Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses

Posted by Zonk on from the stay-awake-in-the-back-there dept.

writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"

7 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. What's Microsoft got to do with it? by davmoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled.

    They shouldn't have waffled. They should have given the answer this deserves...how the hell is this Microsoft's problem to correct?

    Vista was in beta forever and a day. Beta 3 was out and the API was locked down for at least several months before RTM. In cases where any third party software does not now work under Vista, it is *entirely* the fault of that software company. Holding Microsoft responsible to any degree here is just plain stupid.

    --
    I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
    1. Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? by batkiwi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?

    2. Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? by Detritus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sounds like a driver interface design problem.

      --
      Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
    3. Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? by hdparm · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are absolutely right although there might be a bit of guilt on the other side, if MS didn't break functionality between last beta and vista release.

      I mostly blame schools though. They are the ones who let the vista in without going through enough testing, Like they haven't experienced exactly the same with previous windows releases.

    4. Re:What's Microsoft got to do with it? by BrokenHalo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So whose fault is it that the nvidia headers for binary drivers have to be recompiled every kernel release due to incompatabilities for no good reason?

      How do you know it's for no good reason? If you've seen the source code, then perhaps you might enlighten us.

      In any case, who cares? nVidia does it, and does it very promptly when required. Which is more than we can say for the majority of hardware producers, who as a rule are content to leave Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD users completely unsupported.

  2. *shrug* by fabs64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hopefully this encourages universities to move away from Blackboard if anything.. it's a steaming pile of crap, really.
    Doesn't affect me anyway, as any school of comp sci should be, all our labs are thin x-servers.
    The rest of the uni can suffer in Novell hell for all I care, stupid ITS.

  3. sloppy coding? by briancnorton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Writing a Win32/64 app that only works in one OS/browser/java version/etc seems to me to be sloppy coding. Blackboard is a *WEB* app, is it not? Why does the client matter? Usually the answer is because the Devs were lazy and took shortcuts by using the client to do something that the server could just as easily do. (Not necessarily the case here)

    --

    People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.