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MS: Use the Source, Luke!
McSpew writes: "The WSJ (via MSNBC) has an article about Microsoft's upcoming push to get universities to use .NET code in programming courses. Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day. The article does a good job of explaining the issues and why MS may yet fail in spite of their push. I wish the article had discussed the reverse-engineering issues of needing 'virgins' who have never seen the product being reverse-engineered and how MS's newly broad distribution of its code makes finding virgins much more difficult."
Just pick a name from the roster of any CS course...
--riney
When these guys came to my campus a couple of weeks ago (CU Boulder) I think the majority of students were more interested in the free XBOX giveaway than the .NET. Although finally having a legit copy of XP Pro was a nice bonus as well :)
Who is John Galt?
Here is your diploma and FYI, M$ owns all of your future work.
Microsoft trying to talk to students about "the source" is like your dad wanting to "rap" with you about drugs.
Pat
All these schools are mistakenly running Linux
when they could be running the BSD they've
always ran on their VAXes and PDP-11s on their
PCs now. We need to stop this travesty and
reintroduce programmers to good clean kernel
code, not the spaghetti code that hides
underneath the hood of the GNU/Linux kernel.
If you ever pop the hood of that car, you'd
see squirrels running in a wheel for an engine.
It's enough to make a self-respecting old
Unix hacker post to slash .
They were called IS students.
We're not here to supplant anybody else's operating systems or tools in the university, says Microsoft's Rashid.
This definitely belongs in the Most Outrageous Vendor Lie Ever Told? article
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
So, the professors/administrators, who cannot be bothered to do the work of maintaining the campus computer network, come in and say "MS has offered us platinum chains and underwater blowjobs if we teach all courses in the .NET environment, so go ye forth and set it up."
.NET initiative is going to net (ahyuck, I made a funny) are the people in watered-down sorta-computing pre-business-school majors (Information Management, whatever) who don't actually do any programming or use the campus network. These schmucks, god how I despise them, are going to be all about .NET, and perhaps some poor fool is going to end up working for them. However, this is in-no-way going to alleviate MS' problem where the students who can actually code are using some UNIX derivative.
Whereupon the five guys in the basement of the engineering building (all campuses have such a building, with such a basement, with five slashdot readers in it - you know who you are) who actually maintain the campus computers say, depending on the rank of the personage and other political concerns-
1) "Run it by the chair of the department" (who is a crank with a zany axe to grind, 100% guaranteed.) Surprisingly, this works even if it has been run by the chair of the department three times already.
2) "Sir, we would start if we could, but these orders haven't been approved yet." (Have him sign some stuff, making the pompous blowhard think things will be "expedited" with his signature, then throw them away.) This is always the response if the prof. or admin. has officious looking documents with him.
3) "Fuck you, Dan." At a public university.
Regardless of what these five guys SAY, they DO the following set of things: {}.
And the students keep working on SPARCs, b/c the faculty don't have the wherewithal to push through an upgrade of the computers actually used for instruction.
The people that this
Just my $0.02 US ($3.00 Canadian)
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 3,736,589,132 times, shame on gullible consumers sucked in by manipulative marketing.
The RIAA has announced a new coursebook for law students "IP theft - a history". The coursebook examines the importance of Intellectual Property and the how the theft of IP threatens the foundations of our society.
Monsanto have announced a new series of videos for Biology undergraduates. Called "The ethics of genetic engineering", the series examines subjects such as how having patented gene sequences allows companies like Monsanto to help feed starving children in the Third World.
Disney-trained lecturers will be visiting art faculties all over the country in the coming weeks. The lecturers will be giving fun and thought provoking demonstrations about how to draw Disney-style characters. Before attending the lectures, students will have to sign a contract which stipulates that any Disney-style characters they draw in the future will be automatically copyright of Disney Corporation. They will also be encouraged to send any characters they draw directly to Disney, and not to show them to anyone else.
Environmental Studies students are all to receive a free study pack from ChevronTexaco Corporation. The study pack includes a text book "The Truth About Global Warming", as well as a t-shirt, stickers, felt pens, a colouring pad and a fridge magnet.
"...finding virgins much more difficult."
I have a hard enough time with this as it is. Damn you Microsoft! DAMN YOU!!!!!
--It's Pimptastic!--
I took an intro to CS class last year, and we were programming in C++. I remember being marked down by 50% because, even with the Makefile I supplied, the guy who was grading couldn't get it to compile under Visual C++.
Mind you, I had no trouble under g++. My prof, an emacs junkie, later reversed the grading decision.
--Mike--
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
printf("Hello, Microsoft EULA.\n");
return 1;
}
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I went the the George Mason version of this show and it was like going to a trade show announcement party, food, drink (non-alcoholic), give away, you know the whole nine yards.
.NET because of it (well because of the given aways)
There were over 800 people at the event and most raised their hands for being MIS students, not CS. The Event was sponsored by Mason's Business School, not the Engineering school (where CS resides). It was a good party and I will try
85%: Microsoft Word (Sure beats tex for the average student)
15%: Telnet to the *nix server to code.
5%: Using in VB for their IS course in GUI design.
University students giving 105%?! Are the seas boiling over?
The only difference between a 1st year grad student and a 4th year undergrad is an acceptance letter.
-Erik
Why not? They screw everybody else.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.