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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."
Uh, does that surprise you. Heaven forbid someone still believes in full disclosure.
This could prevent some students of getting some jobs in the future.
.NET source code is mandatory for some classes. Now, could a student refuse to take a particular class or ask for an equivalence because of that? If not, it's like if they signed a whole lot of people into non-compete clauses, without much benefit for them! I'm not even talking about Free software here. They could probably prevent you from working for a competitor (Sun, Apple, etc.)
Suppose I enroll in one of those programs where the exposure to
The use of "sponsored" material in classes has always been dangerous, but when it can influence where you can or can't work after you graduate, it's just plain Not a Good Idea (tm).
Translation: Microsoft hopes professors and students will improve their work, so it can be sold back to them at a grossly inflated price.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Why not let people with some programming experience already poke and prod at the source code?
.NET.
.NET is the only solution for all their web coding activities (I know not all students are like this, but honestly.. i remember what university was like.. 75% sheep). Not to mention bringing in a whole slew of .NET-trained graduates into the workforce.
Three reasons:
1) Control over how the universities use the code. Universities are notoriously underfunded, so any help coming their way from a company like MS is a godsend. I'd love to see the restrictions placed on any code developped in university labs on
2) Good PR. MS looks like a saint for helping out the struggling education system.
3) The student programmer is in just the right stage to be brainwashed into thinking
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
This is a bit unsettling.
.net (or something else popular), they have trade schools.
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
If you want to focus on something like
===
The Internet is generally stupid
Most University's are adding Windows workstations, but not the servers. You know what students are doing on those Win2k lab PCs?
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.
They still keep *nix labs for the serious geeks, and they always have SGI labs for the graphics stuff. Occassionally Macs. But the Pcs are there to fill the gap of cheap, nearly disposable clients. The real R&D is still on *nix.
In short, it's marketing, and good marketing in that the misdirection is well-concealed. But then, they know that the money guards in most companies respond better to pretty picutres and unsubstantiated graphs rather than real-world tests.
This newest .NET push is simply more of the same. At last, the people who know technology are being allowed to have some say in purchasing decisions (in my company anyway), and they're not deciding on MS as much. So, MS has to get to the people who know, now. Sadly, their reputation is so tarnished with developers and tech-savvy people, they have to catch them young, before the truth gets out.
Where is .NET anyway? Anyone using it in a production environment? Last I heard, it was pushed back because of security concerns. Again.
Do not touch -Willie
If you were going to teach a course around MS stuff, are there any University quality textbooks about MS Operating Systems and Products?
The main problem I see is that a given MS buzzword (.NET now, was DCOM, COM+, COM, OLE, blah blah blah) tends to have a 12 month or less half-life. Professors aren't going to like to have use modify a course heavily every time they teach it.
If a school can get some nice tools for free, then hey! alright!
CS is not about tools, it's about concept and design and problem solving. Any good CS major knows how to develop software independant from any specific language. So if they want to learn about software using MS stuff, then go right ahead.
Just because students aren't forced to use GCC is not a bad thing.
While I posted above saying its great news that Linux made news by being Microsoft's foil on the front page of the marketing section of the WSJ, I can't help but come to the rather pessimistic conclusion that it doesn't matter one fly fuck what a single administrator says he will or won't do. Bullshit, I call. Unless you're willing to lay down your job(yeah right) you are going to do what you're told to do. If Linux is to be brought mainstream, it will NOT be done by the circle jerk of techies here on slashdot. It will be done by the future stuffed suits of the corporate world. So.....
You want to make a difference while you're in college? Convert two or three business/accounting/marketing majors to Linux. Set them up, provide free support, make them comfortable. Keep up said support. Recruit your geek friends to do the same. Do for the future stuffed shirts what Microsoft does for the present stuffed shirts. If and only if this is possible(no idea if it is) will it be possible for Linux to make REAL progress in infiltrating Microsoft's home world....the working world.
The idea was to teach us to program, not to condition us for a life under redmond rule.
That's funny. When I was in college the idea was to teach us to solve problems using computers in any language. I wrote code in PERL, Java, C/C++, and LISP.
The point of college isn't to learn to program in different languages, but to acquire and hone basic problem solving skills that you can apply to whatever language/tool/solution best fits the bill.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Some universities (under the pressure from non-cs departments) are deploying more and more win machines with the motivation "the students are going to need to know how to use windows since thats what theyll use when they leave university". This is absolute bull. I sometime receive job applications that proudly list their skills as being microsoft only. We never hire them. A person who only knows one os cant call him/herself a computer professional.
The "bad guy" in this case is usually non-cs management who think theyre doing the student a favour while actually ruining the possibility for the student to receive a solid academic education.
One thing that would be valuable to me would be a directory that lists all universities that do windows only training in their computer science classes. This would be efficient for me as I could redirect these applicants to the round filing cabinet under my desk without having to waste my time reading their cvs.
/m
I'll second that. My university was a hodgepodge of technologies, but almost all lab computers were NT boxen and the compiler of choice in the low-level courses was VC++. As an instructor of some of the 100-level courses there, however, I can attest that nobody was learning MS-specific stuff (like MFC) in those courses, but the technology was there.
You may not want to believe this, but most students are looking for the skills/terminology that will get them the most coin, not necessarily the ones that are the "purest" or "most interesting," from either a theoretical or aesthetic standpoint.
Note that I'm not condoning any of the above. I couldn't wait to get out of a university that presented such a confused picture to its faculty and students.)
:wq
Hmmm... Most colleges known for good CS departments (Ucal-Berkely, UW, UWisc, CU-Boulder, MIT, Illinois, etc.) have extremely Unix intensive courses and large (and sometimes famous) Unix labs for their students.
I guess if "dumbing" down computer science is important (where no one actually LEARNS ANYthing), then Win2k is for them. But the schools that actually TEACH comp sci. in a practical way still seem to favor Unix.
BTW - Unix is used QUITE often in the business sector. Just not for echking email and secretarial word processing. Unix machines do the REAL work behind the scenes.
Ciao!
How can you be a CS GRAD student and not know how to use gcc/g++/make?!?!? Honestly!
CS graduate students and even "professors" for lower-level programming classes often don't know what the hell they are doing anyway. My professors for both Java 1 and Java 2 were like this, and it's not like I go to a small university (I go to Oklahoma State).
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I know bashing Microsoft is cool here and nobody will mod me up for this from -1, but I don't agree. Find me examples of Microsoft doing this to people and I'll listen a little more. Slashbots said the same thing when the source to Windows CE was opened. Nothing happened. I understand some paranoia but what justifies you or me to say for sure we know MS' intentions with this?
Jack Buck (1924-2002)
Darryl Kile (1968-2002)
My school is in the process of moving all programming for its CS classes back to Unix. When I asked a professor why, the answer I got was, "Frankly, trying to turn Windows into a decent educational software development platform is about as fun as jumping naked into a pit of rabid wolves."
Having tried to do some homework for advanced classes on the Win2k workstations in the computer labs, I can only agree. . . with the minimal access student accounts get on the workstations, activities as simple as getting third-party libraries to work sometimes have their difficulty ratings upgraded from "routine task" to "black art."
I respect Miguel a lot, and fully support Mono.
That said, ugh. Yes, digital pictures are just bits. Yes, Windows and Linux are just bits. Yes, all human knowledge can be represented as bits, though we don't necessarily know how yet. But isn't this getting old yet?
Maybe if you're an eight year old showing off to your friends that you know what a bit is, then go ahead. But a compiler hacker is not in this position. Might as well start showing off that you also know what a molecule is, and tell everyone to "go have some molecules for breakfast" or "look both ways for fast bunches of molecules moving very quickly before crossing the street".
We, as programmers, are past that stage. Lets drop it.
This issue is pretty serious for OSS. Consider: While all the jaw-jacking about MS is typically justified in their stance on OSS, one thing is certain about the MS vs. Linux debate:
.NET, coral may likely be destroyed if the wave is strong and deep enough.
.NET and other MS-unique technologies have a good chance to convince the people who make decisions yet do not code--the school administrators. After all, this is a money argument, not a "mine is better" argument.
Microsoft could win it.
Imagine the software world as a big ocean. OSS is like coral. It's cooperative, works for the common good, shares its resources to build a community. As a result, a structure is built for the good of all.
Microsoft appears as waves in that ocean. None of these waves, paradoxically, are good for MS, the wave generator. Sometimes the waves are small and help to move the OSS coral's spores along to form other colonies (apps). In the case of the tidal wave known as
A wave is as strong as its organization. Microsoft has succeeded (and unjustly much of the time, but that's another topic) because it is very organized at a corporate level and can utilize resources that other groups, particularly disorganized cooperatives such as OSS groups, find hard to counter.
OSS is mostly organized at the software level, writing code. But code writing doesn't "sell" the work to the business--marketing does. And that's the front where Microsoft is working. Microsoft thinks, "Why debate the facts where we can just act like the 800-pound gorilla and flood the schools with free stuff to boister interest?"
Unfortunately, no one group or person appears to speak for OSS. Without a bona fide, consolidated group that fights MS at whatever level it wants to move to,
The OSS/MS fight is akin to hand-to-hand combat vs. carpetbombing. OSS can't fight without a general--an organized group that can move to counter MS and use its powers of hacking virtually ANYTHING into compliance or existence for UNIX systems without fee.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
I would focus on the "derivative works" provisions, which share some of the characteristics MS has characterized as "viral" in the GPL. Query what happens if in a few years, MS files a series of lawsuits claiming that various developers improperly created a "derivative work" of the shared source, without giving proper attribution to MS. Although it would be hard to prove that a particular individual had seen the code, given the uncontrolled access, note that it would be equally difficult for the individual to prove s/he had not seen the code. And MS would likely interpret the "derivative" language along the lines of the "one click ordering" and "hyperlinking" patent holders, claiming that anything using a distributed model was derivative of theirs. So in order to fend off the lawsuit, the developer would have to launch legal attacks on the "viral" part of the license: the derivative works definition is too broad and vague, this similar concept isn't really derivative, free public distribution negates the contractual nature of a license, etc. That is, the developer would have to make the very sort of arguments that MS has publicly proposed against the GPL.
Am I just too too paranoid, or is this rather a clever no-lose situation MS has created? If MS wins one of these lawsuits, it gets to tie up Jane Developer's project for years and then stick its name on it. But if it loses, the loss establishes a legal precedent that will help it launch future attacks on the GPL, the success of which attacks could possibly allow MS to thwart open source projects. And MS accomplishes this with at least superficial protection from accusations that it is wielding improper monopoly power - how can licensing provisions modeled on the GPL be monopolistic? And how can anyone criticize poor MS for lawsuits arising from the open release of their source code, when that's exactly the antitrust punishment the states were seeking?
I'm sure there are a lot more scenarios to explore here, and I don't purport to be a great legal expert on the GPL so I defer to anyone who is. But in any event, I hope that schools do not widely succumb to this until the implications have been thoroughly considered.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
I agree with the sentiment that a college or university should give students a broad education, however, with the exception of liberal arts colleges, this doesn't seem to be the case. A four year degree in business is nothing more than vocational training for working in a beaurocratic organization. A four year engineering degree produces cookbook engineers who can't problem solve. And a four year IT/CS degree is vocational training for programmers.
Any real learning about CS is only at the 400 or greater level, and limits the students to only one year of real learning. The rest is training to work in a Dilbert shop.
Do students go to college to learn or to prepare for a job? If you are honest, you will admit that 95% of the students go to college to prepare for a job - and that is vocational training.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
> Its a difference between people who just want to know how to use something vs the people that want to understand it.
No, it's worse than that. It's the difference between people who want a certificate to show a prospective employer that *says* they know how to use something versus the people that want to understand it.
Chris Mattern