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Free Software As Nigerian Scam
djeaux writes "In the November 4 issue of Syllabus, Howard Strauss, manager of technology strategy and outreach at Princeton University, presents 'The FREE, 0% APR, Better Sex, No Effort Diet' in which he scattershoots at open source software. The Nigerian scam is part of his imagery, leading to a great quote: 'While you are installing your free open source software you may want to write Mrs. Ahmed a check. Her $8.5 million will help pay for the real cost of that free software.' Elsewhere, Strauss describes the open source community as 'a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators, and a menagerie of others with whom you will feel great pride in entrusting your IT infrastructure.'" Not everyone at Princeton agrees.
- No more institution centric home page
- There should only be one portal. (don't want the students using Yahoo! or
Excite - we want them to use our portal)
- There must exist -complete- customization available to the user. Otherwise, they will continue to use another portal that allows them to do what they want.
- Replaces your desktop
Some of the neat terminology Howard creates: Cameos: Small pieces of data from larger data set and most important, the most important challenge isn't technical, it is requiring all data owners to work together.Congrats Howard, get your closed source, proprietary formats working together. GOD this guy is listed as a futurist! Here's another damn article about portals in 2015. JEEZ give it a break.
and as for programming experience
- 4 had 1 year
- 10 had 2-4 years
- 31 had 5-9 years
- 40 had 10-20 years
- 16 had 20+ years
Then there is the Boston Consulting Group's Hacker Survey, which found Occupation ChartHardly what Howard Strauss's article portrays.
Fear not. This particular personage works for OIT (Office of Information Technology), a bunch of folks who mess up the networks they're supposed to manage so badly they've been summarily banned from the CS Department.
Did I mention that I love my regular internet service outages?
I'm posting AC because I'm at Princeton. I did some checking around. According to our campus directory, he works in the Enterprise Infrastructure Services department of our IT division (OIT--Office of IT). And while the article credits him as "manager of technology strategy", I cannot find him on the OIT org. chart that you can find in our OIT's annual report. He must be some underling who's bitter.
I intend to write his boss. I mean, I appreciate satire and parody, but as everyone has pointed out, his article is just malicious and factually false. It's filled with ad hominem attacks at students, hackers, the whole open source community. All based on a ridiculous metaphor that doesn't hold. Hell, it doesn't even make sense. If he hates young people so much, why in the world would he work in an "outreach" capacity at a university?!
Interestingly, his department is responsible for serving the notorious PeopleSoft management and purchasing software here....roundly hated by every administrative person I know at Princeton. I only mention this because he specifically mentions PeopleSoft. OIT at Princeton is definitely a mixed bag--some outstanding services, people, and liberties (including, yes, plenty of linux support)--and some horrible policies and red tape (like, charging for every ethernet box they activate--both for students and in the depts!--AND charging for every device attached to the network! They nickle and dime like crazy).
ECMAScript is the non-trademark name for standardized JavaScript. SMIL doesn't appear to be supported by Mozilla yet, and I think most of what it can do can be done in ECMAScript + those other technologies (except changeing the volume on sound clips)