongside the Windows box, he started complaining profusely (more so than I do) about the stability (or lack thereof) of the Windows box...
I think alot of people just don't realize how bad it is until they've used something better.
Hopefully this doesn't get modded down through the toilet. This is not meant as flamebait, but rather just as me sharing my personal experience. This is what I have encountered over the past several years. When a system's told to use "Printer A" as a default all over the place, and instead it uses "Printer B" -- something's not right. I do not have alot of the problems other users on the network have. The only real difference is that they run Windows and I run Linux. And it's not just with Linux, Mac seems to be more stable even.
All of our production machines run either Linux or BSD, so it's only the workstations that suffer, but still.
And again, this is not flamebait. I am simply sharing my personal experience and my views from seeing both OSes. Alot of people say that Linux does not impress them at all on the desktop -- and I am saying I've seen/tried both and Linux impresses me a LOT more than Microsoft does right now.
While the gist of my (intended to be joking) comment was that you could implement essentially anything in emacs via elisp extensions, you don't have to get quite that complex in order to add a spell-checker to emacs. It can simply call ispell externally to do its spell-checking.
Upon some further perusal, it seems that Emacs 20 at least actually does have built-in spell-checking (M-x spell-region and M-x spell-buffer, among others). I'm not sure if this is actually coded in Lisp or an ispell hook though.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
... doesn't mean you shouldn't learn it.
Regarding topics addressed in the parent post:
1. Yes, Microsoft products are made such that easy tasks are simple, yet complicated setups are still complicated. They put a lot of money into making things generally easy for most people, and although I don't always agree with their choices, I find myself "up and running" quickly with any Windows OS. Mac systems I find to be similarly easy, but more restrictive at times. Unix-based systems... well, it takes a while longer and a lot more effort to get baseline functionality in place. And if you don't know what you're doing, the learning curve is huge and you go through a lot of frustration. Anything requiring reading more than two paragraphs of documentation to get working is harder than what I'm typically used to.
That said, when you're trying to set up complex networks and complicated hardware setups, Windows can be as painful as Unix. But I don't blame them for making a "network wizard" - the target audience is too small, too smart, and needs too much flexibility for MS to really attack those kind of things like they did with simple dial-up networking or playing music files on a typical sound setup. Also, because they left most of the flexibility there, I have as many options as I can afford or comprehend. It's up to 3rd party vendors (software and hardware) to make their own products easy to use, flexible, powerful, cheap, etc. (Whatever market they're targeting)
2. Back to the main topic of CS and MSFT - I agree with the concept of "it's present, real, and you will run into it in the field".
I find it to be irritating when CS departments want to stick to Unix-only programming, just because there's a wide variety of systems out there that students may run into. I went through 4 years of college and, because I never got involved in any non-school projects (I had many problems with staying in-focus with school assignments and had to put extra time into that), I NEVER did a single CS assignment on anything but Solaris. This is just as bad as doing everything in Visual Studio... it's one company's product with one company's vision of how things should be. I may have learned many general concepts, but I won't know for a while just how much of what I learned was tied down to that particular OS or the specific products we used on our systems.
Furthermore, a lot can be said of practical programming experience... and I believe that flexibilty and adaptability among computer systems is as desirable a concept to learn in CS as are program organization and programming paradigms. Yes, we don't want to teach a generation how just to use MS products because they're 90% of the market... but we don't want them to learn only Java, only Scheme, etc...
As it turns out, there are universities out there that don't stick to only MS products for teaching, and that's good. However, many of these same universities are sticking only to teaching on one of the other systems available, and that's a very bad thing. You could say at least one thing about sticking to MS products: it may not be a good teaching philosophy in general, but if you're going to be stubborn and political, sticking with 80-90% of what's used out there is better than sticking with something that's only 5%.
While StarOffice/AbiWord/etc. can replace MS Office for many uses, LaTeX is the only UNIX text formatting tool powerful enough to actually fully replace MS Office's functionality. In particular, no UNIX word processor that I'm aware of has an equation editor even approaching MS Office's, so to write any sort of a math paper it's either LaTeX or MS Office. I'll let you guess which is easier to use.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I guess what you do depends on where you fall on the ideology/greed spectrum... ;-)
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
...it's the business students, and the political students (and to a lesser extent, the art students), that will determine the future of Microsoft.
CS people here (myself included) learn Java and Ada95 as first and second languages, primarily on Solaris and Mandrake Linux boxes, then go on to study (and write) bits of the linux kernel in OS class, build bits of compilers in Linux for compiler class, etc. The business and management weenies (The Engineering Management and Systems Engineering get a bit more hard-core program, but they're still kind of weenies) learn Office 2000, Visual Basic [so they can be more in tune with the requirements of software development, or something], etc. On one hand, fine...let them play with VB and make pretty Flash webpages and laugh at the antics of the animated paperclip all they want. On the other hand...guess whos offices will be using Microsoft products because that's what they learned in college? We engineering types may see Windows as a piece of software that allows computers to play video games when they're not booted into the actual operating system (Non-windows...anything else will suffice, really) for real work, but for the business students, Windows is practically a way of life. Remember who's buying the software for the office....it's not the engineers, and with the way the job market is, you'll work where you can, whether or not the company boxes are running a game system [Windows, remember?]. As long as universites teach their squishy arts people Microsoft, the Beast of Redmond will be quite healthy.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Why aren't they using Solaris and Sun's ANSI C compiler?
GCC is okay, but only really optimized for x86. And it's not particularly ANSI. It's extend-and-embrace ANSI (it has very inviting non-standard extensions that aren't flagged if you tell the compiler to check for ANSI compliance -pedantic switch).
If too many CS students stop using Microshit products, no one will graduate with the ability to deal with system-crashing bugs.
$comment =~ s/[Uu]niversity/M$ Re-Education Camp/g;
.doc is defacto, so open the damn spec so everyone can exchange docs in the same format...oh wait, that might encourage competition.
Just kidding...
Anyway, as a CS student about to graduate, my experience has been the reverse of yours. I enter Uni not even know anything besides Mac and Windows existed. I struggled against UNIX my first year...vi, pwd, wtf??? Then, in a stroke of irony, I saw a Linux banner ad (link exchange, i believe)...possibly the only useful banner add I've ever seen. I tried Linux that Christmas, and haven't looked back.
Now, 4 years later (my program is 5 including co-op), I'm the hippy in the CS lab badmouthing the lack of standards compatibility, program robustness, etc.
I don't forsee a time in the future where I'll gladly use or embrace any MS products...not until there are no more decent options, anyway. I used to be pissed about the stability issues, but those seem (mostly) resolved as of win2k...now, my beef is the standards compliance issues. I know
Anyway, I don't know if this on topic or off, but wtf!...Anybody need a good linux sysadmin or programmer?
-Ben
I got my copy from that batch (Feiner's class)... I've used it exactly twice.
-- Point? None! Cob.
Did anyone notice the date on that article to be March 11th? Does that mean that we found a hole in the space-time continume, or that the page is almost a year old?
I recently attended the ACM SIGCSE (Special Interest Group- Computer Science Education) last week in Cincinatti. Microsoft was there and in full force. The gave everyone WinXP Pro, VS .net Pro, 2 books on C# and VB, a 32 MB diskonkey, and more little novelty items. They are really trying to push themselves in CS cirriculum by cutting deals and offereing freebies.
Are you guys aware that companies besides Microsoft are charging for backend server software? Microsoft licensing fees are chump change compared to what it costs to establish a IBM, Sun, or Oracle platform. Each one of the aforementioned corporations each have more market share that Microsoft in their stronger areas.
In fact, in the server arena, Microsoft can be seen as the little guy trying to catch up to these other galiants.
So why is everyone gunning for Microsoft? Are you *scared*?
Actually, your analysis is correct, but the reason isn't what you think it is.
I've worked with other server software for years (mostly Novell) and tried to pick up Win2k. I approached the problem with an open mind, determined to figure out the right way to do things and to find a way to make Microsoft work.
This link gives some idea of the kind of Rube Goldberg nonsense you are subjected to in attempting to do very simple things with Microsoft, but really doesn't come close to describing the kind of scatterbrained, random, and poorly thought out crap that Microsoft software is.
Microsoft ultimately proved to be incompatible with my work ethic. I could not do my work in a duck tape and bubble gum environment. One may be tempted to consider that I was incompetent, and simply couldn't learn the new system.
I picked up Linux and OpenBSD well enough in six months to make a living as a Linux networking and security consultant. I've never looked back.
Learn how to spell. It'll get you farther in life. Besides, if you do migrate away from Microsoft, emacs doesn't have a built-in spell checker, AFAIK.
Try Meta-X "ispell-buffer"....
Before you say anything else about Emacs, remember that "Emacs is a operating system cleverly disguised as an editor". Now, how do I run windows emulator in Emacs???
...richie - It is a good day to code.
When these kids graduate, they're gonna use whatever their jobs tell them to use. If its Microsoft, then that's what they'll use (at least if they want a paycheck).
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
At the school I attended, Windows and VS were definitely preferred tools. Only once you got well into the program (about junior year) is programming for Unixen even brought into the equation. Many students would initially try to write code in VS, and bring it across to a Unix (Linux or Solaris), and discover the inherent problems with that.
Students most definitely do learn from those who teach them.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Actually, I agree with the Sig. I don't want to have neither MS nor SUN hold the numbers of all my credit cards, and passwords to all my accounts. I'll keep them myself, thank you very much.
If these companies were really interested in my convenience, they would release sofware that keeps all the info securely encrypted on my computer, with an unreadable (to them) backup on some server.
Instead, I use GNU Keyring to keep my passwords in my PDA.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Maybe all that marketing backfires sometimes: people become so saturated that they feel the need to try something new. Of course, I could just have weird friends.
(Hopefully, this is only a joke)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I went to my girlfriend's Speech 111 class a few years ago and one of the CS students who was in the class was doing a presentation on Linux. Then I found out my Dad's ISP used Linux. So I took a Unix class, doing my homework logged in as root on the ISP's server.
Now I'm a loser living alone in Seattle after I quit a job at Microsoft after I dropped out of school and spend my weekends posting on Slashdot and working on my website (changing from PHP+Apache to Jetty+JBoss) that noone visits.
For the record, my girlfriend's speech was about the "warm fuzzies" and "cold pricklies". As you can tell, she left me, but that was before I fell in love with Linux. I drew my own penguin, but since I can't get SANE working, I guess the world is stuck with Tux.
Maybe, just maybe there is a much more efficient way to develop software.
Maybe you should try then, instead of whinning all over the place, huh?
BTW, how much of your money money do you think GM or FORD are wasting promoting they cars? Maybe you should come up with better way to make cars as well, while you are on it. I'd be thankful. [grin]
most of the higher engineering schools will typically use alot of unix .. this has been this way for years and years.
the only places where MS is a primary toll are usually community colleges and lower end engineering schools
I was persistent in using Visual C++ for some time until I spent over 2 hours trying to remove an error from my code that didnt really exist. I sent my source to a friend that uses CodeWarrior, and it ran flawlessly. When I took up the issue with my prof, he told me how Visual C++ fails to comply with the industry standard for c. Needless to say, I use CodeWarrior now...
I'm an Australian CS tutor (I believe Americans call us "T/As"). I have a couple of points:
.NET). It seems to me that APIs come and go, and this year's .NET specialist will be next year's dole recipient if s/he isn't willing and able to retrain to the next fashionable package. As a University, my institution is offering training as a background to a lifetime of employment. We're trying to give you the tools with which you can re-educate yourself: flexibility, critical thinking, logic, and a sound understanding of the basics. You won't come out of one of *my* prac classes without knowing what a "core dump" is for!
1) When my students grizzle that we're teaching them C and MIPS R2000 assembler instead of Java and Pentium assembler, I point out to them that in my first year, 1986, I learned interpreted Pascal and VAX Macro. Where would I be if I'd refused to learn anything apart from what I did at Uni? Unemployable, that's where. Current vendors would like you to think that their products are the final phase of computer technology and will never be outdated. This is, of course, horseshit. If you graduate with a BCompSci and manage to make a professional programmer of yourself, you'll be retraining yourself every couple of years.
2) A related point: people who get most of their computer knowledge from the back of PC Week or similar publications will get the impression that programmers need to know some API or another, and will jump to the conclusion that universities should teach an API (such as
3) Recently, the IT Support department at my university tried to make MS Visual C++ the standard C compiler in our PC labs. The first-year lecturers overrode them: we're currently using Borland C++ for those first-years who choose not to use Linux/GCC (first-year pracs can be done under the OS of their choice, but we enforce linux for subsequent years). The key reason for Borland over Microsoft in this case is that students can fetch a compatible C compiler that they can use at home from borland.com, for free. Not cheap. Free. As in beer. Oh yeah, and when you go to tell me how cheap the academic versions of things are, please remember that the Australian dollar is worth bugger-all at the moment, so it's going to be twice as many of our dollars...
It is a woman's prerogative to change other people's minds.
..what Microsoft is doing to prevent this..
Place ADS on slashdot is a good start
We have a dozen or so secretarial types who use LaTeX every day and are very comfortable with it. Training a new person takes a few days - but we just sent some of these same people off to a class for MS Office, which is also taking several days out of their lives. Not really very much different. One thing about somebody with secretarial training is they know how to type VERY fast, so the point-and-click stuff doesn't seem to do much for them.
By the way, I delved into TeX's math font metrics recently. It's not that hard to mess around with them; there are several open-source programs for pfb/pfa/afm etc. conversion (it's been a few months so I don't remember all the details, but it only took me a couple hours on Google etc. to get it figured out). And have you tried doing ANYTHING similar with MS font formats?
Energy: time to change the picture.
You're getting ripped off, man. You'll need at least $490,000 just to break even on those people.
Several points.
The industry standard for technical writers is Adobe Framemaker, a $900 word processing and page layout program. Though a lot of people do, you can't effectively use Word for thousand page documents, and there are important things you can't do at all with Word (like frames). So if you want to play in the big leagues, you have to use Framemaker.
.ps and .pdf tools, etc. Adobe then considered offering Frame for Linux, and released a free beta. I downloaded and fooled around with it for a bit. But I had become so enamored with the free stuff, I didn't bother with Frame anymore. And the cost wasn't really an issue- I could easily justify it, if I really needed the tool.
.Net will not change anything.
But once I started using Linux at home, I learned I could do everything Frame did with the free tools that come with Linux- TeX, LaTeX, all the
The moral of the story is that as people become more familiar with the free stuff, and as the free stuff improves, MS will be more and more irrelevent. It's already happened in the server realm. I predict
Those things are expenseive, $1,000 a year??? And from what I've seen the software from MSDN CD's are full blowen versions with help sections and all, but I could be wrong. The software I'm talking about came with the VB book. But ya can't knock those MSDN CD's, I love having win2000 pro, win2000 server, and win2000advanced server on ONE CD.
This sig is a virus, take it and use it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
For many years Pascal was the language of choice in CS programs, yet it never was the leading language in industry. Unix was taught many years before MS Windows was developed and yet Windows still became successful. So the track record indicates that what is taught in school is not necessarily what graduates end up using in industry.
Actually, Java has the syntax of C and C++. I see no difference.
If you want to see the perfect language for teaching CS, see Lisp or Scheme. Java has many pitfalls of its own*.
* Footnote: For a short review of Java see http://tunes.org/Review/Languages.html#Java.
Microsoft does similar things here at the University of Washington. They are actually giving CS majors free copies of all the development software. I guess they're hoping that people will get used to using them and therefor continue to use them in the marketplace.
Easy. Just buy a bunch of cool hardware and give it away as door prizes. or you could even give a Segway away as a door prize. (How much do those cost?)
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Their whole system is horrible IMHO. When you use GNU gcc and friends you can just about pull any old book about C or C++ off the shelf and write a program that works like you would expect it to.
Even after paying the big bucks for Visual Studio, you have to wade through a big freakin stack of Microsoft manuals about the Windows API (which is horrible to work with) and basically all you can ever hope to do is turn an elegant 100 line program into a 1000 line windowed app which probably looks like crap and is less useful than the command line version would be.
Of course the command line is obsolescent in Windows, instead you have to click a button a thousand times with your mouse to do anything because nobody can type anymore. Shit they should stop selling keyboards with PC's equipped with Windows because you can't hardly ever use the thing.
Clickety Click
(* I'm very comfortable with Java in a UNIX environment, and I'm sticking with it whenever I have the choice. *)
Java is one of the most narrow-minded languages there is. At least C++ and Python allow decent procedural programming, and a tad of functional. Java has no functions. Sure, you can emulate them, but it is not optimized for that. VB allows one to do both strong typing and dynamic typing (at least pre-NET VB). It sucks in many other ways, but such is a rare feature in a language. It caters to different styles and thinking modes.
Java is chisled out of a single narrow vision of "how things should be done".
Choice is being killed off. Whether it is by greedy corporations with fat marketing budgets, or some other conspiracy, I don't know, but it is happening. I don't like it (Java and singleness).
Table-ized A.I.
Use the other $35k to hire RMS to do the keynote...
just a suggestion...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I have a friend attadnng UC, Davis he told me that
all student engineering papers must pass MS Office
grammar checking (i.e. no green underlined text).
The intent is to improve student writing... The result must be a lot of MS Office sales (or
"theft") to meet the requirement.
My young friend is a Mac lover and felt outraged
the University would mandate an expensive application
that woud feed the coffers of a greedy monopoly.
At this point, I don't believe the University has
altered the policy. Papers can be failed for
not passing the grammar checker. I suspect the University has a site license for the faculty
to grade the papers using MS Office.
Don't even get me started on High school campuses
with Coke or Pepsi contracts...
I can't help but feel turned off of Linux and the like whenever I walk by the great unwashed nattering about how the evils of the corporate world can be felled with the right choice of OS. "It's the smell," as Agent Smith would say.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
Is it just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really, wants to protect its future interests?
It is just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really wants to buy its future customers?
Is it just me, or does this smack of a company that wants to give all of the college students legitimate copies of the software that they already downloaded from a P2P network?
greg
Speaking of which, currently i'm trying to scrape together some old pentium parts to get a working PC. so far i've got an AST Premmia GX P90, 128MB of ram crammed on there, a scsi 1gb hard drive, win95 for now, I want to play old games on it. But i'm having trouble with the LAN drivers onboard, and..of course...with win95 : ). I love old computers...
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
I am about three years through CS and Math undergrad degree at a major Canadian university. And yes, we are being snowed under with MS Visual Studio, W2K, etc.
However, the question has to be asked - is it really going to affect Microsoft's fortunes? This dislike of MS products is hardly a new phenomenon - in my experience, people with a strong interest in computing have ALWAYS held Windows and other M$ products in low regard, and with good cause (they're flaky, limited, bloated, and irritating). However, Microsoft is not making its billions off the backs of computing science students or other demanding users - their target market is precisely that segment of the population that don't know or need any better. They aren't too concerned with how fully-featured the OS they use is, they use it because it's familiar, it's widely available, and it (sort of) performs the tasks they need. And seeing as most software development companies sort of enjoy getting a bit of remuneration for their efforts, as long as MS hangs onto the home market we are going to be stuck with wading through Microsoft garbage in an attempt to produce something for the home market.
Of course, one obvious counter-argument would be that the more developers get driven into the Linux camp, the more feature-rich/easy-to-use Linux will become, which *may* in turn cause Bobby-Joe Punchclock to try out this "new Linux thingy". I suppose to a certain degree this is already happening, but will it be enough to make a real difference?
Feel free to commence screaming about how much you like linux. =) Yes, I like it too... settle down.
When I did my CS degree, we worked exclusively on UNIX boxes - but it didn't stop the majority of my friends and I ending up in Windows-programming jobs.
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
During my CS study, the only OS that was appropriate to talk about was Unix. Mentioning Microsoft during classes was forbidden, the only exception was when you wanted to show how great Unix was. (ok, it was back in the early '90 so MS wasn't that big then).
Nowadays I don't touch Unix at all. And probably never will again in the future if the win32/.NET platforms keep on getting better plus the tools keep on getting better.
The reason for this is not that the University was crap or anything, the point about the CS study is that you learn basic things about just that, CS. Not connected to a language, an OS, a certain editor or whatever. Students of today probably all learn Java in the 'OO programming' classes. Will they all keep on developing in Java after they're graduated? I don't think so.
If a student truely did understand what was taught and what was important, he/she will choose the right tool for the job.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
CS is not about what kind of features are in Windows, or are in Linux or are in XINU or in SunOS. It's about HOW you can develop software to solve a problem, by investigating the WHY first. This has nothing to do with any language nor platform.
In my days at the uni we had to write parts of the XINU os. (It's a unix clone for the PC, for educational purposes). Linux was in its 0.x versions. Is Linux inspiring? No. Not at all. You know why? Because I've seen it all before, even XINU had lots of stuff that's in Linux.
Ever looked at designdocuments of the Windows XP kernel? Or the Mach kernel? There is more on this planet than Unix.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
you could even give a Segway away as a door prize
DoorSTOP, surely. 'bout all the thing's good for.
Mod this sucker down !
Actually I believe he's referring to the MSDN Library, which really is just what you'll find on msdn.microsoft.com, only it's on a CD and has indexes.
Am I mistaken, is this report on MSNBC - part of the great(!) MicroSoft Network? Is it going to stay there long?
I'm a CS undergrad student at Dartmouth, an institution that has traditionally been mac-based. It's been 2 years since I've used a mac, though, as most of my classes are now taught with Linux and GNU software. After using the standard development tools that Linux has to offer (g++, cvs, etc.), there's no way I'm ever going back to Microsoft's convoluted and buggy software, despite the almost 6 years of programming experience that I have in the Windows OS. The fact that their software is is only made worse by their strong-armed tactics. I should have a choice of good vs. y software.
XTAZ
Reboots on my test Windows 98 box in the past week: 16
Last reboot of my Linux box: 6 months, 18 days, 7 hours, 3 minutes ago
linux _is_ good.
,
and how can you really learn an O/S if a good portion of the api are secret.
oh maybe ms will blindfold you with ear plugs
and take you on a dark road somewhere
where some of the api's will be revealed to you
if you sign a paper saying your soul belongs to
Softy.
that's a great way to learn CS.
Think of windows as the ultimate black box.
the bottom line, is that MS has earned all the
atttitude it gets.
because monolithic K&R C based command line operating systems with 1970s architectures are so much better than modern micro-kernals (just ask andy tanenbaum :-) Hey, I've lived in 1970s built flats, so I know it was the decade that quality forgot.
Many people predicted on 1995,that with the advent of more high speed processors,Java would be the best development language .After 5 years ,it is still slow and they have a worst user interface(Swing). ,it is fully written in C#.
Look at SharpDevelop
I guess Java still has a long way to go on that
& dwarfs walking arround with bowls of cocaine balanced on their heads
Ywh I know its been done before.
My favorite line....
:)
Linux hackers from Germany and elsewhere are working on a Windows-like graphical interface for Linux PCs called KDE (for K Desktop Environment). They expect to release it this spring--free of charge
And all this time I have been using vaporware I guess...
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
this whole get the students to use your hardware/software certainly worked for apple, right? hmmmm (checks market share)
i personally think that the whole point of this article is like saing the political energy of students doesn't change to the bitter cynical views of the middle aged.
lets face it. first off, the college/univ students are exposed to this stuff because unix was developed in academic environments and have always been embraced by such. i've never seen a csi program built on windows alone.
it has ALWAYS been this way. it's nothing new. we worked on a bunch of sperry 5000s or whatever running system V i think.
right now i am coding using VS.NET. why? because the job i'm on demands it. previous to that i was at various dotcoms where unix rules. now i'm building enterprise software. does it really matter what platform i learned to code on?
and besides. in a few years all the kids entering college would have been weened on XBOX and cheap PCs anyway.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
"...what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do."
Who made this fable up? When I went to school - yes it was a long time ago - everyone learned on a VAX or a Unix mainframe.... and we all (well - OK, most of us) went on to become M$ - based developers.
How many Windows hacks first computer at school was a Mac? Many!
That statement is groundless, and in my experience, false.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not only that, but you have had zero effect on the actual problem.
Actually that is not entirely true, my employer (a telco), has a division. It regularly drops it's customers (Businesses), if their customers (consumers) are abusive to its staff, because of the staffing problems it causes, it causes.
50 dollars of beer -- per person?
Well, only if they're engineers. CS students don't drink that much :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
When I hire someone, I'm looking for BOTH theoretical knowledge AND practical experience. I'm liberal in terms of theory - most of the market is very much looking for people with very specific skills. I believe they are shooting themselves in the foot.
However, I hire a good CS student with good social skills over an excellent CS student with bad or mediocre social skills. Good CS students in a good enviroment are more productive than excellent CS students in a bad environment. To my knowledge.
Stop the brainwash
I was raised on DOS. Started with 1.1, and went from there. As far as I was concerned, 5.0 was the mecca. I went kicking and screaming into the "GUI revolution", stopping briefly by Win 3.1 on my way to OS/2 (2.0?) and quickly to OS/2 Warp.
Even then, everything beyond WYSIWYG was just eye candy, and my 486 dx2 66 (with 32 megs of RAM!) was a little slow. Not that it wasn't "pretty good" for the time, it was! I still preferred Word Perfect 5.1 for word processing, and the print preview button for WYSIWYG as a combination of efficiency and page accuracy.
Based on what I actually did, for a while I was labelling myself as a member of the "Operating System of the Semester", because that's about as often as I switched. Did I pay Microsoft for everything I used? No, but I actually had licenses (trading favors/work/things/trinkets) for unused licenses -- M$ got their money, and no copyrights were violated (I still don't buy the whole prohibition of transferring ownership). I just couldn't afford to do all that expirementation and learning! But my skills were growing quickly. Eventually, I went to NT 3.51 server and had enough spare parts to go to Linux 2.0 (Slackware '96 was my friend) on a different machine. I couldn't do everything I needed to for my classes with Linux, but I had NT there to do that for me (no games under 3.51, remember? kept my GPA from falling too far).
Then I realized that, in order to compete, I had to learn Win95, because potential employers were asking about that. I traded for WinNT4.0 workstation, and that gave me the GUI experience I needed for a job. I really resent having to do all that grey-market trading to get the experience I felt I needed, but at this point I feel I'm pretty well rounded. My workplace bought me a computer with Windows 2000 Professional (and I'm competant there), a workstation (with AIX on it, so I'm still good), and at home I have two computers, one with Linux (2.2.flavor-of-the-month) and one with OS/X, my current favorite.
Before I left, my school was replacing all the UNIX machines with Windows machines because of an Intel/M$ grant to do so. The CompSci classes were changing their curriculum to accomodate, but there was an underground movement to "upgrade" all those machines to Linux so CompSci wouldn't have to change their curriculum ("But it worked on GCC in my dorm!" was a realistic thing to hear when working against Visual C).
Will CS students switch from Microsoft? I hope so -- if only to learn what the alternatives are and their strengths/weaknesses. The ultimate question is, what will they do about it? Will they keep their non-Microsoft tendencies, or switch back?
I'm about ready to give back a Windows 2000 Professional license to my company, because I've recently learned that Wine can do everything I need to in order to do my job, and Linux is more what I prefer anyway. Sure, I'm just one engineer, middle management is making all the purchases, but I'm one more in a growing culture here. Our voices will be heard. I'm not saying that as some zealot trying to change the world, but as one engineer who thinks that there's a more efficient way of getting work done, and it happens to cost less in licensing fees. After all, money is what managers care about. If my manager can avoid one more license, and get increased efficiency out of me, what do you think he'll do?
Yeah, he'll probably blacklist one of my favorite news sites in the name of efficiency.
Whatever happened to the days when writers seriously researched before putting something out to the public? I can't wait for this KDE thing to happen--wow, a GUI for Linux! It might have helped if the author experienced Linux before picking up the pen. Oh well, Linux rules, Microsoft drools and foams at the mouth.
PegQuin--I've got a sneakin' suspicion
"Computer programmers are quick to point out that they don't impugn the quality of Microsoft's software. It has some advantages: it is generally more consistent in quality and easier to install on servers, especially for inexperienced programmers."
Perhaps programmers don't, but any Software Engineer worth his weight in sand certainly does (and let's face it, so do many competant programmers as well.)
Clearly, anyone who prefers an OS because it's easier to install must by definition be inexperienced. Is the solution here really to perpetuate that inexperience?
The biggest problem I see here is that those who use Linux as an example of good Software Engineering are perpetuating a horrible practice in the industry. You see, Linux Source Code sucks as an example of good Engineering. It makes a great example of excellent hacking, but does not meet the first criteria for assesing the quality of Source Code
The more people who get confused into thinking Linux is an example of good Engineering, the worse the overall quality of the worlds engineers will be.
Does that constitute diatribe, or a tirade? 8^}
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I started using win95 back when I stated my degree in 96/97 took me 3 months to get reed of it and move to NT I was a happy user of NT until things got to heavy for my box PI 166 40 megs of ram that was around SP4 which was among the worst thing I have seen in the planet as a patch.
After that and since most of the work I had to do for University was just programming in C++ and Java I decided I did no longer need the whole of the VC++ and the like. Vi and Makefiles do wonders for me. About the graphical stuff never got bothered with it until Swing came around it was all useless. *Nix operating systems in diferent flavours just supplied me with the tools I wanted for development. And when we got to learn about OS's the example was Unix the project was system programming in Unix. Changed to amore MS aware university and they could simply not provide a systems programming module. Well there is one but it was running on a old Solaris box. Wonder why.
It is true that corporate accpetability is what makes companies go one way or the oder in the choice of their tools. But Ihad two choices either be a MS computer scientist (e.g. a power user) Or really play and understang what goes on inside a computer and how the things actually do happen. The later is forbidden under MS so I had to go *Nix they forced to move out of them because I had no idea about how their OS worked and getting information about it was hard at the beggining. I's rather be an absolute geek and understand what goes on in my box (helps me be a better developper) than just be a mouse click junkie with no idea of what happens.
However most of the people actually need Windows so let them have it in the desktop let them Have Mac OS X The frontend is nice but the backend where only profesionals work does not have to be the same as for computer Iliterate staff.
Where is my mind?
Sorry, I've been out of college a while, but real CS schools still teach in UNIX, right?
Drug dealers hook kids on drugs by giving out free samples. This works because kids are gullible and want to be cool.
.NET server to best utilize the product. And they will have to convert their backend to SQL server for single sign-on to work. And they will have to use ISA server to actually attempt to secure the web servers...and they are hooked.
M$ can play this same game to increase their userbase but they are giving the candy away to the wrong crowd. CS students are the equivalent of the new "Just say no" generation of kids. They know the dangers of coding in Windows and will not subject themselves to the frequent crashes and eventual blue screens.
If M$ was smart they would move from the campus playgrounds to the hangouts of middle managers. Now here is a gullible bunch. With promises of increased productivity, outstanding support, and the salespitch of complete integration of eCommerce from online ordering to delivery status this group of backstabbing overachievers will try anything.
Of course it they will have to authorize the purchase of the new
The MS versus OSS debate is old. If you want OSS only then start your own company and only use OSS. Otherwise the people that initially made the company successful get the say. I use a mix of both OSS and MS products (and Java, not sure where this fits in). The goal in business isn't what's popular with CS or CE students. It's what is going to get our product out the door the quickest. If 95% of the Desktop world uses Windows and the other 5% uses Mac OS where's Linux? On the server.
I like Linux a lot but until MS really starts screwing people over there will be no switch. Activation, while irritating, will not kill MS. What will kill MS is subscription based s/w. The funny thing is my company sells software based on subscription and it does fine. It's weird how in one area this is a bad idea and in others it's good.
Once MS becomes too expensive for the PC you will see Linux Desktop take hold. KDE seems better from the windows standpoint but I prefer Enlightenment/Gnome. Actually I run fvwm2 on my old pentium 133 laptop. Reminds me of linux in '96. Fast and furious! lol....
"Greg Sullivan, product manager for Windows XP, says that the product-activation policy was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible and will have negligible affects[sic] on anyone who isn't breaking the law."
There should be *no* effects, however negligible, on anyone who isn't break the law. Don't you get it yet, MS? Those who buy and lawfully use your product are not going to accept additional hassle just so you can crush the +-15% who don't.
As the Purple One (no, not Barney the Dinosaur) has said before:
Forever is a mighty long time.
I give Java only a few more years before capability-based distributed programming languages become widespread.
The article isn't deep or flawless, but hits on a major point: what students learn in school is key to what they go on to do.
Really? Then why aren't we up to our ears in Macs?
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Dear God I loved the Dead Milkmen. Stuart, Punk Rock Girl, the whole left-handed, midget, eskimo albino thing...
You know that kid delivers papers in the neighbourhood, the Worstwood kid, he's a good kid, a fine kid, all he ever wanted was a burrow owl, kept buggin his old man, "Dad, get me a burrow owl". So the guy breaks down and buys him a burrow owl. The other night, I go out into my back yard, and there's the Worstwood kid looking up in my tree, I said "what're ya looking for", he said " I'm looking for my burrow owl", I said "Jumpin Jesus on a pogo stick, everybody knows that burrow owls live in hole! In the ground!" Now Stuart, do you think a kid like that knows what the queers are doing to our soil? - classic. Off the top of my head, and its been a while since I listened to it (I have it on vinyl) so that may not be perfect, but I can still hear it rattling around in my head some days.
Basically, any University that has been bitten by the "we must produce people with jobs" bug.
I am a very angry techie who was told that in order to be of any real value to the tech industry (Re. IBM), I would need to put aside my Linux "hobby," and focus on the "real" operating system for every PC -- Windows. If this is the way that IBM is supporting Linux, I do not feel that they should get ANY kudos for their "efforts" (or lack thereof). I'm tired of being told that my interests and skills are useless. I don't think that any of the Unixy variants or Linux are useless. Back to school once again to become a CPA I guess. They can always find work. Maybe 10 years from now they will realize their mistakes.
If there is a local LUG or UUG, I strongly urge you to rally the troops and distribute Linux/BSD ISOs before the entrance to the MSFest. If there isn't a users' group, get a couple friends or do it yourself. It would be best to have a few PCs running Linux doing cool stuff like fractal generation, running webservers, distributed processing, etc. Also, a tuxracer machine would help. :-)
The key here is to inform the students that there are other options. This is especially important for the younger students who might be easily roped in by the glitz and glamour of an MS marketing party.
BTW, how about something like this for a big poster?
* 700 copies of your latest proprietary software: $5,000
* Airfare and accomodations for pretty marketeers: $4000
* Donation (bribe) for CS department: $10,000
* Having your event crashed by students distributing free alternatives: Priceless.
One of the reasons that I became a lawyer was to avoid ever having to hire one. -SPYvSPY
I see lots of opinions, but I'd like to see more than that. Has anyone does a real survey of colleges and universities to determine what the "dominant" operating system is for Computer Science departments? A real survey would use standard statistical methods, for example, identifying all the universities and then creating a random sample to evaluate (because self-selected samples are notoriously biased). I haven't seen anything like that, but I sure would like to.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Maybe.
On the programming side of the house, however, things are just the opposite - the Unix syscall interface, while not perfect, is limited in complexity. You can pick it up in a semester, no problem. The windows API is quite a beast. I can't imagine trying to do the practical component of a semester-long OS class using Windows (although I know someone who did).
My experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here are the fork(2), exec(2), and pipe(2) system calls. Go do your project (which involves some actual thought)."
Someone else's experience:
"Now that we've talked about process management, here is the CreateProcess API. It takes 1,358 arguments as follows.... Oops, we're out of time."
We too have a ".NET launch party" in New York on 13th with lots of free development soft if you can sit through the 4-hour event.
That's very nice, but those are all distributed as self-extracting .exes.
I don't have a WinBloze system. Those are as useless to me as all those Outlook virii out there.
Is there any place to get a nice set of free fonts _for_Linux_?
Unless somebody has a way to unpack those with Linux?
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Quick summary of the article:
Comp Sci students have decided that Windows isn't even worth stealing.
Fact: Microsoft hire the top 1-5% of the graduating CS, CE class. They put the candidates through a day of logic and technical interview. They will get the best and the brightest. If hired, they will living off of Microsoft dough, 401K, and stock options. They are not going to suppose the free software movement. For what? The bottomline is that Microsoft get the best and brightest and it is hard to compete with that.
I mean, I thought that thing died last century - nobody here in Seattle uses that OS - it's so OS/2 that it makes crufty look cool ...
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--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Anyone reading the article would think that KDE isn't available yet--the authors evidently think that the upcoming version of KDE is the very first version, judging by the way they wrote it up.
It's well-known within the Empire that "Linux has no GUI". This is a consistent FUD assertion which Imperial minions are happy to propagate. I've seen several statements (the "UNIX on the desktop makes no sense" FUD, among others) which repeat that *NIX/Linux has no GUI, and requires the user to type inscrutable commands unto a shell prompt. I've also seen (several times) that "KDE, the Linux GUI, is due to be released xxxx". Nevermind that X is older than WinBloze, or that I had fvwm2rc95 in 1997 which looked exactly like Lose95, the Empire can't seem to publicize _that_.
Most M$ lusers were happy to lose the command prompt with DoS, and were always made queasy, if not simply terrified, by a big blank screen that said nothing but "C:>". Threatening them with a return to that is valuable FUD, from which the Empire will not part.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
Sure, if they offered me enough, I'd work for them. It would need to be enough that I'd be able to afford to retire in a handful of years, and the contract would have to have no restrictions on what I did after retirement.
I'd work for them for N years, then I'd retire and spend my time writing free software, either for Linux or Mac OS X.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
That's good discipline too. I hated it at the time, when I was using Linux at home and had to go to the computer lab before class to compile for DOS. It helps you learn two things, ANSI -- and portability. GCC is worse than Visual Studio about non compliance.
"Is it just me, or does this smack of a company that really, really, wants to protect its future interests?"
It smacks of a university that is really, really corrupt. If your faculty had any ethics they would be horrified at the thought that they would participate in such a thing.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm picturing a terminal and keyboard sailing out the window with "deleting inode 041523...." fading from the screen.
I guess I should consider myself lucky. I attend the University of Wisconsin, where Unix/Linux servers outnumber windows servers more than 5 to 1. There is a similar statistic for lab computers. All CS students are obligated to learn Unix by the time they get to CS 352, with hundreds of Unix tutorial classes along the way. It doesn't stop there, most CS professors have written "handin" bash scripts to allow students to hand in assignments by ssh'ing in to 1 of the 50 available tux (Red Hat 7.2) servers or 1 of the over 100 available nova servers set aside just for CS students to use to do assignments. It's quite humorous to me to hear that the prognosis isn't very good, because on this campus of over 40,000 students, you can walk around all day and not see one start menu. If M$ was trying to buy our CS department, I think I can safely say they have long since given up, because the only progression this campus is making is from Sun to Red Hat. Life is good...
Out of order?! Fuck, even in the future nothing works...
hi,
in the article it talks about KDE as if it were vapor ware. when I read it I was flabbergasted, but then I looked at the domain, and it was an msnbc.com site.
go figure that either a) theyre trying to make it look like linux doesnt have a nice GUI already, or b) theyre totally clueless.
*sigh*
MyNameIsMok
Greed rules the minds of considerably more young college-grads than does Ethics/Principle...every man have his price, and Microsoft can always raise the dollar bar a bit higher.
And before you go preaching again about principles and love of CS/code/open source/etc, remember what the majority of people are like, and respect the power of the almighty dollar.
And for the record, I know _multiple_ CS grads who acknowledge that Microsoft is evil, produces inferior software, and should be done away with, and still WORK (or intern) for the company.
Magius_AR
So you'd rather trust your personal data to Sun who's CEO said "Privacy is a myth, get over it".
ROFLMAO.
I'm a Comp. Sci. major at SUNY Plattsburgh The Computer Science labs here are dual boot Linux (Redhat) and Windows 2000 machines. Most students here prefer Linux though over Windoze. Most of the classes teach howto program in Linux. The use of Windows isn't discouraged but most people choose not to use it. Also most of the teachers prefer Linux over Windows, only one Windows user among them. This seems to be a pattern here at Plattsburgh State.
Does anyone else get this mental image of a guy in a trenchcoat standing in a dark alley holding his coat open to reveal the rows of .Net CDs lining it? "Pssst; hey, kid... over here... the first one is free... just a little taste to whet your appetite... send all your friends my way..."
At least it isn't physically addictive. But then again, neither is gambling...