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Colleges Signing Secret MS License Agreements
David Gerard writes "As seen on Yale LawMeme: Microsoft is requiring colleges wanting cheap licenses to keep their license terms secret (e.g. Ohio State, University of Michigan) ... in direct contravention of state public records and Freedom of Information laws." Many FOI laws have loopholes permitting state agencies not to disclose information when it would harm business interests, so what the colleges and Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway), but it certainly is shady.
You mention the FOI law, but that has nothing to do with Microsoft. That's completely the responsibility of the college - if they don't like it or it's not legal they can't sign the contract. End of story.
Microsoft isn't doing anything wrong, and it sounds like the college isn't either. I've pulled more interesting, and bloody, things out of my nose.
I really don't care what kind of agreement my college (RIT) has with MS. I got a legal and free copy of Visual Studio.NET. And I don't care what you say about Microsoft's evil business practices. But I don't see any developement environments that are that amazing for linux. I mean KDevelop is good and all, but it doesn't even come close. I already pay my school thousands of dollars every year, and if some shady agreement with MS puts Win2k in the labs and Visual Studio on my PC I got no problem with it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
in direct contravention of Someone's been using their word of the day calendar.
Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway)
How can this be legal? This kind of action is basically violating the settlement. Can someone explain, please?
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
While it smells fishy the way it was posted, I don't see what harm comes from this. Just seems like standard barganing stuff...
— darco
I say good for them . If they can get a discount on MS licenses, I say "power to them." While I understand the need for access to information regarding public facilities, I think schools having to pay less outweighs the .02% of the population that cares or even looks through the records.
While some of you will probably be saying "they'd be better of switching to linux," that isn't always the answer. Sure, students looking for some sort of computing degree may benefit slightly but architects, engineers, doctors, etc all use tools primarily in windows. While there are "similar if not better" products for linux, they are NOT the industry standard. Students need to be exposed to what's in the real world.
Sure, an architect might be able to develop a building in some obscure package in linux. But the firms want you to know AUTOCAD.
Sure, StarOffice is great (I use it), but most companies require MS Word for a reason. And EXCEL MACROS are a must in most research places.
Linux is good, but Schools need to be realistic. I say, "good for them."
Microsoft says phooey to foi
Many are saying "well good for them, it doesn't matter if it is secret" or "having a cheap license is the important part." However, the entire purpose of these Public-Disclosure laws is that citizens (who pay for these Universities with tax money) should have the right to know what is being done with their money. A private University can sign whatever contract they want with Microsoft, but a publicly-owner organization has an obligation to _us_ (the people paying the bill) to tell us what they are doing.
Having secret contracts with a monopoly to use taxpayer-paid dollars in unknown ways is a dangerous business. For all we know, these contracts could ablige these universities to use exchange-server or block access to filesharing networks in exchange for getting and selling their software at a low price. For that matter, it could be a high price, no-one knows!
The beauty of the public-disclosure laws comes where any citizen can complain about the use of their tax dollars.
I go to one of the universities listed above, so I'll post anonymously on this topic. People here ask "Why does it matter what is in these agreements?" I'll tell you why it matters. My speculation is that courses are being changed as a result of these agreements.
For example, my school has a "Microsoft.NET laboratory". This literally is an entire room of a building dedicated to working on Microsoft.NET products. A course I am taking next semester that historically has been done in Java all of the sudden is now including C#; without seeing the syllabus, I cannot say which one is being emphasized more.
Secret agreements may be nice, but it makes me wonder what is going on. I wish I had a good compromise answer here; it's nice to let students get $1,000+ worth of software for less than $200 (which we can then keep after we leave school), but if the curriculums are being compromised in response, academic integrity and independance are going down the drain.
To have a team of lawyers looking for loopholes and ways to manipulate the law is by some viewed as competition. Others view it as cheating the intent of the law.
Sorry to be blunt, but I believe your stance, though popular, is short-sighted.
Microsoft technology is the dominant tech today, who's to say what will be in highest demand tommorrow?
They're paying less to a known monopolist. What if they opened the information, allowing other companies to bid, and thus lower the price of software due to competition over the long term?
Microsoft is trying it's hardest to keep competition out of its markets, and I think decisions like that help them considerablely. Too bad so many IT directors can't think past the next budget cycle.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I go to CMU. MS Office XP costs $10. MS Windows XP costs $10. MS Visual Studio.NET costs $15. All these are without manuals, in tiny packages with a license for installing it one time (actually, the license is separate, and it claims it's illegal without a license, but the people at the computer store say it's a one time install).
Anyways, this cuts down on piracy on one hand. On the other hand, I'm seriously bothered by the fact that they are using MY highly priced college tuition to support a convicted felon.
What's really sad is that there is a Microsoft club at my university called MSImpact, supported by MS (and the girl who runs it is paid by MS to do this, she interned there one summer and has some sort of deal right now).
Here's who you make a FOIA request to and here's MSU's FOIA price list. Here's a summary of Michigan's Public Records Act. There's no exemption that would cover a signed contract. Somebody in Michigan should ask.
>so what the colleges and Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway), but it certainly is shady.
What they might be doing is offering different universities packages at different prices.
When the terms of the contract MS was pushing on public schools was brought to everyones attention, there was a pretty big uproar. Remember - MS forced the schools to pay them for licenses for ALL PC's in the district whether they actually ran Windows or not. The effect of this practice is to hinder the ability to buy Mac's for - say the graphic arts department or even use donated PC's to run Linux or anything else. Makes you wonder just what kind of "deal" these schools are getting and if they are possibly anti-competitive.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Excuse me? How can you be so blind?
The student council is paying them, and you actually believe that somehow that bill is not paid by yourself?
This deal actually makes everyone pay for the Windows licenses. It's just another way to pull money out of the Linux and Mac crowd by having them foot the bill for discounts that "benefit everyone". You know, crack dealers also give great discounts to poor college people to make them dependant on it.
Of course, if you think it through, you will notice that there is only one who benefits here -- Microsoft. Because people like yourself will now learn to use Windows and Windows based software. That in turn will lead businesses to use Windows, because that's all the new guys from college know. That in turn leeds to people believing that you have to use Windows because "that's what businesses use".
Oh, and I just love how you imply that everyone who has not bought a copy of Windows and Office is a pirate. I don't have a copy of Office. I wouldn't even own a Windows license if I could have bought my notebook without one.
"how I have started life as a drone." If you are a CS major, get ready for a life of flipping code as an employee for MsDonalds.
.
.. btw, I will be making more than you, working less, and if we happen to work on the same project in the same company in the future, I will tell you EXACTLY what you are required to do, or you will be replaced by another drone (flipping VS.net, no less). And it has nothing to do with smarts or hard work, just the fact that I picked a real "profession" run on "OPEN" standards, governed by an organization looking in the best intrests of its professionals (AICPA), rather than its own revenue.
I've posted before here about why IT is NOT a profession since its standards are owned by a self-serving corp. (in contrast to CPAs, Lawyers, and doctors). I think this post rests my case . .
Enjoy your life kid . .
You can either change professions or TRY changing your current quasi-profession (but I doubt enough of you "get it" to accomplish that), just don't come back here 10 years from now complaining that you can't get a job, while the rest of us "non-geeks" are getting by just fine (thanks to financial reports written on Lamp, unsupported by my company's incompetent IS staff, which didn't slow me down a bit).
I know this is hard medicine to take, but if you are smart, you will take this to heart, otherwise enjoy your pathetic drone life, Chrismas came early.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
how is this news? there's nothing wrong with telling them to keep licenses a secret. keep your propaganda to yourself.
They don't care about Joe Sixpack buying WinXP Home at ChumpUSA, they are after bigger fish. Like the country of India or China. Or every customer of Dell, Gateway, IBM, etc.
I think the budget items of a state university should be subject to some sort of FOIA inquiry, perhaps using state laws not federal. This is a really bad trend because when it becomes impossible to avoid paying Microsoft the "gratis" / free aspect of open source is nullified. If anyone in the states mentioned has the motivation they should pursue this with their state representative to bring these charges and their amounts to light.
An added bonus they have with their "free" Front Page copies (at one of the FAQs for the universities) is that they generate bad code for non-IIS servers * . Gee, I'll have to go download IIS for Linux once I'm done with this post.
http://www.oit.ohio-state.edu/site_license/mslic ense/answers.html*Is FrontPage recommended for use with my environment?
Before purchasing or developing your web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, ensure the web server for your pages will be the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running on Windows NT. FrontPage embeds proprietary and/or non-protocol-compliant features within HTML code, many of which are incompatible with many non-Microsoft web servers, including those utilized in OSU's OpenVMS and Novell architectures. The implications are twofold:
o Web page creators can't just place FrontPage-generated HTML files in their OpenVMS accounts or in their Universal Disk Space and expect the web pages to work correctly.
o Even if the pages are served successfully, they may only be fully readable by certain versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
- Nobody is in full compliance without an institutional license (like these) and probably nobody is in compliance even with such a license program.
- The cost of full (a la carte) compliance would be enormous. How do you track 20,000 licenses among many departments, research groups, students, etc.?
- Anyone who thinks about legal exposure is running scared.
License administration is exceedingly unproductive work that everyone hates. So we had a pretty strong reason to pay MS's "protection money" and sign up for the blanket license. Even under the program, there are a lot of onerous provisions, as the FAQs cited at Ohio & Michigan show.A courageous administrator (more courageous than I) would add up all the costs and risks and conclude that the rational thing is to go Open Source. Microsoft's strategy seems to be to extract all the cash from universities that the market will bear, without starting a rebellion.
All this has nothing to do with FOIA and everything to do with monopolists, institutional inertia and risk avoidance.
Fiat Lux.
The terms in the agreement are probably meant to provide Microsoft with information about the students, possibly including things like when they graduate (making them eligible for Microsoft to begin marketing more software products to them). Notice the registration requirements. They may also include a requirement to provide to Microsoft a detailed accounting of all computers on campus and what OS they are running. Almost certainly these terms are intended to give Microsoft some special advantage in the post-academic commercial market, and perhaps to some extent to head off more deployment of Linux on campus, especially in areas exposed to the general student population (e.g. the labs of rows of computers for students to use). Financially, the university will be gaining, not losing. The question is what non-financial issue is lost that the university leadership doesn't care about.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Microsoft had an agreement with Industry Canada's
Computers for Schools program. It was also secret. I got a copy under Canada's Access to Information law, though no-one was very cooperative.
There was nothing particularly disturbing about the agreement, although there was one funny part:
5. VIRUSES --- you acknowledge that the SOFTWARE may contain viruses and you accept any risks associated with using the SOFTWARE without recourse to Microsoft, Microsoft Canada Co. or the Government of Canada.
I think M$ is just plain paranoid.
I know Lehigh University recently (last year) signed an agreement with MS which granted a liscence of MS office and Windows XP to all the students. I found it completely wrong that I'm forced to pay tons of extra money to buy software I don't even use (as I'm a linux user). Microsoft loves the deals because most of the students either have their own copy of that software already, or would have pirated a copy from the guy down the hall from them. I imagine the main reason the universities agree not to give out the information is they don't want people to see how much they're paying to get copies of MS products. I imagine MS probably uses the threat of "stopping piracy on campus" as part of the reasoning to get the university to cough over the money for the liscencing. I hate it as much as the next guy. Whats particularly ridiculous is that I know people with 3 legitimate windows copies now. The one that came with their computer, the one the school paid for, and the one that they get from the CSE departments subscription to the MSDN (which is a great deal for both the department and MS as we get free software, and they get their software to be used educationally). Hopefully some day our administration will come to its senses regarding this. Philip Garcia Computer Engineer Lehigh University '03/4
It's bad because MS is using it's unfettered Monopoly power to force (yes, force) publicly funded institutions to hide important contract points, despite legal prohibitions on doing this. MS says sign this agreement and break the law or you and your poor students will not only be buying all this software at retail +, and We and the BSA will also be by to do a full and comprehensive audit of every computer in this institution. And then we'll do another one. We'll let you know when. Or not.
Uhhhm, since most colleges still use social security numbers as identification, and that number is on id cards and schedules, bursar receipts, school records, the borg now get our social security numbers when they audit? If not, how else will they verify that everyone getting the software at a deep discount is authorized to get it? I'll bet the phrase above was lifted straight out of the contract.
Nice.
there's nothing wrong with the first one. All colleges have different needs, wants, and necessities. One will be willing to spend $100 for a toilet, another won't. So in order for MS to get a reasonable profit (NOTHING wrong with wanting a profit, don't say M$ or anything), they need to keep the cheapter licenses a secret so that other colleges don't ask for the same price.
Strange, false and off-topic for such a FAQ, indeed. Mod the parent up.
And if RIT didn't have the shady deal with MS, maybe you'd only be paying hundreds every year, and you'd learn all about other amazing development environments that MS has now contractually forbidden you to see (on school time at least).
Is FrontPage recommended for use with my environment?
Before purchasing or developing your web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, ensure the web server for your pages will be the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running on Windows NT. FrontPage embeds proprietary and/or non-protocol-compliant features within HTML code, many of which are incompatible with many non-Microsoft web servers, including those utilized in OSU's OpenVMS and Novell architectures. The implications are twofold:
Web page creators can't just place FrontPage-generated HTML files in their OpenVMS accounts or in their Universal Disk Space and expect the web pages to work correctly.
Even if the pages are served successfully, they may only be fully readable by certain versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
This is a Monopoly exercising it's unfettered powers. We, the public, have no way of knowing just how one-sided, destructive, restrictive and/or ill-priced these contracts are. And considering that Microsoft is a convicted Monopoly that has made breaking state laws a precondition of licensing (what the schools think of as) essential software, I'll believe the worst about them until the opposite is explicitly proven.
I think one would have to assume it was a bad deal for the taxpayer - otherwise, why would they need to keep it secret?
Wouldn't this violate the settlement agreement MS has with the States?
No anonymous coward, we never get tired of defending our
freedom.
DO NOT PANIC
A better question might be "dosent microsoft ever get ashamed of its highly questionable business practices?" Or "will microsoft ever do the right thing?"
Oracle uses the same dir^h^h^h tactic with universities as well (and not just with states named California). At the University of Arizona, we purchased a site license for their product line at an enourmous price - during the process, they would not divulge (nor were we able to find out) their deals with other universities. However, I found out from my Dad, who is a dean at a university in the northwest, that Oracle tried to sell them the very same deal, but they turned it down.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
Perhaps we will be seeing a demand for Dos 3.3 and Win 3.1 licenses on ebay now.
If you read the full paragraph, it makes it clear that "your new computer must be purchased with an OS" for the upgrade to apply. That is, you can't buy an OS-free computer and then have the univ give you a cheap Windows XP.
every body grow up. Don't like what the university is doing, then go to another school. The universities will eventually get the picture and change their tune.
Yes, the forum is picking apart MS and coming up with a plethora of bogus legal theories as to how MS can be liable.
Yes, it is childish and repetative.
But, you have to try and understand how frustrated we are in our inability to compete with MS on even footing.
Umm, wasn't this kind of agreement prohibited by the anti trust agreement?
1. Anti-compete clause naming specific companies not to offer software or hardware from (Sun, Redhat, Corel)
2.Terms requiring the school to purchase Microsoft software for every computer they purchase
3.A clause that specifically precludes any use of software with "identified licenses"
4. Required promotions for new Microsoft products by Microsoft sales and marketing representatives
5.All faculty must use Powerpoint to distribute class materials, no matter what.
It's up to us, as citizens in a (theoretically) representative democracy to participate in the establishment of rules to prevent such indecent treatment of their customers and competitors. If we don't like their masterful use of monopoly in one business to destroy all hope of honest competition in another business, then it's our job to speak up. Thoughtfully.
And we'd also better be prepared to compete too. (As a very happy Linux user and developer, I believe this is actually being done successfully.)
Like I said in another post in another thread this morning......
And?????
This is news how?
Like anything would ever be done about it. This doesn't suprise anyone and nothing will ever be done about it.
We all know that Microsoft does shady deals. We know that they break the law in the open. This has been proven in court.
Since nothing will ever be done about any of it, why waste time dwelling on it?
Come on people, just get on with replacing them.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Since I'm employeed by an institution that has one of these contracts, I'm going to post as an AC. When we signed our Microsoft Campus Agreement, there were (substantiated) rumors that the contract required a certain percentage of our University-owned computing infrastructure to use Microsoft OSs. That doesn't seem too bad, until you realize that they were counting intelligent switches, Cisco firewalls, etc, it as non-MS products for that calculation. Of course, once the IT populace started getting hot about this requirement, the web-site was pulled are replaced with an MS-sanctioned page like those listed in the blurb.
commenting on the Microsoft monopoly.
Microsoft doesn't give good deals to colleges so they can raise the price on them two years later.
Microsoft gives good deals to colleges (as do Sun Microsystems, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM...) because they want their stuff in front of the people who will be making the decisions in ten years. Microsoft doesn't give software to colleges (or discount the heck out of it) because they want to leverage a monopoly-- they do it because they fear not being a monopoly in 10 years.
Microsoft often goes one step further: They'll foot the bill for some percentage of PC hardware if the college in question will promise to run Microsoft OSes on it.
-JDF
"Programming the McVisual C# Way"
"McVisual Debugging for Dummies"
"Would you like fries with that object?"
"H1B - What is it how it can work for your company"
What your refering to, I believe Microsoft provided free of charge. They basically are donating copies of certain software to those who have taken Software Engineering classes (as best I can tell) so that students will become familiar with Microsoft tools. So this isn't really relevant to the discussion here.
Why do you think Java is all through out the University systems? Sun gave away class materials and set up Java Universities at various colleges to promote the language.
If you think it's less evil to use Java in a curriculuum you've got some serious morality problems.
Many people who post here have picked one of those options and stuck with it. Unfortunately, they picked different ones :)
I think it is good strategy for MS to give away their products for free, or cheaply. Even piracy probably helps them in the long run. It is more than dumping though; by getting more users they increase the utility of the product.
I didn't state that what they do is evil. It would be hard to characterize anything they do as evil; for all I know, without them, we wouldn't have cheap and fast PCs today to run our software on.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
MSWord is the standard
How can something which isn't even documented be a standard? Doesn't something first have to be known before it can be called a standard? The whole point of a standard is to facilitate interoperability of different implementations. If anything, MS Word tries to accomplish the exact opposite.
What you're thinking of is popularity. It doesn't really matter how popular something is, that won't make it a standard.
What do they have to hide?
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
Worst case for Microsoft is that the "cheap licenses" contract is no longer binding. The university still has to obtain licenses for the software it's already using.
Here's a link to the official OSU Microsoft Buckeye Bundle web site - quite different from the QA site linked to above.
One point to highlight is that if OSU sysadmins want to use the Buckeye Bundle software, we must also purchase an OEM Microsoft OS license - it isn't sufficient to purchase just the Buckeye Bundle. Of course many in the university believe this means we're paying for the OS license twice.
All of you who think this is a "great deal"... well, due to the OEM licensing requirements, unless you really need lots of Visual Studio .NET licenses, it doesn't amount to all that much less expense.
Go Bucks! Miami's goin down!
Berto
Strictly speaking Bill Gates IS a convicted felon.
:)
However if I personally chose not to associate with convicted felons there would be alot fewer people I could associate with.
That and the simple fact that life being what it is in West Virginia would also leave me with few family members to associate with, or TX where I live now for that matter...
Why should Microsoft not allowed to support a club, whereas you can have your linux club. You are saying that, businesses which had legal problems shouldn't have any right to do anything in this world. That's your restricted view of democracy.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. You could teach a CS course with any functionally complete language that allows real pointers. You can even use Java, I guess, but you need to teach students about the machine that the code runs on then - the JVM. The concepts are all the same, or very framiliar. The problem is that the universities have sold out to people wanting to learn technology to make a quick buck, and not interested in the theory and operating principles of a computer. Things like interprocess communications, memory management, network theory..
If you have a solid grounding in your fundamentals, learning a new language is easy. Mastering a language takes years, but once you've mastered one, moving between them is not a problem. Unless, of course, you don't have a solid grounding in the basics. When I was in school, we used Modula-2 for all of the intro programming courses. You could use C or modula for the software engineering courses (2nd/3rd year). Most of the higher level courses let you use what you wanted. I didn't expect the school to teach me to be a Java programmer. Now, the school uses Java in those intro courses. This is very confusing to newbies, and has resulted in a pile of engineers (who take the CS courses in 1st/2nd year) that need to be taught what pointers are in another course.
Universities should be ashamed for selling out like this, because the focus on theory and fundamentals is what differentiates University from a technical school. There is nothing wrong with a technical/hands on approach, but the two are designed to accomplish different things.
The above nonsense with Microsoft is why I took engineering in University and not computer science. The hordes of people looking to make a quick buck and the adminstration catering to them was a turnoff. Nobody survives dynamics, analog design, digital systems and electromagnetic fields & waves and the like without understanding the fundamentals at some level.
Nothing against microsoft, but there's something to be said about teaching age-old information and not what corporation XYZ thinks is best for you, this month.
The title of this message is referring to a College, but most of the comments are directed at Universities, so I hope I have the distinction correct.
..don't panic
I went to Ohio State as a CIS student and worked as a sys admin there. They had a great program and I feel one of the best parts was that it was very UNIX centric. You got a better feel for the technical details of how the system and the software would interact as well as how flexable software can be. I can't believe they will be able to conveniently setup all of the tools on an MS client for the students to play with. Varients of any programming language you could dream of, code libraries and research code all accessable and usable from any client.
We also has a pretty slick setup to manage the desktops and servers in a fairly stable and efficient manner while still proving researchers the flexibility they needed.
I heard about MS software creeping into the evenironment more after I left, and they kept having problems with grads getting (and abusing) more authority than they knew what to do with on the NT machines. They will never be able to come up with anything as slick as the diskless client setup we had for UNIX. If a workstation did get hosed, we could rebuild it remotely and have the user reboot and up in under 5 minutes. Hardware could be swapped just as easily without changing the client's software, but it took long since someone had to carry the machine to the office.
I hope OSU isn't going to kill their CIS dept. I had been considering going back for another degree.
I looked around a bit and found this helpful list of all state Freedom of Information laws.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I attended the University of Akron (http://www.uakron.edu/) a while back. M$ Office for Windows was $10/student, M$ Office for Mac OS X was $20/student. No manuals or box, just a CD in a plastic sleeve. That's right folks, M$ can sell Office for this price and still make a profit to continue it's monopoly. Give the POOR students a break, get them locked into M$ habbits and worries about "compatibility" and it'll sustain the monopoly. Regretably I use M$ Office, mostly for compatibility with the business world. Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format. Damned mindless M$ drone bastards.
And while we're on the subject of secret M$ licensing agreetments, the University of Akron removed ALL Apple Macintoshes from EVERY computer lab on campus during the summer of 2001 and went with Gateway running Windows ME. Apple still sells Macs on campus, but the university REFUSES to support Macintosh. Need help connecting your Mac to the University servers? You're SOL. The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on. I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.
One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face was beeing able to print research articles to the laboratory laser printer from my apartment over a dial-up connection. All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).
C'mon, it's Xmas, keep that good'ol Scrooge and Grinch spirit and mod me down as Score:-5, Troll.
>without them, we wouldn't have cheap and fast PCs today to run our software on.
I disagree. My C64 was much cheaper than my current PC, even after inflation conversion.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Managers. I was a sysadmin at a university for a little under 3 years, and every time there was a problem it was because a manager didn't *want* to pay for software, not because it slipped our minds. Usually it would happen like this, boss walks up to me at 3:00pm "We need to have such and such capability." me, "when and whats my budget." boss, "We need it by tommorow, and your budget is nothing." I seriously had this exact conversation wiith my boss about once a month.
Once, my boss walked up to me at 4:30pm and said "We need a webmail system before you go home tonight." So under these circumstances, if I could find a free/Open Source solution, I would go with it ... but more often then not you just did what you had to do.
This is an extreme example, but generally compliance issues are willful ignorance.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
If you think it's less evil to use Java in a curriculuum you've got some serious morality problems.
.NET crap you want, and we better see this entering your curriculum or else you lose your discounts and we audit your asses.
I've seen this argument many times. ALL PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE IS NOT EQUIVALENTLY EVIL.
LESS EVIL: Here, have all the Java crap you want.
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
Do you see the difference?
>Though I've written my resume using TextEdit and saved it in Adobe PDF format from that built-in feature of Mac OS X, I still get recruiters requesting my resume in M$ Word format
Choices, choices, choices!. So many choices! What will I do? I know, I'll click here and make those recruiters happy! (Warning, some solutions may require wine!)
>The computer help center simply refuses all questions related to Apple Macintosh. Sounds like some wierd politics going on.
Makes sense to me... they have about 90% of all computer users covered by supporting PCs with Windows/Linux and Unix boxes. Welcome to the world of Linux users 5 years ago. Sorry... Sometimes thinking differently and thinking outside the box means you're thinking outside your realm of support.
>I wonder which university administrator got paid a healthy bonus for pushing Apple out.
Seriously, he doubt he got the bonus for pushing Apple out. He got the bonus for satisfying more customers with fewer resources. Unless your course mandates your use of Apple, I really don't think you can expect the Uni. to help you with it. Now, if it does, that's another story...
>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face
You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.
>All I needed was the laser printer's IP address and Mac OS X was happy. Pissed him off to no end (LMAO).
You're sorta lucky he was nice enough not to care after your earlier bout... If he was nasty he'd just lock down the routable nets to the printer, like he should have in the first place, but hey, he was nice. Anyways, you can do this with any OS (including windows, all the way back to 3.0 if you made/found a DOS print redirector that would let you access an lp spool). Maybe he wanted it this way so he could do it at home too?
Hey, don't take it too hard. I just hope you were taking some literary license with those comments there...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Have the people that dote on VS actually *used* etags, fume-mode, or any of the other rather important-to-development features in xemacs, or are they just deciding that plain Jane xemacs is no good for development?
I have a couple of friends that use VS. Pretty much what I've heard is that it's not bad, that the interface isn't perfect, but it's pretty easy to use. However, the only feature that I could see using as justification for being married to it is the compiler/debugger's support for modifying running code at the source level.
Is there any other reason to like VS versus gcc, with xemacs?
May we never see th
Unless a traffic violation with no serious injury is a Felony in New Mexico. I'm no worshipper of Gates, but jeesh... come on --- that's just libel.
Java is, IMHO, a really really awful choice for a teaching language.
As a matter of fact, I have serious doubts about an OO language *period* as a first language.
What I've pretty consistently seen is people getting started on Java having to deal with a pretty high up-front cost. They have to get OO architecture, a ton of terminology, protection, and casting shoved down their throat before they can really write simple programs (more than Hello World).
What I've seen in a lot of intro CS classes is that the profs try to teach all the terminology and concepts first (in a pretty abstract manner) so that they can use the terms, and then start teaching the mechanics of the language. Everyone promptly gets lost.
BASIC was a really great language to get people programming in, because it was so incredibly simple to start someone coding reasonably well. You could teach everything needed to write a full-blown program very quickly, then spend time building on a concrete foundation, instead of a bunch of abstracts.
Pascal is pretty simple that way. C is a pain to debug and has a few syntax warts (the syntax of the for loop, the printf syntax...), but it's almost as good to teach things to students with. C++ is only usable as a first language if it's used pretty much like C at first. If you start introducing the entire language up front, you lose a lot of people.
Some people have promoted Scheme as a good first language. I personally think decent static typing is pretty important to someone that may be making type errors left and right, but Scheme is still probably not a bad choice.
Anyway, like I said, Java is a truly shitty language to introduce someone to coding on. It's (potentially) a really sexy language to someone that has a C++ history.
Personally, I'd say that a procedural version of BASIC is probably the best sort of intro language I can think of. Very low cost to entry, not a lot of concepts to bang your head into.
May we never see th
Okay, this is taken a smidgen out of context. I'm also at CMU. And CMU is about as *anti*-MS as it gets (partly because MS hired away all the faculty that were willing to work for them a few years ago).
a nana-trees-two-weeks-before-first-frost scandal.
I do not know of a single CS course (for CS majors) that is taught based on Windows. All development is done on Solaris or (increasingly) Linux. Pushed tools include emacs, gdb, LaTeX, and OpenGL. I have never been required or encouraged to do any work that interfaced in any way with Windows.
How many universities have a video game programming class -- with a Linux target?
There's a Microsoft club? Hell, I wasn't even aware of it. The Linux users group is a lot more visible (frequently putting up posters for Linux Installation Days). Go into the Wean clusters (where most of the CS people do work, if they're working in a cluster) and you see Linux, Solaris, and few (in their own tiny room) Windows boxes.
CMU officially provides free support for a number of different Linux distros to its students. It has banned at least one Windows release from campus usage (NT Server, due to DHCP problems).
Yes, Microsoft recruits aggressively here. The campus does not encourage it more than any other company. There are people that intern at MS, and there are people that intern at IBM. RTLinux had a booth at the last job fair, and IBM's first question for people dropping resumes that mentioned Linux was "Have you written a patch for the Linux kernel?"
I know one professor that allowed MS to come and do a presentation on campus (basically, they'd pay to do a workshot on some of their stuff if they got a room to do it in). He ended up in hot water because of some pretty strong anti-MS sentiment in the CS department.
Now, CMU may not be perfect, but one thing it sure as hell is not doing is promoting Microsoft.
If you want to complain about moronic misallocation of tuition funds at CMU, complain about the annual rip-out-the-flower-planters-and-plant-full-size-b
Or (while it was cool, I'm not sure it qualifies as research) the guy that got an undergraduate research grant to build a shack adjoining Doherty Hall and then live in it for two months without talking to anyone and wearing a lobster suit.
May we never see th
But then too, given my druthers I'll also toss the students into a Unix environment, and an environment without a big fancy IDE.
Why? Because I dont much care what specific language they learn first as long as they learn it. (But see caveat below.) And then learn another language, and preferably several more. My preferred list would be Java for two courses, then C (for pointers and memory), then Python (for scripting), then Haskell (just to bend their brains a bit). Then one or four of APL, J, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, XSLT, SQL, Intercal, Befunge, Unlambda and so on.
Its not overly important which languages they learn as long as they master (and mastery is important) several different languages with several different models (imperative, logic, functional). And most especially as long as the students learn about their own personal process of learning - enough so that they will not be stumped by the process of learning a new language, os or system in the future.
It should be noted though that this is not a view universally shared. I was kicked out of my last teaching job in part because I was asking students to learn Haskell - it seems that Haskell doesn't have an associated "Visual Studio" and isn't supported by major software vendors and learning anything of that sort is considered a waste of time by the students. Especially something difficult enough to require an effort in learning. And the liberal arts administration of the community college - though it liked to call itself a university - liked to agree with the students. Retention you know. Very important thing.
caveat I like to choose a first language that is available for free on as many platforms as possible that the students might want to use (in the school labs I prefer to run unix - mostly to go through that "learn a new system" process), that does not require an IDE, that can do more or less platform independent graphics ( I like drawing pictures and have found that students do too - mostly - and by graphics I do not mean GUI nonsense), and that does not have too many hidden gotchas. This pretty much leaves Java.
I mean, for chrissake. Anyone else remember the umich Mac freeware/shareware archive? Predated Info-Mac by a bit, but was excellent. Only notable thing I'm aware of about umich, too. :-)
And now they've made a complete about-face?
May we never see th
They said...
>>One of the few joys I had rubbing Mac OS X in my advisor's face
>You see, this is why I'm anti-Mac. Well, one of the reasons. Mac people pretend to be better than me. That really pisses me off.
Though you may think that's the case, think about what Mac and Linux and OS/2 and Amiga, and Atari 2600, and TRS-80 users go through every time they have to listen to a Windows user extolling either some amazing, new, innovative feature in Windows that the rest of the world has had for years, or a dozen other similar conversations along similar lines.
Now keep in mind, I'm not accussing you of this. I am merely pointing out that so many Windows users seem to wonder why users of every other OS seem to evangelize their OS... and perhaps that's a big part of it. Tired of hearing the shit from MS, and Windows users who just plain and simply dont know better. It's not entirely the Win users fault, and I know in my case, I found unenlightened Win users more funny than anything... it's very much MS's and the media's fault though - and they I did indeed get very pissed at.
Of course, any response from me - because Windows wasnt my OS of choice, made me a zealot. This, by the way, was when MS had big shares in Ziff Davis, who used to go as far as printing MS pre-prepared "media kits" as Win95 reviews, even in 3 different publications in one particular case, 2 written by one author, the 3rd written by someone else... identical to the word though... identical also to the copy that MS sent us at CompUSA. Oh - and mostly false. True 32 bit, no more DOS, 4MB of RAM... I'm sure you remember all those early claims that MS made that were just pure bs.
So... people wonder why users of other OS's seem to lean towards zealotry? Perhaps it's because many Win users, without knowing better, have went far beyond that extreme... we may brag about what our OS can do, and probably did long before Windows could... but Win users brag often about what their OS is NOT (like stable, secure, fast, slim, non resource hungry, etc...), or about features that their OS had last out of the pack - because they believe the "propaghanda" (for lack of a better word) that they hear in MS ads and paid "reviews".
Again, nothing personal... but perhaps something every Win user should think of the next time they wanna get mad at the user of another OS for being proud of what their OS can do...
- Rob
(Heck, I'm still waiting for MS's promised 64 way cpu support - since 1995... )
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
Do you know the exact contract details? It appears to be secret. I guess then that you don't know the exact details. Then my conclusion is: texts like .NET crap you want, and we better see this entering your curriculum or else you lose your discounts and we audit your asses. .NET using people.
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
are just speculation and ment to be insulting for MS and
If MS gives away tons of computers and software to schools they're up to "converting these children over to their side", when they are making deals with universities (which are just companies if you don't know that, every university has research sponsored by large companies, oh the horror), they are bending courses.
If you really think "java" or "C#" or whatever language you get on your university is more important than the real point of what you get taught: "OO development using an imperitive language", you don't know jack about computer science and how it is taught to students.
and no, to answer your question, I don't see the difference.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
stomp the face of freedom and right from wrong?
I find it interesting that we speack on rights and freedoms concerning the ability to see what MS does. All the while, the feds have spent the last year taking away oversight committes on what they do and I am hearing very little outrage over that.
Do not get me wrong. I object highly to much of what MS does. It is almost always illegal, and morally repugnent. It is rarely what I consider good capitalism or supply and demand. But it is apparent that MS will be losing to OSS in the long run. In contrast, we are losing our true rights and freedoms.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I often wonder how many Microsoft employees/interns frequent this forum.
See something you don't like about a beloved company and you want to restrict freedom of speech now!
what the colleges and Microsoft are doing may not actually be illegal (or could be argued not to be, anyway)
Hey, arguing the point is all the law is about, right? I mean, what's "objective"?
-lousyd
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
And I don't care what you say about capitalism's evil business practices.
It's the humans, not capitalism, who have evil business practices. Let's place the blame where it is due. There are lots of honest and ethical business owners and employers who are overshadowed by the crummy ones. I pride myself in being honest, fair, and compassionate to my employees and my customers who, without which, my business and livliehood would fail.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
You ascribe certain actions to MS with no info behind it.
.NET crap you want, and here is lots of $$$ to entice you to make C# mandatory in your curriculum. In that case they were using a carrot instead of a stick, which is why it wasn't kept a secret. From the point of view of a student, the effect isn't any different.
Ostensibly this is because those details are wisely being kept secret.
Then how about this:
MORE EVIL: Here, have all the
Then you ascribe somewhat more altruistic measures to a company which has screwed over everyone who tries to make a clean implementation of their "open" language.
Black and white thinking, and offtopic as well. You don't have to tell me that Sun is full of idiots. They make boneheaded decisions all the time. But what does that have to do with coercing universities to teach a proprietary language?
No, they're both junk to me. Inherently, no controlled language can provide all the functionality of a open one, and thus they are doomed to failure in the long term.
Well I agree with this except the "doomed to failure" part. Controlled languages are junk but they're more forgiving of bad programmers, so they're not going to go away.
What next, psychic imprinting? It seems MS just can't win, no matter how they price. If they sell at normal prices, you scream that they are robber barons, being usurious, that they should sell the wares at it true value, which is almost nothing. Yet when they sell at "almost nothing" prices, you still scream that this is "dumping". Yet even them GIVING it away is still evil to you. Man, you can't have it all three ways. Either their prices are too high or too low. Pick one and stick with it.
You are a little confused about how predatory business practices work. The name of the game is to subsidize sales when necessary to undercut your competition, and thus distort the market so you can eventually charge above-market prices, as MS does now.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I'm a Microsoft intern and I love slashdot and everything posted here. I like to see Microsoft succeed at some things, but dislike it when they do shady deals. I also enjoy seeing open source and Linux succeed (at home I dual boot winxp/slackware linux w/ slack being the primary boot).
Speech should not be restricted. Everyone should be able to say what they want.
I agree with many of the statements made toward microsoft good and bad.
Just my viewpoints.
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
Wow!
Screw the law, I got mine!
Lets us know where your working after your done with school, I want to be sure to stear my investments away from that company (Enron2).
Seriously, This isn't about who has the best tools, or even the best prices. It's about circumvention, bypassing, and subverting the law, and the rights of the citizens of the States.
There's no such thing as an ok, shady business deal.
At least there shouldn't be, but then again, the Administration that was going to restore integrity to the office of President of the United States, changed the rules so that the Government can continue to do business with individuals and corperations that have been caught breaking the law.