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Big Company on Campus
Daniel Dvorkin writes "MSNBC (oh, the irony) is running a scary article entitled Microsoft's big role on campus, detailing how Microsoft is working its way into academic computer science through a combination of bribery and propaganda. The aricle may be overstating the case, but it does make it sound as though MS products are displacing others at a disturbing rate in computer science departments. Given that academic computing has traditionally been both the source of and the stronghold for innovative software, this is a disturbing long-term trend."
And just why is it disturibing? I don't get this complaint.
If you can't compete on merit (or alleged "bribery") you've lost. What's the point in talking about the "technical superiority of *nix" if you can't prove it on the field and get your system embraced by the academia?
BOO! TERRO
Just a question. Why are you equating open source and true computer innovation here? Name one true open source innovation. As far as I can see, the open source community is just copying whatever innovations the proprietary software makes.
BOO! TERRO
is 'campuses' the right plural for campus
Yes. "campus" is an English word, and that is how we do plurals.
or would that be campii
No. Even were it Latin, the plural would be "campi" -- where did you get that extra i?
In any case, the English "campus", though descended from the Latin "campus", is not the same word. Pluralizing it as if it were Latin would be misleading and pretentious, and pluralizing it with a double i just makes you look like a total idiot.
Enough with the "OMG M$ SUX" replies. Here at VT I was under the impression students started out learning C++ on the Visual Studio compiler because the IDE is easy, the compiler is good enough to learn on, debugging is great (something that royally sucks on Linux) and they don't have to install another operating system. As much as people want to point me to open source tools, you cannot beat MS's developer tools. All of the OSS ones simply try to emulate VS as close as possible. In addition, students don't want to switch operating systems just to take a class, especially if they're not sure its for them. And they shouldn't have to change operating systems.
who cares?
The pope is against contraception and water is wet.
BSD is dying. So is the Internet. Academia is getting progressively stupid. Bill Gates rules the world, people don't care, coz' they are too stupid to care.
a nuclear holocaust would have been a prettier ending to humanity than this. What a shame...
Computers suck. Nerds suck. Nothing matters anymore.
Die.
-Lasse
http://www.advogato.org/article/698.html
It is amazing that redhat have such a restrictive license on thier courseware software, considering how many good courseware projects there are. I find no mention of freedom or the gnu free documentation license on the red hat "open source" educational site. It makes me wonder how good this education is.
Digital Think is the exclusive provider of Red Hat eLearning. http://www.digitalthink.com/catalog/license.html
"Licensee shall not, without the prior written permission of DIGITALTHINK, nor permit anyone else to copy, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise reduce the Courseware to a human perceivable form, or to modify, network, rent, lease, loan, distribute, or create derivative works based upon the Courseware or the documentation in whole or in part."
Introspection is the key to understanding
you can edit text with emacs? damn it really can do everything! I've had it doing my laundry, washing dishes, painting the house, and thinking for me for quite a while now. So now days emacs can not only dictate the text for me, it can write it to!
Emacs surely must be the closest thing to AI yet.
Seriously, if you want to edit text, use vi, if you want something which can do everything on god's green earth but does all of it poorly, use emacs.
The graphics lab has upgraded many old SGI machines to sparkly-new Windows machines... what, for their speed, stability, or security?
And the SGIs were originally donated to the school by SGI.
Hypocrite.