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Big Company on Campus

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the revenge-of-the-nerds dept.

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."

4 of 677 comments (clear)

  1. Blowing off steam by Eric+Ass+Raymond · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    And karma.

    Suck ass!

    --
    BOO! TERRO
  2. Probably gona be labeled falmebait... by Spytap · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    ...but it made my mom laugh ;)

    Burn and Pillage boys, Burn and Pillage...

  3. Re:Oh yeah, it's only MS doing this... by The+Lynxpro · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Uhm, fact check, you can run Linux on Mac *proprietary hardware* (ie. non-x86). It even made it to Slashdot news that the U.S. Navy bought Mac hardware recently specifically to run Linux...

    --
    "Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
  4. rant by shaitand · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This is offtopic, please mod it as such.. skipping my karma bonus here.

    gnu/linux, this is bullshit, wtf is stallman thinking! The operating system is the kernel, everything else in the system is an application running on top of that kernel. Yes you can port applications to different operating systems Congrats for figuring this out!

    The entire "certain apps are part of the OS" crap is something microsoft made up. Are you actually supporting this BS just to get kudos for the work someone else did? Jesus christ there are acknowledgements to gnu all over the damn place, often right in the output of the apps in question, there are is absolutely NO excuse for having the gall to name LINUS' and contributors OS after YOU and contributors APPLICATIONS. This is ridiculous. The GNU tools are worthless without an OS to run on... an OS is worthless without apps... but there are plenty of other apps.

    Why don't we name it Wine/Linux instead, after all wine is an app that runs on the OS and may well be the thing that makes it viable for the desktop. Or XFREE86/Linux, the gui at least has a better argument than a few generally easily replaceable basic tools (most of which have alternatives which could be taken from BSD without a blink)

    To correct this self serving idiocy. When refering to the operating system. Call it LINUX, when refering to it generically to mean the OS plus whatever random apps... call it LINUX. When refering to X distribution... call it X distribution or X distribution LINUX since it's X's distribution of the LINUX OS + some random apps.