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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?
At the recent SIGCSE conference of the ACM MS was there pushing the .NET handing out full copies of it and XP Pro as well as books on C# and things like that. I must admit I saw the add-on to .NET, the Live Wire product I think it's called, as a decent tool to teach non-cs majors an intro to programming course. Then I got home and talked about the product with some colleages and to my disgust one was using it to develop actual software.
It's one thing if a school jumps on board with this, but for the love of pudding, please mention there are other things out there, and what is sometimes just a teaching tool isn't always something for use in industry.
Wheeeee
Here is your diploma and FYI, M$ owns all of your future work.
Their code-sharing initiative is all about winning hearts-and-minds at the university level, where Linux and open-source rule the day
Yeah, I used Unix (not Linux) in programming courses when I was in college, but most colleges now-a-days use Win2K labs and are phasing out their Unix labs (same programming courses in my college are using Visual Studio's version of C++).
Sorry to burst your bubble, but lately Linux and open source aren't "ruling" at the university level.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I will not support, learn, tolerate, or any way enable or support either Windows XP or this ".NET" crap. We're a Microsoft shop, using NT and 2000 for servers, and 98 for workstations. We will NOT "upgrade", EVER.
It does what we want, albeit imperfectly. The new bugs and security holes (and hardware requirements) are more trouble then they are worth.
--Mike--
Microsoft trying to talk to students about "the source" is like your dad wanting to "rap" with you about drugs.
Pat
It seems Universities are surprisingly good at waiting to see if a new technology is more than just hype and actually establishes itself in the IT world before they add it to their courses. If .NET falls on it's face, they don't want to have students who paid thousands of dollars to learn about it.
1) MS is not cool. People with personality don't use MS. When's the last time you met someone way out there, who was a die-hard MS user. I've never met one MCSE that wasn't a drone. 2) Linux, Open source, etc, is ACTUALLY OPEN. You want to do what with it? Ok, go ahead. And also, start a mailing list... 3) MS doesn't mean it, and people know it. They've already called "Open Source" a cancer. Why would the adopt a similar model?
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
First, in what course exactly would an instructor want to say "Well, here's a whole bunch of code from a commercial (or any) project. Study it." I agree it's good to have an example around for some things, but if MS thinks the Universities are going to create a course like "The .NET Code", they're dreaming.
Second, if I did want a large code example, I'd want a good example. I'd want to be able to point to almost any part of the code and say "That's the right way to do it." I've never seen any MS code, but I'm going to idly speculate that you couldn't do that with it. Probably MS isn't shooting for the .NET code being used as a cautionary tale.
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 .
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
It seems somewhat plausible that Microsoft is concerned about the general lack of programming experience on their products that college students get. I know at all of the universities I ever went to, (three) and all the ones anyone I can recall asking about it went to, (more than three) the dominant programming infrastructure was Unix. As far as I can tell, this has only become more prevalent in recent years, with almost every CS student I know running a linux box at home to save the effort of having to sit in a lab to code homework assignments.
.NET stuff in order to RE it for purposes of Linux interoperability, though. Maybe that's another reason MS is pushing to have it's code displayed so broadly. So noone can legitimately RE it.
It is a shame that it will be harder to find people who have no experience with the
-il cylic
Defend Freedom
even at university level I would guess it is still quite easy to find virgin programmers :P
:D
Hell, just hang around here for a while...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
You can't swing a dead cat around without hitting a few dozen.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
They were called IS students.
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
From the article:
Microsoft historically has been extremely protective of its intellectual property and has vehemently opposed some tenets of the open-source movement. It has particularly attacked the "general public license"
(emphasis added by me)
I suppose in an article discussing m$ and open source, it was hardly necessary to check the acronyms out first. I assume it passed the proof readers as well. It just goes to show that dilignce is alive and well in the popular press today!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
1. What the heck is it? Every time you turn around, it's something different. I suspect it's just another dressed up version of OLE/ActiveX in a pretty new wrapper. .NET, you'll be stuck with it, and it's not going to be portable to anything else. There are plenty of ways to write software that don't require you to give your first born male child to Micro$oft, and I'm going to use those instead.
2. It's a way to trap everyone into their code. If you start using
3. "It's Microsoft, so it's Evil" (TM). They want everyone to use it, so it must be bad. Look at their history of embrace, extend, extinguish. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it's a Faustian deal, no matter how you do it.
--Mike--
The more their source is publicly available, the bigger the chance is that someone sees it. The bigger the chance that someone sees it, the harder it gest to prove you did not look at Microsoft's source code when you wrote your program, no matter if your program is open or closed source.
It is just a way to beat the competition to them.
They're setting up to kill Open Source in the future... not by winning hearts and minds, but by "contaminating" all those students...
MS Lawyer: "What? Product X functions like MS Y.NET? Obviously you had access to our copyrighted source code!"
Open Source Group: "WTF are you talking about?"
MS Lawyer: "Programmer Joe Collegekid over there, he saw our source in his college class. He obviously used it. Stop producing your software, or you'll lose everything you own! Oh, and give it to use, because we own all the copyrights on it!"
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/default.asp?UR L=/downloads/sample.asp?url=/msdn-files/027/001/90 1/msdncompositedoc.xml. Shared source license, but you can use it in classes and courses. So the push is definitely there. The sourcecode is for Windows and FreeBSD
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Features
- An implementation of the runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (ECMA-335) that builds and runs on Windows XP and FreeBSD
- Compilers that work with the Shared Source CLI for C# (ECMA-334) and JScript
- Development tools for working with the Shared Source CLI such as assembler/disassemblers (ilasm, ildasm), a debugger (cordbg), metadata introspection (metainfo), and other utilities
- The Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL) used to port the Shared Source CLI from Windows XP to FreeBSD
- Build environment tools (nmake, build, and others)
- Documentation for the implementation
- Test suites used to verify the implementation
[This is mostly cut & paste from the MSDN page]A few semi-interesting threads have started about this on K5 including this one and this one.
In addition, most students are "going to have to learn multiple programming languages" eventually, says Rick Rashid, the head of Microsoft's research department.
::End Obvious Statements::
Take one real computer scientist, give them a computer with a compiler, a book on the real programming language they need to use, and a day, and they will be coding up non-trivial programs no problem. C/C++, Java, BASIC, Perl, Cobol, Fortran, APL, LISP, whatever. It shouldn't take a real computer scientist or computers science student too long to adjust and move on.
The theory of programming computers transends the language used.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
"Innovation is what drives the software industry," says David Stutz, a Microsoft group program manager. "We would be foolish not to invest in the place that a lot of this innovation comes from, which is the academic sphere."
So if MS isn't participating in all of this innovation, could it possibly mean that someone else is innovating? I don't understand. I thought that all of that open-source activity on college campuses was only for the purposes of piracy and making clones of innovative MS products.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
Can't get any better advertisement for Linux than to have on the first page of the marketing section a reference to the Linux craze, and how its growing becauses its easily available and free. Now....follow that up with an application and gui that people can sell to those who read the WSJ everyday....lo and behold, change can happen.
Maybe I'm being overly optimistic...but it could happen.
Then why are you giving away source code? Isn't it that you want students to learn, and become hooked on, MS products? Isn't this just another attempt to extend the MS monopoly on operating systems? Do you really expect that college students will believe that Microsoft, the company that has exploited the American consumer and been found guilty of felonies, has suddenly become altruistic?
What strikes me about Microsoft is that they really have no clue! Giving away source code is not going to curry favor with college students who are given to idealism. They can see through the hype. They would rather contribute to society at large than become pawns of Corporate America.
Wake up Microsoft! No one with a conscience wants to help you extend your monopoly - we in IT are tired of seeing our ideas and talents used to bully ordinary people into spending inordinate amounts of money for inferior products. We want to work for positive change in society, and you aren't it...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
We have yet to find a single file from any of our customers that requires a newer version to open, which tells me that Office97 is the defacto standard for file exchange, and will be for a VERY long time.
You can get a legitimate copy of NT4 with 10 client licenses for $20.00 or so, and it's not hard to find Exchange 5.5, etc. Office 97, etc... are all cheap now. 8)
The future is not Linux, nor is it XP, the future is Windows 98SE, Office97 Pro, and NT Server 4.0.
--Mike--
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.
When I was at uni (5 years ago I think) we were being taught ansi c/c++ and modula-2. The idea was to teach us to program, not to condition us for a life under redmond rule.
.NET - without talking about software and admin costs
Some of this programming was done on old monochrome sun terminals, the rest on 386s (when high end pentiums were the norm) running DOS or Linux.
If they're suddenly going to switch to the MS way, then thats a lot of equipment that needs replacing, and a lof of money keeping the hardware up to date in order to run the latest O.S. in order to run the latest
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.
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!
depends on the lab. here at drexel, general purpose labs all have macs and pc's running win2k, but the student can setup an ssh connection to a unix system if they want to. specific labs owned by the depts vary depending on what they need. Art students, for example, have tons of adobe and other graphic software on their lab machines, all macs. Business students have win2k with business software.
But the CS lab has a bunch of sun workstations. All courses other than the freshman C++ and elemantary Data Structures course require use of those machines. Upper level OS courses require linux on the student's home machine so that they can do their own kernel hacking. The research labs in the CS dept all have Linux (and other open OS's) running somewhere, too.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
In fact, source access to the Java2 platform under the SCSL has onerous "contamination provisions" and I think using it in a computer science course is irresponsible because it may contaminate students for the rest of their professional lives.
What we really need is better open source, non-proprietary implementations of either language that colleges can use. These then give students access to tools they can use after they graduate wherever they work, and they can work with the full source code without selling their souls. And, besides, colleges shouldn't focus so much on just one language anyway.
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.
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.
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.
While Sun and Microsoft fight it out for the minds of computer science majors, another company has pretty much won the battle when it comes to engineering: MathWorks's Matlab has become the de-facto standard for computing in engineering and some areas of science and applied math. You can't exchange code with many others in the field unless you buy their software. Many research results are built on it and only reproducible using it. Oh, sure, it's cheap as long as you are a student or professor, but once you graduate, expect to pay many thousands of dollars even for a basic license, and many students graduating from top engineering and research labs are largely incapable of programming in anything else. The Matlab success story is a monopolist's dream.
Would I be correct that any homework that a student would want to publish after being exposed to the MS source code would be a violation of DMCA?
At the very least I imagine that students would be bound to a non-disclosure agreement.
The very language of computer science becomes compromised when you let MS in the classroom.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
--Mike--
Currently at my school (The University of Utah) they teach CS1 in scheme, CS2 in java, and Software engineering in C++ (I think). The professor can pretty much pick his language for whatever other class he's teaching. The engineering labs have Sun and Linux. There is one small CS lab for lab sections that uses Win2k. The first class any engineering or CS Student takes is intro. to unix, but it's a 1 credit very basic class. Generally speaking the professors try not to tout any platform. That's why java's popular. I have been advised to avoid M$ IDE's and compilers because they don't conform to standards and I don't know what my Professor will be compiling my code on. Borland is popular.
"...finding virgins much more difficult."
I have a hard enough time with this as it is. Damn you Microsoft! DAMN YOU!!!!!
--It's Pimptastic!--
--Mike--
Arstechnica has a very good article on what the heck .NET is.
In the lab where I work at MIT, we were given 2 high-end Dell boxes with NT on them. We purchased 5 IBM machines, Win98 installed whether we wanted it or not. Only one of these machines now has an MS OS still installed; Linux has nearly wiped out the competition here.
There's a Solaris cluster in the basement of our building, and an MS NT lab; four out of every five times I walk down that corridor, the NT lab is empty. The Solaris cluster is never empty.
#include "stdio.h"
int main()
{
printf("Hello, Microsoft EULA.\n");
return 1;
}
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Its a difference between people who just want to know how to use something vs the people that want to understand it. A shame they don't realize that if they understand how it works, they won't have any trouble using it, or anything like it, ever again.
While it's all well and good that we at Slashdot will bash MS at every opportunity, substantiated or not, I wonder what other companies have to say about this. My school is probably going to teach Java over C++ and C starting next year. How will this change to curriculum affect what happens the real world? Hell, most students (most people too) don't even know what .NET is.
sig
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
I don't know if it still is, but once upon a time Matlab was built on top of the public domain (publicly funded) LINPACK linear algebra libraries. By the same authors, IIRC.
This is a perfect example of how it's possible to take something that anyone can have for free, add value to it, and make money selling it.
Those who doubt the commercial viability of Free software had best not learn about Matlab.
Please tell me this is a reporter's goof. I just can't twist this statement enough to make sense of it.
OMG, I went off on a hysterical rant about how bad Visual C++ sucks.... I loaded a bitmap, but there is no way to get a pixel from the bitmap with visual C++. If you look at the documentation on MSDN: .net.
We are no longer supporting 6.0 because we're moving on to
COME THE FUCK ON, its the year 2002, there should be a function that gets a pixel from a bitmap without having to update.
I have a documentary of a full 20 hours of me trying to just get a damn pixel before I switched back to coding in DJGPP c/c++
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager/ai
God spoke to me
While I agree with the danger of contaminating an entire crop of college graduates with respect to their ability to reverse engineer applications, I'm afraid I just don't see that many professors falling for the trap Microsoft is trying to set here. This is exactly the reason why OSS/free software is so popular in universities in the first place: the lack of license restrictions.
For a short time I worked on a research group investigating java threading and benchmarks and such, and we used kaffe specifically because we could have access to the source with no restrictions (blackdown hadn't come in vogue yet--this was still the 1.1 era). Sun would have given us the source easily enough, but with all of the encumbrances of non-disclousure, etc, it just wasn't workable, especially since this was all going to be PUBLISHED information.
But not only is both the department and university deeply rooted in Unix (especially for Comp classes), we're already incorporating Open Source directly in the curriculum. In a software engineering course I'm in right now, we're using Sourceforge to develop DrJava, a GPL'd Java development environment that is particularly useful for teaching beginners. We're seeing that open source and extreme programming (complete unit tests, rapid releases, etc) are a very effective approach towards building software-- and Microsoft isn't about to woo us away from that with money. I expect that any use of .NET here (if there is any) will be
strictly complimentary to our existing approaches.
we had a programming competition at my school and we gave away as prizes a bunch of software that microsoft sent us, among other things.
One guy took OS X instead of any ms product, even though he doesn't own a mac! Needless to say, this school is hell bent on turning a cheek to ms
The University effort will fail because to trap hearts and minds M$ will have to open kindergarten classes to brainwash effictively. Think of all the $$$ they'd save by bribing with real candy instead of candy GUIs and false promisses of security.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
If you look at where I went to school (RPI), MS has been doing this for at least 5-7 years. RPI has replaced many of their older (better, but slower) unix computers ( aix, irix, solaris) with newer faster windows machines. Companies like IBM and MS came in and switched them from desktops, now every student has to buy a laptop. In some ways it's very cool, as you can borrow a 802.11 card and use the internet in the middle of the student union, but at the same time the quality (at least when I was there) of the network degraded because windows doesn't have many of the features that makes unix good.
Also, if you look at MS, they are making sure that they are in the middle/high schools as much as possible. One high school I know of is Cart. All their software is MS, and the impression I got is that they teach that software like it's the only choice. They also teach a class on getting your Cisco network engineer certification.
The Mono implementation (http://www.go-mono.com) and yesterday's release (Mono 0.10) does provide pretty much everything that the Shared Source release does.
Get your bits now!
Miguel
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
Could someone explain what this is all about? Virgin in the sense that that have not reverse engineered code before? What differnce would that make? Confused.
A valid argument against using the MS platform and languages such as C# is that learning in that enviroment creates a knowledge set that is limited to that enviroment, while learning in a more *nix type of environment encourages using multiple tools (languages) for different kinds of jobs. I've made this same argument at work, stating that I have no intention of having just VB and C# on my resume for the last couple of years, and it seemed to work. Our CS department does not do windows at all, by the way, and has no intention to do so in the near future.
Why do I feel like Microsoft is acting more and more like a drug pusher?
Handing out freebies to unsuspecting kids to get them hooked!
Time for a Neighborhood Watch program to keep an eye on the Microsoft pushers. We need a list of those schools that don't have signs posted saying 'Microsoft Free Zone'. Future students can then be warned about those schools.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I guess I'm not sure where the benefit lies in using Windows for Java programming as opposed to one of the other operating systems.
Plus, it's so much nicer to be able to use machines remotely using telnet/ssh or X-Windows (you can use Terminal Server but I believe you wind up using up licenses if you want to let multiple people access a machine.)
Then maybe all the professors who were there when the ENIAC was turned on for the first time will be dead, and no one will care about real programming anymore. For instance, my dad, a former CIS professor, was/is discouraged by the lack of commitment to teaching "real" CIS instead of just printing diplomas at certain schools CIS departments. OH wait, I still will. And hopefully by then, I'll be a professor too. .net.
They'll have to fire me to get my class(es) taught in
Sir_haxalot
stuff |
Microsoft has always done this. Microsoft gives discounts, often significant discounts, on software to sales people and academics. I remember buying word and excel for $50 each.
Microsoft killed WordPerfect at the university I attended by "giving" the software away to departments. At first it was a political battle; but how can you argue free vs expensive and archaic?
The problem is; open source and java are powerful and [mostly] free. Microsoft will never open its Kimono, but they WILL give away DevStudio and other development and management tools; in addition Microsoft WILL give away reference materials. You'd be surprised how many people still like to have books...
Given a choice of a nice commercial IDE and VCS system over a free yet quirky one - I'd go with the nice commercial ones.
(Another side point; most professors are easily bought. Many, many, many "grants" to do research are doled out by Microsoft with the catch that Microsoft tools are used. Again, at my U, I saw these documents, and they worked, because 90% of professors are there for the research, and government funding does not even come close to corporate sponsorships.)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
From my brief review, it appears that they are primarily concerned with someone selling their code and patent problems. No mention of the GPL, although obviously several provisions in here are incompatible with any decent open source license.
So here it is:
MICROSOFT SHARED SOURCE CLI, C#, AND JSCRIPT LICENSE
This License governs use of the accompanying Software, and your use of the Software constitutes acceptance of this license.
You may use this Software for any non-commercial purpose, subject to the restrictions in this license. Some purposes which can be non-commercial are teaching, academic research, and personal experimentation. You may also distribute this Software with books or other teaching materials, or publish the Software on websites, that are intended to teach the use of the Software.
You may not use or distribute this Software or any derivative works in any form for commercial purposes. Examples of commercial purposes would be running business operations, licensing, leasing, or selling the Software, or distributing the Software for use with commercial products.
You may modify this Software and distribute the modified Software for non-commercial purposes, however, you may not grant rights to the Software or derivative works that are broader than those provided by this License. For example, you may not distribute modifications of the Software under terms that would permit commercial use, or under terms that purport to require the Software or derivative works to be sublicensed to others.
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
In return, we simply require that you agree:
1. Not to remove any copyright or other notices from the Software.
2. That if you distribute the Software in source or object form, you will include a verbatim copy of this license.
3. That if you distribute derivative works of the Software in source code form you do so only under a license that includes all of the provisions of this License, and if you distribute derivative works of the Software solely in object form you do so only under a license that complies with this License.
4. That if you have modified the Software or created derivative works, and distribute such modifications or derivative works, you will cause the modified files to carry prominent notices so that recipients know that they are not receiving the original Software. Such notices must state: (i) that you have changed the Software; and (ii) the date of any changes.
5. THAT THE SOFTWARE COMES "AS IS", WITH NO WARRANTIES. THIS MEANS NO EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY WARRANTY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR ANY WARRANTY OF TITLE OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS DISCLAIMER ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
6. THAT MICROSOFT WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES RELATED TO THE SOFTWARE OR THIS LICENSE, INCLUDING DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT THE LAW PERMITS, NO MATTER WHAT LEGAL THEORY IT IS BASED ON. ALSO, YOU MUST PASS THIS LIMITATION OF LIABILITY ON WHENEVER YOU DISTRIBUTE THE SOFTWARE OR DERIVATIVE WORKS.
7. That if you sue anyone over patents that you think may apply to the Software or anyone's use of the Software, your license to the Software ends automatically.
8. That your rights under the License end automatically if you breach it in any way.
9. Microsoft reserves all rights not expressly granted to you in this license.
Bleh!
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."
Let's face it, their goal here is a "secret" shared by *every* CS college graduate. Then those graduates are potentially "polluted" from ever participating in Open Source development. Presumably the mechanism would be one or two high-profile court cases, to make an example and scare everyone else.
At least this is the conspiracy theory, which may have some merit.
But look at the flip side... When you start sharing a "secret" that widely, doesn't it start looking like mis-using the work "Kleenex" instead of "Kleenex-brand facial tissue"? The Kleenex trademark was lost that way, and the Windows trademark appears to be lost.
Unless every CS course begins with a legal session, explaining how, "This stuff is *secret*, and will compromise your capability to work on any project Microsoft doesn't like in the future, and they can sue you @$$es off because you've seen it," this looks like a recipe to lose the license terms.
I was once involved in a proprietary memory chip design my company purchased for us to base our design on. Very early on, the lawyers brought the whole team into a room and read the riot act to us, explaining what we could and could not do, based on the "pollution" of looking at that design.
There was also a nifty term called "residual knowledge" that applied then, and applies now.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Incidentally UNM has placed 100% of its CS and engineering graduates for years, which makes me scratch my head whenever I hear of someone from CMU or other top ten unis saying they can't find a job after graduation.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
You *DO* know that those are illegal to resell, right?
I assume that both the Professor and the Student must sign Microsoft's license.
Hmmmm... If you don't sign you can't take an important CS class and if you do sign and later work on open source you'll be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life waiting for the Microsoft lawsuit alleging copyright infringements.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This is not meant to be a flame.
So if Linux and open source "rule the day" at universities then why (when the students graduate) don't they apply that to their careers? One would think that if Linux and open source truely ruled universities for the last 5-7 years that there would be a lot more of it in today's business.
I know there is the server side of the story. But I rarely see a linux or open source OS running the servers of a company. It's usually a non-free Unix or NT/2000.
I know that people here preach the goodness of Linux (of which I mostly believe) but why can't the graduates convince that Linux is a very good alternative?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
in universities. Its unix that you'll find there. I don't know about the rest but Waterloo dosn't offer a single Linux course and although we are forced to use it in class, no one uses it at home at the risk of being left out of the constant LAN gaming.
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.
Here at Michigan State University, the powers that be have decided to scrap teaching the intro to programming classes on Sun machines and instead sign up to be Microsoft technology testers or something such as that. The result is that people who have never programmed before are now starting their lives on Visual Studio. We even used to have a linux lab where the Operating Systems lab was held, Now it is all Windows. Sort of a shame since a lot of the labs were "look here in the source and see how linux implements this".
A number of professors that I know are very upset over this, but as with all things there is a VERY large cash incentive from Microsoft if they do this, and they did.
I use Microsoft and have more personality in my stool than you have in the last six generations of your family. If I spent the money to get certified only to find out that every subsequent release of Windows voids what I worked so hard to get. Personality, or bitterness? YOU DECIDE! :)
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I'm a MIS senior now, and while pure academics may not accept .NET in the classroom, it all depends on what the industry adopts. When talking with fellow classmates about programming courses, they want to take whatever is widest-deployed so they can use the degree-required class as a resume bullet point. If .NET becomes a hot new standard and competitive edge, it will be adopted by the student body much faster than you might imagine.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
From my personal experience, I would say that Unix does rule in fact the CS departments of most European universities. The TU München (one of the biggest technical universities) almost exclusivly uses Unix in their CS Labs (Solaris, Linux, MacOSX). Similar the ENS of Lyon, where all the workstations currently run Solaris. And in my experience, most tutors and profs seem to use either Linux or MacOSX. Very few Windows-Logos around...
just my 0.02.
Microsoft, sacrificing Virgins? No... couldn't be.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
A local college in Kirkland, WA has a CS degree program, the entire program is a string of Microsoft Certification courses.
scary
Well... the .NET is supposedly based on open protocols so there shouldn't be a problem, right? But who can guarantee that one or more of these protocols won't be extended by MS and made proprietary and covered by patents and trade secrets? ``Just Say No'' is probably the best thing you could do when MS comes 'round bearing gifts.
Don't you wonder about the day when MS decides to take a bunch of recent college graduates to court claiming that they're using ideas that they must have seen while they had access to this proprietary MS code in college? I'd hope that the judge would throw the case out on its ear after commenting that ``You can't let whole college CS programs have access to your code and then prohibit them from writing code because you think they're using an idea that you let them see in the first place''. Unless they somehow make all the CS students sign NDAs. Which, if I were a CS student, would spur me to start the process of transferring to another school ASAFP. (Making a student pay a lab fee is one thing but making them sign away their right to write code and earn a living would be another thing altogether.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Didn't MS say just a few months ago that the private sector is what drives innovation? This seems to be a "slight modification" to their earlier statement. anyone have more info on this?
Depends...are you a virgin?
I thought this story pretty much captures the spirit of MS Windows
MS Ordered to Release Windows Code
Judge sick and tired of rebooting
www.valleyofthegeeks.com/News/WindowsCode.html
At NTU in the UK, from where I graduated last July, students were forced to use Windows, including Microsoft compilers.
There were rumours of an old VAX cluster - they turned out to be true. There was a cluster - it was offline and gathering dust.
There was one "student" Linux box, which anyone who expressed an interest could get access to - it was taken offline halfway through my first year, due to "lack of interest", despite what I heard from many disgruntled ex-users.
In the UK at least, be certain to check the type of network a CS faculty runs in advance if it matters to you; I found out too late that presuming big hunks of *nix goodness are going to be available is simply not safe.
For all you LOTR fans.....
Then Bill Gates took on a fair guise and called himself Anatar bearer of gifts....finally he gave copies of Visual.NET to nine Universities of men and eventually those that used Visual.NET became Gateswraiths, terrible shadows of his great shadow......
Advanced Placement test for high-school students be given in Java instead of C ++, an older language supported by Microsoft
Poor m$!
Do you realise what us mean open *Xers are doin to them with our evil open virus. We are crippling them with biased standards like java.
Apparently arguably the most cross platform language in the world is not "supported" by microsoft (although clearly supported by the windows platform.)
I personally suggest we move to true open standards supported by everyone like .NET for example. With these standards everyone can enjoy portablility with .NET easily implementable on all O.S.s (as long as you havent seen the source code that is)
It's time we all played nice with the virgin rapeing monster and stoped exposing them to our source code so they will forever be contaminated. I swear gnu/linux users are so keen on this that barely a program may be obtained without also getting the evil infectous source.
Leave the nice gorgon alone!!When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I put muchos brainos in this and I expect some kinda recompensation. Should I've copyrighted it?
(Using this very /. sig since Idunnowhen), Ben
Use The Source, Luke!
Well, that's a pretty strong metric for lawyer stuff... I'm really reassured, thanks.
cheers
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
I don't know about the rest of you, but I do not allow the presence of any Microsoft products, either being taught in classes, or installed on machines where I work.
Technical issues aside, it is just too harmful to my business' reputation to be seen dealing with illegal monopolies. Not to mention possibilities of litigation by third parties.
Any self-respecting University board would arrive at the same decision.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
>Microsoft hopes professors will use the code in
>computer-science classes, and students will modify
>it in the lab and even suggest improvements.
Oh my. They're trying to embrace, extend, and extinguish the GPL.
:)
Sounds a lot like the RandOS to me. :-)
The article didn't mention it, so I thought I'd add it here. You can download the Shared Source CLI Beta from MSDN here.
At two different universities (undergrad at Miami University and grad State) both programs just recently switched to Java as the intro language and, later on, introduce C/C++ for OS courses.
And this seems to be the big push (I think Cornell uses Java as its intro language too) internationally.
The rational: free (as in a book on Dianetics), object-oriented, relatively painless.
And as far as I know Sun and MS still aren't giving each other reach arounds.
What is music when you despise all sound?
> 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
A new job requires me to use MS development "tools." In a half-hearted effort to get up to speed, I went to Fry's to look at the development offerings. I was, in particular, interested in grabbing a copy of Visual C++ 6.0 Learning Edition, since it was cheap at $100 or so (there's no way I'm spending $500 on the "Professional" version when Linux/*BSD's tools are better and free).
What I found instead was Visual C++ .NET for $109. I read the box very carefully, trying to understand what exactly I was looking at, but so far I've been unable to figure out what the package actually is.
So can someone tell me: Is Visual C++ .NET a native x86 compiler suite that contains .NET support (which is useful); or does it rather compile C++ code to the .NET Common Language Runtime (which is not useful at all)? Naturally, Micros~1's Web site is of absolutely no help in answering this question.
Thanks,
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
all about winning hearts-and-minds
Brainwashing.
We are also working to "win the hearts and minds of the muslim world" to get them to stop hating us. Maybe if we would stop trying to brainwash...err..win everyone's hearts and minds...
Resistance is futile
I'm a 2000 man.
For the information of anyone who cares, Mark may have been one of Luke's sources, but Luke traveled quite a bit (he traveled with Paul all through the Mediteranean region, probably including Troas, Phillipi, and parts of Judea, and attended to Paul while he was imprisoned both in Caesarea, and Rome) and apparently reconstructed the events around Jesus' life by consulting written records and interviewing eyewitnesses.
Mark (also called John Mark) himself was evidentally a diciple, but he probably got most of the details of what went on between Jesus and the 12 Apostles by interviewing Peter.
Mark is also probably the same unnamed person mentioned in Mark 14:51, 52.
"Anything is better than IE, and you can quote me on that." -- Wil Wheaton.
So can someone tell me: Is Visual C++
It can do both.
I'm a 2000 man.
I work at a public university, and #3 cracked me right up. Good work!
I don't see many students examining incomplete code. They wouldn't bother downloading Microsoft source code because doing so wouldn't give them the satisfaction of downloading the entire source tree of a project and building it themselves.
If that is the case it wasn't really his to begin with which means no giveaway occured at all.
I'm faculty at a large westcoast engineering university, and system architect at a computer engineering research group. As far as I can tell, no faculty here are really considering this.
NOONE here wants to use MS development tools over Java.
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
Why not? They screw everybody else.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'd have to disagree on this particular group of people... most of them wanted the gold star on the certificate to be legitimate. They weren't that false. And they had more girls than our department.
Most engineering students would happily avoid mathematics, since the money is elsewhere, but without that knowledge they will not be able to do their jobs any better than someone that has never been to university. A basic education at least as broad as your expected profession is very important - training for a specific position in a specific company may ensure that you'll be driving a taxi once technology or economic factors move on.
That is hardly true.
Business departments tend to run Windows. If they're big or old enough, the probably have come IBM minis too. A lot of departments are likely to use MSWin. Computer science, however, is not one of them. Serious CS departments are still big on *nix, whether it's PA-RISC, SPARC, or Linux/FreeBSD on Intel. Free Software has a HUGE advantage there - there's no substitute for having the use of the source, when you learn to program.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.